Writing in Latin on their patria and its mundane commonplaces, Icelandic historiographers, no different from the rest of Latin Europe, had to pose as insiders of a classical civilization which in all practical terms was alien. Latin, the language of christian clerics and renaissance humanists alike, was always a Rome-centered medium. Thus in the liturgical sequences of St. Thorlac the Icelandic congregation redefines its home country as the latera Aquilonis and terminus mundi. To such an extent had the horizon of significance created by Latin, this historically expansive vehicle of mediterranean prejudice, reached even to faraway places as Iceland. Nevertheless, the optique of Roma Caput Mundi (='Head of the World') and the Mediterranean (='Middle Earth'), however definitive it might seem south of the Alps, could appear askewed when applied from this ultimate latitudinal angle. In the 11th century, when the rudiments of Latin literacy were being imported to Iceland from Saxony, Adam of Bremen had described the natural wonders of Iceland in terms that strained the imagination of scholastic meteorology. Adam even proposed a forced identification of Iceland with Ultima Thule. While the Roman context provided a basis for societal construction in Iceland, the cultural significance of this pristine volcanic island, which had remained uninhabited until AD 874, according to 12th century vernacular sources, seemed from then on hoplessly entangled in a web of erudite impositions, which only grew worse as half-educated seafarers, e.g. Gories Perse of Hamburg, began to spout their slander about Iceland in the age of print. At least this was the uneasy conviction of one Icelandic humanist, Arngrímur Jónsson (1568-1648), who decided to remove the mythic kaleidoscope of Ultima Thule from the scholarly gaze, and present to the naked eye a vision of Iceland, indeed of the whole of Scandinavia, based on vernacular sources: the Icelandic hypothesis.

Konferencen er arrangeret af Stockholms Universitet, Linköpings Universitet, Nordisk Netværk for Renæssancestudier & Barockakademien.