Michael Ridpath's Blog, page 6
March 23, 2021
How to Describe Places: My Research Technique
My first visit to Iceland was going to be very different from the book tour in 1995. This time I had to build up a store of the impressions, the feelings, the sounds, the smell and the little details to fuel my writing of the first draft of my novel over a six-month period.
I had researched many settings for my previous novels — Fife, Brazil, Massachusetts, Prague, Clerkenwell, the Cote d’Azur, Wyoming, South Africa and 1930s Berlin — so I knew what I was doing, but I was daunted. Before, most of my characters had been flying in and out of places. This time Magnus and my characters were stuck in Iceland for at least three books, maybe more.
I had better get it right.
Over the years, I have developed and refined a method for gathering information on locations for my books. I wander around with a tape recorder, a camera and a notebook, my eyes and ears on high alert, taking note of anything I see or hear that might be useful. I use the tape recorder most, muttering into it thoughts and impressions as they occur to me.
My wife finds this mildly embarrassing. I remember a trip to Prague where she chose to walk a couple of yards behind me, pretending she had nothing to do with the weird English guy talking to himself.
It may look weird — it does look weird — but it works. I do listen to the recording at the end of the day and write most of it down, but it is the act of speaking the thought into the recorder that fixes it into my memory.
These days I can combine the camera and the tape recorder in my iPhone and pretend I am on a phone call. Not quite so weird, just a little strange.
What am I looking for? Anything and everything, but there are a few areas I focus on.
First impressions. You only get these once. Write them down.
Details. When I started writing I used to worry that I would be lousy at description because I am not a natural at metaphor or simile, and my prose is clear rather than purple. But I learned that great descriptions often are made up of perfectly selected small details.
These are best when they don’t match the stereotypes of the location. For example, Copacabana beach is famous for its beautiful sunbathers and its sparkling sea. When I was there, drinking a caipirinha with a friend, a hooker with bright yellow hair lurched up to us, and after propositioning us, threw up on a nearby lamppost. That went into the book, as did the small boy peeing on a police car parked in the shade of a palm tree.
Symbols. I look for prominent landmarks in a location that I will refer to several times in a book. Each repetition makes the landmark and hence the location seem more familiar to the reader, so that by the end of the book she feels she really knows the location. Ideally, these will not be the tourist stereotypes that come to mind immediately when you think of a place, but in practice, this is hard to avoid.
It’s good if the symbol can be looked at in different ways by different people at different times of day. In Rio, the obvious choice is the Corcovado, with the statue of Christ the Redeemer on top of the mountain overlooking the city. But more interesting is the favela that tumbles down to the sea on the headland between Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. It is both squalid and beautiful; a sign of modern poverty and almost medieval in its primitive construction.
People. I will need to describe people in each setting, and it is useful to have a set of descriptions to start with. Once again, the less stereotypical the better, but at this stage it’s important to write down what you see, and stereotypes do wander around the streets of the countries that created them. There are indeed beach beauties in Rio, and incredibly skilful young men playing foot volleyball on the beach, but there are also bald plump men with glasses and briefcases.
Movement. What moves? Description comes alive if it isn’t static. People, vehicles, birds, clouds, animals all move about, come and go. A street kid looking skinny on the pavement is one thing. A street kid peeing on the local police car is a better thing — at least for the novelist.
Sounds and smells. What can you hear? What can you smell? Stop, shut your eyes and wait. Then write it down. I remember lying on a beach in Rio, with my eyes closed and listening. It sounded as if I was in a bar. People go to beaches in Rio not just to get a tan, certainly not to read a book, but to chat, to see and be seen, to exchange gossip.
If I do this properly, when I am back in my study writing a scene, I look through my notes and feel that I am back in Brazil, or South Africa or Manhattan or wherever. And so, I hope, will my readers.
I had researched many settings for my previous novels — Fife, Brazil, Massachusetts, Prague, Clerkenwell, the Cote d’Azur, Wyoming, South Africa and 1930s Berlin — so I knew what I was doing, but I was daunted. Before, most of my characters had been flying in and out of places. This time Magnus and my characters were stuck in Iceland for at least three books, maybe more.
I had better get it right.
Over the years, I have developed and refined a method for gathering information on locations for my books. I wander around with a tape recorder, a camera and a notebook, my eyes and ears on high alert, taking note of anything I see or hear that might be useful. I use the tape recorder most, muttering into it thoughts and impressions as they occur to me.
My wife finds this mildly embarrassing. I remember a trip to Prague where she chose to walk a couple of yards behind me, pretending she had nothing to do with the weird English guy talking to himself.
It may look weird — it does look weird — but it works. I do listen to the recording at the end of the day and write most of it down, but it is the act of speaking the thought into the recorder that fixes it into my memory.
These days I can combine the camera and the tape recorder in my iPhone and pretend I am on a phone call. Not quite so weird, just a little strange.
What am I looking for? Anything and everything, but there are a few areas I focus on.
First impressions. You only get these once. Write them down.
Details. When I started writing I used to worry that I would be lousy at description because I am not a natural at metaphor or simile, and my prose is clear rather than purple. But I learned that great descriptions often are made up of perfectly selected small details.
