Icelandic Nature and Global Evils – Concepts of Nature in Romantic Poetry and Nordic Noir TV Series from Iceland

Abstract

This paper takes concepts from spatial theory and globalization discourse and uses them in order to analyze the narrative function of descriptions of nature in romantic Icelandic poetry from the beginning of the 19^th century and an Icelandic TV-Series from 2015. In Iceland’s romantic poetry of the early 19^th century, especially in poems written by Bjarni Thorarensen, sublime nature is described as a form of guardian against foreign influences that threaten the way of living on the peripheral island. This romantic concept of Icelandic nature is closely connected to narrative patterns in the process of the Icelandic Nation-Building, as it characterizes Icelanders as simultaneously defined and protected by the harsh conditions on the island. The paper takes a comparative look at the underlying narrative concepts of nature in two of Bjarni Thorarensen’s poems and a recent Icelandic TV series, Baltasar Kormákur’s Ófærð (2015), that presents a different concept of Icelandic nature in its relation to a (threatening) global influence. The series depicts a globalized world in which crime does not only affect remote communities as an evil from the outside but as a local evil connected to forces on global scale. Nature as a narrative device in the TV series thus does not protect Icelanders from global forces, as it did in Bjarni Thorarensens poems in the early 19^th century, but instead functions a catalyst that reveals the evil from the outside and the evil from within.