Michael Ridpath's Blog - Posts Tagged "iceland"

Last summer, when I was on holiday in Massachusetts, I wrote a long short story, more of a novella really, called Edge of Nowhere. It features my Icelandic detective, Magnus. He is sent up to Bolungarvik, an isolated village in the West Fjords.

There has been an accident: a landslide has killed a road worker. The problem is that the locals think the elves did it in revenge for a tunnel that has just been blasted through the elves home.

I have posted the first couple of chapters on this Goodreads site, and if you want to buy the whole story for not very much, you can download it from Kindle. If you haven't got a Kindle, well I'm sorry. I'll feel a bit bad about that.

Yesterday, I wrote the first post for my new blog: Writing in Ice.

Over the last ten years or so I have undertaken a ton of research on Iceland for my Magnus crime series: reading books, meeting people, and of course visiting the country many times. If you have ever been to Iceland you will know it’s a weird and exciting place, where strange things happen. Much of this I have been able to show in my Magnus series, but not all of it. The time has come to write it down.

Writing in Ice will be the story of how I fell in love with Iceland: a memoir of researching and writing a detective series set in the Land of Fire and Ice.

The blog will describe the landscape, society, history and people of Iceland as seen through the eyes of a writer researching a crime novel.

There will be posts on crime and the police, language, the sagas, volcanoes, the financial crash and the pots and pans revolution, folklore and elves, the sagas, the rapid modernisation of the country in the twentieth century, sheep farming, fishing and the Viking discovery of America. All these will relate to researching the characters, settings and plots of my Magnus novels.

I intend to show what is involved in writing a crime series set in a foreign country: how to come up with a detective, how to describe landscape, how to invent characters, how to plot and how to revise. It will be the story of how I set about discovering Iceland, of getting to know the place well enough that I could convincingly set a series of mysteries there.

I hope anyone who has visited Iceland or plans to travel to the country will find something of interest here, as will readers of my Magnus series. I will include posts on my favourite places in Iceland, a few well known, most less so.

If you would like to take a look at my Writing in Ice blog www.writinginice.com , please do. And if you click on the little white “subscribe” button at the top of the blog, you should get the posts whenever they come out; my plan is to post every week to begin with, and then every couple of weeks thereafter.

If you ever fly to Iceland from Europe, be sure to book yourself into a window seat on the right-hand side of the aeroplane. Your first view of Iceland will be unforgettable.

My first landing at Keflavík airport was in the autumn of 1995. My debut novel, a financial thriller entitled Free To Trade, had been published in January that year to an acclaim which was both satisfying and bewildering. I was lucky: it was the right book at the right time for the publishing world, and the following twelve months exploded in the competing demands of a frenzy of publicity and a contractual requirement to sit down and write a second book. I received invitations from foreign publishers to travel to Australia, the United States, France, Norway, Denmark, Holland. And Iceland.

I was urged by my agent to accept most of these invitations, but I didn’t really have to go to Iceland. Although its population are avid readers, there are only three hundred thousand of them; it’s scarcely an important market in the global scale of things. I knew nothing about the place, but I thought what the hell? It’s only three days.

Peering out of the window, the clouds beneath me shredded to reveal the thick finger of black rock that is the Reykjanes Peninsula at the south-west tip of Iceland, pointing towards me. In the distance, bulges of larger, firmer rock covered in snow, rippled and flexed. A tall plume of smoke, or was it steam, rose upwards from a spot just inland from a small town clinging to the shore.

As the plane descended the rock became rockier, a prairie of stone, gashed and scarred. Browns and yellows and golds emerged from the black, illuminated by an unlikely soft yellow sunshine slinking beneath the clouds prowling out to sea. A single white house sat in a puddle of rich green grass by the shore, where white caps nibbled at its boundaries. A windsock stretched out horizontally.

People, there were no trees. Not a one.

The aircraft touched down on a strip of smooth tarmac several miles long miraculously brushed on to this jagged wilderness. We taxied alongside giant camouflaged golf balls, tennis balls, radio masts and radar dishes, passing two enormous US transport planes. We had arrived at one of NATO’s most important airbases of the Cold War.

I remembered reading a colleague’s country study on Iceland during my days working for an international bank. Mark had pointed out that from the US government’s point of view, supporting Iceland was cheaper than building an aircraft carrier and it was a lot less likely to sink. From Keflavík, American aircraft could patrol the ‘Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap’, searching for the Soviet Navy, keeping it out of the North Atlantic seaways to Europe.

At that time, Iceland’s international airport took up a small corner of the airbase. I went through passport control and stood by the baggage carousel, where I was met by Ólafur, my Icelandic publisher. After a warm greeting a thought occurred to me.

‘How did you get in here?’ I asked. We were, after all, on the air side of the customs barrier.

‘No problem,’ said Ólafur. ‘I’m the consul in Iceland for the Dutch government.’

‘That’s handy.’

It was the first inkling of something that was going to become increasingly obvious over the following couple of days. Icelanders never have only one job. It is a matter of pride that their nation should have all the trappings of a fully functioning country: diplomats, civil servants, authors, musicians, poets, artists, dancers, footballers. You name it, the Icelanders want to do it.

But with only three hundred thousand people, there are not enough bodies to fill all these posts full-time, which is why Ólafur doubled up as Dutch consul. In the coming days I met journalists and publishers who played in the national football league and sang in the national opera.

