Iceland a liter ary guide for tr avellers
Marcel Krueger
TAURIS PARKE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, TAURIS PARKE and the TAURIS PARKE logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain in 2020 Copyright © Marcel Krueger, 2020 Images 1, 8, 13 and 19 by Kai Müller Marcel Krueger has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB: 978-1-788-31148-9; eBook: 978-1-78672-572-1 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters
Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements x About this book xi Introduction 1 1 Reykjavík & Reykjanes: Urban Iceland Bay of Smokes Hafnarfjörður Mosfellsbær Keflavík & Reykjanes Peninsula Akranes & Hvalfjörður 2 Western Region: Snorri Sturluson’s Pool 3 Westfjords: Water & Witchcraft 4 Northwestern Region: Monsters & Executioners 5 Northeastern Region: Home of Poets 6 Eastern Region: Heavy Metal in the Fjord 7 Southern Region: Parliaments & Pirates 8 Highlands: Here Outlaws Dwell
24 26 65 73 78 85 89 106 124 137 153 169 190
Chronology of Events 199 Bibliography 203 Index 206
List of Illustr ations Map 1 Reykjavík, Iceland 2 Reykjavík City Library 3 The world-famous Kaffibarinn Underground sign 4 Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík 5 The Culture House in Reykjavík 6 Harpa, Reykjavík 7 Höfði House, Reykjavík 8 Hafnarfjörður 9 Gljúfrasteinn 10 Gunnuhver 11 The Settlement Centre in Borgarnes 12 The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft in Hólmavík 13 Djúpavík 14 Öxnadalur with Hraundrangi 15 Akureyri 16 Nonnahús in Akureyri 17 Goðafoss 18 Skriðuklaustur 19 Þingvellir 20 Víti and Öskjuvatn
viii 25 32 55 57 59 61 63 66 75 85 91 108 111 139 141 143 149 167 172 197
Map created by Jaina Arts
Acknowledgements Once more, the usually solitary act of finishing a manuscript would have been impossible without the help of the many talented and benevolent individuals who helped me hammer this into shape. I am especially indebted to Professor Carolyne Larrington and Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, who provided invaluable feedback on both structure and gaps in my knowledge and understanding of the sagas and Icelandic literature in general. Without the keen eyes of Eymelt Sehmer and Ólafur Örn Arnarson this book would still be a weird jumble of German, English and Icelandic spellings of places and people. Many thanks to Alda Sigmundsdóttir, Arngrímur Vídalín, Ingunn Snædal and Andri Snaer Magnasson for their willingness to be my test readers, and especially to my Sonic Iceland brotherin-arms Kai Müller for making me aware of the energy and tensions of Iceland and its people in the first place (he is also an ace photographer). I am equally indebted to my commissioning editor Tatiana Wilde and her unfaltering support, and it is a shame that she could not finish the journey with me. Ever onward. I am of course the only one to blame for any blatant mistakes, inconsistencies and typos in here.
About this book As pointed out before, almost every Icelander is a writer or poet to some extent, so the selection in here, especially of contemporary writers, is highly subjective and mainly influenced by the preference of the author. Many works of younger or more obscure Icelandic writers have not yet been translated into English other than excerpts in magazines and collections – these important voices have however been included to provide as complete an overview of Icelandic literature as possible. At best, this can only be a high-level introduction to the deliciously rich literary heritage of the country, and I hope that many more translations will be made available to the English language reader in the future. Icelandic spelling has been retained for all names, publications, place names and so on, which should not overly confuse the reader. The Icelandic alphabet is very similar to the English and consists of thirty-two letters, only a few of which are either not found in English or only used in Icelandic. The three main ones encountered in here are þ, æ and ð. Þ/þ is pronounced like the English ‘th’ in ‘thunder’ or ‘theatre’, Æ/æ is pronounced like the sound of the letters ‘ai’ in ‘Thai food’ – ‘Hi/hæ’ and ‘bye/bæ’ are the same in both English and Icelandic, and Ð /ð like ‘th’ in Thor. Iceland also uses a patronymic naming system: last names take the father’s first name plus either -son or -dóttir depending on whether the child is a son or daughter. In this book, I follow Icelandic usage and refer to authors by their first name whenever possible. This book is also not a comprehensive academic study of Icelandic literature, but aims at providing a broad overview of all the fantastic stories and writing that have come from the country over the centuries – fairy tales and folklore have been given the same place as works of contemporary academic literary merit. There
xii  Iceland is also a high percentage of poetry featured in this guide, reflecting the high share of poetry in Icelandic literature past and present. An extensive reading list can be found at the end of this book. To paraphrase German writer Heinrich BĂśll: the island described in this guide exists, but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.
