Kvennaspor: Unearthing and Foregrounding Women in Icelandic Saga Landscapes

Kvennaspor will produce new knowledge about women and their place in the Icelandic landscape, with a dual focus: (1) on narrative connections between women and Icelandic landscapes as represented in medieval Icelandic narrative sources (especially Íslendingsögur) and the place-name record, and (2) on 19th- and 20th-century women and their unstudied accounts of travel to Iceland and engagement with saga-sites. This interdisciplinary project will bring together humanities and performing arts researchers and practitioners, building on the theoretical concept of gendered landscapes and applying methodological approaches including source criticism, literary analysis and archival research, digital mapping, (socio-)toponomastics, and practice as research. Collaborative work will unearth the complex and sometimes contested nature of relationships between women and saga landscapes, drawing attention to how women have been marginalised and even written out of the landscape contexts in the textual record. Academic and creative responses (e.g. an opera), as well as a high-impact UK- and Iceland-based exhibition will foreground these sidelined women redressing the historical imbalance and chiming with bigger discourses about how biases of various kinds shape society, with the result that some stories gain dominance at the expense of others.