Ask me about Icelandic cuisine. Go on, ask me. Say, “Tell us John, do you know anything about Icelandic cuisine?” Funny you should ask that:
Well one of that country’s specialities is ‘Hrutspungar’: ram’s testicles pressed in blocks, then boiled and cured in lactic acid. Well you asked!
Many Icelanders eat ‘Hrutspungar’ at their annual feast called ‘Porrablot’. I didn’t actually try them myself but some say the taste is not particularly distinct. Others say the testicles taste sour due to the lactic acid. Now you certainly wouldn’t get the Scots eating something like that…for a start we’d boil the bollocks in whisky first!
When the 757 jet landed at Keflavik, Iceland’s airport, the late evening sun was the colour of marmalade spread upon little toasted houses. In the distance the lava fields were browny black, the colour of a racehorse’s rump, the hills were the blue of a policeman’s summer shirt. It was a colourful place!
Keflavik proved to be a relaxed introduction to Iceland. It is a quiet town, a very quiet town. After a good night’s rest I took a stroll down Keflavik’s main street, the very quiet main street. On this bright but cloudy Saturday morning I expected to see florists placing plants on the pavement in front of their shops, van drivers unloading extra stock or shop fronts being hastily swept and windows washed. But no, there was not a mortal soul to be seen, and those mortal souls that were to be seen were all but invisible! Keflavik was deadlavik!
The town looks somewhat like commercial America; restaurants, filling stations, out of town shops all sprawling out from a main drag. And then it takes on the appearance of a brutal Russian outpost town with dreary blocks of flats fronted by overfilled car parks!
When the time came for me to move on to Reykjavik, I asked of the hotel receptionist, “Can you tell me the way to the bus station please?”
“Yes, you go along the main street until you see a boat on land. Then you go to the roundabout. It has five exits, you take one of these and go to where there is a space rocket outside the building and the bus station is opposite that space rocket. There are no signs for the bus station and there are no buses there but it is next to the candle making workshop. You will find it.”
This jumble of images…all delivered with an emphatically honest nonchalance and childlike innocence made me realise I needed to get out of that town, and quickly. I heaved the backpacks over my shoulder and walked briskly along the main street. The space rocket was not hard to find…space rockets are not hard to find in any town. I was at the bus station an hour before lift-off!
Some say that it’s a weird country, Iceland – and certainly it takes a certain pride in its peculiarities. Let me give you an example: Iceland’s oldest brewery is named after a legendary Viking called Egill Skallagrimsson who wrote poems when he was just three years old. Maybe he was a sort of underage Dylan Thomas or Brendan Behan. Anyway, a couple of years later he killed a man in a fight. Lesson to be learnt: never mix poems with pints and never criticise a 5- year-old’s poems! Nowadays the brewery produces a light lager called Polar Beer…a nice play on words.
On the subject of words, there are dozens of writers in Iceland and a huge number of books are published there each year, both in Icelandic and in English. Literature is one of the mainstays of Icelandic culture. Iceland’s best known writers are Snorri Sturlusson who notated the great sagas way back in the 13th century and Halldor Laxness who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. He died in 1998 aged 96. It would be safe to say that Icelandic literature is progressing well. They’ve been creating prose and poetry for at least ten centuries, and they now have two good writers.
The name Reykjavik comes from the two Norse words: ‘vik’ meaning bay, and ‘reyk’ meaning smoke. As in countless other areas of Iceland, steam issues forth from the ground wherever there is a fault in the earth. Sometimes it feels like you’re walking across a cooker.
The city centre of Reykjavik is renowned throughout Europe as one of the greatest nightspots. Thanks to its mushrooming music scene and its clubs it has earned itself the reputation as a thrilling attraction for thousands of young people on a Friday or Saturday night. Today is Friday, it’s 6pm and I’ve just returned from Laugavegur, the city centre’s main street, where crowds of young people of all nationalities have already started gathering for a night on the town. They’re here to listen to Iceland’s DJs like Jon Atli, DJ KGB or the 60-year old DJ Andrea Jonsdottir affectionately known as the Rock’n’Roll Grandmother. And it’s all so good-natured and easy-going; these young people are simply out for a good time. There’s no trouble, and there’s not one policeman or woman to be seen. I even saw one young man put his empty lager can in a bin.
