First thing’s first: a note on Icelandic orthography
There are two Icelandic letters, Þ/þ (thorn) and Ð/ð (eth), that used to exist in English but disappeared from the language by the 15th century, having been replaced by the digraph “th.” However, Þ and Ð are so characteristic of Icelandic that I have retained them in the few instances they appear in this essay.
When I was seven, my father took me to the movies to see Journey to the Center of the Earth—a rather fanciful rendering of Jules Verne’s novel, starring James Mason and, of all people, Pat Boone. There was also an outsized, blond Adonis of an Icelander named Hans, who did the grunt work of getting the explorers down the gullet of a dormant Icelandic volcano. The story had good momentum, and the imaginative sets (Giant salt crystals! Subterranean waterfalls! Dinosaurs!) dazzled my little boy eyes. But it was something that caught my ear that altered my life’s trajectory. Hans didn’t speak English. When he uttered his first syllables, Dad told me it was a language called Icelandic, but to me, it was music. I clearly recall telling my father, with all the conviction I could muster, “Someday I’m going to learn Icelandic.”
He charitably patted my head.
In those days, there were virtually no English-language resources for learning Icelandic, until, in my late teens, I discovered a course by a company called Linguaphone. I immediately ordered it. Consisting of a thin, yellow, hard-bound text with line drawings from Iceland of the 1940s, and a series of 45 rpm records, it was, in a word, dated; but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. Lying in bed at night, neglecting my schoolwork, I repeated words and phrases to the extent that, when I woke up in the morning, they had migrated to the tip of my tongue. I started addressing my parents in Icelandic: Góðan daginn! (Hello!), Takk! (Thanks!), Bless! (Bye!). My indulgent parents put up with this until, at one Thanksgiving dinner, I inquired of my father, “Viltu gera svo vel að rétta mér sósukönnuna?” (Will you kindly pass the gravy boat?) That’s where my father drew the line, and he directed me to speak only English for the rest of the meal.
I finished the Linguaphone course but knew of no other materials for continuing my education in Icelandic (this was long before the internet and anything resembling AI). As a result, I soon forgot most of what I had learned. Only three phrases had managed to root themselves:
Það er mikið ólán að vera blindur (It’s a great pity to be blind).
En ilmurinn! Er hann ekki góður? (And the fragrance! Isn’t it nice?).
Það hlýtur að hafa verið hræðilegt slys (It must have been a terrible accident).
More years passed, but my interest in all things Icelandic didn’t slacken. During my grad school program in biology, I was continually side-tracked in the library by books about Iceland. In a fit of inspiration, I wrote a letter to the Embassy of Iceland, asking if there was some way I could spend a summer working on a farm there in exchange for room and board. They dutifully forwarded my query to the Ministry of Agriculture in Reykjavík. I was thrilled when, a short while later, I received a reply:
Greetings. Normally, farmers take on help from the Nordic countries. However, there is one farmer in the north of Iceland who would like to have an English speaker come, to teach his young boys the language. In return, he will help you to learn Icelandic. Here is his name and address if you wish to contact him.
The die had been cast, and I felt there was no turning back. I immediately wrote to the farmer, Eggert, while wondering what I would tell my thesis advisor about taking a summer off in the middle of my master’s research.
Two weeks later I received a short letter from Eggert, in perfect English, encouraging me to come:
Go to the central bus station in Reykjavík and tell the driver to let you off at Svínsstaðir (“Pig Place”). We will pick you up there. Bring boots. The worst thing is the wind. Welcome to Iceland!
My God. It was really happening. Telling my thesis advisor left him stunned. “I thought you were staying here at the university this summer,” he said, his expression one of disbelief.
All I could do was gesture helplessly—belying what was boiling within me. After assuring my professor that I would eventually make up for lost time, he punctuated his response with two words: “But why?”
“I just have to go,” I told him. And that was the truth—Iceland had become an itch that I had to scratch.
Twenty years had passed since I watched Pat Boone lose his way en route to the center of the earth. I bought my ticket and flew out over the North Atlantic while my thesis advisor remained behind, wringing his hands.
