The week of November 16th to 24th, 2024, marks the opening of a new exhibition at Edda, World in Words, showcasing Iceland’s most treasured cultural artefacts: the ancient manuscripts. These invaluable documents, filled with sagas, poems, and other writings, offer a glimpse into the lives, beliefs, and society of past generations.
The exhibition delves into the multifaceted world of these manuscripts, illuminating themes of life, death, love, religion, honour, and power. It also explores the impact of foreign influences on Icelandic culture and language, as well as the global reach of Icelandic literature.
A central theme is the concept of creation, encompassing both the physical creation of the manuscripts and the creative spirit inherent in the Icelandic language itself. The exhibition incorporates various media to engage visitors, including manuscript displays, interactive touchscreens, videos, audio readings, and hands-on activities.
The Five Sections of the Exhibition
The exhibition is split into sections and each section covers a certain topic related to the manuscripts’ contents together with images and informative and interactive elements. Each of the five sections features manuscripts on the topic’s theme. The sections are the beginning of the world, human life, worldviews, law and order, and the end of the world.
Creation Myths and Cosmic Order
Where does the history of the world start? Nowadays, our answer is that the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang. In the Middle Ages, the creation story from the Bible was the consensus idea in Iceland about the world’s origin, but Icelanders also inherited pagan mythologies to explain how it all began.
The Human Condition: Life, Death, and Destiny
Explore the complexities of the human experience as depicted in the manuscripts. Discover tales of love, loss, heroism, and villainy. Learn about the challenges of daily life, and the pursuit of honour.
Worldviews, Stories and Poetry
The worldview appears as mythology, pre-Christian ideas about the order of the world, which survived in stories and poetry. They tell us about the world tree and how it stretches across the sky and through the earth, about the witches who twine the threads of human fate and can see into the future regarding events in the world of the gods as they give rise to natural phenomena like weather and earthquakes.
It is unknown when people first set foot on Iceland. Presumably, they first came on shorter visits to assess conditions. Coordinated settlement took place after the mid 9th century.
- See also: The Discovery and Settlement of Iceland
Law & Order in Oral Form
Iceland’s settlers did not preserve their cultural heritage in books. All information was preserved orally and passed down to the next generation: poems, stories of mortals and gods, laws and rules and practical knowledge.
With the adoption of Christianity in Iceland, everything changed. The work of the church was based on the written word. Icelanders gradually adopted this new practice and started writing down everything that used to be transmitted orally through previous generations. Instead of living narratives that changed over time in oral iterations, there was now a text record in permanence in a certain volume.
End of the World Fears Are Nothing New
Talk of the end of the world has probably followed us since humanity was born. Nowadays, mankind fears climate change, wars or being outdone by technology. Mediaeval Icelandic texts describe how the world would perish in fire, only to be later reborn. What can we learn from the ancient beliefs about the end of the world?
Guests can enter for free during the opening week of November 16-24.
Find more events in Reykjavík in our event calendar.
The photo at the top of this post of Edda (the house of Icelandic studies) is from Government of Iceland – Sigurður Stefán Jónsson. Retrieved from this news story on Vísir.
