News from Nowhere

Our holiday in Iceland was booked through Discover the World; it was effectively their Fly, Drive & Hike option, but modified and slightly extended (we flew from Manchester, flights are less frequent than flights from London, and we chose to extend our holiday rather than shorten it). We spent 17 nights in Iceland, staying in hotels with bed and breakfast prepaid, and the cost of flights, car hire and accommodation for the two of us was slightly over £4000. We don't habitually prebook to this extent, so the size of that sum rather took our breath away, but it compared well enough to what other firms were offering, and we were both very happy with our holiday (to the extent that durham_rambler is convinced that going to Iceland was his idea, and I think it was mine!). Would we use Discover the World again? Probably not, now we know how easy it is to deal with Icelandic hotels in English - another time we would probably travel independently.

There follows, for my own benefit and that of anyone else who might be interested (not to mention setting out some of the feedback I might want to give to Discover the World), a list of hotels, with our impressions: ( Cut for length and detail )

I missed Thieving Magpie Morris is the Market Place yesterday; but Bob the Bolder posted this picture, plus a link to this video which conveys the authentic flavour of a morris side in action by fading down the music and focussing on the comments - a loud cry at one point of "He's just making it up!"

In yesterday's Guardian, Carol Ann Duffy commissions new war poems. Her own Big Ask is an explicit tribute to Adrian Mitchell, but the poem which reminds me most strongly of Mitchell's voice - think of To Whom It May Concern with its incandescent, barely restrained contempt - is Sean O'Brien's Of Course If I Can Help in Any Way.

John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash, and also of Harris Tweed, has died, at the age of 88 - I'm sorry to hear he has died, of course, but pleased to learn that he had not died long ago. Captain Pugwash was a childhood favourite, and I still think of the television series before the books - which is unusual for me (also, I realise, I think of it in colour though I must have watched it in black and white). In his memory, a rousing rendition of The Trumpet Hornpipe (which you may know as The Black Pig).

I have started posting my photos from Iceland to Flickr. There will, in time, be many, many more of them, and no doubt there will be posts here as well, where there are thoughts or stories to accompany the pictures. But I'll try to resist posts where all I have to say is "Wow! Look at that! It's a [what it says on the label]. Isn't that amazing?" (Like this picture of a boiling hot, sulphurous stream at Seltún on the Reykjanes peninsula, for example: some of the mist is soft rainy cloud descending, and some of it is steam rising from the ground. Isn't that amazing? You just walk along the boardwalk, following the stream back into the hills, accompanied by the gentle burbling sound of boiling water. Wow!)

Oops, that's only four. Very well, another one from Iceland: my copy of William Morris's Icelandic Journals has as a frontispiece a drawing entitled "The Arms of Iceland" showing a split salt cod. I thought this was a piece of dubious humour, but no - between some time in the fifteenth century and 1903, the codfish really was used officially as an emblem of Iceland. You can to some extent explain this away: it was the emblem used by Denmark to represent only one part of its national territory, salt cod was for a long time Iceland's one internationally traded product (see durham_rambler on the subject of the role of coffee in the electrification of Iceland - it's all about the salt cod, really) - but the fact remains. And we saw the flag still flying outside the Icelandic Saltfish Museum in Grindavik, as far as a flag can fly in steady rain. We didn't visit the museum - that'll be for another trip - instead we went to the restaurant opposite and ate salt cod.

You do not know how many pictures I have taken this holiday in which those oh so characteristic Icelandic sheep are shown having just turned away, moved out of shot or otherwise failed to cooperate with the photographer. But I persevere, and behold:



I give you 'Sheep under Snæfellsnes'.

As with geography, so with history: I keep misreading Iceland.

It's easy to slip into thinking of Iceland as 'an old country' - as if this expression means anything. The presentation of Ieland to tourists - and that includes internal tourists - relies heavily on the sagas, and before them, on tales of the Age of Settlement. You are constantly invited to think of Iceland's history as starting with a First Settler in the ninth century, and recounted in the sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; everything reminds you of the middle ages, which means: old.

