I've been doing a lot of reading (and some writing) about Iceland ahead of my next visit there at the weekend. The Sagas are an important part of Icelandic identity, and are very much stories of the everyday geographies of people and their quarrels and feuds, often between family members. They are bloodthirsty and grim, and funny and powerful in their nature. Carol Hoggart has written a very useful piece in the journal Limina. This publishes pieces relating to history and cultural studies. Read the article on the University of Western Australia (PDF download) Description: Iceland at the time of Norse settlement (c.870) was territory unmarked by human culture. It was a space with no history, no myths, no stories attached to it – a land with no human meaning. The ‘family sagas’ written in thirteenth-century Iceland (the Íslendingasögur) describe the past in a way that fills an empty terrain with significance – or as Jürg Glauser puts it, they perform a ‘semioticization of the lan