These are best when they don’t match the stereotypes of the location. For example, Copacabana beach is famous for its beautiful sunbathers and its sparkling sea. When I was there, drinking a caipirinha with a friend, a hooker with bright yellow hair lurched up to us, and after propositioning us, threw up on a nearby lamppost. That went into the book, as did the small boy peeing on a police car parked in the shade of a palm tree.
Symbols. I look for prominent landmarks in a location that I will refer to several times in a book. Each repetition makes the landmark and hence the location seem more familiar to the reader, so that by the end of the book she feels she really knows the location. Ideally, these will not be the tourist stereotypes that come to mind immediately when you think of a place, but in practice, this is hard to avoid.
It’s good if the symbol can be looked at in different ways by different people at different times of day. In Rio, the obvious choice is the Corcovado, with the statue of Christ the Redeemer on top of the mountain overlooking the city. But more interesting is the favela that tumbles down to the sea on the headland between Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. It is both squalid and beautiful; a sign of modern poverty and almost medieval in its primitive construction.
People. I will need to describe people in each setting, and it is useful to have a set of descriptions to start with. Once again, the less stereotypical the better, but at this stage it’s important to write down what you see, and stereotypes do wander around the streets of the countries that created them. There are indeed beach beauties in Rio, and incredibly skilful young men playing foot volleyball on the beach, but there are also bald plump men with glasses and briefcases.
Movement. What moves? Description comes alive if it isn’t static. People, vehicles, birds, clouds, animals all move about, come and go. A street kid looking skinny on the pavement is one thing. A street kid peeing on the local police car is a better thing — at least for the novelist.
Sounds and smells. What can you hear? What can you smell? Stop, shut your eyes and wait. Then write it down. I remember lying on a beach in Rio, with my eyes closed and listening. It sounded as if I was in a bar. People go to beaches in Rio not just to get a tan, certainly not to read a book, but to chat, to see and be seen, to exchange gossip.
If I do this properly, when I am back in my study writing a scene, I look through my notes and feel that I am back in Brazil, or South Africa or Manhattan or wherever. And so, I hope, will my readers.
March 9, 2021
One Degree of Separation: Icelandic Society
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.
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.
February 24, 2021
New Novel: The Diplomat's Wife
The Diplomat's Wifeis published this month!
It's part Cold War road trip, part pre-World War 2 spy thriller.
To love, honour and betray.
1936: Devastated by the death of her beloved brother Hugh, Emma seeks to keep his memory alive by wholeheartedly embracing his dreams of a communist revolution. But when she marries an ambitious diplomat, she must leave her ideals behind and live within the confines of embassy life in Paris and Nazi Berlin. Then one of Hugh’s old comrades reappears, asking her to report on her philandering husband, and her loyalties are torn.
1979: Emma’s grandson, Phil, dreams of a gap-year tour of Cold War Europe, but is nowhere near being able to fund it. So when his beloved grandmother determines to make one last trip to the places she lived as a young diplomatic wife, and to try to solve a mystery that has haunted her since the war, he jumps at the chance to accompany her. But their journey takes them to darker, more dangerous places than either of them could ever have imagined…
I've received some nice quotes from fellow writers:
"The Diplomat's Wife takes us on a fast-paced, twisty and hugely enjoyable tour of Europe and its complex history. Emma's dramatic and moving story reminds us of the risk - as well as the rewards - of deciding to shape your own destiny. Michael Ridpath's wonderfully vivid descriptions, colourful characters and thoroughly engaging plot made me want to jump into a two-seater and head for Paris! A real treat." - Sophie Hardach, author of Confessions with Blue Horses
The Diplomat’s Wife is an intricately plotted tale of betrayal and espionage, but it is also the story of a growing relationship between grandmother and grandson. Part road-trip, part spy thriller, it is utterly compelling and unputdownable. - Sophia Tobin, author of Map of the Damage
The Times called it "a gripping ride through pre-war Europe".
The Diplomat's Wife is available on Kindle everywhere. Clicking the link should take you to the Kindle page for your country. The paperback is available from all online retailers in the UK, including bookshop.org, but only from amazon.com in the US.
If you buy it, I hope you enjoy it!
February 23, 2021
Not Quite Scandinavians: The Icelanders
So, Magnus is an Icelander. But what are Icelanders really like?
Now that is a dangerous question. Dangerous because we are in the territory of playing with stereotypes.
I first came across the notion of stereotype at school studying history. I think I had suggested that the first world war started because Germans liked invading people. I was admonished, quite rightly, and told that ‘stereotypes’ had no place in history. You couldn’t say that Italians were excitable, the French didn’t queue, the Americans were loud or that the Germans liked invading people. It was bad history, it was often plain wrong and it was morally dubious. All true.
And yet. It is hard to suggest that the unification of Germany or even the origins of the first world war can be analysed without some understanding of the development of Prussian militarism.
