When Anthony Trollope travelled to Iceland in 1878 on board the steamship "Mastiff," he knew that he was following in the footsteps of several prominent travellers: Sir George Mackenzie, Sir Richard Burton, Lord Dufferin, and John Pfeiffer, among others. By then, Murray's had already produced a travel guide to Iceland, a sure sign that the country was ripe for the tourist trade. Rides to Thingvalla and the Geysers by Icelandic pony were de rigueur for any Icelandic visitor. And yet, visitors, from Ida Pfeiffer who travelled to Iceland alone in 1845 to W. H. Auden, visiting in 1937, assert their right to be called travellers rather than tourists by emphasizing the remoteness of the island, the intransigence of the local people regarding spontaneous and speedy departures, and the lack of banks, tasty food, and vermin-free beds. Moreover, the Icelanders were viewed by the Europeans as primitives--peasants with pre-medieval living standards and ways of thought. Against this primitive scene, the Europeans counterpose their own superior tastes and culture while simultaneously fancying themselves to possess the same physical stamina and stoic acceptance of wretched living conditions as the Icelanders. While Europe was swarming with eager tourists, educated by Murray and Baedeker guidebooks, and chaperoned by Thomas Cook tour guides, Iceland, along with Norway and Finland (but not usually Sweden) was the destination for those who wished to distinguish themselves as adventurer-travellers.
In this paper, I will examine how travel writers, such as Richard Burton, Ida Pfeiffer, the Marquess of Dufferin, Anthony Trollope, and Ethel Tweedie, present Iceland as the backdrop to illustrious self-definition, while purporting to relate only the essentials of the Icelandic experience. Simultaneously, however, these works gently ridicule the traveller aspects of the journeys through irony, humor, and pointed references to the tales of previous "intrepid" travellers. Indeed, all of these works share incidents, names, and particulars: the story of how the eider duck's down is taken, the legend of Flossi jumping over the chasm at Thingvalla, lovely Thoras who comfort and entice men, and Zoega, tour leader par excellence. Through these tales, we do learn about Icelandic history, the landscape, and something of the peoples; but these are all only segments of the picture onto which the scientific, astonished and intrepid travellers, the Mastiffs, and the new woman are superimposed. These are stories of travellers, and, as such, are self-promoting; but however much the voyagers focus on themselves, they do so, at least partially, as stimulation to the reader's imagining of her or his self in the same scenes, thereby encouraging both traveller and tourist experiences. Read together, these books show the reader that the divide between the traveller and the tourist is not always clear or desirable, and that the journey is made more intriguing by blurring the boundaries along the beaten tracks.
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