As the plane traced its route, thick gray clouds gathered below us. We skirted the dense, opaque carpet for the bulk of the trip. After some six hours, the plane began to descend through the mire, and then, like a curtain opened to display a work of art, Iceland was revealed. The coast looked forlorn, the North Atlantic whitecaps chopping at black volcanic sand. Inland, the scene was barren—rocky fields, sheens of the greenest grass, small white dots of grazing sheep. In the distance, naked mountains rose up, their profiles sharpened by the absence of trees. Truly, I thought, this is the edge of the world.
Looking back, I don’t know how I navigated Iceland without the internet or a smartphone. All I had was a small, folded paper map of the country. I rode the airport bus the forty-five miles to the capital, Reykjavík, past field after field of blocky, frozen lava—the hardscrabble remains of eruptions that had flowed out like icing, covering the land hundreds, thousands, millions of years ago. The day was dismal, with a low, gray, unbroken ceiling. At the bus station, I disembarked into a sort of atomized rain, which gave me the feeling of walking within a cloud. The station was a busy place, austere and unadorned, echoing with the occasional announcement in Icelandic. I spotted a driver standing outside the door of a bus and asked him, in my primitive, antediluvian Icelandic, if it was the bus to Pig Place. He scratched his head and asked, in English, “Which Pig Place? There are many Pig Places in Iceland.”
I pulled out my letter from Eggert and handed it to him. He immediately brightened. “Ah, I know Eggert. Yes, this is the bus you want. I’ll tell you where to get off.”
I had read that Iceland, with a scant 300,000 souls, was a place where everybody seemed to know everybody. I was happy that this had worked to my advantage.
It was still very early in the day. I bought a small, open-faced sandwich of salmon and egg at a kiosk. After sitting in the waiting area for a spell, I boarded the bus. A short while later, we were off.
As we turned north, I thought back on my leave-taking from friends back in Maine. Some looked at me as if I had lost my mind. One asked, “What if something happens to you?”
Of course, this is what I was counting on. I wanted something to happen to me, and I wanted it to happen to me in some meaningful way. I reflected on all the times I had asked people about their travels. Their answers invariably reflected what they had seen (Big Ben!), what they had done (a wine-tasting tour of Tuscany!), and the humorous situations they had found themselves in (confusing the words for “mustard” and “champagne” in German). However, I traveled not so much to collect impressions but to see what I could learn about myself. Did I endear people to me? Was I resourceful in tight situations? How adaptable was I to foreign attitudes, behaviors, language, and cuisine? And perhaps most importantly, was I open to being surprised, and would I take risks that would introduce me to experiences that might broaden my understanding of what makes the world tick?
As the bus continued to press north, I was captivated by the endless postcard of the Icelandic landscape—vast expanses of ancient fields of block lava, their brittle-looking darkness punctuated by the fleeces of grazing sheep; treeless basalt mountains sweeping up to the high heavens; the stark whiteness of a glacier in the distance; a swiftly flowing river, white with mica; a waterfall. Here and there, a small concrete house was planted in the middle of one of the lava fields, as if it had been dropped in by helicopter. In one such dwelling, to offset the desolation of its lunar surroundings, someone had thought to hang delicate lace curtains in the windows. The message: here within there is warmth, and light. We passed farm after farm, and the occasional small town. Fresh-faced Icelandic children waved to the bus. Now and then one of them rode alongside us on a stocky Icelandic horse, its mane blowing in the unceasing wind.
I was mindful that I was going to a place where nobody knew me, where nobody, except Eggert, spoke English, and where my duties were yet undefined. In a flight of morbid fantasy, I considered that if I were murdered here, no one would ever know. All the Icelanders would have to do was throw me into the nearest volcano and that would be the end of it.
The hours rolled by. The bus was full of Germans, all infinitely interested in the landscape, pointing at the passing scenes and chattering in their jagged, declamatory language. I recall reading that, in the run-up to the Second World War, Germany had held Icelanders up as the “perfect Aryan type” (perfekter arianischer Typus). As I looked out the window and noted the inhabitants of this exotic land, I could see why they would think this. The people, especially the young people, were strikingly beautiful. Something about the jawlines, the broad foreheads, and the abundance of sky-blue eyes. I chuckled when I recalled what W.H. Auden had written in Letters From Iceland (1937): he hadn’t seen an attractive face in the whole country. That was a time when Iceland was still a poor land. What a difference a half century of prosperity makes.
