Literary Landscapes and Cultural Exchange in the Early Medieval North Atlantic

This brief essay considers the instructive role literary landscapes (i.e., representations of the natural world in the literary record) can play in tracing cultural interplay between early Ireland, England, and the Continent (as well as the early medieval North Atlantic more broadly). Drawing on the possibility that Johannes Scottus Eriugena might have influenced the image of the “source of all waters” in the Old English Boethius, this essay examines how attention to the natural world can suggest new routes of transmission. Ultimately, I propose this model as a possible ecocritical future for a field that imagines the early medieval North Atlantic as a multilingual zone of cultural exchange.