Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.02.2010, Blaðsíða 7

MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS – EDDAS AND SAGAS
The Ancient Vellums on Display
ICELAND :: FILM – Berlin – Copenhagen – Reykjavík
Icelandic Filmmaking 1904-2008
A LOOK INTO NATURE
The Story of the Icelandic Museum of Natural History
EXHIBITIONS - GUIDED TOURS
CAFETERIA - CULTURE SHOP
The Culture House – Þjóðmenningarhúsið
National Centre for Cultural Heritage
Hverfi sgata 15 · 101 Reykjavík (City Centre)
Tel: 545 1400 · www.thjodmenning.is
Open daily between 11 am and 5 pm
Free guided tour of THE MEDIEVAL MANU-
SCRIPTS exhibition Mon and Fri at 3:30 pm.
All those corrupted fruits,
you see, were giving
those involved a bad
name. Not to mention the
smell, the simple unpleasantness
of it all. One year a brilliant solution
was found: not to grow fruits at all
anymore, but corruption itself—fungi
and bacteria that certainly cannot be
called corruption if there is nothing to
corrupt.
Orders were sent out: forget the
apples, forget the bananas, kiwis
and clementines and let's make the
microbes formerly known as rot
(MFKAR)! To begin with there was
plenty for the MFKARs to feed on,
but as only a few fruit trees kept
growing, on their own, by neglect, the
MFKARs had to start feeding on each
other, already in the second year. The
advantage, of course, was that at least
nothing was being corrupted and no
one noticed the smell, since everything
stank anyway.
The third year, it was discovered
that microbes could be nurtured
directly with sugar, and since sugar-
cane was renamed 'MFKAR support
material', this also did not count as
corruption, but a beneficially harvested
natural process.
In year four, production increased
by 12%.
In year five no one knew anymore
what on earth could be the meaning of
'I don't like microbes' or any other such
phrases, for obviously we are all made
of microbes, aren't we?
In year six, those who spoke of fruit
as if they were something to be desired
were arrested and silenced, since fruits
do nothing but invite corruption.
In the seventh year a sudden drop
in MFKAR support material production
took the industry by surprise, urging
authorities to support research and
development in the field of added
microbe value (AMV). AMV'd products
were a major success and sales
almost kept their pace as colourful
fruit-shaped objects made entirely of
MFKARs hit the markets: mapples,
mananas, miwis and mementines,
murberries, mackberries –even
marrots and minach sold out faster
than anyone had predicted. The RnD
teams were awarded appropriately.
We are now entering the eighth
year and everything seems to be under
control.
Opinion | Haukur Már Helgason
Fruits Remain
Forbidden
The founding myth of Ice-
land goes something like
this: A bunch of hardy peo-
ple from the West coast of
Norway escaped the terror—and high
taxes—of a king called Harald the
Fairhaired. Along the way, they picked
up some slaves of Celtic origin—and
thus the Icelanders became a poetic
race and were saved from the fate of be-
ing dull like Norwegians.
Iceland’s Golden and Dark Ages
These people went on to found a true
democracy, based upon Alþingi, the
oldest parliament in the world. These
were proud and noble people, and if
they were also Viking raiders, they did
their killing in a somewhat endearing
fashion—like the warrior-poet Egill
Skallagrímsson who always had a joke
on his lips when he murdered innocent
people.
This Golden Age—the age of the
great sagas—ended when the chiefs
of the greatest families started fight-
ing amongst themselves in the 13th
century. This ended with the ultimate
betrayal by a chieftain called Gissur
the Earl, who delivered Iceland into the
hands of the Norwegian king.
Thus the Dark Ages were ushered
in. These lasted for more or less seven
hundred years, during which time
Iceland was under the reign of first
Norwegian and then Danish royalty.
They treated us horribly in most ways,
erected big and beautiful palaces and
churches in Copenhagen—founded
on Icelandic wealth—while they
shipped boatloads of maggoty food
back to the Icelanders.
Is it true?
This is a standard version of Icelandic
history, epitomized in text books for
schools written by an early twentieth
century politician called Jónas Jóns-
son from Hrifla—Hrifla being a small
farm in the north of Iceland, where
he was born. Jónas was a man who
fervently believed that the fate of the
Icelanders and their true culture lay in
the countryside, with the peasantry. In
the thirties he was a dominating figure
in Icelandic politics, he is said to have
been asked by the Danish king Chris-
tian X:
"Are you still playing at being the
little Mussolini?"
The story continues with the inde-
pendence movement in the 19th cen-
tury. There we have a group of nation-
alistic poets and intellectuals saving
the country from the grips of foreign
colonialists—chief among them Jón
Sigurðsson, the national hero, who’s
statue stands facing Alþingi, his strong
gaze piercing the windows of the par-
liament building.
Modern historians have questioned
many aspects of this story. Possibly the
very isolated and inward Icelanders
were partly to blame themselves. The
isolation might even have been a tool
for rich farmers, the ruling class of the
country, to oppress the general popula-
tion.
