Waterscape in Hjari Veraldar The ‘Last Habitable Edge of the Earth’
From Firenze University Press Journal: Ri-vista
Samaneh Sadat Nickayin, Agricultural University of Iceland — Faculty of Planning and design, Iceland
Living in the ‘Last Habitable Edge of the Earth’One of the fascinating synonyms of Iceland is Hjari Veraldar, translated as ‘last livable/habitable edge of the Earth’, a remote island in the northern sea. Paradisiacal, utopian, dystopian, heterotopian — islands hold an incredibly mysterious and alluring place in our geographical imagination. Islands have their own rules, their own stories, their own charac-ters, their own ecologies, their own functions, and their own forms. Differentiated from their contexts and as much myth as reality, Hjari Veraldar describes how the adventurous and courageous islanders have been dealing with mysterious natural disas-ters, the real worriers who never left their land since the first Viking settlers lodged the island.Islands are figures of otherness and difference in proximity to what surrounds them, water. The inception of all human lives starts by immersing in the womb’s water; by leaving it, we become a creature of land made up of 60 percent of water (Ívarsdót-tir, 2021). The connection to water within humans is vigorous, and Iceland demonstrates a unique case of such a link. The indirect connection to the forms of water is palpable in the Icelandic language and the culture of is-landers. Water shapes the land and creates differ-ent forms of carving landscapes: lake, island, gulf, peninsula, bay, cape, strait, isthmus, archipelago, and meander. However, one of the unique bodies of water visible in the Scandinavian countries is Fjord. Fjord comes from the Norse fjorðr that has become a common word in the international vocabulary of al-most all languages. Fjord accurately describes those parts of the land which are long, narrow inlets with steep sides or cliffs, created by a glacier and con-nected to the ocean. Almost all of the places in Ice-land take their names after the name of the fjord (fjörður) in which they are located: Borgafjorður, Ísafjörður, Grundafjörður, Seyðisfjörður, etc. Due to the central mountains of Iceland, the pop-ulation is spread between shorelines and the high-lands. Icelanders from different villages use the ex-pression Milli Fjalls og fjord (Between the moun-tains and the fjord) to say, «we all come from the same place», a solitary expression that resonates with the coalition and alliance of a nation who come together to encounter the challenges of the inhos-pitable nature.Icelandic is a rich language that allows for much freedom in expressing different forms of nature with extremely accurate words. For instance, there are countless colours and colour combinations for Icelandic horses or different nouns for exact types of birds’ tails.The forms of water in Icelandic weather vocabulary are astonishing. Such precision is more noticeable in describing the type of snow. Local claims that Ice-landic has over a hundred words for snow, although this may sound exaggerated, the snow-related vocabulary is vibrant; depending on when the snow land, weather conditions and how much of it falls, Icelanders use a variation of terms1. Another form of water and land is geyser. The wordis derived from the Icelandic verb geysa, which means gush. The term geyser, from the placename Geysir in the Haukadalur valley, became popular and has been used for similar hydrothermal features worldwide. While artificial and decorative foun-tains, with the most sophisticated design and technologies, are part of the landscape design realm, the nature-made geysir is a well-known tourist at-traction spot to admire the natural Jet d’Eau, of an eruptive water spring.Although the beauty of these places creates eco-nomic opportunities in tourism, designing the infra-structures with low impact on the surrounding areas is the key challenge for landscape designers in Iceland.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-14179
Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/ri-vista/article/view/14179
