Connecting temporalities: walking through narratives of guilt and passion.

Abstract

As a young man in 1912, the author Thorbergur Thordarson leaves a ship in a small village in the Strandir region of north-west Iceland and decides to walk to Reykjavik, the capital, approximately 300 km away in the south. His pedestrian journey from Strandir and all the way to Reykjavik became the subject of some of his writing. This chapter starts by introducing Thorbergur and providing a glimpse into his personality, with an emphasis on his accounts, factual and fictional, about the walk. The chapter then examines how, in 2012, a group of seven walkers attempted to retrace his steps and how his presence directed the walk and shaped atmospheres. Two selected extracts from the walk are used to provide a glimpse into how the presence of Thorbergur emerged in different ways and influenced the atmosphere.