Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.02.2007, Blaðsíða 20

_REYKJAVÍK_GRAPEVINE_ISSUE 0_007_REVIEWS/BOOKS
Yes, I have a conflict of interest in reviewing this book, as I
have done work for the author, and the Grapevine holds the
copyright, and some of its material originally appeared here
in this magazine. But hey, I’m not on this newspaper’s staff,
and nobody else on the island seems to have reviewed this
truly unusual book. Someone had to do it, and because I
have slogged away in the travel guidebook industry for near-
ly 20 years and am supposed to have developed some kind
of perspective on it, I gave myself the job.
On 25 June 1809, the Danish governor of Iceland, Frederik
Trampe, was arrested in his home on Aðalstræti in Reykjavík,
marched under armed guard to the harbour, and imprisoned
on the British ship Margaret & Anne. The next day Iceland
was proclaimed free and independent of Denmark, and Jør-
gen Jørgensen, a Dane who had lived for some years in Eng-
land, was appointed acting governor. Chapters four and five
of The English Dane, a fine biography of Jørgen Jørgensen,
tell the story of his brief “reign” as protector of Iceland in
1809.
I had only a vague knowledge of the story, and had been
under the mistaken impression that Jørgensen was some
kind of deranged sailor who acted alone in proclaiming him-
self sovereign of an unprotected Iceland. In fact, there was
a whole group of adventurers involved, Jørgensen was not
even necessarily the ringleader, and no less prominent a fig-
ure than Sir Joseph Banks was in on the plan. The episode
had not only to do with the power vacuum in Iceland after
the Danish military was disabled in 1807, but also with British
interests in breaking the Danish trade monopoly in Iceland.
Jørgensen lived an eventful life. He was born in Copen-
hagen in 1780, into a well-connected Danish watchmaking
family. He had already sailed around the world on British
ships before his Icelandic caper. Afterwards, he spent several
unhappy years in Britain, ending in bankruptcy, a theft con-
viction for pawning his landlady’s mattress, and ultimately, in
1826, transport as a convict to Tasmania. There he worked
as a police constable, what we would now call a freelance
journalist, and as a hired explorer, mapping trails through the
wilderness of western Tasmania.
Jørgensen is a troubled figure, swinging between debt,
depression, drink, and gambling on the one hand and great
energy, generosity, organisational skill, and prolific writing
on the other. He had a talent for messing up his life, and
sometimes my stomach churned with embarrassment at the
scrapes he got himself into. There are many high points, such
as the banquet he attended on Viðey island on 27 June 1809,
and many low points, not least his narrow escape from a
death sentence.
The book is meticulously researched and referenced, but
all the footnotes are kept out of the text and the narrative
is pretty lively and fast-moving. A few sections may go into
a bit too much detail for the casual reader, but overall this
book, which is also available in an Icelandic translation, gets
my thumbs up.
Reviewed by Ian Watson
The Ice Museum is a kind of travelogue about north European
regions, with chapters on Oslo, Shetland, Iceland, northern
Norway, Estonia, northwest Greenland, and Svalbard, loosely
tied together by the puzzle of trying to identify the place
that the ancient explorer Pytheas called Thule. Kavenna also
reports on a visit to Munich where she tries to understand
the Nazi fascination with the north.
I found Kavenna’s web site on the Internet, and saw that
she has also written some fine travel journalism and a novel.
But this book, unfortunately, offers little to those who know
the north already. The search for Thule is too thin a concept
to sustain a book, as she half admits. Nor is The Ice Museum
a fully satisfying travel book. Kavenna’s love of commas and
run-on sentences makes her prose sputter and cough, and
her insights into this jumble of eight very different places
are necessarily shallow. Her Iceland write-up rehashes earlier
journeys by Burton, Auden, and MacNeice, and she wastes
three pages ranting about the Volcano Show in Reykjavík, to
which she took a peculiarly strong dislike.
