Münchner Nordistische Studien

Der Band „Germanische Kultorte: »Vergleichende, historische und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Zugänge« zieht die Bilanz eines interdisziplinären Symposiums, das im Oktober 2015 am Institut für Nordische Philologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München stattfand. Diskutanden aus Nordischer Philologie, Archäologie, Altorientalistik und Religionswissenschaft tauschten sich in diesem Rahmen über unterschiedlichste Aspekte germanischer (und ausgewählter anderer) ›Kultorte‹ aus und deckten dabei ein Spektrum von Fragen ab, das von allgemeinen Problemen der Auseinandersetzung mit ›heiligem Raum‹ über die spezifischen religiösen Räume der germanischen Religionsgeschichte bis hin zu ihrer modernen Rezeption reichte.

Snæfellsjökull is one of Iceland’s most famous volcanoes. It is there that Jules Verne located the entrance to the centre of the earth; it is the abode of a medieval saga hero and the location of one of Halldór Laxness’s novels. Travellers, painters, poets, and film-makers have been drawn to it in equal measure – while at the same time and against all expectations, others seem unfazed: as famous as the mountain is on a national and international stage, local folklore and medieval historiography have amazingly little interest in it. Clearly, Snæfellsjökull is not the same to everyone.
This volume presents a survey of the place of Snæfellsjökull in the Icelandic and European imagination. It adapts the paradigm of geocriticism, which shifts the focus of the scholarly investigation from the work of individual authors to the multitude of views that different authors, artists, and practitioners have on a single place. The results of the perambulation of Snæfellsjökull presented here show that both its cultural and literary history, as well as the paradigm of geocriticism, open up broad vistas that amply repay the effort necessary to tackle this mountain.