I believe there are certain traits that are more prevalent in Iceland than elsewhere, and I think it is the job of a novelist to capture these. But a writer has to be careful. For many of the most obvious characteristics, there are less obvious, opposing trends lying just beneath the surface. Which makes it all the more interesting.
Some of what follows is based on my own observation. Much of it comes from Icelanders themselves speaking about their own country, especially some of those I have met in London, whose removal from home gives them some clarity. Many of these characteristics will be examined in future posts.
Most of the character of Icelanders derives from their geography and history, which I have already touched upon: dark cold winters, summer days of interminable length, poverty, rubbish weather, the struggle to grow food, a small society and centuries of dominance by a foreign absentee government.
Icelanders work hard, and they work quickly. I have already mentioned how most of them have several different jobs. Historically, there was a lot to get done during the short summer on the farm, and many daylight hours to do it in. If you didn’t work all those hours, you starved in the winter. They are not good planners and they are not good timekeepers. If they say they will do something, they do it right away or not at all.
An example. When I emailed Pétur and asked him if he knew any policemen in Reykjavík I could talk to, I expected a response in a couple of days giving me the contact details of a friend’s husband who was a cop. What I received was an email ten minutes later saying that the chief of the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police was expecting my call. Immediately. The police chief gave me a great contact whom I have met several times.
Another example. Crimefest is an enjoyable literary festival for crime fiction which takes place in Bristol every May. In May 2013, a bunch of Icelandic crime writers were having a beer, and thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a similar international crime festival in Reykjavík? Classic authors’ chat in the bar. Except that in November that same year Iceland Noir held its first festival in Reykjavík, with top crime writers from all over the world showing up. I can’t imagine a major literary festival being set up so quickly in any other country.
Speed helps in other ways. Icelanders take search and rescue seriously: there are 99 units with 3,500 volunteers. They have plenty of toys: snowmobiles, boats, super-jeeps with massive tyres, horses, even parachutes. They have always been willing to drop everything and set out in rough seas to help a ship in distress, or to rush up a mountain through a blizzard to look for a lost neighbour, or these days a lost tourist. This all plays to Icelanders’ strengths: tough, brave, resourceful, quick to react, eager to play with man-toys.
They are ready to respond to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or flash floods at a moment’s notice. They have found their niche in world disasters: they get there first. The Icelanders only have a small global emergency unit, but they pride themselves on being the first international response on the scene in places like Haiti.
I have mentioned that literature has always been important in Icelandic culture, and so too is art, music and sport. With a hard-working population, willing to put in the extra hours, some of it is very good. Reykjavík’s bookshops are big, and groaning with books written by a small population.
The city is teeming with art, some of it good, some of it bad, most of it quirky. Early in the evenings on Fridays and Saturdays the streets of downtown Reykjavík are full of bearded men unloading the musical equipment of dozens of groups ready to play their heart out.
The Icelanders love per-capita comparisons, but the national achievements really are impressive for a place with a population similar to Coventry or Buffalo. World-class musicians include Björk, Sigur Rós and Of Monsters and Men. Iceland’s opera singers, artists and designers spread across the globe. Dramas about sheep win international film awards. The football team reached the semi-finals of the 2016 Euros, and in Halldór Laxness Iceland had a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. After this victory, Icelanders crowed that they had the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita until they found out a guy from the Faroe Islands had won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1903.
I sometimes think that there is a department at the University of Iceland devoted to calculating per-capita statistics. These supposedly include: the most peaceful country, the highest internet usage, the greatest levels of gender equality, the highest literacy ratio, the most rules for writing poetry, the most Coca Cola consumption, the most musicians, the most authors and the highest sales of the computer game Championship Manager.
They also eat a lot of Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs, but I don’t have the global statistics on those to hand.
There is something about the way Icelanders go about things that is effective, beyond just hard work. Like the great disrupters of Silicon Valley, they move fast and break things. They are optimists; when something goes wrong, they try something else. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but hey, thetta reddast.
Now that is a dangerous question. Dangerous because we are in the territory of playing with stereotypes.
I first came across the notion of stereotype at school studying history. I think I had suggested that the first world war started because Germans liked invading people. I was admonished, quite rightly, and told that ‘stereotypes’ had no place in history. You couldn’t say that Italians were excitable, the French didn’t queue, the Americans were loud or that the Germans liked invading people. It was bad history, it was often plain wrong and it was morally dubious. All true.
And yet. It is hard to suggest that the unification of Germany or even the origins of the first world war can be analysed without some understanding of the development of Prussian militarism.
I believe there are certain traits that are more prevalent in Iceland than elsewhere, and I think it is the job of a novelist to capture these. But a writer has to be careful. For many of the most obvious characteristics, there are less obvious, opposing trends lying just beneath the surface. Which makes it all the more interesting.
Some of what follows is based on my own observation. Much of it comes from Icelanders themselves speaking about their own country, especially some of those I have met in London, whose removal from home gives them some clarity. Many of these characteristics will be examined in future posts.
Most of the character of Icelanders derives from their geography and history, which I have already touched upon: dark cold winters, summer days of interminable length, poverty, rubbish weather, the struggle to grow food, a small society and centuries of dominance by a foreign absentee government.