Introduction Islands are places apart where Europe is absent. W.H. Auden, Journey to Iceland Betra er berfættum en bókarlausum að vera. Better to go barefoot than bookless. Icelandic proverb
Writing about an island should be easy. After all, it is surrounded by the sea, neighbouring lands far away. The boundaries are set. The outlook can only ever be inwards, away from the tides. Nothing could be further away from the truth in the case of Iceland. This is an island of many identities, of constant flux, just like its unruly volcanic ground. It was the last place in Europe to be settled, but the first democracy; a backwater under foreign rule, its population almost eradicated by catastrophe and neglect; emerging as a progressive Nordic democracy after the two World Wars; and finally from being one of the poorest members of the European Economic Area to becoming a major global financial player, only to be brought crashing down again by greed and failing banks. Today, Iceland is once again reinventing itself as the one destination on everyone’s holiday bucket list. To say that Icelanders have developed a certain resilience and ingenuity over the centuries, and a very peculiar way to express it, would be an understatement. An island settled by explorers and raiders, the view of its people was never just inward – and it manifested itself in a rich oral and literary heritage, something that to this day links Icelanders past and present. This rich heritage was carried on through the generations: even during times of extreme hardship, Icelanders retained a high level of literacy, and the stories and poems of old were retold and expanded upon by sheep farmers, psalm writers,
2 Iceland travelling reverends, independence fighters, scholars and hedonists. The appreciation of the written word and the emphasis on cultural progress has also led to Iceland having one of the highest standings of artists in society globally. Here, more than anywhere else on the planet, writers and poets become prime ministers and mayors, and vice versa. My personal fascination with Iceland began, as for many others, with the Norse myths, with stories about Odin and Loki, about Víking raids and the discovery of Vínland. Kevin Crossley-Holland says it best in the introduction to Norse Myths – Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki (2017): When I think about the Vikings or talk about the Vikings my eyes brighten, my heart beats faster, and sometimes my hair stands on end. Energetic and practical and witty and daring and quarrelsome and passionate, always eager to go to the edge and see and find out more: that’s how Vikings were. Their tough and stubborn and often beautiful women managed self-sufficient farmsteads in Norway and Sweden and Denmark and Iceland and Greenland, and were at least as capable and outspoken as their men. And for around three centuries – from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the eleventh – many of their husbands and not a few of their sons and daughters sailed south and east and west in their elegant and superbly made clinker boats as mercenaries, traders, hit-andrun raiders, settlers and rulers. And of course they took their gods and beliefs and language with them.
This is, of course, an idealised view of the Víkings and their mythology; but as the country settled by them is as much shaped by storytelling as it is by tectonic activity, Norse lore always served me well as a beeline into both Iceland and Icelandic literature over the years. After all, its mountains and rivers, shores and valleys have all been named by the settlers and writers recording the tales of the settlement. It is both the otherworldliness of the landscape and the outward-looking culture of Icelanders that has made me return to
Introduction 3 the island time and time again, and over the years my fascination with Icelandic literature has only increased: Iceland is one of the smallest linguistic areas in the world, with only around 350,000 inhabitants and about 50,000 speakers outside the country, which means that the language has not changed much since the ninth century and modern Icelanders can still read the original medieval texts with relative ease. Here, literature plays a crucial role in preserving and developing culture and language equally. In geological terms, Iceland is young. It was formed about twenty million years ago from a series of volcanic eruptions caused by the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, which even today spread at a rate of two and a half centimetres per year – at some point in the future, Iceland will tear apart. For a long time, it remained one of the world’s last uninhabited islands. The land called ‘Thule’ by the Greek merchant Pytheas in the fourth century BC – recorded in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (AD 79) – might have been Iceland, but for a long time that remained the only potential mention of it in ancient texts. There is some literary evidence that Irish monks, the so-called Papar, arrived in Iceland before the Norsemen somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries; however no archaeological evidence has been found to this day. The real show began in the ninth century, when the Víkings, or to be more precise the first Norwegian travellers and explorers, arrived. Their names and those of the areas in which they made their homes during this so-called ‘Age of Settlement’ were recorded in a number of chronicles written down between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, like The Book of Icelanders (Íslendigabók), The Book of Settlements (Landnámabók) and The Book of Flatey Island (Flateyjarbók). As Robert Ferguson puts it in The Hammer and the Cross (2009): The Book of the Settlements [Landnámabók] is a full and often dramatic account of the colonisation of Iceland. Based on a lost original from the early twelfth century it contains the names of over 3,000 people and 1,400 places.
4 Iceland According to the Landnámabók, Iceland was discovered by a man named Naddodd, who was sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands when he lost his way and came to the east coast of Iceland instead. Only observing it from the safety of his ship, Naddodd called the country Snowland (Snæland), The first proper settler however was Hrafna (‘Raven’) Flóki Vilgerðarson, named after the fact that he took ravens with him on board ship and released them periodically. When they didn’t return he knew they’d found food and land. Hrafna-Flóki settled for one winter at Barðaströnd in the southern Westfjords region. His journey and stay did not start out well however: his daughter drowned en route, and then his livestock starved to death during the harsh winter. The Landnámabók records how this led Flóki to give the country its name: The spring was an extremely cold one. Flóki climbed a certain high mountain, and north across the mountain range he could see a fjord full of drift ice. That’s why he called the country Iceland, and so it’s been called ever since.
