Widdershins along Route 1
Jul. 8th, 2009 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustSelfoss was the first point in our circumnavigation of Iceland. According to the CD provided by the car hire company, it is the largest town in the interior of Iceland. It isn't very big, and it's all of 10 miles from the sea. But it has an excellent bookshop combined with café (with internet access), and I bought a botanical map of Iceland, which seems to be the nearest thing available to an actual book about the wild flowers (which are many and beautiful).
The road runs through the saga country: a rich green coastal plane, and the mountains gradually closing in on the left (north). At first we see only remote profiles gleaming with snow, the glacier a line of light at the horizon, becoming more distinct as we travel on. The cone of Hekla, with her own cloud, moves across the skyline. The heights move closer, become the vertical walls of a semicircular bay lapped by green grass (and the sea this time lining the southern horizon with light). When we pause to admire one of many waterfalls, the Westman isles come and go in the mist.
Skogar has a waterfall; but it also has a museum - a heroic, quixotic museum, its collection launched in 1945, with Iceland newly independent and very conscious that it was becoming a modern country, and that the old ways would be lost if they were not preserved. The initial collection, opened in 1949, was housed in the basement of the school.
Since then it has grown, become more ambitious, acquired its own modern building, not to mention a collection of buildings - traditional turf farm buildings (which are actually slate-roofed stone buildings, wrapped in turf and just visible through the window in the photo), a church, a schoolhouse. Another star exhibit is the fishing boat Pétursey, built by local men in 1855 and used until 1946, a shallow open boat designed for use on this flat coast with no harbours, a boat they could haul up onto to beach but capable of sailing to the Westman Islands. I think, inevitably, of the distinction between Orcadians and Shetlanders: were these farmers with a boat, or fishermen with ploughs?
But the odds and ends of the collection are even more joyful than these treasures; why do museums never sell postcards of the best and most bizarre of their posessions? This one would have sold me as many pictures of geysirs and glaciers and puffins as I could desire (and I can desire a lot of pictures of puffins). But where were the postcards of the Noah's Ark (with its champion sheep, and its family of ducklings riding on their mother's back)? Where was the embroidery, some of it old and fine, some bold and modern? Where were the elaborate side saddles? Where were the models in national dress, invented by a romantic in 1850 and owing much to the french model? I got the impression that the museum's policy was to accept - and to display - everything they were offered. Hence the large number of bird skeletons in the basement, the skeletal gannet fixed forever in a head down dive, Rita the skeleton kittiwake, all painstakingly pieced together by the donor. Hence, perhaps, the case of lustreware pottery looking across at the larger collection of wooden bowls, all of it imported (Iceland has no clay suitable to make pottery, and fuel is too scarce to fire it - I keep stumbling across these reminders of what you can't take for granted here). Hence, no doubt, the implausible number of harmoniums; it dawned on us only gradually that every room that could hold a harmonium, did. The museum building had a room dedicated to half a dozen or so, each of the buildings had at least one, the schoolhouse had four.
I could go on. One last favourite from me: a chunk of black volcanic glass as big as a grapefruit was a ravenstone (believed to protect cattle, and to protect from fire). And one from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler: the role played by coffee in the electrification of Iceland.
The road runs through the saga country: a rich green coastal plane, and the mountains gradually closing in on the left (north). At first we see only remote profiles gleaming with snow, the glacier a line of light at the horizon, becoming more distinct as we travel on. The cone of Hekla, with her own cloud, moves across the skyline. The heights move closer, become the vertical walls of a semicircular bay lapped by green grass (and the sea this time lining the southern horizon with light). When we pause to admire one of many waterfalls, the Westman isles come and go in the mist.
Skogar has a waterfall; but it also has a museum - a heroic, quixotic museum, its collection launched in 1945, with Iceland newly independent and very conscious that it was becoming a modern country, and that the old ways would be lost if they were not preserved. The initial collection, opened in 1949, was housed in the basement of the school.
Since then it has grown, become more ambitious, acquired its own modern building, not to mention a collection of buildings - traditional turf farm buildings (which are actually slate-roofed stone buildings, wrapped in turf and just visible through the window in the photo), a church, a schoolhouse. Another star exhibit is the fishing boat Pétursey, built by local men in 1855 and used until 1946, a shallow open boat designed for use on this flat coast with no harbours, a boat they could haul up onto to beach but capable of sailing to the Westman Islands. I think, inevitably, of the distinction between Orcadians and Shetlanders: were these farmers with a boat, or fishermen with ploughs?
But the odds and ends of the collection are even more joyful than these treasures; why do museums never sell postcards of the best and most bizarre of their posessions? This one would have sold me as many pictures of geysirs and glaciers and puffins as I could desire (and I can desire a lot of pictures of puffins). But where were the postcards of the Noah's Ark (with its champion sheep, and its family of ducklings riding on their mother's back)? Where was the embroidery, some of it old and fine, some bold and modern? Where were the elaborate side saddles? Where were the models in national dress, invented by a romantic in 1850 and owing much to the french model? I got the impression that the museum's policy was to accept - and to display - everything they were offered. Hence the large number of bird skeletons in the basement, the skeletal gannet fixed forever in a head down dive, Rita the skeleton kittiwake, all painstakingly pieced together by the donor. Hence, perhaps, the case of lustreware pottery looking across at the larger collection of wooden bowls, all of it imported (Iceland has no clay suitable to make pottery, and fuel is too scarce to fire it - I keep stumbling across these reminders of what you can't take for granted here). Hence, no doubt, the implausible number of harmoniums; it dawned on us only gradually that every room that could hold a harmonium, did. The museum building had a room dedicated to half a dozen or so, each of the buildings had at least one, the schoolhouse had four.
I could go on. One last favourite from me: a chunk of black volcanic glass as big as a grapefruit was a ravenstone (believed to protect cattle, and to protect from fire). And one from
durham_rambler: the role played by coffee in the electrification of Iceland.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 12:08 am (UTC)Though not nearly as worth it as the Museum of Sorcery & Witchcraft in Holmavik, which is also Westfjords but more accessible from the Ring Road, and about which Janni and I can go on and on about at the drop of pin.
Lessee -- what were the other good ones? Akureyri's is, appropriately for Iceland's second largest city, larger and more focused on providing a narrative history, but there's still the collection of impedimentia in the basement; the better draw there is the botanical gardens. Stykkisholmur was much like Skogar sounds like, only the unsorted mass was in the attic not basement. I think we visited one other, but I forget where at the moment.
ETA link.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 03:28 pm (UTC)Just sayin'.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 07:17 pm (UTC)And we're really not going to get into the Westfjords, though I read and loved
no subject
Date: 2009-07-10 12:28 am (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-18 03:14 am (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 04:11 am (UTC)Did I originally think visiting Iceland would be a one-time thing? Hah! :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-09 07:18 pm (UTC)After today's drive, we're promising ourselves more time in the east, 'next time'. (maybe when the Norrona starts calling in Britain again...)