Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Icelanders'

This thesis is a contribution to the ongoing discussion of dreams in the islendingasogur. Most previous scholarship on this subject has dealt with one of the following: either attempted to identify a scheme to explain the origin of saga dreams (e.g. identifying influence from European dream-book theory on saga dreams), or attempted to explain the saga dreams using what can be referred to as the "matching approach", that is taking specific elements from the dream and seeking to understand their relevance to the rest of the text. My thesis hangs upon the following two hypotheses: 1. saga dreams are essentially inconsistent in their nature and therefore saga readers were required to bring to bear a variety of interpretative techniques when seeking to understand them, and 2. saga dreams use complex and multi-layered symbolism. The imagination of the medieval saga readership allowed and even expected dream-symbolism to operate on a number of levels and for dream-symbols to have a number of referents elsewhere in the text. In order to test these hypotheses, I have reviewed all of the dreams in all of the islendingasogur, but chosen six particular texts to seek to understand how these authors used dreams. These texts are as follows: Droplaugarsona saga; Njdls saga; Laxdoela saga; Viga-Glums saga; Gisla saga; Surssonar Hardar saga. I have devoted a chapter to each of these six sagas. For each dream I have written a 'context' that allows the dream to be understood. I have then presented a text of the dream alongside an English translation. Following this I have written a short commentary dealing with some of the textual problems in the passage, identifying the role of the dream and seeking to understand the way in which the medieval reader would have understood it, suggesting loans, analogues and analogies elsewhere in Norse literature.

The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file. Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on November 19, 2009). Thesis advisor: Dr. John Galliher. Includes bibliographical references.

The purpose of the present study was threefold. First, to investigate Icelandic and American students' counseling expectations. Second, to study counseling expectations of men and women. And finally, to explore the relationship between counseling expectations and Holland's typology. Eight-hundred-and-one useable responses were gathered from the students. To explore the first two objectives, a 2 (Nationality: Icelandic and American) x 2 (Sex: men and women) between subjects multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was calculated with prior counseling experience as a covariate and scores on the three factor scales of the Expectations About Counseling Questionnaire-Brief Form (EAC-B) as the dependent variables. It was found that the Icelandic students expected greater expertise from the counselor than did the American students. It was also discovered that women, as compared to men, expected to be more personally committed to the counseling process, whereas men expected more counselor expertise.To investigate the third objective, a canonical correlation analysis was performed using responses to the three factor scales of the EAC-B as the predictors and scores on the six Holland's types (RIASEC) as the criterion. It was found that counseling expectations were significantly related to Holland's typology. That is, the more Social persons were the more they expected to be personally committed to counseling and the less counselor expertise they expected. Also, the more Realistic persons were the greater their expectations about counselor expertise and the lower their expectations about being personally committed to counseling. On the whole, it appeared that Icelandic students' counseling expectations resembled expectations of persons with no past counseling experience, counseling expectations of men, counseling expectations of some minority groups, and counseling expectations of individuals who tend to posses Realistic personality characteristics. Namely, expecting direction and guidance from an expert counselor. On the other hand, women and persons who tended to be Social expected less guidance from the counselor and expected to be greatly involved in the counseling process. Results were discussed in relation to past findings in the expectancy literature, the validity of the expectancy construct, and the need for unique counseling interventions to meet the needs of diverse multicultural groups.
Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