After that hard winter, however, the whole island started to turn green, making Flóki realise that it was habitable, so he returned to Norway to spread the word about this new fertile island he had discovered – but kept the name. The first permanent settlers after Flóki were Norwegian chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir, who arrived around AD 874. According to the Landnámabók, Ingólfur threw his two highseat pillars (crucial parts of a Víking chieftain’s hall) overboard as he neared the island, vowing to settle where they landed. After wintering on the south coast in the first year, Ingólfur sailed along the coast until the pillars were found in a place he named Reykjavík, or Smoky Bay, after the geothermal steam rising from the earth – a place that would become the capital of modern Iceland. He was followed by many more chieftains, their families and slaves, who settled all the habitable areas of the island in the next decades, mostly along the fjords and river plains. These settlers were primarily of Norwegian,
Introduction 5 Irish and Scottish origin – most of the latter being female slaves and servants raided from their homelands. The stories of the Settlement Age and the next 200 years are recorded in the sagas, the most important Icelandic literary heritage – a fascinating canon of heroic and family stories written down between the ninth century and the fourteenth century, its structure and composition unlike anything written in contemporary Europe of that time. According to the sagas, the new immigrants arriving from Norway were independent-minded settlers fleeing the harsh rule of King Harald Fairhair, a man who makes an appearance in almost all of the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur). In AD 930, without a ruler drawing his or her power from divine sources, the Icelandic chieftains established an assembly called the Alþingi, the Alþing. This parliament convened each summer at the Þingvellir plain in the south of Iceland, where representative chieftains (Goðar) amended laws and settled disputes (the parliament also provided the backdrop for many saga episodes). Icelandic laws were not written down, but instead memorised by an elected lawspeaker, the lögsögumaður. The one thing Icelandic society was lacking was a central executive power, so laws could only ever be enforced by the local community – giving rise to instability, cronyism and feuds, which again provided the writers of the sagas with plenty of material. Despite that internal struggle, Iceland enjoyed a mostly uninterrupted period of growth in its so-called ‘Commonwealth Years’ until the thirteenth century, with settlers travelling to Greenland and eastern Canada (their exploits were recorded in the Saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða), and the Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga Saga)). By the tenth century, Christianity had reached the country and many prominent Icelanders accepted the new faith, although the majority remained dedicated to Odin and Thor, and civil war between the religious groups seemed likely. As recorded in the Íslendigabók, in the year AD 999 the Alþing appointed one of the chieftains, Þorgeir Þorkelsson, to decide the issue of religion by arbitration. After a night of contemplation, he ruled that the country should convert
6 Iceland to Christianity as a whole, but that pagans would be allowed to worship privately, making the transition from heathendom to Christianity in Iceland one of the few peaceful ones in history. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the power of independent local farmers and chieftains gave way to the growing power of a handful of families and their leaders. This period is known as the ‘Age of the Sturlungs’. The fighting became a proper civil war that ravaged the country, with groups of ill-disciplined troops causing havoc in a land inhabited almost entirely by farmers who could ill-afford to provide the manpower for standing armies. The Age of the Sturlungs also saw a veritable proliferation of sagas being written down, maybe in an attempt to reunite the country by making the stories of heroic deeds widely available. It also saw the emergence of the first giant of Icelandic literature, polymath Snorri Sturluson. A member of the Sturlungs and a politician, he is today best known as the author of the Prose or Younger Edda (Snorra Edda, thirteenth century), one of the two sources that have introduced the Norse pantheon and mythology to the modern world – the other being the Poetic or Elder Edda (Ljóða Edda), an anonymous collection of poems from around the same time. In the Prose Edda, Snorri might have recorded his own assessment of the age he was living in based on a quote he took from the Elder Edda: ‘A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age. No longer is there mercy among men.’ The sagas themselves can be divided into the so-called ‘kings’ sagas’, such as Snorri’s Heimskringla which traces the rulers of Norway from legendary times to 1177, and the Saga of Cnut’s Descendants (Knýtlinga saga), dealing with Danish kings from Gorm the Old to Canute IV; legendary sagas, which are basically romances and fantastic hero tales; and the Sagas of Icelanders – more or less fictionalised accounts of the Settlement Age (AD 900–1050), with the majority of the sagas written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. To the last category belong highly-accomplished literary works such as Egill’s Saga (Egils saga Skallagrímssonar), the life of the warrior-poet Egill
Introduction 7 Skallagrímsson; the Saga of the People of Laxárdalr (Laxdæla Saga, a triangular love story set in West Iceland; the Saga of Gisli Súrssonar (Gísla Saga Súrssonar), the tragic tale of a heroic outlaw in the Westfjords; and the Story of Burnt Njál (Njáls Saga), generally considered the high point of Icelandic literary art, a complex and rich account of human and societal conflicts playing out across the fertile fields of south Iceland. As Daisy Neijmann puts it in her A History of Icelandic Literature (2006): Iceland differed from its neighbouring countries in that it had no king or any other centralised authority or public executive power; it was, instead, an unstable federation of chieftaincies accepting a common law and a common system of courts. […] Since Icelandic literature, too, was unlike any other European literature of the High Middle Ages, it is only natural to assume that there was a connection between the particular social and religious aspects of society and the unique character of literature it produced.