Kavenna lives in London, in an apartment overlooking an
expressway, and what she is really chasing is an elusive, half-
real landscape of open space and broad ice fields, not the
human reality of the countries that she visits. Over and over
she uses phrases like “northern dreamworld,” “silence of the
plains,” and “purity as a plain white space,” and she admits
to an “anti-social impulse.” Recalling part of a winter spent
living near Trondheim, Kavenna says that “everyone was
quiet and friendly in this snow world [and] they waved from
a distance” – a compelling image if you are squeezed into
a sweaty subway train in London, but one which turns the
people who live in the snow world into stick figures. There
are few insightful character sketches in the book, she seems
ill at ease with people, she spends a lot of time in bars, and
many of the interactions she reports on are anonymous. In
Iceland, the only person with whom she reports a conversa-
tion is a poet she meets briefly in a pub who claims to write
in the tradition of the sagas.
How much better a book this might have been if Kaven-
na had been able to make readers genuinely feel the paradox
of human settlement in the far north: lives lived out every
day on the brink of habitability, the fragility of supply and
communication, the coexistence of beauty and danger, and
the small scale of social institutions. Her Greenland chapter
comes closest to managing this, and also has the most inter-
esting cast of characters. But for the most part, I found The
Ice Museum hard going.
These five intriguing books are all either wholly or partly
about Iceland and all have come out over the past year or so.
All are available on loan from Reykjavík’s libraries, or can be
ordered online or from Bóksala stúdenta.
Recent Books about Iceland
Scottish television anchor Sally Magnusson asked her father,
the Icelandic-Scottish translator and television personality
Magnus Magnusson, to go with her on a trip to Iceland to
visit the places his family came from (mostly around Akureyri
Dreaming of Iceland:
The Lure of a Family
Legend
By Sally Magnusson
The Ice Museum:
In Search of the Lost
Land of Thule
By Joanna Kavenna.
The English Dane
By Sarah Bakewell
Inside Reykjavík:
The Grapevine Guide
By Bart Cameron
The main character in this novel is a Scottish dot-com entre-
preneur who sells his company and moves to Iceland to live
with an Icelandic geologist he meets by chance in Glasgow.
She doesn’t know that he is still haunted by memories of his
former girlfriend and business partner. But she too turns out
to have a more interesting past than he bargained for. De-
spite its implausible plot, stereotyped characters, sometimes
clumsy dialogue, and misspelled Icelandic, why did I actually
enjoy reading The Killer’s Guide and not want my time back?
I think it was because of the pleasure of seeing the Reykjavík
I know on the pages of a cheesy British novel. Radcliffe did
his homework and much of the description of Iceland reads
quite true to life. And, having been once new in Iceland my-
self, it feels a bit flattering to see the experience of newly
arrived foreigners here given book-length treatment. Still, I
wish I had a hundred crowns per “Heimæy,” “Bírna” and
every other misspelled word in the book, and anyone who
actually lives here will find some of the story details a bit too
much to swallow.
The Killer’s Guide
to Iceland
By Bane Radcliffe.
Inside Reykjavík is not precisely a guidebook to Reykja-
vík, as it’s way more sophisticated and doesn’t cover hotels,
transport or sightseeing. It’s more of a companion to the
city. It lists restaurants and clubs, but not their hours or pric-
es. It covers daily life, swimming pools, cafes, food, going
out, shopping, music and art, and daytrips. There are more
than thirty superb candid photos, selected by Guðmundur
Freyr Vigfússon. (I recognised a few people I know; so might
you.)
Bart means to be tongue-in-cheek when he says that the
book is “doing a commendable and historical sociological
service in documenting the phenomenon that is Reykjavík
today,” but in fact this is just what the book does. And it’s
cutting edge. It’s ahead of the curve. As Bart himself might
put it, the book voices “key thoughts” about Iceland that
many people think but are “unable to state.” It’s one of the
best things to come out in English on Iceland since Amalia
Líndal’s Ripples from Iceland.