Icelanders work hard, and they work quickly. I have already mentioned how most of them have several different jobs. Historically, there was a lot to get done during the short summer on the farm, and many daylight hours to do it in. If you didn’t work all those hours, you starved in the winter. They are not good planners and they are not good timekeepers. If they say they will do something, they do it right away or not at all.
An example. When I emailed Pétur and asked him if he knew any policemen in Reykjavík I could talk to, I expected a response in a couple of days giving me the contact details of a friend’s husband who was a cop. What I received was an email ten minutes later saying that the chief of the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police was expecting my call. Immediately. The police chief gave me a great contact whom I have met several times.
Another example. Crimefest is an enjoyable literary festival for crime fiction which takes place in Bristol every May. In May 2013, a bunch of Icelandic crime writers were having a beer, and thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a similar international crime festival in Reykjavík? Classic authors’ chat in the bar. Except that in November that same year Iceland Noir held its first festival in Reykjavík, with top crime writers from all over the world showing up. I can’t imagine a major literary festival being set up so quickly in any other country.
Speed helps in other ways. Icelanders take search and rescue seriously: there are 99 units with 3,500 volunteers. They have plenty of toys: snowmobiles, boats, super-jeeps with massive tyres, horses, even parachutes. They have always been willing to drop everything and set out in rough seas to help a ship in distress, or to rush up a mountain through a blizzard to look for a lost neighbour, or these days a lost tourist. This all plays to Icelanders’ strengths: tough, brave, resourceful, quick to react, eager to play with man-toys.
They are ready to respond to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or flash floods at a moment’s notice. They have found their niche in world disasters: they get there first. The Icelanders only have a small global emergency unit, but they pride themselves on being the first international response on the scene in places like Haiti.
I have mentioned that literature has always been important in Icelandic culture, and so too is art, music and sport. With a hard-working population, willing to put in the extra hours, some of it is very good. Reykjavík’s bookshops are big, and groaning with books written by a small population.
The city is teeming with art, some of it good, some of it bad, most of it quirky. Early in the evenings on Fridays and Saturdays the streets of downtown Reykjavík are full of bearded men unloading the musical equipment of dozens of groups ready to play their heart out.
The Icelanders love per-capita comparisons, but the national achievements really are impressive for a place with a population similar to Coventry or Buffalo. World-class musicians include Björk, Sigur Rós and Of Monsters and Men. Iceland’s opera singers, artists and designers spread across the globe. Dramas about sheep win international film awards. The football team reached the semi-finals of the 2016 Euros, and in Halldór Laxness Iceland had a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. After this victory, Icelanders crowed that they had the highest number of Nobel laureates per capita until they found out a guy from the Faroe Islands had won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1903.
I sometimes think that there is a department at the University of Iceland devoted to calculating per-capita statistics. These supposedly include: the most peaceful country, the highest internet usage, the greatest levels of gender equality, the highest literacy ratio, the most rules for writing poetry, the most Coca Cola consumption, the most musicians, the most authors and the highest sales of the computer game Championship Manager.
They also eat a lot of Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs, but I don’t have the global statistics on those to hand.
There is something about the way Icelanders go about things that is effective, beyond just hard work. Like the great disrupters of Silicon Valley, they move fast and break things. They are optimists; when something goes wrong, they try something else. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but hey, thetta reddast.
January 26, 2021
Boghildur and Biggi: Icelandic names
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.
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.
January 11, 2021
My Detective: Magnus or Magnús?
I described the beginnings of a plot for my first Icelandic crime novel in an earlier post: The Problem. What if Tolkien had been inspired by an Icelandic saga? He probably had been inspired by an Icelandic saga. So what if he had been inspired by a lost Icelandic saga that someone had found? And that someone had been murdered. And my detective had to sort it out.
Now I needed a detective.
Creating your detective is probably the most important step for any writer when beginning a crime series. You want the man or woman to be interesting to you as much as the reader. You want him (I decided on a man, perhaps because I am a man) to be sympathetic, strong, independent, intelligent.
But to create drama he needs flaws: traits that will get him into trouble. He needs personal problems. He needs to be in conflict with family friends or colleagues.
Given these requirements, you can see how writers have created detectives who are middle-aged, divorced, with a drink problem, a wayward daughter and a difficult boss. All that really helps with the drama, but it creates a new difficulty: a stereotype which the writer has to be careful not to follow too closely.
So I didn’t start from that point. I had a particular problem. I needed a detective who spoke Icelandic, knew Iceland, yet could see his own country clearly through the eyes of a guest. Solve that, and I could add features that would make him interesting.
First, I needed a name. The name had to be easily recognizable to English speakers – Skarphédinns need not apply – simple to say and read, and authentically Icelandic. A name immediately popped into my head, and it may have popped into yours. Magnus.
For Britons of my generation, Magnus Magnusson was the best known Icelander, although in fact he lived most of his life in Britain. He had a great name (Latin pun stumbled upon by accident). He presented the intellectual quiz show Mastermind on TV, and I remember his blue twinkling eyes and soft Scottish-Icelandic accent fondly.