Closely related to the sagas are the Eddas, among the main sources for the knowledge about Norse gods we have today. The Poetic or Elder Edda is a group of more than thirty poems on gods and human heroes preserved in oral tradition until they were recorded by an unknown chronicler (or group of chroniclers). The Prose or Younger Edda is the work of Snorri Sturluson and the most important source of modern knowledge on this subject, and also contains a guide to poetic diction and the kennings, a typically twoword metaphor found in Norse and Icelandic that stands in for a concrete noun: ‘bone-house’ (body), ‘whale-road’ (sea), ‘wave-horse’ (ship), ‘sky-candle’ (sun). After decades of bloody civil war, the warring Icelandic chieftains finally agreed to accept the sovereignty of Norway and signed the ‘Old Covenant’ (‘Gamli sáttmáli’) between 1262 and 1264, establishing a union with the Norwegian king and peace throughout the country. Little changed in the following decades: Norway’s consolidation of colonial power was slow, and the most
8 Iceland drastic change in Icelandic society was, as everywhere else in Europe, the growing power of the church. Power gradually shifted to ecclesiastical authorities as Iceland’s two bishoprics in Skálholt in southern Iceland and Hólar in the north acquired land at the expense of the old chieftains. Around the same time a climate shift occurred: during the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’, Europe began to have shorter growing seasons and extremely cold winters. Since Iceland had marginal farmland to begin with (mostly in the coastal plains), the climate change resulted in increased hardship for its population. On the other hand, church fast days all over Scandinavia increased demand for dried and salted fish, and the cod trade became an important part of the Icelandic economy for centuries to come. The island remained under Norwegian hegemony until 1397 when Norway (and thus Iceland) became part of the so-called Kalmar Union with Denmark and Sweden. Denmark did not need Iceland’s fish and homespun wool, which again led to a deficit in Iceland’s trade and an overall decline in living standards. From 1602, Iceland was even forbidden to trade with countries other than Denmark: the Danish–Icelandic Trade Monopoly remained in effect until 1787. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Christian III of Denmark began to impose Lutheranism on the subjects of his empire. Jón Arason and Ögmundur Pálsson, the Catholic bishops of Iceland, opposed the king. Ögmundur was deported in 1541, and in 1550 Jón Arason was captured by loyalist forces together with his two sons. The three were subsequently beheaded in Skálholt in the south of Iceland, effectively ending Catholicism in Iceland. Icelanders became Lutherans and remain largely so to this day. With Iceland’s loss of independence to Denmark and the accompanying hardship, Icelandic literature somewhat declined, and from about 1400 to the early nineteenth century hardly any new prose was written – the sagas and folklore, especially tales of fairies and elves, remained a source of unity and pride, however. Increasingly, the main compositions were sacred verse and rímur, an Icelandic form of balladry remarkable for its metrical ingenuity. The outstanding clerical work of these centuries – and the one that
Introduction 9 was more often printed than any other in Iceland – is the Passion Hymns (Passiusálmar, 1666) by Hallgrímur Pétursson, a Lutheran pastor living in the north of Iceland (see chapter 4). This does however remain one of the few outstanding works of literature emerging from Iceland for almost 200 years, with the exception of a handful of then-considered exotic travelogues either by Icelanders going abroad or by visitors to the country, such as The Life of the Icelander Jón Ólafsson, Traveller to India, Written by Himself and Completed about 1661 AD (published in English in 1805) or the chronicle of an Arab pirate attack on southern Iceland in Ólafur Egilsson’s The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627 (Reisubók Séra Ólafs Egilssonar, 1630). As William Cronon puts it in his foreword to Karen Oslund’s Iceland Imagined (2011): By the eighteenth century, the glory days of the Viking Age were half a millennium in the past, and the North Atlantic seemed very much a backwater in comparison with Enlightenment Europe.
To make matters even worse, Laki volcano erupted in 1783, killing more than 9,000 people (a quarter of Iceland’s population) and between 50 and 60 per cent of the country’s livestock. The event was famously captured by parish priest Jón Steingrímsson (1728–91) in his ‘Fire Sermon’ (Eldmessa), which he delivered on 20 July 1783 at Kirkjubæjarklaustur, a village threatened by the lava flow from the volcano: This past week, and the two prior to it, more poison fell from the sky than words can describe: ash, volcanic hairs, rain full of sulfur and saltpeter, all of it mixed with sand. The snouts, nostrils, and feet of livestock grazing or walking on the grass turned bright yellow and raw. All water went tepid and light blue in colour and gravel slides turned gray. All the earth’s plants burned, withered and turned grey, one after another, as the fire increased and neared the settlements.
10 Iceland The period following the eruption was known as the ‘Mist Hardships’ (Móðuharðindin). Danish officials were actually contemplating whether to move the remaining Icelandic population to Denmark, but Icelanders stubbornly refused to leave their steaming rock, again taking pride and resilience from their old stories and tales. In many of the farmsteads across the country the old custom of húslestur (house reading) was practised, where every member of the household would gather in the baðstofa (living room, sleeping quarters and workshop all in one) in the evening after the outdoor chores were done, and the man of the house would read out loud from the Bible, Icelandic sagas or whatever book or journal was available, to entertain his family and the farmhands. During the first half of the nineteenth century many Icelanders decided to emigrate, either seeking education in Denmark with the hope of returning home as a Danish official, or emigrating to the New World, particularly to Manitoba in Canada where a strong Icelandic community exists to this day. At the same time, a new national consciousness was revived in Iceland, inspired by romantic nationalist ideas spreading over from continental Europe. As elsewhere on the continent, a linguistic and literary revival began in Iceland, often instigated by young Icelanders educated in Denmark. The revival was spearheaded by the so-called Fjölnismenn, four young Icelandic intellectuals studying in Copenhagen who, from 1835 to 1847, published the Icelandic literary journal Fjölnir. Jónas Hallgrímsson, Konráð Gíslason, Brynjólfur Pétursson and Tómas Sæmundsson, all poets and writers in their own right, sought to revive national consciousness to support Icelandic independence. Hallgrímsson is today considered one of the most important romantic poets of Iceland, if not the national poet per se. On the island itself, key writers of the independence movement included renaissance man Benedikt Gröndal, deputy governor and poet; Grímur Þórgrímsson Thomsen, poet and editor; Valdimar Ásmundsson, founder of Icelandic literary journal Fjallkonan and the man who translated and expanded Bram Stoker’s Dracula into Icelandic; as well as Torfhildur Þorsteinsdóttir, a Manitobian exile
