This monograph traces the history of one of the most prominent types of geographical myths of the North-West Atlantic Ocean: transmarine otherworlds of blessedness and immortality. Taking the mythologization of the Viking Age discovery of North America in the earliest extant account of Vinland ('Wine-Land') and the Norse transmarine otherworlds of Hvitramannaland ('The Land of White Men') and the Odainsakr/Glaesisvellir ('Field of the Not-Dead'/'Shining Fields') as its starting point, the book explores the historical entanglements of these imaginative places in a wider European context. It follows how these Norse otherworld myths adopt, adapt, and transform concepts from early Irish vernacular tradition and Medieval Latin geographical literature, and pursues their connection to the geographical mythology of classical antiquity. In doing so, it shows how myths as far distant in time and space as Homer's Elysian Plain and the transmarine otherworlds of the Norse are connected by a continuous history of creative processes of adaptation and reinterpretation. Furthermore, viewing this material as a whole, the question arises as to whether the Norse mythologization of the North Atlantic might not only have accompanied the Norse westward expansion that led to the discovery of North America, but might even have been among the factors that induced it.
Author(s): Matthias Egeler
Series: Medieval Voyaging, 4
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 370
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
A View to the West 1
Historiographical Context 4
A Word on Methodology and Terminology 10
Summary of Research Objectives and Structure of the Enquiry 21
Chapter 1. North-Western Europe: Scandinavia, Ireland, and the Land of the Living 25
Irish Beginnings 25
Scandinavian Transformations 64
Chapter 2. The Classical Mediterranean: Rome, Greece, and the Islands of the Blessed 107
Greek Beginnings 108
First Transformations in the West: The Paradisiacal Otherworld Island in Etruria 165
Second Transformations in the West: The Paradisiacal Otherworld Island in Rome 191
Chapter 3. Eastern Roots? 209
Egypt via Crete 209
The Garden of Eden 218
Mesopotamia 222
Chapter 4. Continuity, Interaction — and Westward Expansion? 235
By Way of a Summary: Continuity Orient–Scandinavia? 235
Typology and Mechanisms of Regional Interaction 265
Types of Religious Contact Exemplified by the 'Islands in the West 268
Mechanisms of Religious Contact Exemplified by the 'Islands in the West' 279
Paradise on Earth, Resonance, and the Norse in the Farthest West 287
Appendix. Beyond History 295
Bibliography 313
Index 349