A year later, Ólafur was the hot favourite in the Reykjavík press for the ultimate Saturday job: president of the country. Sadly, he decided not to run.

Once through customs, I met Pétur, Ólafur’s sidekick. Ólafur was the boss: a smooth, sophisticated intellectual in his fifties. Pétur was about my age, that is in his thirties, tall, blond and austere looking, with a biting humour delivered in the most Icelandic deadpan.

Icelanders have a profound sense of irony, which combines dangerously with a rock-like reserve. You can be speaking to one for several minutes, have decided that they are shy and a little simple, before you realize that they have been gently but effectively taking the piss out of you the whole time without you realizing it. Pétur can still do that to me.

Iceland’s international airport is actually forty kilometres outside Reykjavík. The road is a long straight black ribbon pulled taught across a lava field.

After a short distance, we turned off on to a rough track and stopped by a series of a dozen or so wooden racks, about eight feet high, on which were dangling what looked like grey-brown rags. These were cod, salted and left out to dry in the wind and occasional sunshine. The resultant stockfish will keep for months, possibly years, and is a delicacy in Portugal and West Africa. Icelanders have been doing this to fish for centuries.

It was a lonely, bleak spot. I looked out over the sea of stone surrounding me. A lonely mountain, in an almost perfect cone, sprouted up a few kilometres away.

‘You see all those crevasses?’ said Pétur. I looked at the deep gashes on the rolling landscape. ‘It’s the perfect place to hide a body.’

The thriller writer in me appreciated the point. The soft English desk-worker shivered.

Pétur showed me the frozen lava. It seemed ancient, but was in geological terms brand spanking new. It had been spewed out of a volcano only a few thousand years ago.

Then mosses and lichens had grown on it and begun to nibble. They were in brilliant but unlikely colours: bright yellow, lime green, soft orange, glowing brown, a shimmering grey. Eventually the lava crumbles and creates a thin layer of soil to which grasses cling. There were a few clumps of these, already yellow at this time of year.

Later, a little further towards Reykjavík, we passed a fresher lava spew, black as a coal hole, where the lichen was only just beginning to establish itself.

Still no trees.

Next stop was a power station, the source of the plume of steam that I had seen reaching up towards our aeroplane as we had landed. The plant took the hot water bubbling out of the earth and converted it to electricity which coursed along power lines to Reykjavík. The process produced hot water, and someone had recently had the bright idea of creating a large swimming pool in the rock to hold the stuff.

October in Iceland is cold, the air was fresh and a stiff breeze bit my cheeks. Ólafur, Pétur and I were wearing coats, but yards away Icelanders were cavorting in the hot water in swimming trunks. The water there is an unreal shade of bright light blue. The Icelanders' skin was a pale pink.

This, of course, was the ‘Blue Lagoon’, images of which now daub the walls of London Underground stations and bring hordes of tourists flocking to its warmth. I had never heard of it.

We reached Reykjavík. The outskirts of the city reminded me of the outskirts of Warsaw: grey, dull, soulless.

Ólafur and Pétur took me to my hotel in Reykjavík, which was very comfortable, but housed in an unprepossessing block of grey. I had a shower. Ólafur had told me that almost all Reykjavík energy came from the magma bubbling beneath the earth, and I could believe it. I emerged from the shower smelling faintly of sulphur, ready for whatever an evening in Reykjavík held for me.

This is the second post for my blog www.writinginice.com . For now I will continue posting a copy here as well.

Last week, I told you how I visited Iceland on a book tour in 1995. I had dinner the first evening with my publishers Ólafur, Pétur and three of their colleagues.

On the way, I spotted my first tree! It was, squat, no more than ten feet high, its naked, twisted branches shivering in the front garden of a small house. The house itself seemed to be constructed of white-painted corrugated iron with a red-painted iron roof. Indeed the hill in the centre of Reykjavík seemed to be covered in these brightly painted toy metal houses, gleaming in the evening sunshine. It was all rather jolly.

We went to a crowded restaurant and ate delicious fish. By this time, I was becoming used to dinners with publishers. Publishers are by and large well-read, friendly, interesting people. The talk often revolves around books, new and old, and people. Despite the bad press they sometimes get, people in book marketing love books as much as editors do.

The person in charge of marketing my book was Helga, a lively blonde woman. She asked me whether I had heard of the hidden people.

‘No,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Who are they?’ I wondered if they were some especially hard-to-reach target market.

‘They are all around us, here in Iceland,’ she said.

‘OK,’ I said, looking around. ‘Can I see them?’

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘They are hidden people. You can’t see them.’

‘I see,’ I said. A lie in so many ways. ‘So how do you know they exist?’

Helga went on to explain that some people could in fact see these hidden people at least occasionally, people like her grandmother who had had a number of dealings with them. They were similar to elves. They lived in rocks all over Iceland, and occasionally imparted their wisdom to the more conventional human inhabitants.

I checked the others around the table. They were listening seriously. I detected a hint of amusement in one of Helga’s sales colleagues.

‘Do you believe in these hidden people?’ I asked Helga.

‘Absolutely. Ólafur is an expert on them.’

I checked the sophisticated publisher who smiled benignly.

