Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.06.2018, Page 6

There are few beverages as
iconic to Icelandic culture
as Maltextrakt. The closest
available comparison is the
Russian drink kvass, in that
both are non-alcoholic bev-
erages made from grains
used in the process of mak-
ing beer (note: Maltextrakt
is 1% alcohol, rendering it
even less powerful than the
near-beer sold in grocery
stores).
As the name suggests,
Maltextrakt’s active ingre-
dient is liquid malt extract,
which gives it its molasses
colouring and rich flavour.
You can also probably taste
traces of licorice and cara-
mel. Not a drink that you
chug on a hot day, it’s more
something you would sip
with beef, lamb or choco-
late. It’s been billed as good
for digestion since the early
20th century and one half-
litre can will definitively
prove why.
It cannot be emphasised
enough just how Icelandic
this drink is. In 2013, on
the 100th anniversary of
Maltextakt’s creation, Egils
Brewery released a celebra-
tory commercial that is so
Icelandic you can smell sul-
phur and fermented shark
as you watch it. Brewed with
virtually the same recipe
since 1913, Maltextakt is
mostly consumed around
Christmas time, when it is
mixed with orange soda to
create Jólab-
land, or “Christ-
mas mix”, but
i t ’s a c t u a l l y
quite nice on
its own. An Ice-
landic classic.
PF
MBL reports that the National Museum
of Iceland received a peculiar phone call
the other day, when they were asked to
inspect a series of strange objects that
had landed in one of charity shop Good
Shepherd’s collection bins. The items
in question, wrapped in toilet paper
and placed in a plastic box, turned out
to be priceless artefacts from antiquity.
Amongst the items discovered were
spear points, axe heads, arrowheads
and similar items, all of them obvi-
ously remarkably old.
Thousands of years old
Archeologist Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálms-
son was amongst those who saw these
objects on the news when the story was
first reported. By his estimation, they
are actually far older than the Dark
Ages estimation that reporters were
bandying about. Writ-
ing on his blog on the
matter, he believes that
the spear heads, for
example, likely date to
the time of Christ, or
possibly even older.
But the story
gets even
weirder.
Hey, that’s my stuff!
Arró Stefánsson
wrote about the matter on Facebook
and, as it turns out, he has a special
connection to the items.
“Around 4AM last Sunday morning
I was awoken by the incessant ping-
ing of my phone getting flooded with
messages from my family and friends
asking if I knew anything about a
particular news story that appeared
in one of the weekend newspapers,”
he wrote. “I almost had a heart attack
when I read the arti-
cle...in short, it said
that a box containing
various ancient arti-
facts had been found
at one of the rubbish
heaps in Reykjavík.”
Arró confirmed
that his cousin had
thrown the items away;
the oldest item in the
collection is 3,000 years
old. He is currently in
correspondence with
the National Museum, who now have
possession of the artefacts that were
nearly lost to history.
Ancient Artefacts
(Nearly) Lost In The
Garbage
Literally throwing away history
Words:
Paul Fontaine
Photo:
mbl.is/ Arnþór
Birk is son
First
T EMPL A R A SUND 3 , 101 RE Y K JAV ÍK , T EL : 5711822, W W W.BERGSSON. IS
BREAKFAST FROM 7
LUNCH FROM 12
Words: Juliana Iluminata Wilczynski
Photo: Kristinn Ingvarsson
We asked philosopher Gústav Adolf
Bergmann Sigurbjörnsson, PhD can-
didate in philosophy at the Univer-
sity of Iceland and chairman of the
Icelandic Philosophy Society, about
the island mentality in Iceland.
Island mentality is a colloquial
term and, as such, is rather vague.
It is loosely supposed to capture
two characteristics that are said
to be typical of island communi-
ties (though not exclusive to them).
On the one hand there is a positive
kind of exceptionalism, the belief
that your community is generally
better than other communities,
and on the other there is a sort of
provincialism that is character-
ized by a disregard or enmity to
outsiders and outside values— a
certain kind of narrow-mindedness.
All communities establish norms,
ways of being and ways of conceptu-
alising the world that are particular
to that community and relate to its
history, its present and suggest to
it a future. If the imagery that these
ideas evoke are generally positive
they are likely to relate to other com-
munities with an air of superiority.
This is not something particular to
islands or closed off communities.
It’s typical in-group behaviour and
you can find it in large communi-
ties (“Make America great again!”)
as well as in small ones (“HÚH!”).
The exceptionalism that char-
acterises Icelanders is strongly
linked to our self-image as one of
the Nordic states, evoking both
the perceived successes of the
states of the North Atlantic as well
as some, well, rather confused
notions of a Viking heritage.
ASK A
Philosopher
Q: What is the island
mentality, and do
you think it exists in
Iceland?
6 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 10 — 2018
FOOD OF ICELAND
M
al
t-
ex
tr
ak
t
“Writing on
his blog on
the matter, he
believes that the
spear heads, for
example, likely
date to the time of
Christ, or possibly
even older.”
These all almost ended up in somebody's attic