Introduction 11 who became the first Icelander to make a living as an author and who is frequently cited as the first Icelandic female novelist. Finally, an independence movement formed under the leadership of lawyer and publisher Jón Sigurðsson. In 1843 a new Alþing was founded as a consultative assembly in Reykjavík, claiming continuity with the old Alþing of the Icelandic Commonwealth (which had stopped functioning as a legislative gathering in the Middle Ages and was completely abolished as a cultural gathering by the Danes in 1800). Romanticism, dominant in the 1830s and characteristic of the work of Hallgrímsson and of Bjarni Vigfússon Thorarensen, was succeeded by realism and naturalism in prose fiction. The first example of the modern Icelandic novel was Lad and Lass, a Story of Life in Iceland (Piltur og stúlka, 1850), a description of contemporary life by Jón Thoroddsen, a poet and novelist from the Eastfjords. This early modern Icelandic fiction is either introspective in mood or given to detailed pictures of typical Icelandic rural life – as in The Mountain Farm (Heidarbylid, 1908–11), a four-volume cycle by Guðmundur Magnússon, who wrote using the pen name Jón Trausti. In 1874, Denmark granted Iceland a constitution and home rule. The constitution was revised in 1903, and a minister for Icelandic affairs, residing in Reykjavík, was made responsible to the Alþing – the first of whom was Hannes Hafstein, a poet and politician from northeastern Iceland. In the quarter of a century preceding 1914 Iceland prospered, and demand for Icelandic wool, sheep and cod reached an all-time high during World War I. As Halldór Laxness puts it in Independent People (Sjálfstætt fólk, 1935): This so-called World War, perhaps the most bountiful blessing that God has sent our country since the Napoleonic Wars saved the nation from the consequences of the Great Eruption and raised our culture from the ruins with an increased demand for fish and train-oil, yes, this beautiful war, and may the Almighty grant us another equally beautiful at the earliest possible moment – this war began with the shooting of a scruffy little foreigner, a chap
12 Iceland called Ferdinand or something, and the death of this Ferdinand was taken so much to heart by various ill-disposed citizens that they kept on hacking each other to pieces like suet in a trough, for four consecutive years and more. And in the little loft in Summerhouses, where, on the occasion of the Shepherds’ Meet, there had assembled once more all those indomitable warriors who themselves had waged a lifelong unremitting struggle much more serious than any World War, and one which was prosecuted for reasons far weightier than that any Ferdinand should ever have been assassinated, this war was now the theme of debate.
Iceland remained part of neutral Denmark during the war. The Act of Union, on 1 December 1918, recognised Iceland as a fully sovereign state – the so-called Kingdom of Iceland, which joined with Denmark in a personal union with the Danish king. Iceland established its own flag, while Denmark was to represent its foreign affairs and defence interests. Iceland was one of the first countries in the world to grant women the right to vote in 1915. A few years later, Icelandic post-World War I prosperity came to an end with the outbreak of the Great Depression, which hit Iceland hard as the value of exports plummeted. On the other hand, and comparable with the rest of Europe during the 1920s and early 1930s, these times again saw a robust upswing in the output of Icelandic literature. Icelandic writers travelled widely, and the themes of their writing – while still being focused on the life on the island – increasingly incorporated more global topics and politics; and were now written in other languages or made more widely available in translation. The political affectations of the time were also played out on the Icelandic stage: socialist Þórbergur Þórðarson (1888–1974, see chapter 7) published a novel that was as far removed from an Icelandic saga as could be possible: A Letter to Laura (Bréf til Láru, 1924), a thoroughly-composed hybrid text that combined letters, essays, short stories and fantastic episodes. Þórbergur was later found guilty of ‘derogating a foreign nation’ for calling Adolf Hitler a sadist in one of his essays. Other outstanding prose writers
Introduction 13 of that era include prolific author Gunnar Gunnarsson, a master of characterisation who wrote many of his Christian-themed novels in Danish (and was a long-time Nazi sympathiser who went on reading tours in Germany after the outbreak of World War II). Poet and prose writer Unnur Benediktsdóttir Bjarklind from the north of Iceland, who wrote under the pen-name of Hulda, became one of the leading voices of symbolism, and widely-travelled novelist and essayist Halldór Kiljan Laxness, future Nobel Prize for Literature winner, published many of his key works like The Great Weaver from Kashmir (Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír, 1927) and Independent People (1935) and established himself as a voice in Icelandic publishing to be reckoned with. Iceland and its literature was also becoming increasingly popular with outsiders – either writers inspired by Norse mythology and the sagas or visitors to the country. At Leeds University in the 1920s, J.R.R. Tolkien formed a drinking club where he and his fellow students would recite Old Norse poetry and sing Icelandic folk songs. His Lord of the Rings trilogy was directly inspired by William Morris’s translation of the Völsunga Saga which was published in London in 1888 as The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (containing the famous tale of Sigurd and Brynhild and the destruction of the Burgundians which later also inspired composer Richard Wagner and his Ring Cycle). Reasons to visit Iceland itself included scientific expeditions to the wild interior of the Highlands, touristic outings on horseback, and even an attempt to find a ‘Germanic Heartland’ – travelling poets W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice encountered Hermann Göring’s wife and brother during a stay in Iceland in 1936, and in Letters from Iceland (1937) quote an ‘unknown Nazi’ stating that: ‘Für uns ist Island das Land’ – ‘Iceland is the country for us.’ With war looming in spring 1939, Icelandic officials realised that the country’s exposed position in the Atlantic shipping lanes would potentially be very dangerous in wartime. The invasion of both Denmark and Norway by Nazi Germany began on 9 April 1940, severing communications between Iceland and Denmark. As a
14 Iceland result, on 10 April, the parliament took temporary control of foreign affairs and also elected a provisional governor, Sveinn Björnsson, who would later become the country’s first president – Iceland became a de facto fully sovereign country. However, Icelanders and the Danish considered this a temporary state of affairs and it was mutually agreed that Iceland would return powers to Denmark once the Nazi occupation was over. The invasion of Norway and the capture of its ports however left Iceland highly exposed as a potential next target to invade and threaten Britain from, so Winston Churchill and his war cabinet decided to pre-empt a German invasion: on 10 May 1940, British military forces sailed into Reykjavík harbour and began an Allied occupation of the country that would last for five years. At its peak, the British had 25,000 troops stationed in Iceland – all but eliminating unemployment. In July 1941, the responsibility for Iceland’s occupation was handed over to the US and British troops were replaced by 40,000 Americans, who at the time outnumbered all adult Icelandic men. Overall, the occupation and the work provided by the many naval and air force bases in places like Keflavík, Hvalfjörður, Akureyri and Kaldaðarnes proved to be an economic boon. A first impression of Iceland that must have been shared by many Allied servicemen was captured in a letter by war artist Eric Ravilious (1903–42), who would later perish on a flight from the Kaldaðarnes RAF base: We flew over the mountain country that looks like craters on the moon and it looked just like those photographs the M. of Information gave me, with shadows very dark and striped like leaves. It is a surprising place.