Background: The main objective of this study was to investigate older people’s physical activity, their participation in various life situations, and their perceptions of their own health. This included an exploration of potential influences of urban versus rural residency on these outcomes, an evaluation of the measurement properties of a balance confidence scale, and an examination of the proposed usefulness of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) as a conceptual framework to facilitate analysis and understanding of selected outcomes. Methods: The study design was cross-sectional, population-based, with random selection from the national register of one urban and two rural municipalities in Northern Iceland. There were 186 participants, all community-dwelling, aged 65 to 88 years (mean = 73.8), and 48% of the group were women. The participation rate was 79%. Data was collected in 2004, in face-to-face interviews and through various standardized assessments. The main outcomes were total physical activity; leisure-time, household, and work-related physical activity; participation frequency and perceived participation restrictions; and self-rated health. Other assessments represented aspects of the ICF body functions, activities, environmental factors and personal factors. Moreover, Rasch analysis methods were applied to examine and modify the Activities-specific Balance Confidence (ABC) scale and the ICF used as a conceptual framework throughout the study. Results: The total physical activity score was the same for urban and rural people and the largest proportion of the total physical activity behavior was derived from the household domain. Rural females received the highest scores of all in household physical activity and rural males were more physically active than the others in the work-related domain. However, leisure-time physical activity was more common in urban than rural communities. A physically active lifestyle, urban living, a higher level of cognition, younger age, and fewer depressive symptoms were all associated with more frequent participation. Rural living and depressive symptoms were associated with perceived participation restrictions. Moreover, perceived participation restrictions were associated with not being employed and limitations in advanced lower extremity capacity. Both fewer depressive symptoms and advanced lower extremity capacity also increased the likelihood of better self-rated health, as did capacity in upper extremities, older age, and household physical activity. Rasch rating scale analysis indicated a need to modify the ABC to improve its psychometric properties. The modified ABC was then used to measure balance confidence which, however, was found not to play a major role in explaining participation or self-rated health. Finally, the ICF was useful as a conceptual framework for mapping various components of functioning and health and to facilitate analyses of their relationships. Conclusions: The results highlighted the commonalities and differences in factors associated with participation frequency, perceived participation restrictions, and self-rated health in old age. Some of these factors, such as advanced lower extremity capacity, depressive symptoms, and physical activity pattern should be of particular interest for geriatric physical therapy due to their potential for interventions. While the associations between depressive symptoms, participation, and self-rated health are well known, research is needed on the effects of advanced lower extremity capacity on participation and self-rated health in old age. The environment (urban versus rural) also presented itself as an important contextual variable to be aware of when working with older people’s participation and physically active life-style. Greater emphasis should be placed on using Rasch measurement methods for improving the availability of quality scientific measures to evaluate various aspects of functioning and health among older adults. Finally, a coordinated implementation of a conceptual framework such as ICF may further advance interdisciplinary and international studies on aging, functioning, and health.

This thesis considers depictions of and discourse around sexual activity in the Íslendingasögur (the sagas of the Icelanders), also drawing on Eddic poetry, the samtíðarsögur (contemporary sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas) and riddarasögur (chivalric sagas) to give a broader view of sex in Old Norse literature. The Old Norse literary canon is extensive, and seduction, complicated love lives and sexual insults often lie at the heart of conflicts and fatalities. Where sex comes into focus, contextually and culturally relevant imagery and wordplay enliven the scenes, conveying the tension, humour, or erotic ambitions of the authors. The thesis explores how sex and sexuality are represented, possible reasons behind these methods, and their effect on the audience's perspectives of sex and the body. Analysis of the language and context is supported by contemporaneous literature, cognitive metaphor theory and modern theories of sexuality and anthropology, providing fresh perspectives on well-known passages in the sagas. The first chapter concentrates on sexual metaphors, offering an assessment of different aspects of sexual language that feature in the sagas and identifying common themes, from the benign and regular euphemisms for sexual intercourse, to more obscure metaphors that are highly contextualised and ambiguous. The second chapter looks at public judgement in the form of gossip, which often serves as a vehicle for sexual material, as well as the methods and motivations behind its circulation. Chapter three considers the opposite: the private discussion of sex and sexual woes, with reference to Foucault and examples of the model of confession as precedent for honest and open discussion. The final chapter looks at how sex and the sexualised body are employed as a means of entertainment, bringing slapstick humour, jokes and grotesque imagery to even the bleakest situations, thus concluding an interdisciplinary, theoretically-inflected approach to the forms and functions of sex in the sagas.

The thesis brings together Íslendingasögur and srpske junačke pesme, two historically and culturally unrelated heroic literatures, literatures that had, nevertheless, converged upon a similar kind of realism. This feature in which they diverge from the earlier European epics - Beowulf, Nibelungenlied, La Chanson de Roland, is the focal point of this study. Rather than examining it solely in terms of verisimilitude and historicism with which it is commonly associated, I am approaching it as an emergent feature (emergent realism) of the non-linear, evolutionary dynamics of their production (i.e. their networked, negotiated authorship), the dynamics I call the distributed author. Although all traditional narratives develop in accordance with this dynamics, their non-linearity is often compromised by Bakhtinian 'centripetal forces' (e.g. centralised state, Church) with an effect of directedness akin to the authorial agency of an individual. The peculiar weakness of such forces in the milieus in which the sagas/Serbian epics grew, encouraged their distributed nature. As a result, they come across as indexes of their own coming into being, preserving, meshing and contrasting the old and the new, the general and the more idiosyncratic perspectives on past events and characters. In so doing they fail to arouse in the recipient the feeling of being addressed and possibly manipulated by an all encompassing organising authority. As a consequence, they also impress as believable. While chapters one and two of this study deal with theoretical and aesthetic implications of the two literatures' distributed authorship and their emergent realism, chapters three and four illustrate the ways in which these are manifested in the rich texture of the past and the complex make-up of the characters. The final chapter summarises major points of the thesis and suggests the poetics of complexity as a term particularly suitable to encapsulate the two literatures' common creative principles.