After five hours of gawking at the environment, I dozed off. The next thing I knew, the dutiful Germans were shaking me awake, shouting “Schweinplatz! Schweinplatz!” Pig Place. I had arrived.
I stumbled off the bus, gathered my backpack, and watched as the bus ground off down the dirt road, kicking up dust and pebbles. Then it was gone. I looked around to see only those upswept basalt mountains, a broad green meadow studded with sheep, and a rushing river. The wind, of course, seemed destined to be my constant companion. There wasn’t another soul in sight, or a human habitation. For all I knew, I was the last man on earth. It was then and there that I learned the first valuable nugget about myself—I was not prone to panic.
I noticed a hillock facing the river. That’s where I nestled with my backpack. Watching, and listening, and waiting. In short order I perceived a warmth welling up from the earth beneath me—perhaps Iceland’s greatest natural grace, responsible for its abundance of geothermal energy. Snuggling in, I knew that I was secure for the moment. Everything I needed was in my backpack: clothing, a little bit of food, a bottle of water, a first aid kit. And I was in a benign land where it was unlikely that I would be waylaid by strangers. An added blessing was that this was the period of round-the-clock daylight. So I would not have to anticipate being cast into a cold, windswept darkness.
Pulling my knees to my chest, I tried to close my eyes for a spell but was soon upended by the roar of an engine. I looked up and watched as an old Toyota Land Cruiser slowed to a stop. There was a young woman at the wheel, and a chubby, tow-headed boy riding shotgun. Both stared out at me. I got up and approached them. “Eggert Lárusson?” I inquired. The woman nodded. I got in. We headed down a dry, rocky dirt road that ran along the river. No one said a word. But I didn’t, for a moment, think that these two people had it in them to murder me and throw my body into a volcano.
We drove some thirty miles, arriving at long last at a small, rectangular, concrete one-story farmhouse, painted yellow. It was centered at the very navel of the Vatnsdalur river valley. The surrounding land was flat for a spell, and then rose, on both sides, onto grassy heaths. The first thing that struck me, upon alighting from the car, was the abject silence. No vehicle traffic, no human voices, no animal sounds. Only, at intervals, a soft susurration of wind sweeping over the grasses and the hayfield. And oh, the beauty of the sky, stark blue, with low, roving clouds hurrying off to who knew where.
I went inside, shedding my shoes by the front door, as I had read was the Icelandic custom. In the farmhouse, the practice struck me as incongruous, as the house itself was cluttered and redolent of the farm, littered with chaff, no doubt blown in by the wind, or shed from work clothes. As I entered, a lamb came bleating its escape, shooed out of the house by a squat, sweet-faced woman, who greeted me and gestured for me to sit down at the kitchen table. A moment later I was surrounded by the family (except for Eggert). The mother identified herself as Hjördís. She was joined by her daughter, Soffía, who had picked me up, along with her rotund little brother, ten-year-old Jónni. Completing the picture was sixteen-year-old Páll, a handsome teen with a mop of straight brown hair, and eleven-year-old Þröstur, blond and serious-faced. The family stared at me in silence until, a short while later, Páll got up, went into the kitchen, and returned with a charred sheep’s head on a platter, which he set down in front of me.
Mustering what seemed to be the entirety of his English vocabulary, he said, haltingly, “You—will—eat—this.”
My moment had come. Like a revelation, the Icelandic phrases I had retained from the Linguaphone course precipitated. Noting the charred eyes of the sheep’s head, I proclaimed, in Icelandic, “It’s a great pity to be blind.”
This set the family aflutter. They looked at one another and emitted a wash of Icelandic. But I wasn’t done. Drawing my face close to the sheep’s head, I sniffed it and, leaning back, said, “And the fragrance! Isn’t it nice?”
