Illness and Sense of Place in Rural Iceland: The Stones Speak by Þórbergur Þórðarson

This paper intersects two areas of human geography research: therapeutic landscapes and literary geography. Using Þórbergur Þórðarson’s The Stones Speak (2012) as a case study, the paper explores the mixing of the rural environment and the wilderness in a farming community in Iceland at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the health-related properties of this space. The built environment can function as a site of physical and social health, while the wilderness provides emotional healing and normalcy for the physically sick. Though elements can be recognized separately, this paper highlights how local people experience both wilderness and rural elements as one landscape, as well as how human activity shapes the landscape and its inhabitants’s sense of place. Literary geography limits the study to a single cultural context, thus more study is needed to articulate the intersection of rural and wilderness space.