Iceland review - 2016, Page 40

38 ICELAND REVIEW
a reputation for cold weather and some
of the highest prices in Europe. A poten-
tial explanation was offered to me by
another traveler a few days into my trip.
A former student of art history, she said,
“It’s interesting. I’ve studied the concept
of the sublime before, but this is the first
time I’ve experienced it.”
WHAT IS SUBLIME?
The dictionary defines ‘the sublime’ as
“something causing strong feelings of
admiration or wonder.” The great British
philosopher and statesman Edmund
Burke elaborated on this, writing:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite
the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to
say, whatever is in any sort terrible … is
a source of the sublime; that is, it is pro-
ductive of the strongest emotion which
the mind is capable of feeling ...” Could,
perhaps, this concept of the sublime
explain my own feelings as well as some
of Iceland’s appeal to modern travelers
inundated with options?
As a former lawyer I’m hesitant to
draw conclusions without evidence, so
I started my investigation by turning to
the history of the sublime. I soon found
this was closely tied to the history of
tourism itself. Basically, tourism as we
know it began in Europe in the mid-17th
century with the rise of the Grand Tour
as a rite of passage for wealthy young
men. As far as natural scenery was con-
cerned, the tour focused on the pastoral
landscapes of Italy that had inspired
painters for centuries, but unlike modern
travelers who hop on a two-hour flight
to any place in Europe, the 18th century
traveler could only reach the rolling
hills of Tuscany after a difficult journey
through the Alps.

CHANGING VIEWS
As hard as it probably is for most people
to imagine (myself included), prior to
the 18th century most travelers viewed
mountains as scars upon the landscape.
Mountains were thought to be populat-
ed by strange monsters and were seen
as obstacles to be overcome only out of
necessity. Similar attitudes can be read in
the early accounts of visitors to Iceland,
who described the land as barren and
desolate. Even so, as travel for trav-
el’s sake became more common, visitors
began to discover something else in these
challenging landscapes. As the English
writer Joseph Addison wrote: “The Alps
fill the mind with an agreeable kind of
horror.”
While this may not sound like a glow-
ing review, writers like Addison slowly
began to create a new perspective on
beauty. Borrowing from literary concepts
that dated all the way back to the first
century AD, these writers created a new
aesthetic conception of the sublime. This
conceptualization of the attraction to the
overwhelming power of nature devel-
oped alongside Romanticism in the 18th
century and eventually solidified into
the love of dramatic landscapes that is so
easily taken for granted today.
The terror and the horror of the sub-
lime, however, have slowly faded from
our collective conscious and even the
word has lost some of its meaning. Now
the word sublime is most often used
simply as a synonym for exalted, mag-
nificent or wonderful. Perhaps this is no
surprise, given how the once imposing
Alps are now home to countless lux-
urious ski resorts and mountain cot-
tages. Having both skied and trekked
extensively through the Alps, I can bear
witness to their awesome beauty, but
the nearly-constant site of human set-
tlement, the persistent presence of other
travelers and the easy access to food and
shelter has raised some of the treks to
almost the level of luxury.
THE SUBLIME IN ICELAND
Iceland, however, remains a land of
largely inaccessible mystery. An island
more than ten times the size of Puerto
Rico, Iceland possesses less than half the
much smaller island’s mileage of roads.
Iceland’s national highway has sections
that sometimes close in the winter and
the famously small population is huddled
close to the shore. Travelers who brave
the country’s highlands find an unspoiled
wilderness and even the views from the
main road are often devoid of houses or
any of the usual signs of human presence.
In fact, Iceland’s landscape is argua-
bly one of the most sublime on earth.
Imposing mountains, massive glaciers,
fiery volcanoes, roaring waterfalls, the
list goes on and on. Even so, many places
offer similar attractions and I myself had
seen all these things before, most of them
on a larger scale. I felt certain the sub-
lime power of Iceland didn’t rest solely
on its formidable landscape and isola-
tion and, thinking back to my reading, I
recalled that any part of nature that could
inspire awe and fear could be sublime.
This included the weather. I had found
another piece of the puzzle: Iceland’s
formidable climate.
My own experience with Iceland’s var-
iable weather had begun the second I
stepped out of the plane and was greeted
by cold wind and rain. Later, driving
around the majestic Snæfellsnes pen-
insula in West Iceland, the low-hang-
ing clouds made the alien landscape
T R AV E L
From left: Jason Visco at Hjalteyri in rural Eyjafjörður, North Iceland;
on Borgartún in central Reykjavík.