Around The World In Words

Time travel to Medieval Iceland at Arnastófnun

It’s winter and you’re tired of being cooped up at home. The nights are still long and the weather is bad. You need a little escape, but nothing too far from town. A day trip would do — or maybe just a half day. If you’re really lucky, you might be able to book a trip off the island, somewhere warmer and sunnier, but most of us don’t have that luxury. How about going somewhere you’ve never been before. Have you considered time travel?

Step into the cathedral

Modern European countries tend to be built around the physical reminders of their history. Contemporary office buildings are wedged in between Renaissance-era churches and medieval mosques were built over 2000-year-old Roman ruins. In Iceland, however, the oldest standing buildings here date back to the mid-18th century. Although they were the height of luxury in their time, they’re little more than quaint wooden houses today.

What Iceland lacks in historical buildings, it makes up for in historical books. This is why Icelanders have often referred to their collection of medieval manuscripts as the “Cathedrals of Iceland.” They not only contain the cultural foundations upon which the modern nation of Iceland is based, but they have also preserved important elements of Northern European history that would’ve otherwise been lost completely.

Heimur í Orðum, or World in Words, is the opening exhibition in the new museum space at the The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. For the first time since the manuscript exhibit closed at Safnahúsið in 2013, many of the most important manuscripts from Icelandic history are again on display for the public.

“It’s a different world for us now to be in this building where we can also host exhibitions,” says Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, editor of the materials on display. “We want to make people subtly aware of the fact that the manuscripts are not in isolation here. They are part of this environment. We care for them, but we also do research into what they contain and even into the manuscripts themselves.”

After four years of work to design and build this exhibit, you could say that the Cathedrals of Icelandic history have just finished a massive restoration project and swung their doors open. Step on in.

The beginning of the world

You begin in a dark room. On one side, words flicker across the darkness as a voice speaks them aloud. They describe the creation of the world according to Old Norse mythology: how the the Earth was created from the text of “Völuspá,” the “Prophesy of the Seeress,” the principle poem of the Poetic Edda. Across the room, another voice recites the Christian creation story. Between these two visualizations, medieval manuscripts of the Edda and the Bible are on display together.

“All these manuscripts are the product of people who had been a part of a Christian kind of society for a couple of hundred years,” Svanhildur adds. “So it is a filter that everything goes through. So we wanted to address that right at the beginning, to make people aware that both of these things are going on simultaneously.”

At its centre

From here, you enter the main part of the exhibit. Compared to the bright and modern reception in the building, the exhibition space really gives the impression of stepping into another world entirely. “The designers designed it in such a way that you come to the beginning of the world and you go out to the end of the world,” Svanhildur says. “In between, there are three sort of broad themes, but you can navigate the exhibition however you like.”

It’s cavernous and dim, with points of interest glowing throughout in soft, warm light. The displays are asymmetrically shaped and connected by benches that invite visitors to stop a moment and soak up the environment. Huge projections fill the longest wall of the room, sliding along in a seemingly endless loop of illustrations taken from the margins of the manuscripts themselves. Men battle, angels fly, and monsters breath fire amongst twisting plants in a hypnotic display.

The diversity of the manuscripts is on full display: they vary in tone, texture and size from as small as a modern credit card to a tome the size of a side table. Many elements are interactive and tactile, built out of wood in styles and colors that evoke the materials and craftsmanship of the era. Its most innovative elements are the digital displays arranged by topic, ranging from Law to Feelings to Travel to Appearance. Each screen grants the visitor insight into the research by the institute’s scholars, connecting the visitors to the living study of the materials in a groundbreaking way.

The end of the world

By now, you’ve reached the exit. In an echo of the entrance, the last words you hear and see are the closing passages of “Völuspá.”

Just as the poem is narrated by a female fortune teller, the woman’s voice describes Ragnarök, the end of the world as envisioned by the Norse people: how the world is burned away and a fresh new world grows in its place. When you step out of the darkness and back into the brightly lit outer area, it really feels like you’ve left behind an older world and returned to our newer one.

You are greeted by a final display on the legacy of the mythological poetry in the modern era to remind you that, in some way, the Norse gods and heroes are not so far off from us.

“The people who created the manuscripts worried about the same things that we worry about,” Svanhildur says, “and they also enjoyed many of the same things we do. They were happy and they were sad and they loved and they hated and so forth… We obviously want people to become aware of the treasures that we look after here but we also really want to touch people, to move them. To make them realize that this is something that is not irrelevant to them.”

The World of Words exhibition is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00. Find more information at worldinwords.is.