This study undertakes a comprehensive comparative analysis of natural imagery in Old Norse literature—specifically the Poetic Edda and the Sagas of Icelanders—in dialogue with classical Eastern poetic traditions from China, Japan, and Korea. Focusing on four elemental motifs—ice and snow, fire and volcanism, the sea, and light—the research explores how these distinct literary traditions construct meaning through the natural world. Adopting a methodology that combines close reading, ecocritical theory, and cross-cultural comparison, the study reveals that while both traditions employ natural imagery to articulate human experience, they diverge fundamentally in their understanding of nature's ontology, temporality, and relation to human agency. The Icelandic tradition, shaped by the extreme environments of the North Atlantic, constructs nature as a force of chaos—material, indifferent, and resistant to human meaning-making. The Eastern traditions, emerging from more temperate landscapes and shaped by Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian philosophies, construct nature as a medium of harmony—symbolically legible and open to human attunement. These divergences, the study argues, are not merely aesthetic but reflect different ontological commitments, different experiences of time, and different understandings of the human place in the cosmos. By bringing together Nordic and Eastern traditions rarely placed in sustained dialogue, the study contributes to the expanding field of cross-cultural poetics, demonstrates the value of ecocritical approaches to premodern literature, and offers resources for rethinking contemporary human-nature relations in an era of environmental crisis.
Bo Xia (Fri,) studied this question.