Despite its Latin derivation, Magnus, or as it is written in Icelandic, Magnús – pronounced Magnoos – is an authentic Icelandic name. The story as told to me goes that in the Middle Ages there was an Icelandic poet named Sigvatr at the court of a Norwegian king. The king had an illegitimate child born prematurely, and Sigvatr thought the baby was going to die immediately.
The poet, not wanting to wake the king, hastily baptized the baby, giving him the name ‘Magnus’ after ‘Carolus Magnus’, the Latin name for Charlemagne, meaning Charles the Great. Magnus survived, grew strong and eventually became King Magnus of Norway himself.
So, like that Icelandic poet, I called my progeny ‘Magnus’. Or at least ‘Magnus’ when he is speaking English: it’s ‘Magnús’ when he is speaking Icelandic. May he live long.
Back to the problem: how on earth do I get him to be a policeman capable of interviewing suspects in Icelandic and of seeing the country through a foreigner’s eyes?
This is the answer I came up with after a couple of weeks’ thought.
Magnus was born in Iceland to Icelandic parents. His father was an academic and his mother an alcoholic.
When Magnus was eight, his parents split up. His father went to teach at university in Boston, and his mother kept Magnus with her. Because of her alcoholism, Magnus lived at his grandparents’ farm on Snaefellsnes in the west of the country. He had a miserable time
Magnus’s mother died when Magnus was twelve, and he and his little brother Óli went to join his father in Boston. So Magnus grew up in America, attended an American high school, but never forgot his Icelandic roots, or his native language.
When he was twenty, Magnus’s father was murdered. The local police tried to solve the crime, but failed. Magnus himself tried, and also failed. But as a result, after leaving university he decided to become a policeman.
Ten years later, and he is the only homicide detective in America who speaks Icelandic. So when the Icelandic National Police Commissioner visits America looking to borrow a detective to help the Reykjavík police with modern big-city crime, Magnus is his man, and Magnus is invited back to Iceland.
The day he lands in the country, an Icelandic professor is found murdered near Lake Thingvellir and our story begins.
This background created a number of problems for Magnus, problems that I could explore in my future books.
Could he understand Icelandic society, having been out of it for so long?
Did he see himself as an Icelander or an American?
As an American policeman used to carrying a gun, how did he deal with the tamer Icelandic criminal scene?
How did he deal with being an outsider?
How did he deal with Icelandic women?
How did he come to terms with his parents’ early death and his painful time at his grandparents’ farm?
And, a gift for a crime writer: who killed his father?
Plenty to work on there, and I am still working on it.
Now I needed a detective.
Creating your detective is probably the most important step for any writer when beginning a crime series. You want the man or woman to be interesting to you as much as the reader. You want him (I decided on a man, perhaps because I am a man) to be sympathetic, strong, independent, intelligent.
But to create drama he needs flaws: traits that will get him into trouble. He needs personal problems. He needs to be in conflict with family friends or colleagues.
Given these requirements, you can see how writers have created detectives who are middle-aged, divorced, with a drink problem, a wayward daughter and a difficult boss. All that really helps with the drama, but it creates a new difficulty: a stereotype which the writer has to be careful not to follow too closely.
So I didn’t start from that point. I had a particular problem. I needed a detective who spoke Icelandic, knew Iceland, yet could see his own country clearly through the eyes of a guest. Solve that, and I could add features that would make him interesting.
First, I needed a name. The name had to be easily recognizable to English speakers – Skarphédinns need not apply – simple to say and read, and authentically Icelandic. A name immediately popped into my head, and it may have popped into yours. Magnus.
For Britons of my generation, Magnus Magnusson was the best known Icelander, although in fact he lived most of his life in Britain. He had a great name (Latin pun stumbled upon by accident). He presented the intellectual quiz show Mastermind on TV, and I remember his blue twinkling eyes and soft Scottish-Icelandic accent fondly.
Despite its Latin derivation, Magnus, or as it is written in Icelandic, Magnús – pronounced Magnoos – is an authentic Icelandic name. The story as told to me goes that in the Middle Ages there was an Icelandic poet named Sigvatr at the court of a Norwegian king. The king had an illegitimate child born prematurely, and Sigvatr thought the baby was going to die immediately.
The poet, not wanting to wake the king, hastily baptized the baby, giving him the name ‘Magnus’ after ‘Carolus Magnus’, the Latin name for Charlemagne, meaning Charles the Great. Magnus survived, grew strong and eventually became King Magnus of Norway himself.
So, like that Icelandic poet, I called my progeny ‘Magnus’. Or at least ‘Magnus’ when he is speaking English: it’s ‘Magnús’ when he is speaking Icelandic. May he live long.
Back to the problem: how on earth do I get him to be a policeman capable of interviewing suspects in Icelandic and of seeing the country through a foreigner’s eyes?
This is the answer I came up with after a couple of weeks’ thought.
Magnus was born in Iceland to Icelandic parents. His father was an academic and his mother an alcoholic.