Only, of course, not. The mere fact of being able to identify a First Settler (and for the purposes of this argument, it doesn't really matter whether Ingólfr Arnarson was really the first settler, or whether Iceland was actually settled by the Irish) indicates that the history of the country is all pretty recent.



There's an abandoned settlement called Sandfell just to the east of Skaftafell: turf banks which mark the site of a farm, a white fence enclosing the old graveyard, and a tree (you can't miss it, it's the only tree for miles). A noticeboard explains the history of the place, with reference to the sagas, which I would reproduce here if I could only remember which guide book I read it in. It's a peaceful, evocative place. But the farm was not actually abandoned until the 1940s - those memories of the remote past are actually overlaying the changes of a much more recent period, the time at which Iceland was at last and rather self-consciously becoming a modern independent nation.

Far from being an old country, Iceland is a very new one. Old buildings don't survive, but are constantly rebuilt. I am writing this tonight in the oldest hotel in Iceland: it dates back to 1884. It's like being in the US, where a house built in 1900 can be historic.

Something else which keeps misleading me: the elements of the Icelandic language which I recognise are often analogous to older English terms. All the place names, the Dales and the Wicks and the Burys: the wording on the map which reads
"Þú ert hérna" - thou art here.

Even the geology of Iceland is new: most places do geology first, then history, but not here - in Iceland, geology just keeps on happening.

Selfoss 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 Folk Museum. Short version: we loved it. )

After two days in Iceland, I'm close to information overload: we have seen so many wonderful things that I need some time to process and sort before I begin to write about them. The short version is that we spent yesterday exploring the Reykjanes peninsula, pulling off the road to explore minor tourist attractions: black cliffs dotted with birds, a bridge spanning a sandy gully which happens to be the fault line between the Eurasian and American tectonic plates, the boiling mud of Seltún - stuff like that. Today we toured the Golden Circle route - the major tourist sites: the original Geysir and his livelier little brother Strokkur, Gullfoss waterfall, Þingvellir. I'm overwhelmed, and a little exhausted, too.

After all that, we went out for a pizza, so instead of any weightier cultural analysis, here are two of the pizzas available:

The Viking

Cheese, sauce, tabasco sauce, mushroom, pepperoni, fresh chili, pineapple, black pepper, cayenne pepper, fresh jalapeno.

Janis Joplin

Cheese, sauce, ham, banana, pineapple.

I have held forth elsewhere about the wrongness of ham and pineapple pizza; it never occurred to me to add that that goes double for bananas, Of course, we are in Hveragerði, where most of Iceland's banana crop is grown...

Even so, we had the 'Salmon Harbor' (prawns, mussels, smoked salmon).

Gail, who knows what I like, and also where I am going for my holidays, gave me a copy of William Morris's Icelandic Journals (on-line edition here), and I have been reading them in preparation for our trip. (Meanwhile, durham_rambler has been reading Arnaldur Indridason's crime novels, so between us we should manage a balanced view).

A small grumble: my book is the 1969 'Travellers' Classics' edition, with an introduction by James Morris (as then was) but with no commentary of any kind about the text itself. It's an attractive hardback, easy on the eye (comparing it to the on-line edition, I suspect it's a facsimile of the original publication, in Morris's Collected Works of 1911). It contains a full, day by day account of Morris's first trip to Iceland in 1871, and a scantier and incomplete account of his return in 1873. Throughout the first visit, Morris refers to writing his journal each day, but only at the very end of it does it emerge that although he made notes at the time, the finished version was not written up until 1873, when he had decided to return. The 1873 Journal is from the start less detailed, but at first it seems simply a reluctance to repeat, for example, the details of the outward journey. Next the entries themselves become less detailed, and place-names are abbreviated to their initials; I thought 'Ah, these are Morris's contemporaneous notes that he has not written up.' Then entries become more cryptic still, and I thought 'No, these are Morris's contemporaneous notes...' Finally, on August 19th, the entries stop, in mid-entry, with the words "Looking back we can see the last of Oxnadalr." What happened? No indication.

