Women and Water: Icelandic Tales and Anglo-Saxon Moorings

Abstract

This collaborative article offers a multidisciplinary dialogue about modern and medieval ways of knowing and understanding water as place and process—as source and resource—and in so doing, explores and unsettles habitual disciplinary associations of place with specific times, identities, and genders. It brings together medieval and modern ideas about water, women, and the monstrous in art, popular culture, poetry, and learned texts to demonstrate how the subject of water connects different times, places, and media. Beginning in modern Iceland, the essay moves through Icelandic and early medieval British tales of the watery, the fishy, and the female, using the work of contemporary American artist Roni Horn, known for her work on place, identity, and Iceland, to focus this criss-crossing of temporalities, cultures, and places.