Reykjavík Grapevine - sep. 2020, Blaðsíða 32

32The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 07— 2020
The Stron! Icelandic
Female Spirit
Throu!h 3( Books
If your not ready for a hand !renade, castratin!
sarcasm, and ven!eful mastermind !irlfriends,
you're not ready for Icelandic women
Words: Valur Grettisson Images: Subject's Own
In the wake of two Icelandic wom-
en being slut-shamed over the idi-
ocy of some poorly-quarantining
English football halfwits, the
Grapevine has put together this
selection of recommended stories
to help you better understand Ice-
landic women as a whole.
Konan vi# )úsund grá#ur/
Woman at a thousand
degrees
Hallgrímur Helgason
This is, to say the least, a contro-
versial pick. Hallgrímur Helgas-
on was criticized heavily for this
book, as it was largely based on
real people that lived in Iceland.
Those kinds of things seem to
spark controversy and bickering
within small bourgeois societies
like ours, even if the story itself
is fiction... well, more or less.
There is a small ground for that
bourgeois bickering. The main
character of the book is called
Herra—which actually translates
to “sir” in English, but is short for
Herbjörg—and she’s a stand-in for
the very real Brynhildur Björns-
son. The story revolves around old
lady waiting for her death, telling
the readers about her colourful
past, which entails a Nazi father,
the Russian invasion of Berlin
in WWII, the insane harshness
of Icelandic women in early 1900
and how messed up life is was for
a grandchild of a president. Oh,
did I mention that she’s holding
a hand grenade the whole time?
Trust me, this novel is about the
great Icelandic feminine spirit.
Kópavogskrónikan/The
Chronicles of Kópavogur
Kamilla Einarsdóttir
The idea of a fucked up life takes
on a whole new meaning when
reading this novel about an abso-
lutely lost woman trying to explain
to her kids why she is so utterly
messed up. To start with, she lives
in Kópavogur.
What Kamilla captures here
is the brutal sarcasm of Icelandic
women that can castrate a man
with a few words. At the same
time, she doesn’t really want
that, so she just drinks vodka at
Catalina and explains why she let
that miserable stockbroker cum
all over her. Hm...perhaps I’m not
explaining this very well. The es-
sence here is that Icelandic women
are hilariously funny, witty and,
well, dangerously sarcastic on top
of being weirdly straight forward.
This book is a must-read for ev-
eryone that has had a failed rela-
tionship and suffers from low self-
esteem. Or anyone who just wants
to have a good laugh.
Ósjálfrátt /
Absentmindedly
Au#ur Jónsdóttir
'Ósjálfrátt' by Au!ur Jónsdóttir is
one of those books that can change
your life. It will definitely linger
with you, slowly changing your
soul the more you think about it.
Au!ur is the grandchild of Hall-
dór Laxness, Iceland’s only Nobel
Prize winner, but more impor-
tantly, she’s also the granddaugh-
ter of Au!ur Laxness, the wife
of Halldór. She also appears as a
character at the beginning of the
book, which is a fiction, although
Au!ur always writes close to her
own reality.
Au!ur doesn’t shield herself
in any way in this story, going
through her own failed marriage
and the terrible ordeal when she
experienced the 1995 avalanche in
Flateyri, in which 20 people died.
The story also dives deep into the
writer’s relationship with her alco-
holic mother.
Besides all of this, Au!ur has
publicly defended the poor Icelan-
dic girls that have
been slut-shamed
in Iceland and the
UK for visiting the
a forement ioned
English halfwits
and she wrote a de-
tailed article about
all of the stupid
things she did be-
fore we invented
the smartphone.
And I am not exag-
gerating when I say,
it’s insane what she
was up to. You can
find her account at
Kjarninn and run
it through Google
Translate. Even a bad translation
can’t damage that article.
Brennu-Njáls saga/ Njál’s
Saga
Well, obviously not all of Njál’s Saga
only the part with Hallger!ur and
Berg"óra.
Women in Iceland have always been
strong and powerful—even the Vi-
kings understood this.
Two of the best female char-
acters in Icelandic literature are
Hallger!ur Langbrók and Berg"óra
Skarphé!insdóttir. Despite how
epic they are in their own rights,
they are complete side characters
in this Icelandic classic. These
women were nothing less than ba-
dasses and while the thick Vikings
were hammering each other with
rusty swords like idiots, the women
were playing the political game.
This is such a big dramatic
story, so, for the sake of concision,
I am simplifying things here.
What matters here, is that all of
t h e w o m e n
that appear in
Njáls Saga end
up convincing
men to kill for
them and being
responsible for
their own hus-
bands’ deaths
in one way or
another.
Ha l lger!ur
plays a particu-
larly big part in
the death of her
husband, Gun-
nar á Hli!aren-
da. He slaps her
around earlier
in the book. Instead of whimper-
ing and falling into silence, she
threatens him, telling Gunnar that
she would have her revenge sooner
or later. He doesn’t think much of
it, being the most skilled Viking
of them all, mostly because of his
spear and his bow, which is notably
strung with Hallger!ur’s hair.
Fast forward to the end of the
tale, when Gunnar is fighting
dozens of men and his bowstring
snaps. He asks his beloved Hall-
ger!ur for a strand of hair to save
his life and she gives him only a
cold stare, saying “now I will have
my revenge.” Of course, Gunnar
dies. Some ages ago, this was per-
haps perceived as an example of
how deceitful and vengeful wom-
en are. The common perception
of this is pretty simple: the fucker
had it coming.
Books
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Kamilla Einarsdóttir, having a spirited moment