In fact, the dark ages do not start
until much later than the above history
would have it. Until the reformation of
1550, the country fared relatively well,
even doing good business with English
seafarers who traded with the Iceland-
ers. The most horrible time were the
17th and 18th century, when very few
ships came to Iceland; this was a pe-
riod when the Icelanders languished
in their mud hut dwellings through
the cold and dark of the arctic night. At
that time Icelanders were the poorest
people of Europe. Volcanic eruptions,
pestilence, hunger and cold decimated
the population—plans were drawn up
to move all the all the residents (well,
the 40 thousand who were left) to the
heaths of Jutland.
At this time Alþingi had simply
become a court of law, where horrible
judgements were meted out. Adulter-
ous women were drowned, small time
thieves were flogged and had their
limbs cut off, sometimes for stealing
a piece of rope, alleged sorcerers were
burnt at the stake. Over this presided
the farmer chiefs who had founded a
system of serfdom wherein working
people were bound to the farms where
they were placed. Their fear was that
people of independent mind might
move to the seaside, start fishing, and
towns would begin to form and thus
they would lose their grip on society.
The idea that great wealth was
founded upon these people is prepos-
terous. Even if Halldór Laxness says so
in his famous Íslandsklukka (Iceland’s
Bell), a key work of the late indepen-
dence movement, Copenhagen was
not built with Icelandic money.
NATO ushers in a Soviet-Iceland
Iceland after independence in 1944
was a strange place in many ways.
During the war the country became
fabulously rich, using the opportunity
to sneak away from the Danes—then
under German occupation—to found
a republic, albeit under the protection
of the US military. And, despite Ice-
land having actually made money from
the war, it received its generous share
of the Marshall help.
All this money was spent in a few
years. This heralded a chapter in Ice-
landic history where the country can
almost be compared to one of the so-
cialist republics of Eastern Europe.
Extremely tight currency restrictions
were put into place—not to be lifted
until the late eighties—food, clothes
and building materials were rationed
by an all powerful government agency.
Even if the country had not suffered
any hardships during the war, people
stood in long lines to buy necessities.
To the frustration of the Ameri-
cans, the powerful socialist party man-
aged to make an agreement with the
Soviet Union, accepted even by the
right wing, stating that the Russians
would buy fantastical amounts of Ice-
landic herring and woollen products in
exchange for oil and Russian cars. Far
into the eighties the streets of Reyk-
javik were full of Russian Moskvitsh
and Lada automobiles, and even if the
oil companies called themselves Esso,
Shell and BP, they all sold the same
Russian oil from the same Russian
tankers.
Beer was not for sale in the country,
it was simply banned. So was the im-
port of foreign candy. Some shops even
dealt in smuggled boxes of Quality
Street—a very sought after luxury item
at the time.
The owners of Iceland
The whole system was under strict
political control; to get loans in banks
or even housing you had to have po-
litical contacts. The riches that were to
be gained from the US military were
divided between cronies of the largest
political parties. No wonder the Inde-
pendence Party, the dominating party
in the history of the republic, has been
compared to the Mexican ruling party,
the strangely named Institutional Rev-
olutionary Party. To get anywhere in
society you had to belong to the right
party, merit counted for very little.
Icelanders have always believed
themselves to be exceptional. A for-
mer Prime Minister once famously re-
marked that normal economic laws did
not apply in Iceland. It has been gov-
erned accordingly, with the restrictions
of the fifties and sixties, the rampant
inflation of the seventies and eighties,
and then consumer mania in the nine-
ties, culminating in the big bubble that
burst in October 2008.
The founding myths are being pa-
raded again, about Gissur the Earl, the
so-called “Old Treaty” (Gamli sáttmáli)
and Iceland’s loss of independence in
1262. About Jón Sigurðsson and his
stand against the Danish government:
"We all protest!" (Vér mótmælum al-
lir!). Jón Sigurðsson is being portrayed
as a staunch opponent of the European
Union—150 years before the fact.
In a sense this is a battle between
those who prefer openness and those
who are content with isolation—a
theme in the real, not the sanitized,
history of Iceland. Much of the rul-
ing class and the opinion makers are
home grown, they come from the same
schools and the same law department,
famous for its lack of intellectual cu-
riosity. In their hearts they consider
themselves to be the owners of Iceland,
much as the farmer chiefs of the dark
ages. They fear that joining the EU
would undermine their power.
Dealing in deception
In the age of the sagas Icelanders
seem to have been wealthy. In recent
research this been attributed to thriv-
ing commerce between Iceland and
Greenland and Europe. Iceland didn’t
have much of worth to export, but in
Greenland you had furs and tusk. The
West of Iceland, where most of the sa-
gas were written, seems to have been
a port of trade for Greenlandic goods.
Some historians still think that this
wealth was based upon dried fish and
wool of questionable quality, not prod-
ucts that would fetch a high price in
any period, but the former explanation
sounds more plausible. To write one
saga you have to be able to kill a lot of
calves for their skin.
It is even said that the most valu-
able commodity of all was the tusk
of the narwhale, almost two meters
in length, sold in Europe as unicorn
horns and worth a bishop’s ransom.
Those merchants would have been
the true forerunners of the venture
Vikings of the 21st century. Like them,
they would have dealt in deception;
because of course, they could not have
divulged the true origin of their prized
goods.
Opinion | Egill Helgason Illustrations by Lóa Hjálmtýsdóttir
Iceland And Its Founding
Myths: Isolation or openness
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 01 — 2010
7