The woman of the mountains

Magnús Bjarni, Daði Geir , Kristinnog Jóhannes

Mountain Woman

• This picture is of the mountain woman but she is the ,,chosen one”.

• She is chosen once in every year from the community

• She goes with the ceremony of the mountain on 17th June but he is the independence of Icelandic's .

• Mountain woman

Text about mountain woman

• The "Lady of the Mountain" (Fjallkonan) is the female incarnation (national personification) of Iceland.

• While she symbolised what Icelanders considered to be genuine and purely Icelandic, in her purity she reflected a deep-seated, but unattainable, wish of Icelanders to be a totally independent nation

• Fjallkonan is thus not only a national symbol, she also represents the national vision, the nation's ultimate dream

• She was first depicted in the poem Ofsjónir by Eggert Ólafsson (1752) but her name was mentioned for the first time in the poem Eldgamla Ísafold by Bjarni Thorarensen

• From that moment onwards she became a well-known symbol in Icelandic poetry

• The oldest image of "the woman of the mountains" was published in an English translation of Icelandic folk-tales, Icelandic legends, (1864-1866)

• It is the work of the German painter J. B. Zwecker, who drew it to specifications provided by Eiríkur Magnússon, one of the translators. Eiríkur described the picture in a letter to Jón Sigurðsson (11 April 1866)

• Also very popular is the image designed by Benedikt Gröndal on a memorial card of the National holiday in 1874

• Her typical dress of was first presented in Winnipeg, Canada in 1924

Since the establishment of the Icelandic republic in 1944 the reading of a poem by "The Lady of the Mountain" on the national holiday (17 June) has been a tradition. And our teacher was once the woman of the mountain.