That was yesterday evening; today is Saturday and as the Icelanders value their weekends off, everywhere is closed and there’s very little to do. I’m in my hotel room overlooking the city’s commercial and industrial area. It’s an unenticing 40-mintue walk into the city along the dreary main road and it has been raining all afternoon. I have a sandwich, a yoghurt, fruit and water for dinner. There are 16 swimming pools in Reykjavik; I could go to one of them but I don’t. So I am fed up.
Travel can be great fun but there are times when you have to ask yourself why you’re doing this. At the moment I feel rather lonely. I haven’t spoken to anyone today except to ask directions or to buy postcards. Tomorrow is Sunday, another very quiet day. The weather forecast isn’t good and I have nothing planned except an early morning run. So what am I doing here? Why exactly am I doing this trek? What’s the point of this journey? And how come the time passes so slowly?
I ask myself all these pathetic questions and then I hit upon to the real question I need to ask myself: why am I so far away from the woman I love? Why have I removed myself in this way? How long will it be before I get back to her?
I stare out of the hotel window at the blankness of the closed lawn mower showroom and the empty Securitas offices opposite. There’s no-one in the street. The traffic lights at the junction turn to green and a solitary car inches forward into what passes for night in Iceland. The half-eaten sandwich sits on the window sill.
I pick up the mobile…
Some statistics: in his book ‘Blood of the Isles’, Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, notes that in Iceland the male Y-chromosome shows 75% of the men to be of Scandinavian extraction, and the other 25% of Irish/Scottish extraction. Those numbers are reversed when it comes to the mitochondrial female DNA: 75% of the females in Iceland are of Irish/Scottish descent and only 25% are of Scandinavian descent.
The tour bus comes to a halt in Thingvellir by Oxara – a protected national park and a UNESCO world heritage site. Thingvellir is the centre of Icelandic culture as it reflects the social and political history of the people. This is where the Althingi, or government structure, came together for the first time in 930 AD. The national park lies within a belt of volcanic activity where fissures cut cross Iceland forming the junction of the American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Things are on the move…west of the gorge the land is edging westward and east of the gorge it is moving eastward, at a rate of 3mm per year. Thus does Iceland straddle two continents. The tour bus stops: once again I buck the tourist route and head off in the opposite direction of the tourists bah-bahing their way to the souvenir shop. I frog-march for five minutes, far enough for the sounds of the buses’ idling engines to disappear and close enough to nature to hear a well-camouflaged Golden Plover’s plaintive call topple over the rough tundra as delicately as would a butterfly dart over a summer meadow.
The geyser Strokkur lies within the geothermal field at Haukadalur. This is where the original ‘geysir’ is also to be found. Geysir gave its name to all erupting springs but sadly it is now inactive. However, since a major earthquake in 2000, Geysir has erupted very occasionally…surprising unwary visitors with a hot shower! Strokkur, on the other hand, is a fountain geyser that erupts several times each hour sending a shower of water 20 metres into the air. And when it erupted the Viking re-enactors cheered and celebrated by showering each other with lager, occasionally managing to swallow some of it!
In South Uist in the Hebrides there is a mountain called Hecla. I always knew that was a Viking name. A large proportion of the place names in the The Western Isles are from Old Norse and indeed the same can be said for certain place names and street names in Cumbria. When I saw Iceland’s largest active volcano, also called Hekla, I asked a local historian the origin of the name. He told me the story: in the Middle Ages Hekla the volcano was thought to be the gateway to hell. The way it pumped out fire and spat out flame, its sulphuric stink and its deep, resounding voice thundering across the island. It was no surprise that people thought it was the entry into hell. In 1785 two Icelanders were the first to climb Hekla and when they came back down the people said, “Tell us, is it really the gateway to Hell? Tell us like a true man. Is Hekla the gateway to Hell?”
