Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek 36(2), 2018/19 Except where otherwise indicated, the content of this article is licensed and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 34 ICELAND AS AN IMAGINARY PLACE IN A EUROPEAN CONTEXT – SOME LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson University of Iceland sye@hi.is Abstract The article focuses on the image of Iceland and Iceland as an imaginary place in literature from the nineteenth century onwards. It is especially concerned with the aesthetics or discourse of the sublime, claiming that it is the common denominator in many literary images of Iceland. The main proponents of this aesthetics or discourse in nineteenth-century Icelandic literature are discussed before pointing to further developments in later times. Among those studied are the nineteenth-century poets Bjarni Thorarensen (1786-1841), Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807- 1845), Grímur Thomsen (1820-1896) and Steingrímur Thorsteinsson (1831-1913), along with a number of contemporary Icelandic writers. Other literary discourses also come into play, such as representing Iceland as "the Hellas of the North", with the pastoral mode or discourse proving to have a lasting appeal to Icelandic writers and often featuring as the opposite of the sublime in literary descriptions of Iceland. Keywords Icelandic literature, Romantic poetry; the discourse of the sublime, the idea of the North; pastoral literature. This article will focus on the image of Iceland and on Iceland as an imaginary place in literature from the nineteenth century onwards. It will especially be concerned with the aesthetics of the sublime, claiming that it is the common denominator in many literary images of Iceland. The main proponents of this aesthetics in nineteenth-century Icelandic literature are discussed before pointing to further developments in later times. By looking at a number of literary works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is suggested that this aesthetics can be seen to continue in altered form into the present day. While aesthetic images such as these can be studied as a kind of "discourse" (de Bolla, 1989), as will become evident in the article, since they touch on national stereotypes, they also fall within the scope of "Imagology", as defined by Joep Leerssen: To begin with, Imagology, working as it does primarily on literary representations, furnishes continuous proof that it is in the field of imaginary and poetical literature that national stereotypes are first and most effectively formulated, perpetuated and disseminated" (Leerssen, 2007, 26). Below, we will see how certain poets and writers formulate, perpetuate and disseminate collective self-images of their own country and its character. These self-images often prove to