Chasing the Lights: Darkness, Tourism and the Northern Lights

Abstract

In recent years, winter tourism in Iceland has been growing steadily featuring the Northern Lights as an important attraction, and since 2009 the Lights have been used intentionally to promote Icelandic winter landscapes. The Lights, however, are mysterious, flickering in their nature and sightings are unreliable due to their different strengths and weather conditions. Moreover, the primary condition for sightings is darkness, which has traditionally in the Western mind been associated with chaos, even danger. This may seem to contradict how Icelandic landscape were composed and created by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers or to be visually approached as pristine and majestic, evoking a sense for the sublime, an image that the contemporary tourism industry continuous to promote. Thus, the paradox of the promotion is that Icelandic natural landscapes were created to be seen and appreciated in daylight and not in darkness. In order to explore how the Northern Lights fit in with this natural landscape, this chapter explores how the Northern lights are promoted and simultaneously experienced by tourists, which reveals how darkness is constantly being improvised, ordered and managed by different actors, making it inviting by bringing out its sublime qualities.