Landscapes, place-names and Iceland: Interview with Dr. Emily Lethbridge

English Dr. Emily Lethbridge holds a PhD in Old Norse literature from the University of Cambridge. She is currently working at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. She also teaches the subjects of medieval Icelandic literature and culture at the University of Iceland. She has called Iceland her home since 2011, relocating here permanently for work. I am grateful to be able to share some of her story here in her own words.

Photo: Emily Lethbrige

The Doctor at the Farm

For many years I studied Old Icelandic, just as one might study Latin or Greek in a Classics degree. It was passive learning, out of books, without any contemporary relevance or exchange. I knew that Old Icelandic and modern Icelandic were closer to each other compared to other languages such as English and since we had not had the opportunity to learn any modern Icelandic, once I finished my PhD, I arranged to come to Iceland and work for a period of a few months at a time on a dairy farm in the countryside. I learned a huge amount from that because I was trying to speak and use Icelandic as much as I could. On one hand, I was very lucky to find a family who I got along with really  well and on the other hand doing something physical was a really good change from all the studying. I enjoyed the work and loved the experience. Another thing that I got out of these periods in Iceland was that for the first time I was able to build my own sense of the Icelandic landscape. I saw the geography and thought about how all the literature that I have been studying like the sagas, and how they fit in the geography of Iceland today. That caught my interest, and this was back in 2008. Eventually, that led to me taking a whole year, January to December in 2011, where I lived in a Land Rover Defender ambulance that I had bought in the UK and driven over to Iceland. I lived in this van on my own and explored all the places mentioned in the 40 or so sagas that cover pretty much all of Iceland, especially the ones that describe the settlement of Iceland in the first few centuries of Icelandic history. 

Learning Icelandic

It gave me a great opportunity to practice Icelandic and to just learn about Icelandic culture. I met lots of people, had a great amount of adventures and disasters. But it was formative for me and helped to find a sort of angle on Iceland that I felt was my angle. I then took up a research position at the Árni Magnússon Research Institute and carried on doing much more traditional manuscript based, desk-based, research. Meanwhile, I was also developing these ideas that I started to have about the landscape and how the place-names were important over many centuries for Icelanders and their understanding of the sagas and manuscripts. My academic background and my research and fieldwork meant that people were always very open to me and interested in what I was doing. They were curious about why someone from England should want to do this, as in learning Icelandic and spending years exploring and thinking about the sagas. To be honest, taking a step to the side, the fact that I am white and came from the University of Cambridge, and belong to a past tradition where people from Britain have come to Iceland wanting to learn to Icelandic and look at the sites of the Sagas, I think I fitted in very easily as just one contemporary version of that long tradition. Which I am sure has helped me and made things easier for me in many ways. People did not question my motivations for learning Icelandic and studying their literature. It seems self-evident compared to if I was coming from another part of the world or from another culture. Still, I was making an effort to learn and use Icelandic and doors definitely opened for me because of that. I made sure to only speak Icelandic at work and that cultivated strong relationships with colleagues based on mutual trust because they were so patient with me from the beginning.

Life as of now 

I now work within the Department for Name Studies (Nafnfræðisvið) at Árni. Some of my more admin-type jobs include working with the Landmælingar Íslands, which is the national land survey of Iceland. Very often disputes come up about place names, and what is correct. People sometimes want to change names or make new names and there are actually rules and a set of laws in Iceland that protect place names. It is because this is a very particular and important cultural heritage that is also concerned with [the Icelandic] identity. Here I find the overlap of my research with contemporary social relevance. I find the subject of being an immigrant in Iceland, being foreign in Iceland, overlaps with place names. They are a perfect example of how people can be included in a society or excluded. Until you start learning Icelandic place-names will have no meaning, they will be just a collection of syllables that are often difficult to pronounce that do not mean anything but once you start learning Icelandic you realise that the names are quite transparent and they describe landscape features so that you can start feeling your way into the landscapes and you build up a sense of belonging. This is hugely important from the aspect of identity. 

Photo: Emily Lethbridge

Some current projects

My favourite project right now is developing a project about women and landscapes. I am really interested in the concept of gendered landscape, landscape as a concept and there's a lot of research discussing landscape as a construct. First, you might think, uncritically, that landscape is just there. That is not the case. Landscape is always political, always constructed, influenced by ideological law, economical gains or social factors. These factors act on landscape and how we perceive it. Gendered landscape is an approach that is trying to unpick the gender dimensions on how landscape is constructed. Questions such as: whether landscape is constituted or constructed from a male perspective or female perspective, or from both [perspectives]? Who gets to go where? For instance, if you think about urban landscapes, then you might ask where do women feel safe and where do women feel unsafe? Also, think about street naming and how many are named after men, how many after women? 

I am also working on a project about travel writing, which is interesting to me because others visited Iceland and talked about it just like I did. One such person was William Morris who came to Iceland in 1871 and 1873. He is an important figure in British cultural history and politics. He was a typical upper-class white privileged man that learned Icelandic and was welcomed warmly by the Icelanders he met. Of course, women were travelling as well. Their narratives have not been studied as much. I am looking into the female-authored accounts in the 19th and 20th centuries. One of them is actually William Morris’ daughter, May Morris, whose writings I have been given access to. She came to Iceland three times but her diaries have never been published. I am transcribing her diaries and thinking about what her relationship was and how she is describing the places in Iceland she visits and how she frames her journey compared to her father. I will be putting her accounts in the bigger context of other women who were travelling and learning Icelandic. Academia has always been more interested in the male narratives and I am hoping to re-address the balance there a bit.

Favourite place name

This is a hard question. There are a bunch of place names that begin with the first element ‘vetur’ meaning winter, for instance there is ‘Veturlönd’ which is winterland. There are all kinds of places with the word winter in them. When I first noticed these I thought “Wow Winterland, what a grim place name”. My emotional response was that this place must always be cold, dark and difficult. Many negative connotations are attached to it. Then I looked it up in a few reference books and I found that actually, these place names with winter in them do not denote a place that is wintery or snowy and instead are actually places where livestock was grazed in the winter because that was where there was more grass, or where better conditions existed. It was actually the land you could use in the winter, opposite of what I expected and assumed. I love these place names and they are a reminder to me that sometimes you can read place names at face value but sometimes you do need to double-check your interpretation. 

As this was my last article for the paper I really was torn between talking about some very serious and important issues concerning diversity or doing this interview. I had the time to do just one piece and I chose to speak to Emily and share her story because I believe everyone has a unique reason for being in Iceland, and the foreigners who live here are a part of the ever-changing Icelandic landscape.