Reykjavík Grapevine - 23.05.2008, Blaðsíða 10

10 | Reykjavík Grapevine | Issue 06 2008 | Article
Countless travellers have waxed lyrical about the
harshness and grandeur of the Icelandic terrain,
while the populace itself has received more mixed
reviews. The English explorer and writer Richard
Burton wrote of Icelanders with eyes “dark and
cold as a pebble” at the site of which a mesmerist
would despair.
Betsy Tobin’s new novel, Ice Land, in which
Christianity and the old, pagan gods battle it out
in the shadow of Hekla, is the latest in a long line
of stories about Iceland. For well over a century,
writers have turned to Iceland for the picturesque
or the grotesque.
Famously, the Sagas have influenced writers
from Sir Walter Scott to JRR Tolkein to Jorge Luis
Borges. How Iceland has itself nudged its way into
literature though is not so well known, with the
big exception of Jules Verne’s 1964 novel, Journey
to the Centre of the Earth. Prof Lidenbrock’s party
begin their descent through the crater at the top
of the atmospheric Snaefellsnes and this has be-
come as much a part of Iceland’s tourist industry
as the Blue Lagoon.
Forty years before Verne turned his gaze
north, the future French literary heavyweight, Vic-
tor Hugo, wrote his first novel, Hans of Iceland.
The titular Hans is actually a peripheral charac-
ter in this romance but a wild one nonetheless.
He is a hideous dwarf, a proto-Quasimodo, who
comes on like an evil version of Rabelais’ Gar-
gantua. He’s abandoned as a child and taken in
by a bishop whose palace he torches. He sails to
Norway where he burns Trondheim cathedral,
hurls mountains on to villages and slaughters regi-
ments, while riding a polar bear called Friend. All
of this seems to have represented Hugo’s sexual
frustrations when a clandestine relationship was
discovered and ended by his mother.
Hans - The Trusted Guide
In Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Lidenbrock
and his nephew Axel discover a runic parchment
tucked inside a copy of Snorri Sturluson’s Heims
Kringla and realise that it describes how they can
reach the centre of the Earth through the crater on
Snæfellssnes. They set sail for Iceland, landing in
Reykjavik, where Axel explores the “sad, dismal
streets” and within three hours has seen “not only
the town itself but its environs. The view was re-
markably dreary” he notes. He describes the men
as robust but clumsy, their facial muscles some-
times contracting in a sort of laugh but never a
smile. The women have “sad, resigned faces, quite
pretty but expressionless”.
Lidenbrock finds the library almost devoid
of books but is informed by the science teacher,
Mr Fridriksson, that the 8,000 volumes are spread
across the country. “There isn’t a single farmer
or fisherman who can’t read and doesn’t read.....
The love of study is in our blood.” They hire Hans
(“You could see at a glance he asked nothing of
anybody. He worked as it suited him, and that
nothing in this world could astonish or disturb his
philosophy of life”) as their guide and begin their
journey. They overnight in Garðar where poor but
hospitable farmers feed them soup made from li-
chen, dried fish in sour butter (“which was twenty
years old and therefore, according to Icelandic
ideas of gastronomy, vastly preferable to fresh but-
ter”) and skyr.
At Stapi, they marvel at the basalt columns
and are ripped off by the local rector. The next
day they make their ascent of Snæfellssnes and
disappear into the crater. The ever cool and re-
sourceful Hans then helps them through a myriad
of strange adventures.
Evil Spirits and Dead Sailors
It isn’t Iceland or its people that feature in the next
French novel but the sea. Pierre Lot’s 1886 novel,
An Iceland Fisherman, is a story about Breton
fishermen catching cod in Icelandic waters: “the
frigid regions where the summers have no night”.
While the men catch cod in peaceful seas, “far
off Iceland” appears, showing her “mountains of
bare stones”. But the sea isn’t always calm. Back
home a graveyard is filled with memorials to lost
fisherman. “Iceland – always Iceland! All over
the porch were slabs bearing the names of dead
sailors”. Fishermen “which the Icelandic Moloch
devours”.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist is
an extraordinary novel, proselytising the pseudo
religion, spiritualism in which he had come to
believe profoundly. In it, his heroes of The Lost
World one by one become convinced that vari-
ous psychic phenomena are real. First Malone the
rugby-playing reporter, then Lord John Roxton the
big game hunter and finally the great Professor
Challenger himself.