When Magnus was eight, his parents split up. His father went to teach at university in Boston, and his mother kept Magnus with her. Because of her alcoholism, Magnus lived at his grandparents’ farm on Snaefellsnes in the west of the country. He had a miserable time
Magnus’s mother died when Magnus was twelve, and he and his little brother Óli went to join his father in Boston. So Magnus grew up in America, attended an American high school, but never forgot his Icelandic roots, or his native language.
When he was twenty, Magnus’s father was murdered. The local police tried to solve the crime, but failed. Magnus himself tried, and also failed. But as a result, after leaving university he decided to become a policeman.
Ten years later, and he is the only homicide detective in America who speaks Icelandic. So when the Icelandic National Police Commissioner visits America looking to borrow a detective to help the Reykjavík police with modern big-city crime, Magnus is his man, and Magnus is invited back to Iceland.
The day he lands in the country, an Icelandic professor is found murdered near Lake Thingvellir and our story begins.
This background created a number of problems for Magnus, problems that I could explore in my future books.
Could he understand Icelandic society, having been out of it for so long?
Did he see himself as an Icelander or an American?
As an American policeman used to carrying a gun, how did he deal with the tamer Icelandic criminal scene?
How did he deal with being an outsider?
How did he deal with Icelandic women?
How did he come to terms with his parents’ early death and his painful time at his grandparents’ farm?
And, a gift for a crime writer: who killed his father?
Plenty to work on there, and I am still working on it.
December 29, 2020
The Icelandic language
I have tried hard to learn Icelandic, I really have. For two stints of several months each, I spent three-quarters of an hour every morning listening to audio files and reading grammar and teach-yourself books. I'm currently several months in to a lockdown-inspired third attempt.
At first it seemed easy. Many words, especially the simpler ones, are close to English. For example, sokkur is sock, takk is thanks and blár is blue. Easy, right?
Wrong. The grammar is a killer. Everything has to agree with everything else. There are cases, moods, tenses, genders. It’s like Latin, but more complicated. And the natives really care if you get it right. For example, the words for the first four numbers are significantly different depending on the gender of the thing you are counting. In French you only need five words to count to four: un, une, deux, trois, quatre. In Icelandic you need twelve: einn, ein, eitt, tveir, tvaer, tvö, thrír, thrjár, thrjú, fjórir, fjórar, fjögur. I mean, really. And should you ever need to say ‘the four blue tables’, you need to make ‘four’ and ‘blue’ agree with tables. And you need to use the correct form of ‘the’ and stick it on the end of the table.
If you do ever find yourself in a restaurant, one with multicoloured furniture, and have a desire to say ‘the four blue tables’, my advice is hold up four fingers and point.
Or just say it in English. They all speak English.
You see, in one important way, Icelandic is about the most futile language to study. Not only are there only three hundred thousand speakers (compared to over a billion Mandarin Chinese speakers, for example) but almost all of them speak English.
On my first visit to Iceland, when I proudly tried my gódan dag – good day – in shops, nearly everyone replied in English. And after a couple of days, I realized that the ones who did answer in Icelandic were Poles who hadn’t cottoned on that I was a foreigner.
Just about everyone under the age of sixty, and most of those older than that speak English, and often extremely good English. Linguistic theory suggests that in this situation the less widespread language will die out.
I am not so sure. Everyone is proud of their language, but Icelanders are really proud of theirs. In a country with no ancient architecture, but with a rich literary history, language is important.
Bilingual Icelanders write massive amounts of poetry and prose in Icelandic. They have spelling wars: there was an epic struggle in the Great Spelling War of 1941, followed by a rematch in the Second Spelling War of 1974, with the Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness taking on the Icelandic literary establishment in a fight to make spelling more phonetic. Rock bands, such as Sigur Rós, sing in Icelandic (of a sort) rather than English.
Icelanders are infuriatingly pedantic when it comes to their medieval grammar; the Icelandic language is not something they will let go of lightly.
But there is a point to learning a little Icelandic. It’s fascinating.
Icelandic is a lightly modified version of Old Norse, the language of the sagas, and of those Viking tourists I described before. Hence the complicated grammar.
Its relationship to Danish, Swedish or Norwegian is similar to that of Italian or Spanish to Latin: possible to make out individual words, difficult to understand complete sentences rapidly spoken. Norwegian and Danish are much simpler.
The pronunciation is phonetic and mostly follows consistent rules. They roll their ‘r’s wonderfully, and the ‘g’s disappear somewhere in the back of their throat. There are some weirdnesses, for example ‘Keflavík’ becomes ‘Keplavik’. The word for yes, ‘já’ pronounced ‘yaw’ is often sucked rather than spoken.
It’s just about possible to speak and understand individual words and short sentences; after years of practice, I can now say the name of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull. Auden has a useful tip. He wrote: ‘We are going around a thing called the Langjökull (Long Glacier); if you want to pronounce it you must move your mouth both ways at once, draw your tongue through your uvula and pray to St David of Wales.’
Icelandic has two great little letters. Thorn is like a p with the line on the left sticking up higher, and is pronounced like the ‘th’ in ‘thing’ (see the letter at the top of this post on the left).