‘Pétur?’ I said. While Helga seemed a little touchy-feely, I thought I could rely on Pétur for some healthy cynicism. ‘Do you believe in these elves?’

‘Of course I do,’ he said, his face granite. I searched for a twinkle, but his blue eyes were dead serious.

I had absolutely no idea. It occurred to me that the entire Icelandic publishing industry might be crazy. Or were they just having me on?

That’s the kind of feeling I have often experienced in Iceland

The conversation shifted, as it often does in Iceland, to the small size of the population and how as a result everyone knows everyone else. Icelanders claim that in a country of only a couple of hundred thousand people everyone is bound to know everyone else. This is patently not true. The population is similar to the London borough of Barnet, yet most people in Barnet don’t know each other. I don’t even know most of the people in the block of flats in which I live.

Yet Icelanders do seem to know each other, and if they don’t, there is only one degree of separation: they will know someone who knows someone. This is partly because Icelandic extended families are seriously large – a generation back, eight or nine children was not uncommon, which soon leads to dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins. But it’s mostly because Icelanders are furious networkers. If they happen to meet a stranger, the first five minutes of conversation is spent triangulating whom they know in common.

There really were very few famous Icelanders in the 1990s. In fact there was just one: the singer, Björk. Ólafur was pointing out how even the most famous Icelanders were down to earth, how a postman would address the president by her first name – the president was a woman at that time – and how you might come across a celebrity acting like a normal person in a bar.

‘Like Björk,’ said Helga. ‘Have you heard of Björk, the singer?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Well, she is sitting just over there. Right behind you.’

I wasn’t going to be made a fool of twice in one evening. I glanced at Pétur, who almost smiled, and refused to turn around.

But when we left the restaurant, I glanced back at the noisy group in the corner behind me, in the middle of which was a small woman with short black hair and very pale high cheekbones, laughing.

Björk.

A couple of years later, I went on a book tour to Germany. It was here I learned that despite British rumours to the contrary, Germans do actually have a sense of humour. At any rate, they laughed at me several times, and they were set off into hysterics by a small Swedish lady named Maj Sjöwall, who read to them something about the police surrounding a dog. I was leaving the event when one of my fellow authors, a German crime novelist, mentioned she had once visited Iceland.

‘So have I,’ I said. ‘It’s a seriously weird country.’

‘But wouldn’t it be a great place to set a novel?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Why don’t you write one?’ she asked.

‘I write financial thrillers,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how I could possibly write one of those set in Iceland. The country is too small; their banks are tiny. I doubt there is any financial crime there.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’

And I thought no more about the country for ten years.

This is the third entry for my blog www.writinginice.com . I'll continue to post here as well, at least for a bit.

If you have any ideas for subjects you would like me to cover in future posts, please suggest them in the comments section below.

I began to read. At this stage I was just trying to get a general idea of the country, its society and its people. Wide was good; serendipity ruled. I had done this before: I had set books in Brazil and South Africa, and Iceland is much smaller than those two countries, and therefore less daunting.

The first book I picked up was Dreaming of Iceland by Sally Magnusson, a charming description of a one-week holiday the author took with her famous father Magnus back to his homeland.

Then I read Ring of Seasons, by Terry Lacy, an American who has lived in Iceland for many years and The Killer’s Guide to Iceland by Zane Radcliffe, an excellent novel about an Englishman visiting the country and getting himself into deep trouble. Radcliffe has a way with food similes: lava-like digestive biscuits, glaciers like icing on a cake. It sounds corny, but it’s actually rather good.

I assumed that there were no crime writers of note in Iceland, which was unforgivably naïve. In fact, Arnaldur Indridason had written several novels translated into English, one of which, Silence of the Grave, had won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2005. Crime writers like to claim that their novels shine a powerful light on the societies in which they are set, and I think they are correct. Arnaldur and his detective Erlendur introduced me to a useful range of fictional Icelanders.

On a more mundane level, the ‘Contexts’ sections of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides were excellent. I find the authors of these guides in particular are diligent and careful and their books are packed full of useful detail.

W.H. Auden and his friend Louis MacNeice produced a whimsical collection of poems and diary entries as payment to Faber for a holiday in Iceland in the 1930s, when the country was the poorest in Europe. This was updated imaginatively by the modern British poets Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, chronicling their own Icelandic travels in Moon Country.

I soon encountered the Iceland Review, a quarterly magazine with stunning photographs and interesting articles about all aspects of Icelandic life. The magazine is online, of course, but it’s better in its physical version.

The Iceland Weather Report was a blog by the Icelandic-Canadian Alda Sigmundsdóttir. The blog no longer exists, but Alda is well worth following on Facebook and elsewhere: over the years, she has given me all sorts of information and ideas.

The Reykjavík Grapevine is a weekly English-language newspaper with a good web presence.

I bought DVDs; I wanted to see what the country actually looked like. 101 Reykjavík, a film of the book by Hallgrímur Helgason, is an enjoyable story of Reykjavík’s nightlife. Nói Albinói is a bleak tale of the bleak life of a bleak teenager in a small isolated town in the middle of winter. Seagull’s Laughter is a sweet film set in a fishing village in Iceland in the 1950s.

I was beginning to get some idea of what Iceland was like. These are the sources I used at the very beginning: I will give much fuller lists of books, websites and films about Iceland in a future post.