The aim of this master’s degree essays is to analyse and compare the first-contact situations and means of communication as described in four different sagas including Legendary Sagas and Sagas of Icelanders, more specifically Vínlandsagas. Two additional papers on contacts and communication with indigenous people from the perspectives of Spanish conquistadores and Brittish settlers in Australia were reviewed to establish a baseline for behaviour in contact situations with unknown peoples. The analysis of both sagas and additional sources shows that neither of them focus in their description on communications tools and instead focus on the different behaviour of the indigenous people as observed by the settlers and conquistadores and on the actions and transactions with the indigenous peoples.
Das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit war es, die Beschreibungen von Erstkontaktsituationen und Kommunikationsmitteln in vier verschiedenen Sagas zu vergleichen und zu analysieren. Zu diesem Zweck wurden Vorzeitsagas und Isländersagas, insbesondere Vínlandsagas untersucht. Zudem wurden zwei ergänzende Artikel zu Erstkontakten und Kommunikation mit indigenen Bevölkerungen aus der Sicht von spanischen Conquistadores und britischen Kolonisateuren in Australien aufgearbeitet, um eine Operationslinie für das Verhalten in Kontaktsituationen mit fremden Bevölkerungen zu haben. Die Analyse von sowohl Sagas als auch den ergänzenden Quellen zeigt, dass weder Sagas noch spätere Aufzeichnungen Beschreibungen der Kommunikationsmittel en detail erwähnen. Stattdessen liegt der Fokus auf dem vom eigenen abweichenden Verhalten und dem Umgang mit den indigenen Bevölkerungen.

The global financial crisis has provoked a robust debate in international political economy literature. Existing studies afford readers with a thorough analysis of the impacts of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism, both of which are regarded as determinants of economic and political volatility. These studies identify a relationship between financialization and volatility that is encouraging as it permits for a more qualitative assessment of global phenomena, therefore facilitating a greater understanding of country-level experiences of the global financial crisis, of which there exists substantial and puzzling variation. Iceland’s financial crisis is an example of this variation. Though Iceland’s financial liberalization occurred during an era of unprecedented international financialization, this does not explain why Iceland’s government prohibited foreign competition, nor does it explain the rapid, astronomical growth of Iceland’s banking sector between 2002 and 2008. Furthermore, Iceland’s refusal and subsequent inability to honor foreign debt obligations represents a new development that merits addition consideration. These discrepancies provoke a number of questions regarding the impact that Iceland’s institutional structure has on domestic and international developments, such as the liberalization of its financial sector and the financialization of the global economy. This suggests not that Iceland’s financial crisis is a purely domestic phenomenon, but rather that domestic institutions played a unique role in exacerbating the impact of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism. I develop a conceptual framework informed by Mancur Olson’s theory of ‘institutional sclerosis’ to reveal the institutions that pre-dated Iceland’s financial collapse and argue that Iceland’s corporatist structure is conducive to capture, resulting in a disproportionately overextended banking sector. In addition, I summarize the events of Iceland’s debt negotiations to provide a more comprehensive understanding of what influenced Iceland’s politicians to provide continued support for honoring foreign debt obligations despite a clear ‘no’ mandate afforded by Icelanders in both referendums, as well as why Iceland honored foreign debt obligations altogether, allowing for proper conclusions to be drawn about Iceland’s recovery model and its implications for existing theories in the fields of international political economy and global governance.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2016.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
"June 2016." Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 116-129).
Some claim Iceland's food security is in grave danger. Farms fear financial failure as they compete with cheaper imports; high import reliance renders the country vulnerable to natural, political, and financial volatility; climate change threatens to exacerbate these food system weaknesses. Yet Iceland has no contingency plan, and adaptation measures are absent from national climate change reports. While this gap could be perceived as negligence, to do so assumes a universalistic framework for risk and resilience -- a trend currently seen in the global proliferation of formulaic, resiliency plans. Ecological resilience is defined as the ability of a system to absorb disturbance so as to retain essentially the same function. In a social-ecological system, what defines that function? Who decides what is at risk? This thesis seeks to understand the defining parameters behind risk and resilience within Iceland's social-ecological food system -- a dynamic and evolving set of tensions between human livelihoods, legal frameworks, biological cycling, and emotive response. Interviews, backed by risk theory and corroborated with survey data, uncover the tendency for risk to be framed in the context of particular value logics. Explored through factor analysis, the aggregate risk scale that focuses on agricultural vitality, for example, correlates with a value scale that embeds preparedness and self-sufficiency, but also cultural heritage. These findings suggest several implications: First, there is a need to go beyond economic valuations in understanding risk. Moral, sentimental, and ideational values shape risk perception, and our current tools -- such as discounting -- cannot adequately consider what a future community will value. Secondly, if a value at stake underpins how risk is defined, then, inversely, preserving that value can define resilience. In other words, value-based resilience offers a framework for defining the function resilience preserves. And yet finally, this logic highlights a powerful hazard in resilience planning -- the risk of systematically establishing preference for certain values and perpetuating a dominant set of social, political, economic ideologies. Value-based resilience is thus a call to planners to recognize the vulnerability built into the plans we make.
by Holly Johanna Jacobson.
M.C.P.