In one episode, Malone and Roxton accom-
pany Rev. Mason to a haunted house in an effort to
aid a lost soul. While there, Mason relates a case
closely observed by Professor Neillson of Iceland:
“an evil spirit used to go down to an unfortunate
photographer in the town, draw his supplies [of
ectoplasm] from him and then come back and
use them”. Ectoplasm gave body to this spirit of a
fisherman of rough and violent character who had
committed suicide, making him “a most formida-
ble creature”, so that “they had great difficulty in
mastering him”.
Conan Doyle adds in a footnote that Iceland
is “very advanced in psychic science, and in pro-
portion to its population or opportunities is prob-
ably ahead of any other country”.
Iceland on Soma
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World presents a ster-
ile future of genetically-engineered stability and
efficiency. Time and Decode have added a dash
of irony to the use of banishment to Iceland as a
threat to non-conformists, like Bernard Marx.
Marx doesn’t like the Feelies, doesn’t like
Obasatcle Golf, and doesn’t even like soma. Ru-
mour has it that while he was still in the bottle,
someone thought he was a Gamma rather than an
Alpha-Plus and put alcohol in his blood surrogate
to stunt his development.
When Marx brings The Savage back from
his holiday at the New Mexico Reservation, he
boosts his status from shunned loner to society
host. When the Savage brings Marx and his friend
Helmholz Watson into conflict with the authori-
ties, The Controller, Mustapha Mond, sends Marx
to Iceland (“Oh, please don’t send me to Iceland”
he begs) and Watson to the Falkland Islands.
When the weeping Marx is dragged out, Mond
explains to Watson that the punishment is really
a reward: “He’s being sent to a place where he’ll
meet the most interesting set of men and women
to be found anywhere in the world. All the people
who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every-
one, in a word, who’s anyone”.
Iceland briefly popped up in that other great
dystopian novel, George Orwell’s 1984. It’s is an
outpost of Oceania, a super-state comprising the
Americas, Britain and Ireland, which is constantly
at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. On his tele-
screen, Winston Smith listens to a clipped military
voice describing with brutal relish the armaments
of a new Floating Fortress anchored between Ice-
land and the Faroe Islands.
The Evil Colonel
Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op was the origi-
nal hard-boiled PI, paving the way for Sam Spade
and Philip Marlowe. He had no name, no home
life, no social life but relentlessly worked his way
through his cases, tackling racketeers, kidnappers
and other assorted hoods.
In This King Business, the Continental Op
is sent to Muravia, an unstable Central European
country, to track down a senator’s son who was
mixed up in a coup attempt. Hammett wanted his
villain to be vicious but also “spectacular, theatri-
cal”, so he turned to a little nation in the North
Atlantic to supply Colonel Einarson.
Einarson was an Icelandic soldier, though
whether he was supposed to have served in an
Icelandic army isn’t made clear. What is certain
is that he arrived in Muravia after World War One
and has steadily risen through the ranks to be-
come the head of the army and has his eyes on
becoming a dictator.
He interrogates a soldier with a whip. It’s
“especially nasty because he was not hurrying
himself, not exerting himself. He meant to flog
the man until he got what he wanted, and he was
saving his strength so that he could keep it up as
long as necessary.” The next evening, dressed in
a dinner jacket, with a handshake stronger than it
needed to be and a Napoleonic air, he’s every inch
the man of action. None of this helps him avoid a
particularly gruesome end. Fittingly, Hallgrímur
Helgason, who wrote 101 Reykjavik, described the
Saga’s as being like Dashiell Hammett on horse-
back.
So that’s Iceland and the Icelanders. A threat
or a sanctuary producing flamboyant psycho-
paths as well as phlegmatic and reliable guides
you’d want to accompany you on a great adven-
ture: a nice mish-mash from a bunch of authors,
none of whom appears ever to have set foot in the
country.
Text by Andrew Clarke
Illustratio by Bobby Breiðholt
Icelandic Heroes of
Foreign Literature
“Einarson was an Icelandic soldier, though whether
he was supposed to have served in an Icelandic
army isn’t made clear. What is certain is that he has
his eyes on becoming a dictator.”