I studied history at university, and I like to know the history of any country I write about. Given my intended plot for the first book in the series, this was especially necessary.

There are, of course, many histories of Iceland, but the one I stumbled across was Iceland Saga by Magnus Magnusson. This is more than a history. Magnusson takes his reader on a journey around Iceland to the locations where the major events in the country’s early history took place. The book really fired my imagination.

More about Iceland’s history in my next post.

Before there were people in Iceland, there were trees. Really. In the ninth century the whole country was covered with trees, and there wasn’t a soul to cut them down.

There are hints that Irish monks may have inhabited Iceland during the early ninth century, and a couple of wayward Vikings sailors stumbled across the island while lost, but the first Viking that we know of who sailed there deliberately was a man called Flóki. He took three ravens with him to help him find Iceland. He let them loose. The first two returned to the ship, but the third flew straight off over the horizon. Flóki followed it and made landfall.

At first Flóki was dismayed by the cold. He climbed to the top of a mountain and looking out at drift ice choking the island’s fjords, so he decided to call the country ‘Iceland’. He returned to Norway disappointed, although one of his mates claimed that in spring butter dripped from every blade of grass. This optimist was henceforth known as ‘Butter’ Thórólfur, in perhaps the first recorded example of Icelandic irony.

The first visitor to Iceland who actually stayed was Ingólfur Arnarson. He set out from Norway in 874, and when he spied the mountains of Iceland, he threw his high seat pillars into the sea, vowing to make his home wherever they fetched up. I’ve never been able to figure out precisely what these ‘high seat pillars’ were, presumably pieces of a disassembled chair. This does, at least, sound authentically Scandinavian.

Although he made landfall right away, at a place coincidentally called Ingólfshöfdi, or Ingólfur’s Headland, it took him many months to find his chair. Eventually two of his slaves discovered it in a smoky bay on the west coast, the smoke coming from hot springs. So this was where Ingólfur made his home. He decided to call the smoky bay Smoky Bay or Reykjavík. You will see that the settlers were not very imaginative in their choice of place names.

Norway was becoming crowded, and a lot of people didn’t like their king Harald Fair-Hair (or ‘Fine-Hair’ depending on your view of Viking hairdressing, ‘fine’ as in ‘beautiful’ rather than ‘thin’), so a number sailed off to Iceland in search of free land.

They brought their sheep and horses with them, and cut down the trees for firewood. Since sheep nibble tree saplings, and the soil in Iceland is particularly thin, the trees never managed to re-establish themselves. Forestry wasn’t helped by the tendency of volcanoes to dump molten lava over the landscape at irregular intervals. Now there are no trees.

The couple of hundred years after Ingólfur’s arrival, are known as the Settlement Period. To my mind, the most extraordinary thing about this time was that there was no ruler. No king, no emperor, no prince, not even a prime minister.

This was a relatively warm period of European history, and so it was possible to grow crops and feed livestock successfully. The outer rim of the island was dotted with farms. Farmers would gather at a local meeting place, known as a ‘Thing’. Once a year, their leaders, or godar as they were known, would travel to the ‘Althing’ at Thingvellir in the south-west of the country near Reykjavík.

Thingvellir was, and still is, an extraordinary place. It is set in a narrow gorge where the two continental plates meet, next to a flat valley floor. (This is Iceland; gorges can be next to valley floors, not above or below them; the land moves around a lot).

At the start of the proceedings, the Law Speaker would stand on the Law Speaker’s Rock and recite all the laws from memory for three whole days. This was before they knew how to write laws down. The godar would then settle their disputes according to these laws, judged by their peers. There were occasional flashes of violence, but usually disputes were resolved peacefully. Outlawry was a punishment for serious crimes, where the guilty party would be sent either into the desolate interior of the country or abroad for a number of years.

The system worked for several hundred years, until it all fell apart at the end of the thirteenth century. It is all described in the ‘sagas’, or ‘sayings’, which were originally oral tales, not written down until the thirteenth century. More on them later.

During this time, Iceland was mostly peaceful. There were occasional skirmishes between farmers, but never full-scale battles. However, it would be wrong to characterize the Icelanders as peace-loving farmers: these were Vikings after all.

Some historians can become quite grumpy about the term ‘Vikings’ and the suggestion that they were nothing more than a bunch of bloodthirsty rapists. They see the early Icelanders as traders and artists, not looters and pillagers. The term ‘Viking’ comes from the word vík, which as we have seen means ‘bay’; it can also mean port or trading post, as in Norwich in England.

So the Vikings were what Norsemen were called when they went travelling. The sagas are full of young men who spend a gap year ‘raiding and trading’ before returning to their farms in Iceland.

These historians also complain that Vikings get a bad rep from the people they were raping and pillaging: monks in Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia and Sicily, who had an unfair propaganda advantage over their adversaries in that they knew how to write down what happened. Those that survived could. Actually, the Norsemen were capable of great art and poetry (all true) and liked to cuddle lambs (also true).

As in all good crime stories, forensics settle the dispute, in this case DNA evidence. A recent study of the Icelanders’ genome shows that while 75% of the patrilineal DNA comes from Scandinavia, less than 40% of the matrilineal DNA came from there – 62% came from Ireland and Scotland.