Bart bursts tourist clichés. He shows you how to think be-
yond weather, volcanoes, and the old story about Iceland and
Greenland being misnamed. He explains why you shouldn’t
discuss elves, Vikings, or geology with Icelanders. He in-
cludes Sólheimajökull, Hafnarfjörður, and EVE Online in the
daytrip section. He reviews swimming pools and fast food,
and dares to discuss cod worms. Actually, I found the fish
section a bit weak, but the other 99% of the book convinces
me of the merits of guidebooks written by people who really
know a town, not scribblers who fly in one week and fly out
the next. For travel guidebook junkies: Inside Reykjavík has
similarities to A User’s Guide to Tallinn, put out by students
at the Estonian Art Academy several years ago, but it is more
practical and less fartsy.
The best thing about this book: This guy Bart Cameron
can write. There’s one great sentence after the next. And
he’s never boring. Some of the listings will be out of date
soon, but this book will always be a monument to Reykjavík
in 2006.
and Húsavík). While not a work of genius, the book that
resulted is short and easy to read, Sally Magnusson comes
across as a friendly sort of person, and if you have a maiden
great-aunt (especially in Britain) who has never been to Ice-
land but would like to read something about it, this might be
the gift for her. And I gotta say one really good thing about
this book: Sally got herself a damn fine proofreader. All the
Icelandic is spelled absolutely right. There are no Sigridurs or
Porbjorgs in this book.
The Magnussons are not your average Icelandic family.
Though born in Iceland, Magnus Magnusson grew up in
Scotland where his father was the head of the SÍS export of-
fice in Edinburgh and later the Icelandic consul there. These
are fine folk. They take a taxi from Keflavík to Reykjavík and
their cousin built Hótel Borg. Sally and her dad are familiar
to millions of British television viewers and they get the red-
carpet treatment from everyone they meet. So this is kind of
a celebrity confessional book, and one which will mean most
to those who know Sally and Magnus from TV. It’s also a
book about family history (someone else’s, of course), as well
as an example of a rare genre: Icelandic diaspora literature.
Sally, to her credit, is smart, and not a snob, and tries to ask
critical questions about her Icelandic heritage and her fam-
ily’s myths, though she doesn’t have room to go into much
depth.
Chapter One
There was a time, the story goes, when the Icelandic nation
possessed but one thing of value. A bell. This bell hung from
one gable-end of the Law Council house on the plains of
Thingvellir on the Öxará river, suspended from the roof beam
where it had been secured. It tolled the judgements of the
Council and was a signal for executions. The bell was so old
that no one knew its age for certain any longer. But by the
time this story begins, the bell had long since developed a
crack and the oldest men seemed to recall that it had once
rung with a clearer tone. All the same, the old men had a
great affection for this bell. In the presence of the magis-
trate, a lawyer, an executioner and a man who was to be
beheaded or a woman to be drowned, the sound of the bell
could often be heard, accompanied by the din of the wa-
terfall in Öxará, the breeze slipping down from the nearby
mountains Súlur, and the smell of the birch shrubs in the
groves of Bláskógar.
Until the year came when the proclamation was borne
out to Iceland, that the king’s subjects were to surrender all
the copper and brass they possessed, for the purposes of
reconstructing Copenhagen after the war, and men were
sent off to fetch the ancient bell from the plains of Thingvellir
on the river Öxará.
Only a few days after the Council had adjourned, two
men rode up trailing pack horses along the path following
the western shores of the lake and descending the steep can-
yon path to cross the river at the shallows of its delta. There
they dismounted at the edge of the lava fields near the Law
Council building. One of them was pale and fair-haired, with
small, close-set eyes. He walked with his elbows protruding
out from his sides in a child’s imitation of a gentleman, wear-
ing a now shabby coat several sizes too small for him which
had once clothed an aristocrat; the other was a swarthy and
ugly pauper.
An old man and his dog making their way from the lava
field cross the path of the horsemen.
And who might the two of you be?
The fat man answers: The administerer and representa-
tive of His Royal Majesty’s justice I am.
Isn’t that so, mumbled the old man, his voice hoarse as
if it had come a long way.
I’ve a letter to prove it said the king’s representative.
I’d expect as much, said the old man. There’ve been so
many letters. And many a letter yet to come.
Are you accusing me of lying, you old devil, the king’s
representative asked.