Empowered by the economic upswing brought in by the Allied forces and with no end in sight of the Nazi occupation of Denmark, on 20 May 1944 Icelanders voted on whether to terminate the personal union with the King of Denmark and establish a republic. The vote was 97 per cent in favour of ending the union and
Introduction 15 95 per cent in favour of the new republican constitution. Iceland effectively became an independent republic on 17 June 1944 (the birthday of independence hero Jón Sigurðsson), with Sveinn Björnsson as its first president. Danish King Christian X sent a message of congratulations. The economic upswing continued after the war ended in 1945 (mostly based on improved fishing and agricultural techniques), but new-found wealth and global strategic importance also brought new challenges to Icelandic society, enhanced by the Cold War – all of it captured and commented on by Icelandic writers and poets laying open what was wrong with the brave new world. In October 1946 Iceland and the US agreed to terminate US responsibility for the defence of Iceland – but due to the strategic importance of Iceland’s position in the so-called ‘GIUK gap’ (the naval choke point formed by Greenland, Iceland, and the UK that Soviet ships would need to pass through to reach the US), the US retained usage rights over the airbase at Keflavík. This agreement led to massive public protests, and plastic batons and tear gas were used for the first time ever on Reykjavík’s main Austurvöllur square. The whole process and public outcry led to Laxness writing The Atom Station (Atómstöðin, 1948) and the establishment of the never fully-defined group of ‘Atom Poets’ – among them important voices like Einar Bragi, Jón úr Vör and Steinn Steinarr. Among the significant novelists and prose writers of the post-war era are Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðsson, author of such masterly novellas as The Changing Earth (Litbrigði jarðarinnar, 1947) and Pastor Böðvar’s Letter (Bréf séra Böðvars, 1965); Indriði Guðmundur Þorsteinsson, who has recorded the challenges of twentieth-century Icelandic society in novels such as North of War (Norðan við stríð, 1971); Guðbergur Bergsson, an ironic commentator on the foibles of ordinary people mostly known for his stream-of-consciousness magnum opus Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller (Tómas Jónsson, Metsölubók, 1966); as well as the important female voices of Svava Jakobsdóttir, author of the slightly surrealistic The Lodger (Leigjandinn, 1969), and Ásta Sigurðardóttir, who established herself on the Reykjavík scene with her poignant
16 Iceland short stories in the 1950s and 1960s. The literature of the post-war years often expresses either nostalgia for the old farming society or a modernist consciousness of loss, separation, and both personal and social depression and a bleak outlook on life. Modernism appeared as an artistic movement in Iceland in the 1960s, first in painting, then in poetry and finally in prose literature, all expressed in the modernist magazine Birtingur, founded in 1953 by members of the Atom Poets circle. Iceland became a charter member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949 – with the reservation that it would never take part in offensive action against another nation, and that other members (mainly the US) would be responsible for the defence of Iceland in the case of invasion. Again, the membership discussions and agreement in parliament were held against the backdrop of antiNATO riots on the square outside. Between the 1950s and the 1970s Iceland also engaged in a series of confrontations with the UK over the rights to fish in Icelandic waters, the three so-called ‘Cod Wars’. The conflict arose from the fact that Iceland decided to extend its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – the area of sea that a country controlled and could fish in exclusively – from just four miles out to sea first to twelve miles in 1958, then to fifty miles in 1972 and again to 200 miles in 1975. Each time, Iceland sent their (increasingly ageing) patrol boats out to intercept and expel British fishing trawlers, and the UK in response sent out the Royal Navy to protect the fishermen. Although it was never a war in the conventional sense of the word (the Royal Navy would have easily defeated the tiny Icelandic Navy), the peak of the ‘Cod Wars’ saw thirty-seven Royal Navy warships mobilised to protect British trawlers fishing in the disputed territory, with British and Icelandic boats trying to ram and shove each other on the choppy waters of the Atlantic. These ‘wars’ were eventually settled through diplomatic means, and in the end Iceland was successful in extending its EEZ – today the 200-mile limit is accepted internationally. One of the Icelandic coastguard ships, the Óðinn, built in 1959, has been preserved as a museum piece and can be visited at the Maritime Museum in Reykjavík.
