Iceland review - 2007, Page 4

2 ICELAND REVIEW
It’s that time of the year when you really have to
face whether or not you like living in this country.
Winter in rainy Reykjavík is dark, wet and slippery.
However, when the clouds part you have large
Venus glowing in the east ern sky, the northern lights
and a wonder ful, bluish-pink light that escap es
descript ion. One can barely understand the hard-
ships of prev ious times when people did not have
en ou gh clothing to protect them selves against the
relent less rain and sleet. Somehow we managed to
survive on this island in the middle of the Atlantic.
Some years ago I interviewed a man for television
who had been brought up in a typical farm house
made of stone and turf in the remote region of
Hornstrandir in the West Fjords. The last inhabitant
left Hornstrandir in 1951 and since then the whole
region has been declared a nature reservation. We
were sitting on the ruins of his childhood home
where a fox had burrowed his den underneath the
stone wall. I asked him if he had ever experienced
hunger when he was a child. His voice broke and
his eyes welled up with tears when he answered,
“Yes, we were often hungry, especially in early
spring.” The nasty feeling of hunger was still inside
him. When we finished the interview he threw a
piece of fresh cod towards the mouth of the foxhole.
The vixen shot out immediately and snatched it
away. You could hear the wailing inside the fox’s
den as the cubs fought over this easily hunted morsel.
They were the only ones left craving food on the
farm that beautiful summer’s day.
Nowadays we seem to be doing all right as Iceland
has moved up to number one on the index of
countries with the best living conditions in the
world. Gone are the days of hunger, poor housing,
insufficient clothing, tuberculosis and other diseases
that can be attributed to poverty and malnour ish-
ment. Instead our culture faces new dangers such as
globalization and the threat of Californi cation, which
hovers over every aspect of life as we move into the
modern world. English is threatening to erase our
beloved Icelandic as the Internet becomes the main
source of information and communication. There
is now even talk of making English the main means
of communication in some large Icelandic com panies
that employ foreign specialists – this done in the name
of surviving the harsh competition the com panies
face abroad.
A nation of just 300,000 people, with its own
language, heritage, culture and currency can by no
means take its survival for granted. The most import-
ant thing to keep intact is the language. Icelandic
has survived more than a thousand years and although
modern Icelandic is quite different from the old
language, we still can comprehend to a large extent
what is written in the books from the settlement
period and the old Icelandic Sagas. Vigdís Finnboga-
dóttir, our former president and UNESCO’s Good-
will Ambassador for languages, summed up the im-
port ance of our language when she urged us to
keep on guard: “Because if the Icelandic language dis-
a ppears we stop being a nation.”
In this issue of IR we bring you some people who
serve their country well in order to preserve and save
our heritage and culture. I hope you enjoy the lineup
we’ve prepared for you from around the country.
And speaking of survival: as the new editor of this
publication I intend to survive a little longer than
my predecessor Sveinn H. Gudmarsson, whom I
thank for his work here and wish well in his new
position as a news correspondent of RÚV in London.
Bjarni Brynjólfsson
Editor
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45.04
ICELAND REVIEW
IR
EDITOR
Bjarni Brynjólfsson
DEPUTY EDITOR &
PICTURE EDITOR
Páll Stefánsson
DESIGN
Helga Gudný Ásgeirsdóttir
Ivan Burkni
STAFF WRITERS
Sara Blask
Jonas Moody
Alëx Elliott
CONTRIBUTING
WRITERS
Trevor Baker
Greg Bocquet
WEB EDITOR
Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir
CONTRIBUTING
PHOTOGRAPHERS
Hester Blankestijn
John Best
Benjamin Crotty
CONTRIBUTING
ILLUSTRATOR
Lilja Gunnarsdóttir
PROOFREADERS
& COPY EDITORS
Erika Wolfe
PRODUCTION
Ivan Burkni
COLOR PRODUCTION
Páll Kjartansson
ADVERTISING SALES
Svanfrídur Oddgeirsdóttir
FROM THE EDITOR
SURVIVAL OF A NATION