At this the old man ventured no closer to the horsemen
but sat down instead on the remains of the stone wall en-
circling the Law Council building to watch them. There was
nothing to distinguish him from other old men, a grey beard,
red eyes, woollen cap, twisted legs, bluish knuckles clenched
around the walking stick upon which he leaned forward, his
head swaying slightly back and forth. The dog continued
over the fence to sniff the travellers without giving voice, as
is the way with sly and vicious dogs.
In the days of old there were no letters, the old man
mumbled to himself.
At that the swarthy one, the pale one’s companion,
called out, Right you are, friend. The hero Gunnar of Hlíðar-
endi never had a letter.
Who are you? asked the elderly man.
He’s nothing but a rope thief from Akranes who has
been lying in the Slaves’ Hold at the Governor’s residence at
Bessastaðir since Easter, answered the king’s representative
aiming a brutal kick at the dog.
At this the dark one spoke with a grin that showed more
than one white tooth, And he’s the king’s executioner from
Bessastaðir. All the dogs pee on him.
The elderly man sitting on what was left of the wall said
nothing, nor did his expression reveal anything as he contin-
ued to watch them, one eye blinking slightly while his head
swayed to and fro.
Now, Jón Hreggviðsson, you wretch, climb up on the
roof of the building, said the king’s executioner, and cut the
rope holding the bell. It tickles my fancy to think that the
day His Majesty has proclaimed that I should put the rope
around your neck here on this site there won’t even be a bell
to ring.
It’s not something you mock and jest about, lads, said
the elderly man upon hearing this. The bell is an old one.
If you’re from the minister’s farm then you can tell him
this from me, said the king’s executioner, that there’s no
point in him whining or protesting. We have a letter calling
for eighteen bells with this one the nineteenth. They’re to be
broken and shipped out on the penal ship. I’ve no man to
answer to but the king.
He took a good pinch of snuff from his tobacco horn
without bothering to offer it to his companion.
God bless the king, said the old man. The king now
owns all these church bells that the pope once owned. But
this is no church bell. It’s the nation’s own bell. I was born
here on the heathlands of Bláskógar.
Got any snuff? the swarthy one asked. The king’s bloody
executioner can’t even spare a man a pinch of snuff.
No, the elderly man said, in my family we’ve never had
snuff nor the price of it. These are hard times, two of my
grandchildren died around midsummer. I’m an old man my-
self. That bell there has always belonged to the nation.
And who’s got a letter to prove it? said the execution-
er.
My father was born here on the Bláskógar heath, said
the old man.
No one has the right to anything unless he’s a letter to
prove it, said the king’s executioner.
I believe it says somewhere, said the elderly one, that
when the first settlers sailed here from the east to land in
this empty country they found this bell in a cave along the
seaside, together with a cross which has since been lost.
My letter’s from the king, I tell you, said the executioner.
So get yourself up on that roof Jón Hreggviðsson, sneak thief
that you are.
This bell mustn’t be broken, said the old man, who had
risen to his feet. Or sent abroad on the penal ship. It has been
part of the meeting of the Althing at the river Öxará ever
since it began - long before the days of the king; some say
even before the days of the pope.
It’s all the same to me, said the king’s executioner. Co-
penhagen’s got to be rebuilt. There’s been a war and the
Swedes, who do the devil’s own dirty work for him, a nation
of blackguards if ever there was one, have blasted the town
apart.
My grandfather’s farm was at Fíflavellir, farther up on
the heath, said the old man as if he were beginning a lengthy
tale. He got no further, though.
Never did the comely king a penchant find
About a wench his strapping arms to wind
About a wench his strapping arms to wind
The thief Jón Hreggviðsson straddled the peak of the
roof with his feet dangling from the gable end and chanted
the Older Ballad of Pontus. The bell hung from a thick rope
wound about the end of the beam and with an axe he cut
through the rope and the bell fell on the flagstones before
the door of the building.
About a wench his strapping arms to wind
Be she not young and rich and kind.
and by now his Majesty the Crown Prince will have taken
himself a third mistress, he added from the roof beam, as
if he were telling the old man the latest news, and eyed the
blade of the axe: by all accounts she’s said to be the fattest
of them all. A great improvement on Siggi Snorrason here,
I expect.