This thesis examines the climate role conceptions and climate role positions of Iceland and Sweden respectively, as they are portrayed in their climate action plans. This study compliments the current trend to examine climate leadership within International Relations, with an additional focus on the Nordic countries. Not only is the Nordic identity enmeshed with ideas of environmentalism, but the Nordic countries also have a reputation of being environmental leaders. Despite this reputation, the Nordic countries vary considerably between themselves when it comes to climate performance, thus inspiring the study of the highest and lowest Nordic emitters of greenhouse gases. The study is carried out from a constructivist role theory perspective, which is complemented with a novel climate role analytical framework. A content analysis is conducted on Iceland‘s and Sweden‘s countries‘ climate action plans, and climate role indicators are coded and analyzed. The study reveals that both Iceland and Sweden depict themselves as climate leaders in their climate action plans. However, while both countries refer to themselves as climate leaders, the leadership indicators are manifested distinctively, resulting in the countries projecting different climate leadership role positions. By evaluating Iceland’s and Sweden’s portrayal of global climate leadership, it is assessed that Iceland assumes the climate role position of a pioneer, with aspirations for setting an example for other countries through its climate transition, and that Sweden assumes the climate role position of a constructive pusher, with aspirations to lead the domestic and global climate transition through ambitious actions. The analysis thus reveals how Sweden’s internationally ascribed roles as a climate leader and Iceland’s internationally ascribed role as an environmental leader is legitimated and reverberated throughout their respective climate action plans, in accordance with their role conceptions and identities.

For much of the history of saga scholarship, questions of origins, the role of feud, kinship, and the structure of the society, and its institutions, have been fertile grounds for research. As such, the female characters – who were certainly less overtly prominent in the settlement of the country as outlined in the texts, as well as in the public and institutional structures – have often been overlooked as subjects of in depth scholarly enquiry. Turning a sharp gaze upon three particular characters, from three different sagas: Auðr from Gísla saga, Guðrún from Laxdæla saga, and Hallgerður from Njáls saga, and entering upon a comparative analysis of the introductions, marriages, and divorces – if applicable – of the characters, this study refutes the archetypical models under which these characters are sometimes studied, and examines the idea of marriage, contrary to its commonly perceived function, as largely a destabilizing force.

In October 1875 the Canadian government reserved a tract of land along the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg for the exclusive use of Icelandic immigrants. This was part of a larger policy of reserving land for colonization projects involving European immigrants with a common ethno-religious background. The purpose of this policy was to promote the rapid resettlement and agricultural development of Aboriginal territory in the Canadian Northwest. The case of the Icelandic reserve, or Nýja Ísland (New Iceland), provides a revealing window into this policy, and the ways in which it intersected with the larger processes of colonization in the region during the late nineteenth century. The central problem that this study addresses is the uneasy fit between "colonization reserves" such as New Iceland and the political, economic and cultural logic of nineteenth-century liberalism. Earlier studies have interpreted group settlements as either aberrations from the "normal" pattern of pioneer individualism or communitarian alternatives to it. This study, by contrast, argues that colonization reserves were part of a spatial regime that reflected liberal categories of difference that were integral to the extension of a new liberal colonial order in the region. Using official documents, immigrant letters and contemporary newspapers, this study examines the Icelandic colonists’ relationship to the Aboriginal people they displaced, to other settler groups, and to the Canadian state. It draws out the tensions between the designs and perceptions of government officials in Ottawa and Winnipeg, the administrative machinery of the state, and the lives and strategies of people attempting to navigate shifting positions within colonial hierarchies of race and culture.

碩士
國立中興大學
國際政治研究所
102
This article use Europeanization’s approach to study the interactive between Iceland and EU, especially the case of financial services. Although Iceland never applied for EU membership until 2009, they interact through the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the European Economic Area (EEA) and the Schengen Agreement. After the financial crisis hit Iceland in 2008, highlighting the problems in the financial services sector in Iceland, Iceland applied for EU membership in 2009. The main arguments are as follows: First, Iceland calls for reform. Second, whether it is Iceland''s political elite, the academic and Epistemic Communities or abroad, want some reform in Iceland on financial services policy. Third, the EU''s institutional and cultural values, there is a high degree of homogeneity of Iceland; Iceland tends to learning normative values and rules of the EU. However, Iceland''s political discourse has very strong sense of national sovereignty, nationalism and Euroscepticism. It becomes the biggest obstacle of Iceland’s Europeanization.