Now at that time Iceland was, very reluctantly, a colony belonging to Denmark. The Danes disliked the Icelanders; indeed they subdued and mistreated the Icelanders. An Icelander would likely have ripped out the heart of a Dane and slapped him across the face with it. The Danes, on the other hand, were of the opinion that the Icelanders were worthless and that they’d live in your ear and feed off the wax. So the senior of the two Icelandic climbers looked at each other and announced to their countrymen and countrywomen, “Yes, it is the gateway to hell, and believe this as the truth my countryfolk, they speak Danish down there.”
In fact the word ‘hekla’ means an item of sleeveless clothing worn by women; a sort of stole that is draped over the shoulders. In the way clouds fold over the top of a mountain.
The cloud says “I want to marry the earth.”
The earth has nothing to say about this,
but the rivers run away and Hekla says,
“You can kiss me but I won’t marry you.”
And speaking of fairies, let me introduce you to our unseen guests here tonight, The Huldufolk of the North Atlantic, the Hidden People who live in the rocks in the mountains, for they are here, just as you are there and I am here and the insatiable spirits of the seabirds are here also. Is that not so? Quack.
Just as the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the English have their fairies, the people of the north Atlantic have the Huldufolk. But there is a difference between the cultures. The urbane English think fairies and elves make pleasant little ornaments for a child’s bedroom; the Welsh think fairies are the stuff of legend and have no bearing on rugby whatsoever; the ecumenical Irish include them in their poems and songs and do a roaring trade in tourism thanks to some clever marketing of Leprechauns playing whistles; the Scots no longer believe in fairies – but they know they’re out there. The peoples of the North Atlantic believe with a packet of passion in the Huldufolk and the Trolls. I have evidence: they build little houses for them. Yes, little houses, like dolls houses to you and me. And they furnish them. Little tables, little chairs, little beds, little toilets. Also, if a new road or airport or tunnel is being built, the government, local authority and contractors must consult with local people about where the local Huldufolk are to be found along the proposed route. If they happen to live in a rock or a great boulder that is in the way of the planned road, the contractors must divert that road around the Hidden Folk’s home. Simple. This is perfectly true. If it’s a lie I am telling, it’s a lie I was told. Sometimes though, the local authority or contractor will say they can’t go around that rock for geographic reasons or because of seismic activity, or even for financial reasons. That’s when the trouble flares up. On the one side the local people get steamed up about protecting the Huldufolk’s homes, not wanting to cause dismay to the gentle ones, and on the other hand the authorities harp on about finite resources, lack of manpower or delays to time schedules. The result is stalemate.
That is when a third party is called in: the Elf Negotiator.
…and so, once upon a time…or as they say in the Faroes…Einaferth var tath, the Huldufolk, the Hidden folk, the grey ones, lived in Paradise….
After my walk on the glacier, did I tell you about that…well I did…I went on an adventure to walk on the black, grit-strewn glacier. It was a bit scary. Anyway, I emailed family members to tell them how exciting it had been edging slowly up the tongue of the great glacier and digging my crampons into the grey-black ice surrounding 50 metre deep crevasses. Each of them wrote back with dire warnings about how I should be taking good care of myself and watching out because ice can be dangerous and slippery and another thing, stop going so close to the edge of the sea cliffs! My son in the USA had no such admonishments: after all he himself was just about to head out to Nevada’s Death Valley to do some extreme running in temperatures of over 120 degrees. All he said in his email reply was that the soccer team he plays for in Colorado is called ‘Glacier United’. I emailed back saying, that’s an odd name for a football team, especially for one based in an American state that can be extremely hot.
Well, he said, we’re called Glacier United because all the players are over the hill and move very slowly.
Click here for Part IV: The Faroe Isles.
Brilliant, very vivid I could see it all glad you made it safely back though glaciers are like tortoises, more of a chalenge then they first appear slippery little critters Sue x