The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1979, Page 48

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
WINTER 1979
the fertility of the land which attracted them.
At that time grain could be grown without
difficulty, and one ,of the most memorable
incidents in the Njal Saga takes place at the
moment when Hoskuld, the doomed but
guiltless priest-farmer, is sowing grain in
his in-field. The climate worsened a great
deal in later centuries, and though it has
again improved, the growing of grain is still
not an economic pursuit. But agriculture
does not totally depend on grain. There is a
great deal of fertility in the soil of Iceland
and during the warm months the main crop,
grass, seems to spring out of the ground
overnight: all livestock (except of course
milking cows) are driven away to upland
pastures and the grass on low-lying fields is
heavily cropped for hay, silage or dried
grass. The surplus animals fattened on the
upland pastures are duly slaughtered, while
the silage and hay are fed during the winter
to the carry-over breeding stock.
“So Iceland is by no means barren in the
agricultural sense. It is said to be barren of
minerals, but here again one must look at
such unique and economically valuable
resources as geothermic heat, likewise the
almost inexhaustible water-power, which
fully compensates for the absence of fossil
fuels.
“No: during my time as Ambassador, I
could never bring myself to attach over-
riding weight to the Icelandic plea ad
misericordiam. At the height of the first
Cod War, the Prime Minister in his New
Year’s Message to the people said: ‘The
Icelanders have probably never lived so well
as now, and there are very few countries
which can claim a standard of living higher
or even as high as ours!
“However, though the ‘poor little Ice-
land’ argument was weak in itself, the
Icelanders were brilliant in the way they
exploited it: most foreigners were so ig-
norant of Iceland that they took the plea at
face value. I may say that I always found it
quite impossible to convince any leader
writer on a British newspaper that the Ice-
landers were more affluent than we were:
the igloo-and-blubber image was too strong
for me to overcome.
“So much for the claim to special treat-
ment because Iceland is barren.”
Since it is generally conceded to be a
prerogative even of the Devil to quote
scripture for his purpose, one should, per-
haps, not be too critical of Sir Andrew for
having tried to prove a point in a serious
twentieth century discussion over fishery
limits with an illustration from a work of
semi-fiction, composed in the thirteenth
century about events purported to have
taken place during the tenth. No one who
has visited Iceland in summer would argue
with Sir Andrew with respect to the lushness
of the grass on Icelandic farms, but Sir
Andrew conveniently disregards the fact
that on account of the mountainous terrain,
extensive lava beds and sand deserts as well
as glaciers in the interior of the island, only
14% of the total land area is habitable. The
grain sown by Hoskuld, moreover, is gener-
ally conceded to have been barley, the only
one of the cereal grains that can mature in far
northern latitudes. Even if cultivated in Ice-
land today, it would scarcely constitute a
significant source of foreign exchange.
Within recent years there has been a market
for Icelandic wool in the Soviet Union and
small quantities of Icelandic cheese have
been sold to Japan, but the bulk of the meat
from slaughtered lambs is for home con-
sumption. Even within recent years the
vagaries of Icelandic weather have so af-
fected the hay harvest that many farmers
were constrained to slaughter a good portion
of their breeding ewes, as they had insuffi-
cient hay to feed them over the winter.
It is of course true and fortunately so, that
Iceland has been particularly blessed with
“such unique and economically valuable
natural resources as geothermic heat, like-
wise the almost inexhaustible water
power,” which does not, however, as the