Eth is like a d, with a curved line, and is pronounced like the ‘th’ in ‘this’ (see the letter on the right at the top). Both letters come from Old English, and were introduced by the monks from Britain who first tried to write in Icelandic. Unlike Old English and the monks, thorn and eth have survived.
Writing these in English is tricky. These days digital technology means you can now type the Icelandic letters themselves, but it’s counterintuitive for English speakers: the god Thór becomes something that looks a lot like Pór, which seems much less mighty.
The convention often used, and which I have used in this blog, is to write ‘th’ for thorn and ‘d’ for eth. The major difficulty with this is that half the time ‘d’ is therefore pronounced ‘th’, for example the word bord, meaning table, is pronounced ‘borthe’.
The English writer of Icelandic crime novels, Quentin Bates, is so irritated by this that he bans any characters from his books whose names include this letter: no Davíds, no Sigurdurs, No Gudrúns. I think if I had my druthers, I would write the letter ‘eth’ as ‘dd’ like the ‘th’ sound in the Welsh county of Gwynedd. That would make it ‘drudders’. Hmm.
There are no ‘c’s, ‘w’s or ‘z’s in Icelandic, but they do have one other letter, ‘ae’, which is an ‘a’ and an ‘e’ squished together, and sounds like ‘eye’.
Accents are very important, vowels with accents are entirely different letters, with their own place in the alphabet. They are also pronounced differently, so ‘a’ is short as in ‘happy’ and ‘á’ is painful as in ‘now’. Never leave them out because it will make Icelanders grumpy. I have intentionally left a couple out in this blog to prove my point.
I sought out some colloquial Icelandic phrases to insert into my novels. There are some great ones.
My favourite is ‘Hvalreki!’ which means ‘Beached whale!’ It’s an expression of joy at good fortune, and refers to the glee an Icelander in times past would feel if he woke up one morning to find an enormous whale lying on the beach in front of his house. Whales provided massive quantities of meat and oil, which was very valuable before petroleum was discovered. It’s the Icelandic equivalent of striking gold, and is used in a similarly metaphorical way as that expression.
Here are some others:
Laugardagur – Saturday, literally hot tub or washing day
The big salmon – the big cheese
Teaches the naked woman to spin – necessity is the mother of invention
Every man likes the smell of his own fart
Men do not limp while their legs are the same length – don’t fuss over my health
Good to have a falcon in the corner – who knows? Interior design tip?
To play chess with the pope – go to the toilet
It is better to be without trousers than without a book – obvious, right?
The dead lice are falling from my head – what a surprise!
Seventeen hundred and sauerkraut – a long time ago.
One phrase that is often heard in Iceland is ‘Thetta redast’, which means something between ‘everything is going to be OK’ and ‘it will sort itself out in the end’. It sums up Icelanders’ optimism in the face of volcanoes, avalanches, financial meltdowns, and their entry not making it through to the final stages of the Eurovision song contest.
And, by and large, everything does turn out OK.
Alda Sigmundsdóttir's The Little Book of Icelandic is great on the idiosyncrasies of a very idiosyncratic language, and was the source of the colloquial phrases above.
This is the latest post in my blog Writing in Ice: A crime writer's guide to Iceland. www.writinginice.com .
At first it seemed easy. Many words, especially the simpler ones, are close to English. For example, sokkur is sock, takk is thanks and blár is blue. Easy, right?
Wrong. The grammar is a killer. Everything has to agree with everything else. There are cases, moods, tenses, genders. It’s like Latin, but more complicated. And the natives really care if you get it right. For example, the words for the first four numbers are significantly different depending on the gender of the thing you are counting. In French you only need five words to count to four: un, une, deux, trois, quatre. In Icelandic you need twelve: einn, ein, eitt, tveir, tvaer, tvö, thrír, thrjár, thrjú, fjórir, fjórar, fjögur. I mean, really. And should you ever need to say ‘the four blue tables’, you need to make ‘four’ and ‘blue’ agree with tables. And you need to use the correct form of ‘the’ and stick it on the end of the table.
If you do ever find yourself in a restaurant, one with multicoloured furniture, and have a desire to say ‘the four blue tables’, my advice is hold up four fingers and point.
Or just say it in English. They all speak English.
You see, in one important way, Icelandic is about the most futile language to study. Not only are there only three hundred thousand speakers (compared to over a billion Mandarin Chinese speakers, for example) but almost all of them speak English.
On my first visit to Iceland, when I proudly tried my gódan dag – good day – in shops, nearly everyone replied in English. And after a couple of days, I realized that the ones who did answer in Icelandic were Poles who hadn’t cottoned on that I was a foreigner.
Just about everyone under the age of sixty, and most of those older than that speak English, and often extremely good English. Linguistic theory suggests that in this situation the less widespread language will die out.
I am not so sure. Everyone is proud of their language, but Icelanders are really proud of theirs. In a country with no ancient architecture, but with a rich literary history, language is important.