The old man said nothing in answer.
You’ll pay dear for those words, Jón Hreggviðsson, said
the executioner.
Gunnar of Hlíðarendi wouldn’t have fled far at the
threats of a pale-faced fatty from Álftanes the likes of you,
replied Jón Hreggviðsson.
The fair-haired representative of the king took a sledge
hammer from his pack, placed the ancient bell of Iceland on
the flagstones in front of the Law Council building, raised his
hammer high and struck. The bell, however, slid to one side
and the blow glanced off with only a muted warning sound.
From Jón Hreggviðsson seated astride the roof beam came
the cry,
A bone seldom breaks when it’s got no backing, man,
as Axlar-Björn said when they were breaking his.
When the king’s executioner had turned the bell so that
he could strike it on the inside, with the flagstone for support
from the back, it split apart along the crack. The elderly man
had sat down on the remains of the wall again. He stared
into the distance, his head gently swaying and his sinewy
hands grasping his stick tightly.
The executioner had another shot of snuff. The bottoms
of Jón Hreggviðsson’s feet could be seen as he perched up
on the roof.
D’you plan on riding that roof top all day, or what?
called the executioner to the thief.
To this Jón Hreggviðsson responded from the rooftop of
the Law Council building
Never shall these strapping arms entwine
A maiden, nor on her sweet couch recline,
Nor on her sweet couch recline
Lest she be plump and rich and kind.
They gathered up the pieces of the bell in a large sack
which they then lifted up onto the pack saddle on the op-
posite side of the sledge hammer and axe and then mounted
the horses. The swarthy one drew the pack horses after him.
The fair-haired one rode at the head of the train as suited his
position.
Farewell then, you old Bláskógar devil, he said. Give the
my regards to the minister along with those of the Lord and
you can tell him that this was the work of his Majesty’s own
administerer and representative Sigurður Snorrason.
Jón Hreggviðsson chanted:
On we march young squires straining,
Gallant lords and ladies uncomplaining
Gallant lords and ladies uncomplaining
Gallant lords and ladies uncomplaining,
With iron bits their stallions scarce restraining.

The train of horses left the same way as it had come,
crossing the ford of the Öxará river, climbing the steep path
through the canyon across from the river delta and heading
southward along the west shore of the lake over the heath
of Mosfellsheiði.

About the Author
Halldór Kiljan Laxness was born in 1902 in Reykjavik, the cap-
ital of Iceland, but spent his youth in the country. From the
age of seventeen on, he travelled and lived abroad, chiefly
on the European continent. He was influenced by expres-
sionism and other modern currents in Germany and France.
In the mid-twenties he was converted to Catholicism; his
spiritual experiences are reflected in several books of an au-
tobiographical nature, chiefly Undir Helgahnúk (Under the
Holy Mountain), 1924. In 1927, he published his first impor-
tant novel, Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmir (The Great Weaver from
Kashmir). Laxness’s religious period did not last long; during
a visit to America he became attracted to socialism. Althy-
dubókin (The Book of the People), 1929, is evidence of a
change toward a socialist outlook. In 1930, Laxness settled in
Iceland.

Laxness’s main achievement consists of three novel
cycles written during the thirties, dealing with the people of
Iceland. Þú vínviður hreini, 1931, and Fuglinn í fjörunni, 1932,
(both translated as Salka Valka), tell the story of a poor fisher
girl; Sjálfstættfolk (Independent People), 1934-35, treats the
fortunes of small farmers, whereas the tetralogy Ljós heim-
sins (The Light of the World), 1937-40, has as its hero an
Icelandic folk poet. Laxness’s later works are frequently his-
torical and influenced by the saga tradition: Islandsklukkan
(The Bell of Iceland), 1943-46, Gerpla (The Happy Warriors),
1952, and Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed), 1960. Lax-
ness is also the author of the topical and sharply polemical
Atómstödin (The Atom Station), 1948.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst
Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
The Bell of Iceland An excerpt
By Halldór Kiljan Laxness Translated by Keneva Kunz
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