Therapeutic landscapes are reputed to have a lasting repute for realizing healing. Traditional therapeutic landscapes have recognized natural environments as often sought after places for well-being. Such places promote wellness via their close encounter with nature, facilitating relaxation and restoration, and enhancing a combination of physical, mental, and spiritual healing. The physical environment of Iceland is explored through a case study approach, primarily employing data from the field notebooks of postsecondary students travelling in Iceland, as well as the authors' ethnographic field experience in Iceland. Iceland is examined using both a traditional understanding of therapeutic landscapes, as well as the contemporary understanding of the coloured landscape. In addition to the colour white, reflected in the glacial ice, moving water, and geo-thermal steams, black and various other colours in combination are discussed.
This paper intersects two areas of human geography research: therapeutic landscapes and literary geography. Using Þórbergur Þórðarson's The Stones Speak (2012) as a case study, the paper explores the mixing of the rural environment and the wilderness in a farming community in Iceland at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the health-related properties of this space. The built environment can function as a site of physical and social health, while the wilderness provides emotional healing and normalcy for the physically sick. Though elements can be recognized separately, this paper highlights how local people experience both wilderness and rural elements as one landscape, as well as how human activity shapes the landscape and its inhabitants's sense of place. Literary geography limits the study to a single cultural context, thus more study is needed to articulate the intersection of rural and wilderness space.
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