Bilingual Icelanders write massive amounts of poetry and prose in Icelandic. They have spelling wars: there was an epic struggle in the Great Spelling War of 1941, followed by a rematch in the Second Spelling War of 1974, with the Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness taking on the Icelandic literary establishment in a fight to make spelling more phonetic. Rock bands, such as Sigur Rós, sing in Icelandic (of a sort) rather than English.
Icelanders are infuriatingly pedantic when it comes to their medieval grammar; the Icelandic language is not something they will let go of lightly.
But there is a point to learning a little Icelandic. It’s fascinating.
Icelandic is a lightly modified version of Old Norse, the language of the sagas, and of those Viking tourists I described before. Hence the complicated grammar.
Its relationship to Danish, Swedish or Norwegian is similar to that of Italian or Spanish to Latin: possible to make out individual words, difficult to understand complete sentences rapidly spoken. Norwegian and Danish are much simpler.
The pronunciation is phonetic and mostly follows consistent rules. They roll their ‘r’s wonderfully, and the ‘g’s disappear somewhere in the back of their throat. There are some weirdnesses, for example ‘Keflavík’ becomes ‘Keplavik’. The word for yes, ‘já’ pronounced ‘yaw’ is often sucked rather than spoken.
It’s just about possible to speak and understand individual words and short sentences; after years of practice, I can now say the name of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull. Auden has a useful tip. He wrote: ‘We are going around a thing called the Langjökull (Long Glacier); if you want to pronounce it you must move your mouth both ways at once, draw your tongue through your uvula and pray to St David of Wales.’
Icelandic has two great little letters. Thorn is like a p with the line on the left sticking up higher, and is pronounced like the ‘th’ in ‘thing’ (see the letter at the top of this post on the left).
Eth is like a d, with a curved line, and is pronounced like the ‘th’ in ‘this’ (see the letter on the right at the top). Both letters come from Old English, and were introduced by the monks from Britain who first tried to write in Icelandic. Unlike Old English and the monks, thorn and eth have survived.
Writing these in English is tricky. These days digital technology means you can now type the Icelandic letters themselves, but it’s counterintuitive for English speakers: the god Thór becomes something that looks a lot like Pór, which seems much less mighty.
The convention often used, and which I have used in this blog, is to write ‘th’ for thorn and ‘d’ for eth. The major difficulty with this is that half the time ‘d’ is therefore pronounced ‘th’, for example the word bord, meaning table, is pronounced ‘borthe’.
The English writer of Icelandic crime novels, Quentin Bates, is so irritated by this that he bans any characters from his books whose names include this letter: no Davíds, no Sigurdurs, No Gudrúns. I think if I had my druthers, I would write the letter ‘eth’ as ‘dd’ like the ‘th’ sound in the Welsh county of Gwynedd. That would make it ‘drudders’. Hmm.
There are no ‘c’s, ‘w’s or ‘z’s in Icelandic, but they do have one other letter, ‘ae’, which is an ‘a’ and an ‘e’ squished together, and sounds like ‘eye’.
Accents are very important, vowels with accents are entirely different letters, with their own place in the alphabet. They are also pronounced differently, so ‘a’ is short as in ‘happy’ and ‘á’ is painful as in ‘now’. Never leave them out because it will make Icelanders grumpy. I have intentionally left a couple out in this blog to prove my point.
I sought out some colloquial Icelandic phrases to insert into my novels. There are some great ones.
My favourite is ‘Hvalreki!’ which means ‘Beached whale!’ It’s an expression of joy at good fortune, and refers to the glee an Icelander in times past would feel if he woke up one morning to find an enormous whale lying on the beach in front of his house. Whales provided massive quantities of meat and oil, which was very valuable before petroleum was discovered. It’s the Icelandic equivalent of striking gold, and is used in a similarly metaphorical way as that expression.
Here are some others:
Laugardagur – Saturday, literally hot tub or washing day
The big salmon – the big cheese
Teaches the naked woman to spin – necessity is the mother of invention
Every man likes the smell of his own fart
Men do not limp while their legs are the same length – don’t fuss over my health
Good to have a falcon in the corner – who knows? Interior design tip?
To play chess with the pope – go to the toilet
It is better to be without trousers than without a book – obvious, right?
The dead lice are falling from my head – what a surprise!
Seventeen hundred and sauerkraut – a long time ago.
One phrase that is often heard in Iceland is ‘Thetta redast’, which means something between ‘everything is going to be OK’ and ‘it will sort itself out in the end’. It sums up Icelanders’ optimism in the face of volcanoes, avalanches, financial meltdowns, and their entry not making it through to the final stages of the Eurovision song contest.
And, by and large, everything does turn out OK.
Alda Sigmundsdóttir's The Little Book of Icelandic is great on the idiosyncrasies of a very idiosyncratic language, and was the source of the colloquial phrases above.
This is the latest post in my blog Writing in Ice: A crime writer's guide to Iceland. www.writinginice.com .
December 16, 2020
Favourite Places in Iceland: Thingvellir
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.
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.
December 1, 2020
Clinging to the edge of Europe: Iceland's history 1264-1976
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.
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.
November 17, 2020
Iceland's history 874-1264: a Viking gap year raiding and trading
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.
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.
