| Description |
Fens, bogs, and shades of death: moorland in literature and culture
In literary history, swamps, fens, and moorlands are not exactly pleasant places: “Created evil, for evil only good, / Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, / Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, /Abominable, inutterable, and worse”, as John Milton claimed in the 17th century. Moors and marshes have provided the settings for great Gothic novels: this is where Sherlock Holmes investigates the mystery of The Hound of the Baskervilles, this is where Aragorn takes a gruesome shortcut on his way to fight Mordor in the Lord of the Rings, and this is where the not-so-nice fairies lead lost travellers astray.
Perhaps not surprisingly, fens and swamps have long been drained and turned into arable land (i.e., more useful to farmers) in Britain as well as Germany. In this seminar, then, we’ll explore how this old image of moorland impacts on contemporary efforts to establish the importance of wetscapes and peatlands to our efforts to fight climate change. We will read selected literary texts dealing with moorland alongside secondary literature concerned with the nature and history of moors (and the relevant terminology), nature writing, and the Sustainable Development Goals (BNE). Moreover, we will get an introduction to the contemporary importance of moorland by the Greifswald Moor Centre, including a voluntary day field trip to a local moor, and some insight to their efforts of using creative activities to change cultural perceptions! |