Then there's the question of the notes. The text is followed by notes by Eiríkr Magnússon, with whom Morris studied Icelandic, and who accompanied him on his first trip. These are mostly additional information, filling in the history of the places visited, and occasionally the names of the people they met there (most of the people they encounter are described by Morris as 'an acquaintance of Magnússon's' - he does seem to have been acquainted with half the population). But there are also footnotes throughout the text, some of them Morris's own additional details, some of them signed 'EM', and some signed 'Ed.' Who is Ed.? I wonder if this too is Magnússon, partly because the voice is similar, partly because of one particular note. On Sunday, August 27th, at Thingvellir, Morris describes himself wandering off alone, lying a long time on the hillside watching a rainbow. "So at last," he says, "I turned to go home, remembering that I had to cook the dinner..." This is footnoted: "He sat about the rocks and ate blueberries till he could find no more, and then remembered about the dinner. Ed."

This is a persona which Morris assumes comfortably: he is the nervous traveller, berating himself for 'milksoppishness' (and in the 1873 Journal surprised and delighted that he is no longer afraid of fording rivers, takes it in his stride), deciding that he has penetrated far enough in the exploration of a particularly tricky cave and will just sit where he is and smoke a pipe until the others return - he is, in short, the hobbit in a party of dwarves (I had spotted his hobbitishness for myself - it would be difficult to miss it - but the precise analogy I owe to Anne Amison). The likeness is emphasised by the glee with which he appoints himself expedition cook, and prides himself on producing edible meals from three plovers and a tin of carrots, armed only with a frying pan. On another occasion, a joint of mutton is cooked in a geysir...

Morris connives willingly at this depiction of himself as the spoiled pet of the party, the buffoon who keeps everyone entertained by constantly losing possessions (a single slipper, for example) which are then brought back to him over great distances by friendly Icelanders - for this is also a party of Victorian gentlemen, and they communicate in a schoolboyish form of banter. Yet in the notes Magnússon makes a point of recounting how one night, in the tent, Morris offered to tell the Saga of Biorn, which he did, says his tutor, "with remarkably few slips", adding "And the audience was still awake when he finished!" Morris is not some hapless bystander caught up in someone else's expedition; the purpose of the trip is to allow him to see for himself the settings of the sagas of which he had already published translations. At least once he is introduced as a 'skald'.

Reading his descriptions of the journey, it is easy to see the truth of this. The scenery, the weather, his mood; these elements combine to bring the landscape to life. Here's an almost random sample (July 29th 1871):

and there we are in the wilderness: a great plain of black and grey sand, grey rocks sticking up out of it; tufts of sea-pink, and bladder campion scattered about here and there, and a strange plant, a dwarf willow, that grows in these wastes only, a few sprays of long green leaves wreathing about as it were a tangle of bare roots, white and blanched like bones: that is the near detail of the waste, but further on, on all sides rise cliffs and mountains, whose local colour is dark grey or black (except now and then a red place burnt by old volcanic fires) and which show through the atmosphere of this cloudy and showery day various shades of inky purple.

It's like reading a fantasy novel - without the plot, admittedly, but with a sense of the journey, of strangeness and exploration, that would enrich many quest narratives. Despite the rain and the bad roads, the apprehensions about difficult or dangerous passes (worse in anticipation than reality), despite the frequent descriptions of the landscape as grim, terrible or awful, Morris's happiness shines through: he is clearly having a wonderful time, and his enjoyment is infectious.

Finally, a thought to give me courage tomorrow as I start packing in earnest: at least we don't have to take supplies for a two-month expedition, nor pack them into boxes which can withstand being carried over the mountains by packhorses (and here's what happens if you try!).

The Icelandic Phallological Museum.

No, really.

"The Icelandic Phallological Museum is probably the only museum in the world to contain a collection of phallic specimens belonging to all the various types of mammal found in a single country.

... The Icelandic Phallological Museum contains a collection of two hundred and four penises and penile parts belonging to almost all the land and sea mammals that can be found in Iceland."

Not to mention some mammals that probably can't be found: the catalogue starts with whales, dolphins, seals, and works its way via hamsters, sheep etc, to the folkloric section: kelpie, merman, troll ("Young boy, thoroughly petrified...").

You want to know if they have a human specimen? Go and check the catalogue (sorry, no direct link. Pick a language...)