So in the past, the majority of men were Norwegians and the majority of women came from the British Isles. My reading of this is many of the raiders and traders came home with women from their years abroad. Slave women.

Christianity came to Iceland in the year 1000. Olaf Tryggvason, the king of Norway, had converted a few years earlier and was eager to spread the word across the Viking world.

This was decided, of course, at the Althing. After days of speeches and acrimony, at which it looked for a moment as if the country would split into two groups with two different sets of laws – pagans and Christians – the decision was given to the Law Speaker of many years, the pagan but very wise Thorgeir.

Thorgeir lay down in his booth, put a cloak over his head and had a good long think. It lasted all day and all night. In the morning, he emerged and announced that henceforward Icelanders would be Christians.

There then arose a problem – a lot of people needed to be baptised in a hurry. There was a river handy at Thingvellir, the powerful, fast-flowing Öxará, but in one of the most un-Icelandic moments in Iceland’s history the chieftains decided that that river was a bit cold, and rode off to the geothermally warm waters of Laugarvatn a few miles away to be dunked.

With Christianity came writing and reading, pastimes that Icelanders have taken to with alacrity over the centuries. It is likely that literacy was higher in Iceland than in the other medieval countries of Europe.

The reason is probably the nature of settlements in Iceland. The countryside is dotted with individual farms, rather than the more common villages of Europe. While some of the larger of these farms had their own churches, most did not. This meant that Icelanders had to do their own reading of the Bible; they couldn’t rely on priests to do it for them. This literacy was no doubt a reason for the sophistication of the sagas, the beauty of the medieval poetry and the determination of every Icelander since then to write a book. More on that later.

From Iceland, adventurous Norsemen ventured further afield. Erik the Red, an outlaw, sailed from Iceland in 982 to Greenland, and built himself a farm there. Amazingly, the south-west corner of Greenland is indeed green, as I discovered when I waded knee-deep through lush grass and wild flowers to visit Erik the Red's ruined longhouse.

From Eriksfjord, Erik’s son and daughter-in-law took a band of followers south and west to what they called Vinland, but what we now call North America. It is tantalisingly unclear exactly where they stopped for a couple of summers, although a Viking settlement was discovered in Newfoundland in 1961.

In my last post, I talked about how Iceland came to have a system of government with no actual ruler, but a parliament of the chieftains, known as the Althing.  This lasted until the late thirteenth century, when there were a series of armed clashes between the chieftains, ending with an appeal in 1264 to the King of Norway to take charge and sort things out. 


This turned out to be not such a good idea in the long term. The plan was for the Althing to maintain its authority, but over time the power of the Norwegian king in Iceland’s affairs grew. Then, in a bewildering session of a medieval version of the board game Risk, Norway and Sweden united with Denmark. The Danes ended up being in charge, and over the following centuries they established a monopoly of trade with Iceland. Iceland became a very poor country, one of the poorest in Europe.

Tough, cold conditions
At this time also, Europe was in the throes of the mini-ice age. The climate was becoming colder, which can’t have helped Icelandic farmers much. They could no longer grow barley. The Greenland settlement died out, its ports frozen, its crops failed, and the local Inuit outcompeting the Norsemen for walrus and caribou. Trade with the rest of Europe was constrained by increasing interference from the Danish government. There were no towns, and villages were small. People lived in hovels of rock and earth, with turf roofs.


Every year, farmers feared not having enough hay to see them through the winter, as they huddled in a single room above their livestock, surrounded by darkness and snow. Spring was the time of starvation, when the crops were planted, the grass was beginning to grow, but as yet there was nothing to feed the sheep or the family cow. There was a feudal system of sorts: rich farmers and poor peasants, but in truth the rich farmers were poor.


And the Icelanders were farmers. The sea around Iceland was teeming with cod and herring, but this was fished by large ships from England, France and Germany. There was some illicit trade with these foreigners, but not much.


Foreigners also came from further afield than Western Europe.  Barbary pirates found Icelandic women easy pickings, plucking them from defenceless coastal communities, and whisking them back to the bazaars of North Africa.


Unicorns
There was one secret source of wealth for the Icelanders during the Middle Ages. Unicorn horn. Unicorns were much prized in Europe: unicorn horn was the most prestigious material to use in court, and ground up it had potent medicinal strength.

The fact that unicorns don’t actually exist wasn’t an insuperable problem for Icelanders and Danish merchants. The narwhal is a small whale with a long spiral horn which is found in the waters around Greenland. Narwhal horn was imported into western Iceland and unicorn horn was exported from eastern Iceland to Denmark from whence it was sold all over Europe.


Eruption of Laki
Iceland reached its nadir at the time of the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783. This was one of those eruptions, similar to but bigger than Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, which threw tons of ash and in particular sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. The resulting ‘Haze Famine’ led to the deaths of eighty per cent of the livestock and a quarter of the population. At one point, the remaining Icelanders considered abandoning their country entirely, leaving it to the volcanoes, the glaciers and the bitter cold.


In the following century Icelanders legged it to North America in large numbers, for Iceland, setting up communities in the Midwest and Canada, such as the town of Gimli in Manitoba. These Vestur-Íslendingar would sometimes return home with fancy clothes and stories of wooden houses and roofs which didn’t leak.


Families were large, and then they weren’t, as children died young.