Introduction 17 In 1955, Halldór Laxness finally put Iceland on the contemporary map of world literature again by receiving the Nobel Prize ‘for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland’. Halldór had been a controversial figure in Icelandic society since he began publishing in the 1920s, both for his left-leaning politics and his modern approach to poetry in his younger days, but it is his social-realist novels that he is mainly remembered for, especially Independent People, a novel that deconstructed the romantic view of the Icelandic sheep farmer. Other important post-World War II works include a novel about a would-be singer, The Fish Can Sing (Brekkukotsannáll, 1957) and A Parish Chronicle (Innansveitarkronika, 1970). Overall, the decades after World War II saw Icelandic literature explode both at home and abroad, where, following the success of Laxness, people were more and more interested in translated books from the island up north. The latter half of the twentieth century has been the age of the novel in Iceland. And writers and poets also continued to directly influence politics and society: poet Vigdís Finnbogadóttir served as the fourth President of Iceland from 1980 to 1996, and was the world’s first democratically directly-elected female president. With a presidency of exactly sixteen years, she also remains the longest-serving elected female head of state of any country to date. The Icelandic economy continued to grow throughout the 1980s and 1990s, following a set of market liberalisation policies, and the country became a member of the European Economic Area in 1994 following a minor recession in the early 1990s. The conservative governments of the 1990s and 2000s were strong supporters of US foreign policy (potentially afraid of losing Keflavík airbase – one of the economic motors of the country) despite domestic protests, and even lent support to the NATO bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo War and signed up as a member of the so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’ during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Over the next years, corporate income tax was reduced to eighteen per cent, inheritance tax was greatly reduced, the net wealth tax was abolished and a system of individual transferable
18 Iceland quotas in the Icelandic fisheries was expanded. Iceland prospered, with Icelanders travelling to London for weekend shopping trips and Icelandic bankers and businessmen owning whole football teams. However, in 2006, as if announcing the end of the old (or new) world order the US closed down Keflavík airbase and left the country for good. Just two years later, in October 2008, the Icelandic banking system collapsed, prompting Iceland to seek large loans from the International Monetary Fund and friendly countries. As comedian and politician Jón Gnarr put it in Gnarr!: How I Became the Mayor of a Large City in Iceland and Changed the World (2014): In 2008, Iceland experienced the terrible consequences of the economic crisis. The country’s banks crashed in a catastrophic way, and we soon learned that the government had practiced [sic] no oversight of our banks whatsoever, with cronyism and incompetence at work at the highest legislative levels. The forces that brought about the economic collapse were selfishness and greed: the bankers made risky investments, enriched themselves, they bought big houses and fancy cars, and then all of the economic miracles of the Icelandic banking economy were exposed as fiction. The rest of the country suffered.
Widespread protests in late 2008 and early 2009, the so-called ‘pots and pans revolution’ (named after the cooking utensils the protesters used to air their grievances) resulted in the resignation of the government. Social Democrat Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was appointed Prime Minister, becoming the world’s first openly homosexual head of government of the modern era. Elections took place in April 2009, and a continuing coalition government consisting of the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green Movement was established in May 2009. One year later, the anti-establishment and almost anarchistic Best Party (Besti flokkurinn), led by Jón Gnarr, won the local elections in Reykjavík (see chapter 1).
Introduction 19 Even in modern times the nature of Iceland can act up: in 2010, just two years after the crash, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted and its ash massively interfered with European aviation: airspaces all across the country were closed and hundreds of thousands of travellers stranded for over a week. Iceland’s economy stabilised under the government of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, but many Icelanders remained unhappy with the state of the economy and government austerity policies. The centre-right Independence Party (Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn) was returned to power, in coalition with the Progressive Party (Framsóknarflokkurinn), in the 2013 elections. During the crash and after, writers and poets remained the social consciousness of the country and helped their fellow compatriots to cope with the situation. Works like Andri Snær Magnason’s Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation (Draumalandið – Sjálfshjálparbók handa hræddri þjóð, 2006) and the books of Hallgrímur Helgason engaged with the crisis humorously and honestly, and in recent years the interest in Icelandic writing has grown exponentially together with the touristic interest in the country. Reykjavík also became a UNESCO City of Literature in 2011. More and more books are now translated into other languages and sold all over the world, especially crime fiction, the so-called ‘Nordic Noir’. With a crime rate of almost zero per cent it is somewhat surprising that many of the leading writers of Scandinavian crime hail from Iceland. The undisputed king of Nordic Noir is Arnaldur Indriðason, who has published twentyone novels so far – most as part of a series following Reykjavík Detective Erlendur, but also standalone thrillers like Operation Napoleon (Napóleonsskjölin, 1999). His female counterpart is Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (b. 1963), whose writing is a shade brighter and more contemporary, and who mainly writes a series following the cases of accidental sleuth and lawyer Þóra Guðmundsdóttir – of which she has published six books so far, with The Silence of the Sea (Brakið, 2011) as the latest instalment. The newest voice of Icelandic noir is Ragnar Jónasson, who has set his ‘Dark Iceland’ series in rural
