ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on transportation of the landscape not, however, as witnessed in the mass media, but in aesthetic media, where information value is not at the forefront. Instead, aesthetic and cultural points of emphasis are salient in the factors already touched on above: self-perception, identity, and memory in relation to place; the value of various landscapes and places; and the ways in which different places interconnect in both individual and 'national' spheres. Landscape paintings grace the living rooms of numerous Icelandic homes and they are also widely to be seen on the walls of companies and institutions. They are frequently representations, in varying degrees of realism, of particular places in the Icelandic countryside or Icelandic nature, or of landscape at least seemingly characterized by Icelandic features. Icelanders received important backing in forging a paradigm which conjoins ideas about the countryside, the rural society, the literary heritage and the beauty or grandeur of Icelandic nature.