Wealthier Icelanders went abroad for education, to Denmark. They returned to their homeland with ideas. Ideas about national identity, ideas about independence. The Danes gradually acceded to Icelanders’ demands.


Independence
Independence came in stages: Iceland got its own constitution in 1874, in 1918 Iceland was recognized as a sovereign state under the Danish Crown and finally in 1944, while Denmark was under Nazi occupation, Iceland declared itself a Republic.


The relationship between Denmark and Iceland is a tricky one. On the one hand, Denmark is and has been for many years a remarkably civilized society with progressive values. Most educated Icelanders used to receive their postgraduate university education there, and many still do. Until quite recently, Danish was the foreign language taught in schools.


And yet. I have met Danes who have been eager to explain Iceland to me on the basis that the country was a former colony of theirs, in the same way a Briton might have spoken about India in the 1960s. Some Icelanders are suspicious of Danes. If Danes try to speak to them in Danish, an Icelander will reply in English.


World Wars
The First World War was a boom time for Icelanders, as Britain in particular became desperate to import food. The depression took its toll, and then in the Second World War the country was invaded.


On 9 May 1940, Hitler unleashed his cunning master plan to invade Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland, to outflank the French and British armies and within weeks to overrun France itself. On that very same day, the British unleashed their own master plan, to invade Iceland, over a thousand miles in the wrong direction from Belgium.


The British invasion was a total success. They landed, put up their tents and made tea. The Icelanders were a little miffed, but decided to be polite and treat the occupying army as guests. At one point, there were 25,000 British servicemen in Iceland. They provided jobs and wages for the inhabitants. Things really looked up in July 1941, when the British handed over the occupation of the island to 40,000 Americans.


The Americans paid higher wages, and brought chewing gum and nylon stockings to the island. There were at that point more American young men than young Icelandic males in the country. Some say it was a good time to be a young Icelandic woman.




Post-war prosperity
This was when Iceland’s fortunes really turned around. The country moved rapidly from being the poorest country in Europe on a per capita basis in the 1940s, to becoming the richest in 2007. Some of this wealth came directly from the U.S. base, which was expanded during the Cold War. Some of it came from the fish, which the Icelanders now caught for themselves. And some of it came from a highly educated, hard-working population creating wealth.


Icelanders fought three ‘cod wars’ against the British in the 1950s through to the 1970s, establishing their right to extend their fishing limits from there miles, to four miles, to fifty miles and then to two hundred miles. Iceland’s fishing villages boomed; England’s fishing port of Hull went bust.


All countries are a product of their history. You have to be tough to have survived Iceland’s past: the cold, the long, isolated winters of hunger, the long summers of back-breaking toil. It’s worth remembering this.


The twenty-first century Icelander in his Ray-Bans, driving his BMW 4x4 home to his geothermally heated minimalist apartment in Reykjavík is only a generation or two away from almost unimaginable hardship. Dump him on a snowy mountain in the dark miles from anywhere and he will probably know what to do. Put him behind the wheel of his BMW, and he might get a little over-excited; it’s probably a good idea to be extra careful when crossing the road in Reykjavík.


Blog Post frequency
Until now I have been posting on this blog every week, but from now on I intend to post every two weeks, on a Tuesday. 

Thingvellir is one of my favourite places in Iceland.
 
Thingvellir or ‘Thing Valley’ is one of those rare places in the world: it is steeped in history, it is geologically extraordinary and its beauty takes your breath away.

It is about forty kilometres to the east of Reykjavík.  Once you escape the city’s suburbs you turn inland and drive through dramatic, desolate mountains. 
 
You descend to the entrance of what is now a national park, and after a kilometre or so stop your car at the floor of a green valley.  To the east rise rough foothills, to the west a dramatic cliff face of grizzled grey rock.  A clear stream runs through the valley past a church to a sizeable lake, Thingvallavatn.

Small wooden bridges span the river.  Stop on one of these and stare into the stream into deep pools of clear water whose colour changes and shifts depending on the sky, the clouds and the angle of the sun.  A host of native Icelandic plants line the pools: birch, willow, crowberries, bilberries, heathers, tiny flowers and all kinds of mosses and lichens.  In autumn, these pools reflect red, yellow, orange, gold and russet, and become the subjects of some of the most stunning photographs in Iceland.
 
You take a footpath up to the cliff from the valley floor.  It turns out that the cliff is actually two cliffs, with a narrow gorge, known as the Almannagjá, running between them for five miles parallel to the valley below.  This is part of the long rift that runs diagonally from the north-east of Iceland to the south-west, separating Europe from North America, a rift that incites volcanoes, earthquakes, and the mysterious depths of Lake Thingvellir, where scuba divers explore the scar between continents underwater.
 
A river, the Öxará, tumbles over the top of the cliff and along the gorge in a couple of powerful waterfalls, before falling down to the valley.  As the North American and European continents grind up against each other, the valley moves; geologists estimate that it has widened by about eight metres and subsided by four metres since the country was settled a thousand years ago.
 

At the top of these cliffs, the Law Speaker’s Rock juts out, from where the Law Speaker could look out over the godar and their companions assembled in the valley below him.  You can still see the rock and the ruins of stone booths where the godar stayed during the Althing.  Here the intricate legal stratagems devised by Njál in Njál’s Saga were acted out.  And in the tumult of the Öxarárfoss, witches were drowned.
 
This place has a claim to be the site of the oldest parliament in the world.  But rather than being housed in a magnificent building, it is located outside in a valley of desolation and beauty. 
 

Which brings us to names. The Icelanders have a unique approach to naming people. It ranges from the simple Jón Jónsson, a boy’s name, to the more complicated Boghildur Dögg Skarphédinsdóttir, a snappy girl’s name. The system works as follows.

Your ‘last name’ is your father’s name, plus ‘-son’ if you are a boy, and ‘-dóttir’ if you are a girl. There is no surname in a conventional European or American sense.

So I would be Michael Andrewsson, since my father’s name was Andrew. My sister would be Mary Andrewsdóttir. My grandfathers’ names were Claude and Conrad, so my parents would be Andrew Claudesson and Elizabeth Conradsdóttir.

This seems noble is some ways: our parents are honoured and my sister and mother have names which respect their sex – there is something fundamentally illogical about the English name Jane Johnson, for example. But our tight little family of four all end up with different last names, which can be a little weird when we try to check into a hotel together.

Of course, all rules are made to be broken. During the nineteenth century some Icelanders affected Danish-style surnames, often having returned from university there. Thus there are a few Icelanders who go by the traditional European naming system – Élin Briem, for example. Other examples of surnames are Blöndal, Thorlacius, Hansen, Nordal and Möller. This practice was banned as un-Icelandic in the twentieth century, but those who already had Danish-style last names could keep them.

Diminutives are often used: Gunni, for Gunnar, Magga for Margrét, Maggi for Magnús. There are thirty-five confusing boys’ names beginning in ‘Sigur-’ and thirty-three girls’ names. Fortunately, the boys are all called Siggi and the girls Sigga.

In times past, the Vikings were more imaginative with their nicknames. The sagas include Audun the Stutterer, Eystein Foul-Fart, Ulf the Squint-Eyed, Thorberg Ship-Breast and Ljótur the Unwashed. My favourite is the name of one of the most influential of the original settlers in Iceland, Aud the Deep-Minded, daughter of Ketil Flat-Nose.

In more modern times, as the number of Icelanders has proliferated, it has become more important to tell the Jón Jónssons apart. Hence the increasing use of middle names, many of which are one syllable, such as Örn, Thór or Dögg.

You may have wondered how I knew there were exactly thirty-five boys’ names beginning with ‘Sigur-’. You did, didn’t you? Well, there is an official book of names, which I have open in front of me. You cannot give your child a name unless it is on the list. Every year a committee adds to the names.

The book is stuffed full of wonderful Nordic creations such as Gunnthóra, Dagbjört and Ragnheidur, but there are also the more conventional biblical Davíd, Símon and Tinna, as well as modern-sounding Karlotta and Marvin. Somehow Michael crept in there, along with Carl, Cecil and Christian, even though the letter ‘c’ doesn’t really exist in Icelandic. Disappointing.

The Icelandic last name, a patronymic, is subtly different from the European surname. Gunnar Jónsson is the Gunnar whose father is Jón. Whereas Michael Ridpath means that I am part of the Ridpath family as well as being called Michael. More practically, there are many more Michaels than Ridpaths. So, in more formal situations, or in official lists or phone books, for example, I would be known as ‘Mr. Ridpath’, or show up as ‘Ridpath, M.’

This doesn’t apply in Iceland. ‘Jónsson’ is more or less as common as ‘Gunnar’. And Gunnar is more Gunnar than Jónsson. So Gunnar is called Gunnar in most situations, however formal, even if he becomes President, and he will be listed as Gunnar in the Reykjavík phone book.

This has its advantages. Two of the top Icelandic crime writers are Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (she has dark hair) and Lilja Sigurdardóttir (she has blonde hair). They are not sisters, but both their fathers happened to be called Sigurdur, a common name. It is much easier and clearer to speak about books by Yrsa and Lilja, than by Sigurdardóttir and Sigurdardóttir.

This naming system posed problems for my detective Magnus, whose father was Ragnar, and whose grandfather was Jón. So in Iceland, Magnus was Magnús Ragnarsson, and his father was Ragnar Jónsson.

When Magnus came to the U.S. to be with his father, this caused difficulties for the American bureaucracy, and so he took his father’s last name and anglicized it slightly to Jonson. Of course, when he returned to Iceland, he retook his father’s first name for his last name. So Magnus Jonson became Magnús Ragnarsson, a constant reminder of his confused identity.

I try to show this by employing the American ‘Magnus’ in prose or when characters are speaking in English, but ‘Magnús’ when they are speaking in Icelandic. It drives my copy editors mad.

Turning aside from Iceland for a moment, I should just mention that my new thriller, The Diplomat's Wife is out next week. Sadly, no launch party. I do like a good launch party.

Magnus is an Icelander and an American, which can be confusing for the poor guy.   He has to fit in.  But fit into what? What is Icelandic society like?
 
Tucked into that per-capita list in my last post, was ‘gender equality’.  The generalisation goes that women are tough, independent and well-educated in Iceland.  Although they are not paid the same as men, pay is closer than in other countries.  Iceland had the first elected female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir who was elected in 1980. 
 
The success of women is ascribed by some to the fact that many were left alone to manage while their husbands went away to sea.  Some say that having children early helps.  Women will often have their first child while still at university, which means that when they are in their early thirties they have older children and are able to struggle with men on equal terms on the career ladder.
 
On Friday 24 October 1975, Icelandic women went on strike for a day, refusing to go to work or to do any chores around the house or look after children.  Ninety per cent of Icelandic women participated.  The men prepared: employers bought paper and crayons in anticipation of kids joining their fathers to work, and easy-to-cook sausages sold out in the shops.  The strike was successful: in 1976 Parliament passed a law guaranteeing equal pay.
 
And yet sexism is not unknown in Iceland.  In 2018 a group of mostly male politicians were recorded by a fellow customer in a bar near Parliament discussing what they would like to do to their female colleagues, causing uproar and demands for resignations.  Domestic abuse is still a real problem.
 
As is alcoholism.  Many Icelanders are binge drinkers.  They share this with many northern countries, places where winter nights are long.  And, despite the extortionate prices, they somehow manage to get drunk at the weekend.  Which, I have to admit, can be fun.
 
Icelandic families used to be large.  Two parents, nine children and an extended family of cousins and aunts.  When the parents were in trouble, the father lost at sea, for example, relatives would step in.  Families are often large now, but in a different, more complex, way. 
 
I mentioned that people have children young.  They don’t necessarily get married young, or get married at all.  Many people get married several times to other people who already have children.  A child may have several parents and step-parents, and a minibus full of siblings, step-siblings and half-siblings, and an aunt her age.  Grandmothers in their forties help out their daughters with child care. 
 
It all seems to work, in fact it seems to work very well, but I wonder what effect if any this breakdown in the nucleus of the family has on children.                  
 
One of the global measures that Iceland seems to score very highly is equality.  And at first glance, it does seem to be a classic Nordic social-democratic society where everyone respects everyone else, everyone calls everyone else by their first names, and everyone goes to school together.  This derives from the shared hardship of a community of poor farmers and the historic lack of an aristocratic or governing class.
 
And yet, scratch beneath the surface . . .  At the beginning of the twentieth century a small group of families, known as ‘The Octopus’, controlled trade into the country.  They were rich, the rest of the Icelanders were poor, but they kept a low profile. 
 
These were joined and in some cases supplanted by a new generation of entrepreneurs and bankers in the 1990s and early 2000s, who rode the boom.  They bought newspapers and some of their friends became politicians.  When the bust came in 2008, known in Iceland as the kreppa, this group was badly bruised but survived.  Many Icelanders are still resentful of them.
 
In a society where networks are so integral, cliques develop.  My own experience is that the bankers know the bankers and the writers know the writers, but they don’t know each other, or not very well – although I do know one writer who is both.  It’s not a rigid class system on the classic British model.  But it’s not a social-democratic paradise of equality either.
 
I mentioned how history can resonate in current Icelandic society.  But one aspect of the past which seems for some reason to have left no trace is the thirst for blood of the Vikings.  Icelanders are peaceable, at least when sober.  The country has no army, and although Iceland is a member of NATO, joining caused mass demonstrations. 
 
Cynics might say they only joined for the money flowing from the U.S. airbase at Keflavík.  A young male culture that venerates toughness and strength when faced with nature, does not produce enthusiastic soldiers, or anything more violent than the magnificent cry in unison of ‘Huh!’ with a thunderclap at Iceland football games.  Apparently this isn’t Viking at all, but was imported from Motherwell Football Club near Glasgow.
 
Icelanders can be rude behind the till in a shop and look as if they want to be somewhere else, but that’s only because they are thinking through their chord change at the gig at the Kaffibarinn that evening.  You might have been cut up by a guy in a Jeep on his mobile phone with no indicator flashing, but he has things to do and people to see.  Icelanders may never include you in a round of drinks in a bar, but that is only because they haven’t had time to take out the mortgage to pay for it. 


In my experience, Icelanders are warm, friendly, generous, kind, interesting, well-read and have the sharpest of senses of humour.  And that’s a generalisation I am willing to stick by. 
 
To understand Icelanders, I believe you need to understand Bjartur.  Bjartur is the independent hero of Halldór Laxness’s greatest novel, Independent People.  The book is set at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Over eighteen years as a shepherd, Bjartur saves the money to buy his own farm on some very marginal land. 
 
Bjartur’s life is a struggle to eke a living out of this farm, called Summerhouses.  He marries twice, faces starvation and destitution, but never gives up on his dream of remaining an independent farmer.  He is stubborn to the point of cruelty  He is also a poet and sensitive to the folklore around him.
 
Why make Magnus American and not English?  He could easily be a detective from Scotland Yard who had been sent to England as a child.
 
I considered this initially.  But as I began to understand Icelanders, I realized Britain wouldn’t work as well as America.  Icelanders fit in very well in London, and a London detective would have little trouble fitting into Iceland.  The irony, the reserve, the reluctance to use guns: that would all seem familiar.  It seemed to me that an American homicide detective would notice more differences, and would have a harder time fitting in, which would make for a more interesting series of novels.
 
Understanding Magnus’s American background and experiences brought its own challenges.  I don’t make life easy for myself.
 
So, I had my detective.  I had my plot.  I had studied the language, spoken to Icelanders in London and read widely about the country. 
 
It was time to go there.  More on that in my next post.