20 Iceland Iceland – the small fishing village of Siglufjörður in the northwest. Jónasson’s detective Ari Þór Arason is a young cop who has just moved to the isolated setting and has to deal with disappearances, curfews and old mysteries; his latest thriller is Whiteout (Andköf, 2017). For the true crime devotee, an Iceland Noir crime fiction festival takes place each November in Reykjavík. Throughout the years the island up north, harsh as it is, has always appealed to outsiders as well, and its dramatic landscape and unique culture have also influenced an impressive body of literature by authors from around the world. From Jules Verne, who, in his 1864 work Journey to the Centre of the Earth set the entry point in the Snæfellsjökull crater, to the sagas and folk tales about elves that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; from W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s exploration of the country in the 1930s (resulting in their shared work Letters from Iceland) to Seamus Heaney and his fascination with the sagas, Iceland has always been inspirational. Recent years have also seen an increase in works being published that are based on the Eddas, like A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology (2017) and Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Norse Myths – Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki (2017). The sagas are still a central part of Iceland’s culture and continue to be taught in its schools, and most people are familiar with a good number, if not all of them. The sagas are certainly known to a much greater extent than British people are familiar with famous works of medieval literature. One key to understanding the power of the sagas lies in their relationship with the landscape itself. The sagas explain how place-names all around the country came to be: some of their explanations about events and characters gave names to natural places – like farms, hills or bogs – and have a historical basis, while others were invented by a saga-author but are nevertheless still used to this day. Despite their age, the sagas still live on in many of the local areas in which they are set – and have a life over and beyond the printed page. Not only have they served as inspiration for countless modern literary works, art and
Introduction 21 music, but there are also many new saga trails criss-crossing the country today, and living history museums, saga theatres and cultural centres allow both scholars and visitors to learn about the stories in the actual landscape where they took place. For me, it is often difficult to think of an analogy in another country where a corpus of medieval literature is so close to people’s hearts on a national scale. The contemporary impact and importance of Icelandic literature does not stop with the sagas, however. There are few other countries around the globe where any art form has become so widely and democratically ingrained in all levels of society as has literature in Iceland. Members of the creative arts are not only seen as the proverbial conscience of the country, but for centuries have provided key politicians and leaders. At the time of writing, the government of Iceland, a coalition of the Independence Party, the Left-Green Movement (Vinstri græn) and the Progressive Party, is led by Katrín Jakobsdóttir, a former writer and editor. The capital, Reykjavík, is home to an array of literary festivals, including, since 1985, the biannual Reykjavík International Literary Festival, where acclaimed authors such as A.S. Byatt and Kurt Vonnegut have conducted workshops and readings. It is fair to say that Iceland today is a country of book lovers and poets. The country retains an exceptionally high rate of literacy (around ninety-nine per cent) and more books are produced per capita than in most other countries in the world, while the country has a higher percentage of writers in its population than any other nation in the world. There are five titles published per every 1,000 Icelanders – similar statistics for the other Nordic countries are two to two point five. The average print run of fiction is 1,000 copies, the equivalent of a million copies in the US. Most publishing companies in Iceland have their home in Reykjavík and today publishing has become a booming industry, impressive considering the fact that only 340,000 people speak the language. The small market supports a large and diverse magazine and book publishing industry, with Icelandic periodicals numbering in the hundreds,
22 Iceland and around 1,600 book titles, most of them fiction, published every year. One of the main reading promotions in Iceland is not really an organised programme, but one that has grown out of tradition – namely the habit of publishing books primarily in the months leading up to Christmas. This is called the Book-Flood-BeforeChristmas, which does indeed sound like a commercial marketing campaign in English, but the word jólabókaflóð is a term familiar to every Icelander. It is no exaggeration to say that in Reykjavík and elsewhere in the country the time from early October until Christmas is dedicated to books: publishers bring out new books in large numbers, bookshops, libraries, cafés and schools promote them in various ways and the public flocks to events and readings with writers even acting as shop assistants in bookshops. Books are the single most popular Christmas gift in Iceland and at this time of year are quite literally the talk of the town – even at the local hairdresser. Despite the many setbacks in their history, natural and manmade, Icelanders retain a positive and progressive outlook, albeit one with a dark northern satirical undertone – it is no wonder that Iceland is one of the few stable countries emerging from a future global crash (complete with a navy) in The Bone Clocks (2015) by British fantasy author David Mitchell. Just as well-travelled medieval poets and scholars used voyages of discovery and heroic tales to reflect on the Iceland of their time, contemporary Icelandic authors have made the world their subject, which they explore through the prism of their own specific literary heritage. To this day the written word keeps Iceland alive, its places named, its corrupt politicians in check and its outlook facing the world. It will be exciting to see what books will emerge from this fascinating craggy island in the North Atlantic in the future. This man is now out of the saga. Borgarnes/Dundalk/Cologne, 2018
Introduction 23
A word on travel Tourism has become a double-edged sword for Iceland in recent years. On the one hand, the steady influx of visitors has kept areas from ruin and desertion that would have long been abandoned by their inhabitants; but at the same time Reykjavík faces the same issues of gentrification and commercial whitewashing as Berlin or Dublin. Not to mention that the touristic infrastructure of the country is not set up for the increase in visitors it has seen in recent years – since 2010 the number of tourists has nearly quadrupled to around 1.8 million annually. In 2017 alone, 2.3 million people visited the country, seven times more tourists than locals. Since the Icelandic national football team spectacularly defeated the English national team during the UEFA Euro 2016, even more people are wanting to see the nation of Víkings and underdogs with their impressive ‘Hú!’ cheering. This influx of visitors, as welcoming as it is in the sense of foreign exchange entering the country, puts additional strain on the infrastructure of this small country not really set up for mass tourism. The security forces of the country, mostly manned by volunteers with day jobs, are stretched to breaking point because of tourists getting stranded in rivers and on mountain roads in rental cars not equipped for off-road excursions, and in recent years a number of visitors have died in accidents as they ignored safety warnings of dangerous undercurrents on beaches or tried to access closed mountain roads. This harsh and dangerous volcanic island has not been placed in the North Atlantic purely for the delectation of visitors.
A guide to Iceland's rich literary heritage--from Norse witches to contemporary crime fiction.
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