| Summary: | International audience At the beginning of the 18th century the so-called Moravian Brethren who are dating back their religious roots to the Reformation and become the status of an independent Protestant church spread to different places in the world and worked as missionaries among local communities and indigenous people. Thanks to the familiar connexion of their leader and protector count Nikolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf to the Danish Crown a few years after establishing the settlement in Herrnhut (Saxony) they received permission to send out missionaries in the European Arctic. They build missions stations in Greenland, got in contact with the Sami and Samojed people in Lapland and tried to establish settlements on Iceland. This article deals with the travel of Moravian Brothers to Iceland in the 1740ties and unpublished descriptions of landscape, people and climate on this island written during and after these journeys. The main aim is to show that this new knowledge was produced as an outcome of Moravians’ mobility and their religious ideas which were transferred as an observation model to describe the local communities as well as social and environmental conditions. Iceland turns out to be a landscape which reflects Moravians’ horizon of expectation regarding the possibility to establish settlements, survive without any economic support from Europe and spread religious ideas among the inhabitants. Even if Moravians commissioned such encoded indications about discovered territories these new representations of European Arctic rise interest in whole Europe. Therefore, Moravians´ descriptions of Iceland will be read in the historical context reflecting the reception of knowledge about Iceland by German scholars in the late 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries published in German, Latin and several translations into German.
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