The intellectual work of maps is to make the world, or an aspect of it, understandable. The earliest maps from medieval Iceland, drawn between c. 1225 and c. 1400, take the entire world as their object, their makers motivated by the intellectual desire to know the world and their place within it. They represent ancient and medieval theories about the order of the world and its position in the cosmos: its places, and the peoples who inhabited them. Their purposes, however, were not simply to instruct their viewers in the cosmographic principles that lay behind them. Maps are tools with which to think, as well as to show, and thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelanders used the cartographic medium, as we shall see, to think about Iceland's place in the world, its people, and their history. The contemplated world, and its role in Icelandic literature and culture, is the subject of this book.

The five maps that survive in Icelandic manuscripts are not sui generis, but represent cartographic genres in pan-European circulation. They date to the apogee of map production in medieval Europe, a period in which maps begin to appear in unprecedented numbers, and in a greater variety of contexts. There was no native Scandinavian tradition of map-making in the centuries before Iceland's conversion to Christianity and the associated advent of alphabetic literacy and bookish culture in c. 1000. The Vikings did not record their extensive geographic knowledge in map form, and the maps Icelanders drew in subsequent centuries do not emanate from the period of European oceanic expansion that began in the Viking Age. The maps drawn in medieval Iceland are of the type referred to by modern and sometimes medieval thinkers as mappae mundi (singular mappa mundi), a compound of the Latin words mappa (‘cloth’) and mundus (‘world’). The Icelandic examples are few, but include representatives of all the main mappa mundi varieties: the hemispherical world map; the zonal map; the tripartite world map; and the schematic T-O map.

These map types are visually and conceptually diverse, and their discussion must of necessity build up from a fundamental understanding of what they show.