 Texts and Commentaries |
 Home |
 Bibliography |
|---|
This map provides direct links to a number of poems by Jónas Hallgrímsson that are intimately connected with particular Icelandic locales. For further information about the map see below.
Take the Tour with Google Earth. [what's this?]
(All of the works linked from here can also be found in the Table of Contents.)
The map reproduced above, originally published by the Icelandic Literary Society in 1849, is a reduced one-sheet version (scale 1:960,000) of the Map of Iceland (Uppdráttur Íslands) surveyed by Björn Gunnlaugsson, Jónas's mathematics instructor at Bessastaðir, in the years 1831-46, and drawn in final form by the Danish cartographer Oluf Nicolai Olsen (1794-1848). Publication of the larger four-sheet version (scale 1:480,000) had been completed in 1848. On the one-sheet version reproduced here, the counties (sýslur) are shown in different colors.
Björn's is the first truly modern map of Iceland and the first to contain relatively reliable information about the central highlands. Jónas played a small but important role in the production of the map, to which his own unfinished "Description of Iceland" was envisioned as complementary.
For accurate reproductions of both versions of the map, see the National Library of Iceland's Web site, Antique maps of Iceland, and Haraldur Sigurðsson, Kortasaga Íslands frá lokum 16. aldar til 1848 (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs og Þjóðvinafélagsins, 1978), Plates 39-43. For detailed information about the maps and their background, see the latter, pp. 241-61 (English summary pp. 269-70).
Source: Björn Gunnlaugsson and Ólafur Nicolas Ólsen (i.e., Oluf Nikolai Olsen), Uppdráttr Íslands. Copenhagen, 1849. Scale 1:960,000. 56x68.7 cm. [image used with permission from Landsbókasafn Íslands (National Library of Iceland); digitally edited]
To use the Tour with Google Earth, you must download and install the Google Earth application.
For technical assistance: