Michael Ridpath's Blog, page 4
December 29, 2021
Characters: it's all about the people
What if a group of ordinary Icelanders, angry Icelanders, met at one of these protests in the Parliament Square? What if they decided that those responsible for the crash deserved to be punished? Directly. By them.
That was my idea for Magnus II.
I decided my ordinary Icelanders would be a fisherman, a middle-ranking bank executive, a writer, a student and a junior chef. Now I needed to find something out about these people.
I have developed a useful technique for exploring my characters. First I locate someone similar to the character in question, usually the contact of a contact, and arrange to meet them. I don’t know why, but in my experience almost everyone wants to meet an author writing a book about people like them.
I don’t ask extremely personal, direct questions. I tell them about my character, what he or she is like, their parents, their fears, their ambitions, where they live, what car they drive. I then ask them what’s wrong with my description. At this stage there is always something wrong and they are eager to tell me.
Next I ask how I can improve the character. We work on it together. It’s fun. They tell me about the ambitions the character would have, their habits, their doubts, their bugbears, their inner conflicts. Of course, often they are projecting their own deeper feelings, but sometimes they are talking about their friends or their family. The character comes alive.
Let’s take the fisherman. My initial idea was that his name was Björn. He was in his early thirties, tough, from a family of fishermen, and came from Sandgerdi, a fishing village near Keflavík Airport at the south-western tip of Iceland. He had borrowed to buy a boat in foreign currency, and suddenly, after the kreppa, he had no chance of paying back his loan.
To discuss Björn, I met Linda at Kaffitár in the middle of Reykjavík. Linda described herself with a smile as a ‘quota princess’. This is because her father is a ‘quota king’. To understand fishing in Iceland you have to understand fishing quotas. To understand Björn, I needed to know his quota situation.
OK − I know fishing quotas sound dull, but this bit is genuinely more interesting than you might expect, so don’t skip it.
Fishermen are Iceland’s heroes. This wasn’t always the case. Although there have always been millions of fish swimming around Iceland, it was a nation of farmers. Only in the early twentieth century, with the invention of the outboard motor, did Icelanders start catching fish in a big way themselves, from small inshore fishing boats.
As the century progressed, Iceland pushed the limits of its fishing waters further and further offshore. Herring became a massive source of wealth in the 1960s, as well as the ubiquitous cod. Fishermen were tough, independent, courageous and, during the herring boom, rich. The chain of small fishing villages that surround the rim of Iceland became prosperous.
As the catches grew, the fish stocks dwindled and, like fishing nations everywhere, Iceland had a problem. Their solution was to implement a quota policy. In 1984, all the fishermen in Iceland were given for free a quota, based on their catches over the previous two or three years. This quota allowed them to catch a certain proportion of the total allowable catch set by the fishing ministry every year. These quotas could be traded.
In many ways, this new system worked brilliantly. The authorities enforced total catches that were low enough to ensure that fish stocks recovered, and Iceland’s fisheries became sustainable. The owners of larger boats were able to buy up the quotas of their smaller colleagues, making fishing much more efficient. Iceland’s economy prospered and fishing remains one of its key export industries.
But it was undeniably unfair. It was a windfall for a small proportion of Iceland’s population. Fishing captains grew very rich. They became quota kings. They bought expensive houses in Seltjarnarnes. A group of them banded together to buy Stoke City football club in England. And while the owners of the boats did well, there were fewer fishermen on bigger fishing boats, and so employment in the industry fell. It was tough for the smaller operators, like my character Björn.
Despite its success economically, and the much-needed foreign currency it earned after the kreppa, fishing remains a divisive issue in Iceland. Some people think the quotas should be taken back by the government. The fishermen themselves tend to support the conservative Independent Party, and to oppose joining the European Union; they don’t want Brussels messing with their fish.
Linda took me down to the harbour and I met her father. At first sight, he didn’t look particularly big, or tough; in fact, he seemed mild-mannered, polite and friendly. But he had huge hands, and a face etched with a thousand wrinkles through which bright blue eyes twinkled.
Linda had explained how he was a canny businessman, but when I asked him how my character Björn could become a successful fisherman, he said he would learn to think like a cod. And he would love to fish. He would have started fishing as a boy and never have been able to give up.
By the end of meeting Linda and her father, I knew all about Björn and his boat and his problems.
That was my idea for Magnus II.
I decided my ordinary Icelanders would be a fisherman, a middle-ranking bank executive, a writer, a student and a junior chef. Now I needed to find something out about these people.
I have developed a useful technique for exploring my characters. First I locate someone similar to the character in question, usually the contact of a contact, and arrange to meet them. I don’t know why, but in my experience almost everyone wants to meet an author writing a book about people like them.
I don’t ask extremely personal, direct questions. I tell them about my character, what he or she is like, their parents, their fears, their ambitions, where they live, what car they drive. I then ask them what’s wrong with my description. At this stage there is always something wrong and they are eager to tell me.
Next I ask how I can improve the character. We work on it together. It’s fun. They tell me about the ambitions the character would have, their habits, their doubts, their bugbears, their inner conflicts. Of course, often they are projecting their own deeper feelings, but sometimes they are talking about their friends or their family. The character comes alive.
Let’s take the fisherman. My initial idea was that his name was Björn. He was in his early thirties, tough, from a family of fishermen, and came from Sandgerdi, a fishing village near Keflavík Airport at the south-western tip of Iceland. He had borrowed to buy a boat in foreign currency, and suddenly, after the kreppa, he had no chance of paying back his loan.
To discuss Björn, I met Linda at Kaffitár in the middle of Reykjavík. Linda described herself with a smile as a ‘quota princess’. This is because her father is a ‘quota king’. To understand fishing in Iceland you have to understand fishing quotas. To understand Björn, I needed to know his quota situation.
OK − I know fishing quotas sound dull, but this bit is genuinely more interesting than you might expect, so don’t skip it.
Fishermen are Iceland’s heroes. This wasn’t always the case. Although there have always been millions of fish swimming around Iceland, it was a nation of farmers. Only in the early twentieth century, with the invention of the outboard motor, did Icelanders start catching fish in a big way themselves, from small inshore fishing boats.
As the century progressed, Iceland pushed the limits of its fishing waters further and further offshore. Herring became a massive source of wealth in the 1960s, as well as the ubiquitous cod. Fishermen were tough, independent, courageous and, during the herring boom, rich. The chain of small fishing villages that surround the rim of Iceland became prosperous.
As the catches grew, the fish stocks dwindled and, like fishing nations everywhere, Iceland had a problem. Their solution was to implement a quota policy. In 1984, all the fishermen in Iceland were given for free a quota, based on their catches over the previous two or three years. This quota allowed them to catch a certain proportion of the total allowable catch set by the fishing ministry every year. These quotas could be traded.
In many ways, this new system worked brilliantly. The authorities enforced total catches that were low enough to ensure that fish stocks recovered, and Iceland’s fisheries became sustainable. The owners of larger boats were able to buy up the quotas of their smaller colleagues, making fishing much more efficient. Iceland’s economy prospered and fishing remains one of its key export industries.
But it was undeniably unfair. It was a windfall for a small proportion of Iceland’s population. Fishing captains grew very rich. They became quota kings. They bought expensive houses in Seltjarnarnes. A group of them banded together to buy Stoke City football club in England. And while the owners of the boats did well, there were fewer fishermen on bigger fishing boats, and so employment in the industry fell. It was tough for the smaller operators, like my character Björn.
Despite its success economically, and the much-needed foreign currency it earned after the kreppa, fishing remains a divisive issue in Iceland. Some people think the quotas should be taken back by the government. The fishermen themselves tend to support the conservative Independent Party, and to oppose joining the European Union; they don’t want Brussels messing with their fish.
Linda took me down to the harbour and I met her father. At first sight, he didn’t look particularly big, or tough; in fact, he seemed mild-mannered, polite and friendly. But he had huge hands, and a face etched with a thousand wrinkles through which bright blue eyes twinkled.
Linda had explained how he was a canny businessman, but when I asked him how my character Björn could become a successful fisherman, he said he would learn to think like a cod. And he would love to fish. He would have started fishing as a boy and never have been able to give up.
By the end of meeting Linda and her father, I knew all about Björn and his boat and his problems.
December 14, 2021
Lock 'em up! But only for a bit.
Throughout the world, people wanted to lock up those bankers who were responsible for the 2008 crash. Iceland is one of the few countries that actually managed to do it.
It started with a public discussion on the TV show Silfur Egils, the name of which refers to our thuggish poet friend Egil from the sagas and his lost silver, but is presented by the journalist Egill Helgason. One of his guests, Eva Joly, was a Norwegian-French judge who had some bracing suggestions for bringing the perps to justice. She was persuaded to spend several months in Iceland advising the government.
There was a strong suspicion among many that the Outvaders, the bankers, the politicians and indeed the lawyers of Reykjavík all knew each other too well, so the government searched for a prosecutor from outside the capital to go after the culprits.
They found one in the small town of Akranes, Ólafur Hauksson. This all seemed a bit of a joke at first. Ólafur had no experience of financial crime: the only picture of him I could find on the internet at the time was of a comfortable middle-aged man with an enormous grin standing next to a river holding a very large salmon. Which was kind of apposite, since you may remember the Icelandic phrase for ‘Big Cheese’ is ‘Big Salmon’.
Anyway, Ólafur got himself a small office in Reykjavík, a couple of computers and three colleagues, and set to work going through documents. Methodically.
Unlike other countries’ prosecutors, who imprisoned the small fry and fined the companies, Ólafur built up his team and kept going until he found the bosses responsible. He didn’t let the shareholders of the banks pay the fines, as happened in Britain and the US; he was going after people, not institutions. And it worked. Senior executives at all three of Iceland’s banks were successfully prosecuted. They went to jail.
So where did all that money come from? How did Kaupthing go from capital of a couple of million dollars in the 1990s to deposits of many billions?
In London, the gossip was that the money came from Russia. I checked this out. While it was true that one of the Outvaders had cashed out from successful bottling and brewing investments in St Petersburg, which may have inspired the rumour, I could find no evidence of Russian oligarchs’ money sloshing around the Icelandic banking system.
Once again, the culprit was ‘clever’ ways of borrowing. Banks are allowed to borrow several times their capital. So a bank with capital of £1 million may have made loans of £10 million, back before the crash. What if £1 million of those loans was made to someone to invest £1 million of new equity in the bank? Then the bank would have £2 million of capital and be able to lend £20 million. £2 million is lent to someone to invest in the bank, which now has £4 million of capital. And so on.
Sounds clever, doesn’t it? Money is magicked out of money. The Icelandic bankers thought it was clever. That’s how they had so much money to lend, to themselves and to their Outvader friends.
It’s not actually that clever, it breaches many regulations, regulations that the bankers either didn’t know about or thought were just red tape. These men are not nearly as crooked as many of the financiers I have come across during my career in the City where I invested in junk bonds, or when writing my financial thrillers, men like the people who put together fake mortgages and sold them on or, more importantly, the people who managed these men. My impression, which is backed up by the views of bankers in London who dealt with them, is that the Icelandic bankers were optimistic, naive and lacked judgement rather than evil masterminds. Don’t get me wrong: they broke rules that were put there for a reason; they should have been punished and they have been.
The Independent Party was thrown out of government. Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir became prime minister, the first openly lesbian leader of a country.
The comedian Jón Gnarr stood for mayor of Reykjavík in 2009. He is well known as the lugubrious manager of a petrol station in the sitcom The Night Shift. He stood on a manifesto of a drug-free Parliament by 2020, a polar bear for the zoo, tollbooths at the border with Seltjarnarnes and the construction of a large white-collar prison for foreign bankster criminals. His motivation for becoming mayor was it would be nice to have a chauffeur to chat to while he was driving to work.
He won, but, like many politicians before him, he didn’t keep his promises. There is no polar bear in Reykjavík’s tiny zoo: probably a good thing too.
Eventually, after several years of pain, Iceland pulled itself back on to its feet. Tourism, which has been booming for a decade now, saved the economy. The ‘For Rent’ signs have disappeared in Laugavegur, the skyline is dotted with cranes again, and brand-new Range Rovers which had become known by locals as ‘Game Overs’ are once again seen powering down Reykjavík’s roads. But there remain people who are having difficulty paying the mortgages they took out in 2006. The fallout from the kreppa still overshadows many ordinary Icelanders’ lives.
It started with a public discussion on the TV show Silfur Egils, the name of which refers to our thuggish poet friend Egil from the sagas and his lost silver, but is presented by the journalist Egill Helgason. One of his guests, Eva Joly, was a Norwegian-French judge who had some bracing suggestions for bringing the perps to justice. She was persuaded to spend several months in Iceland advising the government.
There was a strong suspicion among many that the Outvaders, the bankers, the politicians and indeed the lawyers of Reykjavík all knew each other too well, so the government searched for a prosecutor from outside the capital to go after the culprits.
They found one in the small town of Akranes, Ólafur Hauksson. This all seemed a bit of a joke at first. Ólafur had no experience of financial crime: the only picture of him I could find on the internet at the time was of a comfortable middle-aged man with an enormous grin standing next to a river holding a very large salmon. Which was kind of apposite, since you may remember the Icelandic phrase for ‘Big Cheese’ is ‘Big Salmon’.
Anyway, Ólafur got himself a small office in Reykjavík, a couple of computers and three colleagues, and set to work going through documents. Methodically.
Unlike other countries’ prosecutors, who imprisoned the small fry and fined the companies, Ólafur built up his team and kept going until he found the bosses responsible. He didn’t let the shareholders of the banks pay the fines, as happened in Britain and the US; he was going after people, not institutions. And it worked. Senior executives at all three of Iceland’s banks were successfully prosecuted. They went to jail.
So where did all that money come from? How did Kaupthing go from capital of a couple of million dollars in the 1990s to deposits of many billions?
In London, the gossip was that the money came from Russia. I checked this out. While it was true that one of the Outvaders had cashed out from successful bottling and brewing investments in St Petersburg, which may have inspired the rumour, I could find no evidence of Russian oligarchs’ money sloshing around the Icelandic banking system.
Once again, the culprit was ‘clever’ ways of borrowing. Banks are allowed to borrow several times their capital. So a bank with capital of £1 million may have made loans of £10 million, back before the crash. What if £1 million of those loans was made to someone to invest £1 million of new equity in the bank? Then the bank would have £2 million of capital and be able to lend £20 million. £2 million is lent to someone to invest in the bank, which now has £4 million of capital. And so on.
Sounds clever, doesn’t it? Money is magicked out of money. The Icelandic bankers thought it was clever. That’s how they had so much money to lend, to themselves and to their Outvader friends.
It’s not actually that clever, it breaches many regulations, regulations that the bankers either didn’t know about or thought were just red tape. These men are not nearly as crooked as many of the financiers I have come across during my career in the City where I invested in junk bonds, or when writing my financial thrillers, men like the people who put together fake mortgages and sold them on or, more importantly, the people who managed these men. My impression, which is backed up by the views of bankers in London who dealt with them, is that the Icelandic bankers were optimistic, naive and lacked judgement rather than evil masterminds. Don’t get me wrong: they broke rules that were put there for a reason; they should have been punished and they have been.
The Independent Party was thrown out of government. Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir became prime minister, the first openly lesbian leader of a country.
The comedian Jón Gnarr stood for mayor of Reykjavík in 2009. He is well known as the lugubrious manager of a petrol station in the sitcom The Night Shift. He stood on a manifesto of a drug-free Parliament by 2020, a polar bear for the zoo, tollbooths at the border with Seltjarnarnes and the construction of a large white-collar prison for foreign bankster criminals. His motivation for becoming mayor was it would be nice to have a chauffeur to chat to while he was driving to work.
He won, but, like many politicians before him, he didn’t keep his promises. There is no polar bear in Reykjavík’s tiny zoo: probably a good thing too.
Eventually, after several years of pain, Iceland pulled itself back on to its feet. Tourism, which has been booming for a decade now, saved the economy. The ‘For Rent’ signs have disappeared in Laugavegur, the skyline is dotted with cranes again, and brand-new Range Rovers which had become known by locals as ‘Game Overs’ are once again seen powering down Reykjavík’s roads. But there remain people who are having difficulty paying the mortgages they took out in 2006. The fallout from the kreppa still overshadows many ordinary Icelanders’ lives.
November 30, 2021
The pots and pans revolution of 2009
The crash, when it came, was dramatic.
The global financial crisis of 2008 didn’t start in Iceland. Bankers in the US found clever ways of lending too much money to mortgage borrowers who couldn’t repay it, and passing these risks on to other banks throughout the world. No one could quite work out how many of these bad mortgages there were, and who ultimately held the risk. The banks didn’t trust each other. When Lehman Brothers, an American investment bank, could no longer borrow to fund its activities, it went bust. Now nobody trusted any bank. For a few days in October 2008 it looked as if the ATMs in Britain and America would stop working.
And in Iceland. The Icelandic banks were reliant on the goodwill of foreigners, and this was no longer forthcoming. They didn’t have the funds to repay international depositors who were becoming nervous. Every Icelander knows where they were on the afternoon of 6 October 2008 when Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde addressed the nation. Clearly shaken, he sowed panic among his fellow citizens. He closed the speech with the ominous words: ‘God bless Iceland.’ The banks were nationalized.
Doubt immediately fell on Kaupthing Edge and Icesave, the two Icelandic internet banks operating in London. Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced support for British banks, including British based subsidiaries of foreign banks, like Kaupthing Edge. But Icesave, as a branch not a subsidiary of Landsbanki, was technically the responsibility of the Icelandic government, who didn’t seem to be willing or able to guarantee their deposits.
So, at 10 a.m. on 8 October 2008, Alistair Darling announced that he was freezing the assets of Icesave. Ten minutes later, it was done. The only method Darling could employ to justify this legally was to invoke the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001.
This was a stretch, but Darling believed that if ordinary depositors in the UK lost money in any bank, there would be a run on all the banks and the whole economic system of the country would collapse. Mr Darling saved the British financial system. Just. But he screwed Iceland, or so the Icelanders believed.
The Icelandic currency, the króna, collapsed. Many Icelanders lost all their savings. The country itself was close to bankruptcy: the British government demanded three billion euros to compensate it for repaying Icesave’s British depositors.
Like everyone else, many Icelanders had borrowed too much, but the financial fiddlers had come up with a particularly pernicious instrument of self-harm in Iceland: the foreign-currency mortgage. House buyers had borrowed in yen or Swiss francs at low interest rates. When the króna collapsed, the amount these borrowers owed tripled in local currency. There was no chance they could ever repay their loans.
Icelanders were furious. They were furious with the Outvaders. They were furious with the bankers. They were furious with Prime Minister Geir Haarde, and the previous prime minister and current governor of the Central Bank, Davíd Oddsson, and they were particularly furious that as a country they all owed Britain and Holland over three billion euros as a result of the activities of an internet bank they hadn’t even heard of. Being called a bunch of terrorists by Alistair Darling didn’t please them either.
So they took to the streets, or rather the square. Every Saturday, throughout that winter, protesters gathered in the square in front of Parliament to protest, banging pots and pans to make a noise. Icelanders famous and not so famous spoke, singers sang, signs were waved, protests were chanted.
It’s dark for most of the day in Iceland in winter: people carried torches and lit fires to warm themselves. The crowds grew from 2,000 to 7,000. There was some violence. Food was thrown: mustard, tomato ketchup, eggs and skyr. The police made some arrests and occasionally used pepper spray and tear gas. Flagstones were thrown and two policemen went to hospital.
But, on 26 January 2009, Geir Haarde resigned. The revolution had been a success, and a relatively peaceful one at that.
The global financial crisis of 2008 didn’t start in Iceland. Bankers in the US found clever ways of lending too much money to mortgage borrowers who couldn’t repay it, and passing these risks on to other banks throughout the world. No one could quite work out how many of these bad mortgages there were, and who ultimately held the risk. The banks didn’t trust each other. When Lehman Brothers, an American investment bank, could no longer borrow to fund its activities, it went bust. Now nobody trusted any bank. For a few days in October 2008 it looked as if the ATMs in Britain and America would stop working.
And in Iceland. The Icelandic banks were reliant on the goodwill of foreigners, and this was no longer forthcoming. They didn’t have the funds to repay international depositors who were becoming nervous. Every Icelander knows where they were on the afternoon of 6 October 2008 when Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde addressed the nation. Clearly shaken, he sowed panic among his fellow citizens. He closed the speech with the ominous words: ‘God bless Iceland.’ The banks were nationalized.
Doubt immediately fell on Kaupthing Edge and Icesave, the two Icelandic internet banks operating in London. Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced support for British banks, including British based subsidiaries of foreign banks, like Kaupthing Edge. But Icesave, as a branch not a subsidiary of Landsbanki, was technically the responsibility of the Icelandic government, who didn’t seem to be willing or able to guarantee their deposits.
So, at 10 a.m. on 8 October 2008, Alistair Darling announced that he was freezing the assets of Icesave. Ten minutes later, it was done. The only method Darling could employ to justify this legally was to invoke the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001.
This was a stretch, but Darling believed that if ordinary depositors in the UK lost money in any bank, there would be a run on all the banks and the whole economic system of the country would collapse. Mr Darling saved the British financial system. Just. But he screwed Iceland, or so the Icelanders believed.
The Icelandic currency, the króna, collapsed. Many Icelanders lost all their savings. The country itself was close to bankruptcy: the British government demanded three billion euros to compensate it for repaying Icesave’s British depositors.
Like everyone else, many Icelanders had borrowed too much, but the financial fiddlers had come up with a particularly pernicious instrument of self-harm in Iceland: the foreign-currency mortgage. House buyers had borrowed in yen or Swiss francs at low interest rates. When the króna collapsed, the amount these borrowers owed tripled in local currency. There was no chance they could ever repay their loans.
Icelanders were furious. They were furious with the Outvaders. They were furious with the bankers. They were furious with Prime Minister Geir Haarde, and the previous prime minister and current governor of the Central Bank, Davíd Oddsson, and they were particularly furious that as a country they all owed Britain and Holland over three billion euros as a result of the activities of an internet bank they hadn’t even heard of. Being called a bunch of terrorists by Alistair Darling didn’t please them either.
So they took to the streets, or rather the square. Every Saturday, throughout that winter, protesters gathered in the square in front of Parliament to protest, banging pots and pans to make a noise. Icelanders famous and not so famous spoke, singers sang, signs were waved, protests were chanted.
It’s dark for most of the day in Iceland in winter: people carried torches and lit fires to warm themselves. The crowds grew from 2,000 to 7,000. There was some violence. Food was thrown: mustard, tomato ketchup, eggs and skyr. The police made some arrests and occasionally used pepper spray and tear gas. Flagstones were thrown and two policemen went to hospital.
But, on 26 January 2009, Geir Haarde resigned. The revolution had been a success, and a relatively peaceful one at that.
November 16, 2021
Bust: Viking pillagers in the 21st century
While I had been writing Where the Shadows Lie, happily losing myself in thoughts of sagas, rings, volcanoes and Gull beer, the financial world was melting down around me.
I remembered how I had explained to the German author ten years before that it would never be possible to write a financial thriller set in Iceland, and now the country was smack in the middle of the biggest financial crisis the world has yet seen. Friends urged me to write another financial thriller. I was reluctant.
But I couldn’t ignore it. Especially since I had resolved to write about issues that went beyond Iceland. As a foreigner, I wanted to write about Iceland’s interaction with the outside world, about big issues, not small ones, and there was no bigger issue as far as Iceland was concerned than the financial crash. It was a subject that I knew well, and the intersection of greed, hubris, ambition and self-delusion in the people who caused it was exactly the kind of thing I had examined in my financial thrillers.
Yet I felt I needed to place distance between my new books and my old. It had been hard enough to make the leap from one to the other and I was glad I had done it. Writing about the perpetrators of the crisis seemed a step backwards.
But what about the victims? That interested me much more. Especially since the response by ordinary Icelanders was more immediate and more effective than anywhere else in the world. They began their ‘pots-and-pans’ revolution and it worked. They overthrew their government.
The financial crash slammed into Iceland hard. With hindsight, Iceland may not be the country that suffered most, that honour probably falls to Greece, but the Icelanders suffered first.
Icelanders call the depression after the financial crash the kreppa, which also means ‘pinch’. The financial crisis was started by people throughout the world figuring out clever new ways of getting around stodgy restrictions to borrow too much money. I say clever, but these schemes turned out to be profoundly stupid. What was true globally was also true in Iceland.
As the Iceland Review said in 2009: ‘The crash is the fault of thirty men and three women. All these people are connected.’ In the early 2000s a new breed of young entrepreneur emerged in Iceland. They were called the útrásarvíkingar: útrás is the opposite of invasion, so this literally means something like ‘outvading Vikings’. Let’s call them ‘the Outvaders’.
They were in their thirties and forties, they were ambitious, quick-thinking, decisive and bold. They built successful companies from very little: supermarkets, insurance companies, food manufacturers, bottlers, fund managers. And banks. They invested in high-profile businesses overseas, especially in London: West Ham, Hamleys, Mothercare, House of Fraser, Oasis, Karen Millen. And they did it all with borrowed money.
They had fun. Unlike their low-key predecessors, the old ‘Octopus’ families of import-exporters, they flaunted their wealth. One of the most prominent of these Outvaders was Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, the owner of the Bónus supermarket chain, who supposedly amassed debts of $8 billion by the time everything fell apart. He owned a distinctive black private jet that was seen flying in and out of Reykjavík City Airport regularly. He hung out in the bar of London’s trendy Sanderson Hotel. His wife founded Reykjavík’s trendiest hotel, 101. He owned a superyacht in Miami called The Three Vikings, and a ten-foot statue of a Viking with a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar strapped to his back stood proud in his London office.
This kind of consumption was matched or exceeded by hedge fund managers, investment bankers and Russian oligarchs, but for a country as small as Iceland, with its history of poverty and egalitarianism, it was remarkable. Where had all that money come from so quickly?
Iceland’s banks grew in parallel with its businessmen. There were three of them: Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing. In the 1990s Kaupthing’s capital was only a couple of million dollars. In the 2000s it bought banks throughout Europe, including the venerable merchant bank Singer and Friedlander in London. In 2007 it set up an internet bank, Kaupthing Edge, which took deposits throughout Europe. Within a year the bank had pulled in £2.5 billion of deposits from 160,000 customers in the UK alone. Landsbanki set up a similar internet bank called Icesave in 2006, which operated mostly in the UK and Holland, and within two years it had amassed £4 billion of deposits in the UK.
You know what happened next ...
I remembered how I had explained to the German author ten years before that it would never be possible to write a financial thriller set in Iceland, and now the country was smack in the middle of the biggest financial crisis the world has yet seen. Friends urged me to write another financial thriller. I was reluctant.
But I couldn’t ignore it. Especially since I had resolved to write about issues that went beyond Iceland. As a foreigner, I wanted to write about Iceland’s interaction with the outside world, about big issues, not small ones, and there was no bigger issue as far as Iceland was concerned than the financial crash. It was a subject that I knew well, and the intersection of greed, hubris, ambition and self-delusion in the people who caused it was exactly the kind of thing I had examined in my financial thrillers.
Yet I felt I needed to place distance between my new books and my old. It had been hard enough to make the leap from one to the other and I was glad I had done it. Writing about the perpetrators of the crisis seemed a step backwards.
But what about the victims? That interested me much more. Especially since the response by ordinary Icelanders was more immediate and more effective than anywhere else in the world. They began their ‘pots-and-pans’ revolution and it worked. They overthrew their government.
The financial crash slammed into Iceland hard. With hindsight, Iceland may not be the country that suffered most, that honour probably falls to Greece, but the Icelanders suffered first.
Icelanders call the depression after the financial crash the kreppa, which also means ‘pinch’. The financial crisis was started by people throughout the world figuring out clever new ways of getting around stodgy restrictions to borrow too much money. I say clever, but these schemes turned out to be profoundly stupid. What was true globally was also true in Iceland.
As the Iceland Review said in 2009: ‘The crash is the fault of thirty men and three women. All these people are connected.’ In the early 2000s a new breed of young entrepreneur emerged in Iceland. They were called the útrásarvíkingar: útrás is the opposite of invasion, so this literally means something like ‘outvading Vikings’. Let’s call them ‘the Outvaders’.
They were in their thirties and forties, they were ambitious, quick-thinking, decisive and bold. They built successful companies from very little: supermarkets, insurance companies, food manufacturers, bottlers, fund managers. And banks. They invested in high-profile businesses overseas, especially in London: West Ham, Hamleys, Mothercare, House of Fraser, Oasis, Karen Millen. And they did it all with borrowed money.
They had fun. Unlike their low-key predecessors, the old ‘Octopus’ families of import-exporters, they flaunted their wealth. One of the most prominent of these Outvaders was Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, the owner of the Bónus supermarket chain, who supposedly amassed debts of $8 billion by the time everything fell apart. He owned a distinctive black private jet that was seen flying in and out of Reykjavík City Airport regularly. He hung out in the bar of London’s trendy Sanderson Hotel. His wife founded Reykjavík’s trendiest hotel, 101. He owned a superyacht in Miami called The Three Vikings, and a ten-foot statue of a Viking with a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar strapped to his back stood proud in his London office.
This kind of consumption was matched or exceeded by hedge fund managers, investment bankers and Russian oligarchs, but for a country as small as Iceland, with its history of poverty and egalitarianism, it was remarkable. Where had all that money come from so quickly?
Iceland’s banks grew in parallel with its businessmen. There were three of them: Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing. In the 1990s Kaupthing’s capital was only a couple of million dollars. In the 2000s it bought banks throughout Europe, including the venerable merchant bank Singer and Friedlander in London. In 2007 it set up an internet bank, Kaupthing Edge, which took deposits throughout Europe. Within a year the bank had pulled in £2.5 billion of deposits from 160,000 customers in the UK alone. Landsbanki set up a similar internet bank called Icesave in 2006, which operated mostly in the UK and Holland, and within two years it had amassed £4 billion of deposits in the UK.
You know what happened next ...
November 2, 2021
Favourite Places: Selatangar
There are two ways to get to the Blue Lagoon from Reykjavík – the Blue Lagoon is the large geothermal pool-spa next to a power station, and is well worth visiting, although it is expensive. One way is to take the main highway to the airport and turn left on a well-paved road following the tourist buses.
The other way is by the back roads, turning off the main road just past Hafnarfjördur and following signs to Krýsuvík. The small road passes Seltún, a geothermal area of vents, mud pots, hot springs and sulphurous ponds that simmer and burp amid hillsides of red, yellow and orange, and water of an other-worldly green-blue. Just south of these is the ‘draining lake’, Kleifarvatn, which sprang a leak in its floor in 2000, revealing a hundred metres of black volcanic sand and rock around the shore (Arnaldur Indridason wrote a great novel set here). All around here, you are very aware that something in the ground beneath you is unsettled. The place is spooky, especially when the mist moves in.
Even spookier is Selatangar. When you reach the coast, head west towards the fishing village of Grindavík, which is near the Blue Lagoon. Just before the town, keep your eyes out for a turn off to the left to the car park for Selatangar.
At first Selatangar looks like nothing more than a typical Icelandic lava field of rocks, rubble and twisted black stone, some of which tumbles into the sea. As you walk to the east, threading your way through the rock on a narrow footpath, the rubble begins to take on form. There is a man-made breakwater, and then the contours of black circular walls take shape from the surrounding stone. As you come closer you realize that these are dwellings, or former dwellings. For centuries from the Middle Ages until the 1880s men used to come here to fish for a few months every spring. Spring in Iceland is a season of storms and occasional snow. It is hard to imagine a place more bleak or inhospitable than these black rock booths blending into the black lavascape.
Yet the place has an ethereal, lonely beauty. On one side the sea ripples and rages, on the other, steep mountain slopes rise, and in between the lava field guards the ghosts of those fishermen. I visited on a day when snow streaked the lava, and fog curled in from the sea to smother the ruined huts. Eider ducks bobbed in the current just a few yards offshore. Driftwood lined the black stone beach bleached wood from trees that had once grown in Canada or Siberia. There was no green to be seen anywhere.
One ghost in particular survives, Tanga-Tómas, who has been seen in the area many times. At Selatangar it’s hard not to believe in ghosts.
By the way, just a few kilometres to the west of Selatangar is Iceland's brand-new volcano, variously called Fagradalsfjall or Geldingadalir, which has been erupting prettily for much of 2021, and has become, understandably, a tourist honeypot.
The other way is by the back roads, turning off the main road just past Hafnarfjördur and following signs to Krýsuvík. The small road passes Seltún, a geothermal area of vents, mud pots, hot springs and sulphurous ponds that simmer and burp amid hillsides of red, yellow and orange, and water of an other-worldly green-blue. Just south of these is the ‘draining lake’, Kleifarvatn, which sprang a leak in its floor in 2000, revealing a hundred metres of black volcanic sand and rock around the shore (Arnaldur Indridason wrote a great novel set here). All around here, you are very aware that something in the ground beneath you is unsettled. The place is spooky, especially when the mist moves in.
Even spookier is Selatangar. When you reach the coast, head west towards the fishing village of Grindavík, which is near the Blue Lagoon. Just before the town, keep your eyes out for a turn off to the left to the car park for Selatangar.
At first Selatangar looks like nothing more than a typical Icelandic lava field of rocks, rubble and twisted black stone, some of which tumbles into the sea. As you walk to the east, threading your way through the rock on a narrow footpath, the rubble begins to take on form. There is a man-made breakwater, and then the contours of black circular walls take shape from the surrounding stone. As you come closer you realize that these are dwellings, or former dwellings. For centuries from the Middle Ages until the 1880s men used to come here to fish for a few months every spring. Spring in Iceland is a season of storms and occasional snow. It is hard to imagine a place more bleak or inhospitable than these black rock booths blending into the black lavascape.
Yet the place has an ethereal, lonely beauty. On one side the sea ripples and rages, on the other, steep mountain slopes rise, and in between the lava field guards the ghosts of those fishermen. I visited on a day when snow streaked the lava, and fog curled in from the sea to smother the ruined huts. Eider ducks bobbed in the current just a few yards offshore. Driftwood lined the black stone beach bleached wood from trees that had once grown in Canada or Siberia. There was no green to be seen anywhere.
One ghost in particular survives, Tanga-Tómas, who has been seen in the area many times. At Selatangar it’s hard not to believe in ghosts.
By the way, just a few kilometres to the west of Selatangar is Iceland's brand-new volcano, variously called Fagradalsfjall or Geldingadalir, which has been erupting prettily for much of 2021, and has become, understandably, a tourist honeypot.
October 19, 2021
Publish and be Damned: Magnus I
Writing a novel is all very well, but at some point it has to be let out into the world to take its chances.
My agent Carole Blake and I had agreed that her assistant Oli would act for me on this one. I would be one of his first clients. But he had to like the book.
He read it. He liked it. Together, we came up with a plan. Oli sent the manuscript out.
I was nervous. Extremely nervous.
It takes a while for publishers to respond to submissions, even when supplied by an agent, but I received a couple of quick rejections of the ‘not one for us’ variety. That’s better than the ‘this book is a load of old crap’ variety.
I tried not to panic. I told myself that if a publisher was going to say yes, they would take their time to get back: the manuscript would have to be shown round to colleagues; sales and marketing would need to be convinced. But, frankly, the waiting was difficult. What the hell would
I do if they all said ‘no’? There was no Plan D.
They didn’t all say no. We found a publisher, Corvus, a brand-new imprint set up by Atlantic Books with Nic Cheetham in charge. Nic was young, imaginative and enthusiastic (he is still the latter two if not so much the former). He was setting up this completely new imprint, and he was excited. Kindle was just beginning to take off, and Nic saw it as an opportunity for smaller, nimbler publishers, rather than a threat. His enthusiasm, and that of Oli, fired me up. Publishing was fun again.
Magnus I was not a great title, and so I had submitted the manuscript under the title Fire and Ice. Nic had a better idea: Where the Shadows Lie, a reference to the verses in the epigraph of Lord of the Rings. That was a good title.
Where the Shadows Lie was published in March 2010. Someone, I don’t know whether it was Nic or a hidden person I had unwittingly met in Iceland, organized the most spectacular publicity stunt. In April of that year, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, spewing ash into the atmosphere all over the northern hemisphere, stranding air travellers and placing Iceland firmly on the map.
The book did reasonably well in physical form, but thanks to Nic’s efforts the ebook sold extremely well, getting to number one.
Oli swung into action. He managed to sell the novel to fifteen publishers throughout Europe and the United States, mostly on the back of the Lord of the Rings angle. This was very gratifying. But the best news came from the smallest country. Pétur wanted to publish the book in Icelandic.
Phew! No Plan D required. Time to write Magnus II.
By the way, if reading this post has caused a rich of blood to your head and you have a desire to buy Where the Shadows Lie immediately, go right ahead: Where the Shadows Lie
October 5, 2021
Writing Magnus I: tap, tap, tap
Writing Magnus I was a lot of fun. I liked Magnus, and it was good to know that we were just getting acquainted; in my previous novels, my heroes, as I naively persist in calling them – protagonist is just too analytical even for me – had come and gone. I hoped Magnus and I would be together for a while. And it was fun to write about Iceland. When the writing is going really well, I feel that I am actually there, on the streets of Reykjavík or the slopes of Mount Hekla.
I had my photographs of Iceland to refer to, and my notes. Lots of notes. I had spent a week cutting and pasting notes from all my reading and my trip into a Word document, sorted under headings like ‘Bars’, ‘Thingvellir’, ‘Police procedure’, ‘The Tjörnin’. In the ten years and four novels since Magnus I, this document has become massive, over four hundred pages. But it definitely helps when writing a novel. Or even a blog.
When writing my eighth financial thriller, I came up with a little trick that works quite well. At the quarter-way stage, I stop and reread what I have written and think about it. Is the book going the way I intended it? If it’s not, is that a good or a bad thing? Are the characters developing in an interesting way? And, most importantly, now I am well into the book, do I have any ideas about new directions the plot or characters might take? I usually do. This means I have to go back and make changes to what I have already written, and also to my plan. I do this again at the halfway stage, and before the ending. It takes time, but it strengthens the book and also cuts down on the rewriting required for second drafts.
There are some writers who don’t need editing, who get it right the first time under their own steam. Some of these are overconfident; some of them are geniuses. I am neither of those writers. If there is a problem with a book, I like to know about it before it’s published, or, in the case of Magnus I, before it even goes out to publishers to accept or reject. I recruited Richenda Todd, an old friend from university who is a professional editor, to help. We embarked on a second draft, polishing style, strengthening characters, improving plot and pace.
I also sent the novel to Pétur, who kindly agreed to read it and point out the errors in my descriptions of Iceland, big and small. Pétur explained that there was no chance of him publishing the book in Icelandic: Icelanders wouldn’t see the point of a crime novel set in their country written by a foreigner. Fair enough. And that made me more grateful for his generosity in helping me.
Looking back at them now, he had some useful corrections, such as ‘There are no apple trees in Iceland’, ‘Jaywalking is not illegal in Iceland’, ‘Anna Karenina is not available in Iceland’ and ‘In the sagas it is not so clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys’.
I had my photographs of Iceland to refer to, and my notes. Lots of notes. I had spent a week cutting and pasting notes from all my reading and my trip into a Word document, sorted under headings like ‘Bars’, ‘Thingvellir’, ‘Police procedure’, ‘The Tjörnin’. In the ten years and four novels since Magnus I, this document has become massive, over four hundred pages. But it definitely helps when writing a novel. Or even a blog.
When writing my eighth financial thriller, I came up with a little trick that works quite well. At the quarter-way stage, I stop and reread what I have written and think about it. Is the book going the way I intended it? If it’s not, is that a good or a bad thing? Are the characters developing in an interesting way? And, most importantly, now I am well into the book, do I have any ideas about new directions the plot or characters might take? I usually do. This means I have to go back and make changes to what I have already written, and also to my plan. I do this again at the halfway stage, and before the ending. It takes time, but it strengthens the book and also cuts down on the rewriting required for second drafts.
There are some writers who don’t need editing, who get it right the first time under their own steam. Some of these are overconfident; some of them are geniuses. I am neither of those writers. If there is a problem with a book, I like to know about it before it’s published, or, in the case of Magnus I, before it even goes out to publishers to accept or reject. I recruited Richenda Todd, an old friend from university who is a professional editor, to help. We embarked on a second draft, polishing style, strengthening characters, improving plot and pace.
I also sent the novel to Pétur, who kindly agreed to read it and point out the errors in my descriptions of Iceland, big and small. Pétur explained that there was no chance of him publishing the book in Icelandic: Icelanders wouldn’t see the point of a crime novel set in their country written by a foreigner. Fair enough. And that made me more grateful for his generosity in helping me.
Looking back at them now, he had some useful corrections, such as ‘There are no apple trees in Iceland’, ‘Jaywalking is not illegal in Iceland’, ‘Anna Karenina is not available in Iceland’ and ‘In the sagas it is not so clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys’.
September 21, 2021
Time to write "Magnus I"
Back to London, and time to write the book. I was looking forward to it, but I was also scared. I’m always nervous when starting a new book. Nobody wants to write a dud, but my first Magnus novel was really important. After the slow demise of the financial thrillers and the failure of the spy novel, this was Plan C. There was as yet no Plan D, and I didn’t fancy drawing one up. Plan C had to work.
For encouragement and perhaps a few tips, I read the novels of two British crime writers who had successfully set detective series in foreign countries: Craig Russell and his Fabel series in Hamburg, and David Hewson and his Nic Costa novels in Rome. They were convincing, well plotted with believable characters and, most importantly, authentic settings. They were extremely well written. On the one hand that was encouraging. On the other hand, could I write that well? Welcome to author paranoia. We all have it. It may even be a prerequisite for success; at least that’s what I tell myself.
I am a little slow. Publishers like to publish a book a year; I write a book every fifteen months. It breaks down into five months planning and research, five months writing the first draft and five months rewriting and faffing around. The faffing around seems to be an indispensable part of the process.
Planners and Pantsters
I had done the research. Writers break down into planners and ‘pantsters’; those who like to plan the book in advance and those who write by the seat of their pants, starting with a good idea and seeing where it takes them. Obviously, pantsters are cooler than planners. Stephen King is a pantster. He’s also a genius, which is cheating. I am a planner.
I plan the plot and I plan the characters. I like to know where I am going and who is going there before I start writing. I do allow myself to deviate from the plan as I write. That’s one of the most enjoyable parts of the process: when you are immersed in writing the story and it suddenly occurs to you that a character might not be exactly who you think he is, or a plot might take an unexpected twist. I usually let it, even though it screws up my plan.
I nearly always come up with a better ending just as I am approaching it. My brain cannot seem to conjure up a brilliant idea out of nothing. It needs an existing story structure that works, and then sometimes, just sometimes, something a little better, a little different, will occur to me. I’m not a genius. Pity, that.
Still, I had some good ingredients. I had Magnus. I had Iceland. I had a lost saga about a ring. I had a university professor found dead by the lake at Thingvellir. I could make a story out of that. At this stage I didn’t have a title: "Magnus I" would have to do.
For encouragement and perhaps a few tips, I read the novels of two British crime writers who had successfully set detective series in foreign countries: Craig Russell and his Fabel series in Hamburg, and David Hewson and his Nic Costa novels in Rome. They were convincing, well plotted with believable characters and, most importantly, authentic settings. They were extremely well written. On the one hand that was encouraging. On the other hand, could I write that well? Welcome to author paranoia. We all have it. It may even be a prerequisite for success; at least that’s what I tell myself.
I am a little slow. Publishers like to publish a book a year; I write a book every fifteen months. It breaks down into five months planning and research, five months writing the first draft and five months rewriting and faffing around. The faffing around seems to be an indispensable part of the process.
Planners and Pantsters
I had done the research. Writers break down into planners and ‘pantsters’; those who like to plan the book in advance and those who write by the seat of their pants, starting with a good idea and seeing where it takes them. Obviously, pantsters are cooler than planners. Stephen King is a pantster. He’s also a genius, which is cheating. I am a planner.
I plan the plot and I plan the characters. I like to know where I am going and who is going there before I start writing. I do allow myself to deviate from the plan as I write. That’s one of the most enjoyable parts of the process: when you are immersed in writing the story and it suddenly occurs to you that a character might not be exactly who you think he is, or a plot might take an unexpected twist. I usually let it, even though it screws up my plan.
I nearly always come up with a better ending just as I am approaching it. My brain cannot seem to conjure up a brilliant idea out of nothing. It needs an existing story structure that works, and then sometimes, just sometimes, something a little better, a little different, will occur to me. I’m not a genius. Pity, that.
Still, I had some good ingredients. I had Magnus. I had Iceland. I had a lost saga about a ring. I had a university professor found dead by the lake at Thingvellir. I could make a story out of that. At this stage I didn’t have a title: "Magnus I" would have to do.
September 8, 2021
The hunt for a lost saga
I was on the hunt for a plausible lost saga. How did it get lost? Whom was it about?
Originally, the sagas were written down by monks on vellum (calfskin). They used quills from the left wings of ravens or swans better for right-handed scribes and ink made from willow or bearberry. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of copies of the sagas scattered throughout Iceland.
By the eighteenth century, an Icelandic scholar who lived in Denmark named Árni Magnússon became worried that the stories might become lost, and travelled around Iceland for ten years collecting them. Iceland was poor, and he found scraps of vellum containing sagas repurposed for all kinds of everyday uses, such as shoe insoles or the back of a waistcoat.
He gathered his collection together in fifty-five boxes, and took them all back to Copenhagen in 1720. He became the librarian at the Royal Library, and stored the sagas there. In 1728, a fire swept through Copenhagen, destroying the library. Árni saved what he could, but many sagas were lost. Which was bad for Norse literature, but good for me.
One of these lost sagas concerned a Norseman named Gaukur (or maybe Gauk? I call him Gaukur, breaking my own rule about Old Norse names. Oops). We know it once existed, because there is a gap for it in the Mödruvallabók, with the note ‘Insert here the saga of Gaukur Trandilsson’. It was never inserted.
So who was this Gaukur? He is mentioned in a couple of other sagas, as Gaukur of Stöng. According to Njal’s Saga, he was killed by his own foster-brother, Ásgrímur. Why, I wondered. And where was this place Stöng?
I checked it on my map of south-west Iceland and discovered that Stöng was very close to Hekla, the voluble volcano that has erupted many times over the centuries, and which became known as ‘the mouth of hell’. Indeed, in 1104 a Hekla eruption completely smothered Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and the valley in which it was situated.
Perfect.
Thorsteinn, my helpful saga expert, listened to my outlandish ideas patiently and kindly, and suggested various improvements and modifications. The day after my meeting with Thorsteinn, I drove to Stöng. With some trepidation: Thorsteinn mentioned that he had been scared when he had driven there with his parents when he was twelve.
Stöng is about 120 kilometres to the west of Reykjavík. After leaving the city, you drive up through desolate heath, stones, electricity pylons and steam from the earth bubbling beneath, until you suddenly arrive at the top of an escarpment with a dramatic view of a flood plain, dotted with farms and the odd town, sea and mountains in the distance. Mighty rivers such as the Hvítá and the Thjórsá bring meltwater from several glaciers churning through this plain down to the Atlantic. On the far side of the valley I could see Hekla, with its year-round white crown, a glacier.
I crossed the plain, Hekla growing ever larger, until I came to the River Thjórsá: wide, cold, the white-green colour of melted ice that had once fallen as snow thousands of years ago. As I drove upstream, ever closer to the volcano, the landscape became bleaker, the lava newer, twisted into pinnacles of frozen black trolls, heads of dogs and ravens. The higher I went, the more powerful the river seemed to become, and I wasn’t surprised to see pylons striding across the landscape from an unseen hydroelectric dam. There seemed enough force in that water to power the whole of Reykjavík.
I eventually came to a bridge over a narrow gorge through which the Thjórsá squeezed in a churning torrent and, just on the other side, the turn-off to Stöng. A rough track bucked and wove around a rocky cliff down to a partly visible valley of stone. A simple wooden fence bore a sign: ‘Lokad’. Closed.
For a moment I considered driving around it I had come all this way after all. But I resisted the temptation. May is early spring in Iceland. Snow is possible. Many minor roads remain closed until June. Even then it is unwise to drive on them in little cars like my rented Golf; you really need a four-wheel drive. Driving down that track, sustaining a puncture or a broken axle and walking back to the main road for help would be very stupid. (Sadly, it’s the kind of thing tourists in Iceland do all the time.)
Fortunately, higher up the road, I could look down on the valley of Stöng, which even nine hundred years after the eruption was a barren moonscape of stone, rock and dust. A thousand years ago, it would have been a lush green valley, with meadows, sheep and a Viking longhouse.
In 1939, archaeologists discovered the site of Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and excavated it. A replica stands just off the main road, a long wooden building with a turf roof that reaches almost to the ground and no windows (see photo above). Hekla broods close by.
I had found my saga.
Originally, the sagas were written down by monks on vellum (calfskin). They used quills from the left wings of ravens or swans better for right-handed scribes and ink made from willow or bearberry. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of copies of the sagas scattered throughout Iceland.
By the eighteenth century, an Icelandic scholar who lived in Denmark named Árni Magnússon became worried that the stories might become lost, and travelled around Iceland for ten years collecting them. Iceland was poor, and he found scraps of vellum containing sagas repurposed for all kinds of everyday uses, such as shoe insoles or the back of a waistcoat.
He gathered his collection together in fifty-five boxes, and took them all back to Copenhagen in 1720. He became the librarian at the Royal Library, and stored the sagas there. In 1728, a fire swept through Copenhagen, destroying the library. Árni saved what he could, but many sagas were lost. Which was bad for Norse literature, but good for me.
One of these lost sagas concerned a Norseman named Gaukur (or maybe Gauk? I call him Gaukur, breaking my own rule about Old Norse names. Oops). We know it once existed, because there is a gap for it in the Mödruvallabók, with the note ‘Insert here the saga of Gaukur Trandilsson’. It was never inserted.
So who was this Gaukur? He is mentioned in a couple of other sagas, as Gaukur of Stöng. According to Njal’s Saga, he was killed by his own foster-brother, Ásgrímur. Why, I wondered. And where was this place Stöng?
I checked it on my map of south-west Iceland and discovered that Stöng was very close to Hekla, the voluble volcano that has erupted many times over the centuries, and which became known as ‘the mouth of hell’. Indeed, in 1104 a Hekla eruption completely smothered Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and the valley in which it was situated.
Perfect.
Thorsteinn, my helpful saga expert, listened to my outlandish ideas patiently and kindly, and suggested various improvements and modifications. The day after my meeting with Thorsteinn, I drove to Stöng. With some trepidation: Thorsteinn mentioned that he had been scared when he had driven there with his parents when he was twelve.
Stöng is about 120 kilometres to the west of Reykjavík. After leaving the city, you drive up through desolate heath, stones, electricity pylons and steam from the earth bubbling beneath, until you suddenly arrive at the top of an escarpment with a dramatic view of a flood plain, dotted with farms and the odd town, sea and mountains in the distance. Mighty rivers such as the Hvítá and the Thjórsá bring meltwater from several glaciers churning through this plain down to the Atlantic. On the far side of the valley I could see Hekla, with its year-round white crown, a glacier.
I crossed the plain, Hekla growing ever larger, until I came to the River Thjórsá: wide, cold, the white-green colour of melted ice that had once fallen as snow thousands of years ago. As I drove upstream, ever closer to the volcano, the landscape became bleaker, the lava newer, twisted into pinnacles of frozen black trolls, heads of dogs and ravens. The higher I went, the more powerful the river seemed to become, and I wasn’t surprised to see pylons striding across the landscape from an unseen hydroelectric dam. There seemed enough force in that water to power the whole of Reykjavík.
I eventually came to a bridge over a narrow gorge through which the Thjórsá squeezed in a churning torrent and, just on the other side, the turn-off to Stöng. A rough track bucked and wove around a rocky cliff down to a partly visible valley of stone. A simple wooden fence bore a sign: ‘Lokad’. Closed.
For a moment I considered driving around it I had come all this way after all. But I resisted the temptation. May is early spring in Iceland. Snow is possible. Many minor roads remain closed until June. Even then it is unwise to drive on them in little cars like my rented Golf; you really need a four-wheel drive. Driving down that track, sustaining a puncture or a broken axle and walking back to the main road for help would be very stupid. (Sadly, it’s the kind of thing tourists in Iceland do all the time.)
Fortunately, higher up the road, I could look down on the valley of Stöng, which even nine hundred years after the eruption was a barren moonscape of stone, rock and dust. A thousand years ago, it would have been a lush green valley, with meadows, sheep and a Viking longhouse.
In 1939, archaeologists discovered the site of Gaukur’s farm at Stöng, and excavated it. A replica stands just off the main road, a long wooden building with a turf roof that reaches almost to the ground and no windows (see photo above). Hekla broods close by.
I had found my saga.
August 30, 2021
Seeing a Man about a Saga
I needed someone to speak to about sagas. I found a lecturer in Icelandic Literature, Thorsteinn. His office was on the top floor of the old building of the University of Iceland. Rather unsettlingly, this reminded me a little of my trip to Berlin to research my 1930s novel: it had a touch of the Nazi Gothic about it.
Thorsteinn’s office was small and academic, with the exception of an unexplained Barbie doll on the top shelf. Nothing in Iceland is ever completely serious. There was a view over Reykjavík City Airport to Thingholt and the Hallgrímskirkja.
Just in front of the university is a rather elegant statue of an early Icelandic academic, Saemundur the Wise, and a seal. Like many future Icelanders, Saemundur studied abroad, at the Sorbonne in Paris, specializing in the devil and black magic. In the eleventh century, travel from France to Iceland was tricky, so Saemundur did a deal with the devil, who promised to take the form of a seal and give him a lift home. Saemundur hitched the lift, but as soon as he made landfall in Iceland he whacked the seal over the head with a bible. I suppose the moral of that tale is be careful about giving lifts to academics in Iceland, especially if they are carrying bibles.
I mentioned to Thorsteinn that my story was going to involve Tolkien and a lost saga. Back in England, I had read a lot of sagas, and a little about Tolkien. I was not at all surprised to discover that Tolkien was an expert on them and that The Lord of the Rings was indeed inspired by one. For my story, I needed a lost saga. I had some ideas, but I wanted to check whether they made sense to an expert.
The sagas are a series of stories written down in Iceland in the later Middle Ages in Old Norse. They fall into several categories. There are the lives of the saints, the lives of the Kings of Norway and histories of Europe – there is even a saga about Thomas Becket.
There are a couple of sagas that deal with ancient Germanic myths, including The Saga of the Volsungs, which tells the story of a cursed ancient ring, the Andvaranaut, which is passed around various gods, heroes, dwarves and dragons, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The story inspired Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and of course Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The most famous sagas are The Sagas of the Icelanders, which are stories about the families that settled Iceland in the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Forty of these survive; some are short, some stretch to a couple of hundred pages. They are not exactly histories, they are more historical novels, even thrillers. They are expertly told, with deft, sparse characterization, plenty of action, legal disputes, wagers, stallion fights, people falling in love with other people’s husbands or wives, pride, jealousy, grief. It truly is all there, and in a modern translation they are real page-turners. I love them, although I must admit that some are written better than others, and they could all do with a good editor cutting out chunks of repetition and digression.
The big four are Njal’s Saga, Egil’s Saga, Grettir’s Saga and The Laxdaela Saga.
My favourite is Njal’s Saga, which is basically a legal thriller. Njal is an expert lawyer who advises his friends on how to solve disputes at the Althing without resorting to swords and battleaxes. They don’t always listen, people die, houses burn.
Egil was an extraordinary man and definitely deserves his own saga. He was born in Norway, and from an early age started beating people up unnecessarily. He got kicked out of the country, and went to Iceland, where he settled near Borgarnes on the west coast – his farm still stands at Borg a few kilometres to the west of town. He became a warrior, and fought for the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan in York. As well as being a thug he was a brilliant poet, and when imprisoned by Athelstan, he wrote a beautiful poem to secure his own release. He returned to Iceland, grew old and a little dotty, and buried his treasure. It has never been found.
The sagas are emphatically not just about men. Some of the best characters are women, such as Gudrun of The Laxdaela Saga, who was beautiful, very clever and very dangerous. It was not a good idea to be either her husband or her lover. The women in the sagas are not necessarily the peacemakers: they urge their husbands to get off their fat arses and take revenge against thieving neighbours if they ever want to have sex again.
By the way, these names – Njal, Egil, Grettir, Erik – bring all kinds of difficulties to someone writing in English about both ancient Vikings and modern Icelanders. The conventions are different and inconsistent. I mentioned before that Icelandic grammar is a nightmare. Well, even the names need to be declined depending on what case they are. The likes of William Morris, being classically trained, decided to lop off the suffixes which give the names their case, and refer to just the root. So Njáll becomes Njal, and our old friend Eiríkr hinn raudi becomes Eirík the Red, which is further anglicized to Erik the Red. However, modern translations of Icelandic always use the full nominative form of the name: Njáll and Eiríkur (Eiríkr is Old Norse). So, in the same book I can refer to a modern Icelander as Egill and the old Viking poet and thug, Egil. Icelanders hate it. Copy editors hate it.
If you haven’t read the sagas, you might imagine them to be like the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf or the tales of the court of King Arthur. In fact, they are much more straightforward and down to earth. In the original Old Norse, the language is sparse, the word choice precise, more Hemingway than Proust. Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century translations into English by William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon are quite wordy, and there are quite a few dodgy renditions out there. Magnus Magnusson’s translations are much more readable, and the current Penguin translations are excellent. This is a case where it’s definitely worth paying for quality; be wary of free, poorly translated editions on the internet.
Thorsteinn’s office was small and academic, with the exception of an unexplained Barbie doll on the top shelf. Nothing in Iceland is ever completely serious. There was a view over Reykjavík City Airport to Thingholt and the Hallgrímskirkja.
Just in front of the university is a rather elegant statue of an early Icelandic academic, Saemundur the Wise, and a seal. Like many future Icelanders, Saemundur studied abroad, at the Sorbonne in Paris, specializing in the devil and black magic. In the eleventh century, travel from France to Iceland was tricky, so Saemundur did a deal with the devil, who promised to take the form of a seal and give him a lift home. Saemundur hitched the lift, but as soon as he made landfall in Iceland he whacked the seal over the head with a bible. I suppose the moral of that tale is be careful about giving lifts to academics in Iceland, especially if they are carrying bibles.
I mentioned to Thorsteinn that my story was going to involve Tolkien and a lost saga. Back in England, I had read a lot of sagas, and a little about Tolkien. I was not at all surprised to discover that Tolkien was an expert on them and that The Lord of the Rings was indeed inspired by one. For my story, I needed a lost saga. I had some ideas, but I wanted to check whether they made sense to an expert.
The sagas are a series of stories written down in Iceland in the later Middle Ages in Old Norse. They fall into several categories. There are the lives of the saints, the lives of the Kings of Norway and histories of Europe – there is even a saga about Thomas Becket.
There are a couple of sagas that deal with ancient Germanic myths, including The Saga of the Volsungs, which tells the story of a cursed ancient ring, the Andvaranaut, which is passed around various gods, heroes, dwarves and dragons, leaving death and destruction in its wake. The story inspired Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and of course Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
The most famous sagas are The Sagas of the Icelanders, which are stories about the families that settled Iceland in the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Forty of these survive; some are short, some stretch to a couple of hundred pages. They are not exactly histories, they are more historical novels, even thrillers. They are expertly told, with deft, sparse characterization, plenty of action, legal disputes, wagers, stallion fights, people falling in love with other people’s husbands or wives, pride, jealousy, grief. It truly is all there, and in a modern translation they are real page-turners. I love them, although I must admit that some are written better than others, and they could all do with a good editor cutting out chunks of repetition and digression.
The big four are Njal’s Saga, Egil’s Saga, Grettir’s Saga and The Laxdaela Saga.
My favourite is Njal’s Saga, which is basically a legal thriller. Njal is an expert lawyer who advises his friends on how to solve disputes at the Althing without resorting to swords and battleaxes. They don’t always listen, people die, houses burn.
Egil was an extraordinary man and definitely deserves his own saga. He was born in Norway, and from an early age started beating people up unnecessarily. He got kicked out of the country, and went to Iceland, where he settled near Borgarnes on the west coast – his farm still stands at Borg a few kilometres to the west of town. He became a warrior, and fought for the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan in York. As well as being a thug he was a brilliant poet, and when imprisoned by Athelstan, he wrote a beautiful poem to secure his own release. He returned to Iceland, grew old and a little dotty, and buried his treasure. It has never been found.
The sagas are emphatically not just about men. Some of the best characters are women, such as Gudrun of The Laxdaela Saga, who was beautiful, very clever and very dangerous. It was not a good idea to be either her husband or her lover. The women in the sagas are not necessarily the peacemakers: they urge their husbands to get off their fat arses and take revenge against thieving neighbours if they ever want to have sex again.
By the way, these names – Njal, Egil, Grettir, Erik – bring all kinds of difficulties to someone writing in English about both ancient Vikings and modern Icelanders. The conventions are different and inconsistent. I mentioned before that Icelandic grammar is a nightmare. Well, even the names need to be declined depending on what case they are. The likes of William Morris, being classically trained, decided to lop off the suffixes which give the names their case, and refer to just the root. So Njáll becomes Njal, and our old friend Eiríkr hinn raudi becomes Eirík the Red, which is further anglicized to Erik the Red. However, modern translations of Icelandic always use the full nominative form of the name: Njáll and Eiríkur (Eiríkr is Old Norse). So, in the same book I can refer to a modern Icelander as Egill and the old Viking poet and thug, Egil. Icelanders hate it. Copy editors hate it.
If you haven’t read the sagas, you might imagine them to be like the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf or the tales of the court of King Arthur. In fact, they are much more straightforward and down to earth. In the original Old Norse, the language is sparse, the word choice precise, more Hemingway than Proust. Unfortunately, the nineteenth-century translations into English by William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon are quite wordy, and there are quite a few dodgy renditions out there. Magnus Magnusson’s translations are much more readable, and the current Penguin translations are excellent. This is a case where it’s definitely worth paying for quality; be wary of free, poorly translated editions on the internet.