Again, the family fell into animated conversation. And I still had one arrow in my linguistic quiver. Tsking and shaking my head, I announced, “It must have been a terrible accident.”
Hjördís, astonished, brought a hand to her mouth. Just then, the door flew open, and a big, strapping man with short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a stubbled face, and a wool sweater spattered with fish scales, entered and dropped a stringer of freshly caught trout onto the table. Throwing out his hand, he proclaimed, in accented English, “Welcome to Iceland!”
I took his hand and, welling with gratitude, thanked him for his hospitality. It didn’t take long to realize that his few words of welcome represented the extent of his English. I would later learn that the letter he had sent had been written by an acquaintance in Reykjavík. True, nobody in the family spoke more than a few words of English, but wasn’t this what I had come for? Wasn’t this the language crucible I was seeking? I was in the privileged position of living and working in an immersion situation where, I knew, the opportunity to marinate in Icelandic would eventually bear fruit.
Surprisingly, I didn’t feel off-balance contemplating a lifestyle alien to me. I had grown up in the rough-and-tumble streets of urban New Jersey, and now I was sitting here, on a farm, at the ends of the earth, in a place where, during my stay, there would be no nightfall. As I sat with the sheep’s head, I smiled in a silly fashion while the family continued to regard me blankly and wordlessly. I was again reminded of Auden’s Letters From Iceland, where he referred to “the Arctic stare.”
I was eventually shown to a small room, which Páll had sacrificed in exchange for the sofa. I would have protested if I had had the vocabulary to do it diplomatically. But the path of least resistance was to go into the room and unpack my things. As I did so, the two younger boys, Þröstur and Jónni, wandered in and, standing stock still, yes, stared at me. I had been traveling for a long time, and exhaustion was catching up with me. I lay down on Páll’s bed, hoping this would provide a cue that I was seeking a little repose. But the two boys simply drew closer and hovered over me, like mourners at a wake. Too tired to protest, I closed my eyes and sleep fell like a curtain.
When I awoke, I didn’t know what time it was. Noon? Six in the evening? Midnight? The sun simply continued to hang in the sky. I soon learned that it was seven P.M. I got up, wandered into the kitchen area, and watched as the family went about its business. Every so often someone directed a word or two at me. I nodded dumbly. They then continued about their work. So I assumed that what they had to say to me didn’t have to do with my survival.
My first supper with an Icelandic family was an acid test of sorts. My take was that everything they ate came from the farm. The charred sheep’s head had vanished, but its replacement had me pining for it. I watched as Hjördís brought a platter of what looked like dumplings to the table. But they weren’t dumplings. They were pods of liver and lamb’s blood boiled in sheep skin, which was sewn up with some kind of twine. Liver was the one food that made me gag. I Iooked on as the family dug in. The procedure seemed to be rather surgical—slicing open the belly of the pouch and excavating the brown, crumbly mass within. But there was an added gloss—the family avidly sprinkled sugar on the liver, which brought my hand to my forehead. Þröstur tried to encourage me to follow suit, but this is where I drew a line. I ate the liver, in a painstaking fashion, but only enough to suggest to the family that I wasn’t passing judgment on the meal. I sated myself with the tiny potatoes that complimented the main dish. The last item of mention was a pitcher of milk. I poured myself a glass, but when I went to drink it, I was put off by its warmth. A few moments later I learned why when a cow stuck her head into the open kitchen window, looking on approvingly as I swallowed the fruit of her udder.
I was taken by the speed with which I was integrated into the family’s life. No one made a fuss over me, they didn’t seem to have the least curiosity about me (except for the incessant staring of the two younger boys), and I had freedom of movement about the house. There were some minor gestures of instruction, such as when Eggert escorted me to the sink and showed me how to clean my plate, glass and utensils in the absolutely scalding water that reeked of sulfur. But otherwise, I seemed to be expected to simply step into the stream and go with the flow. And so I did. This alleviated any anxiety I might have harbored about fitting in or doing the right thing. Apparently, there was no wrong thing.
The hours rolled by. Eggert went about his various labors, Hjördís puttered in the kitchen, Soffía disappeared somewhere on the farmstead, Páll went out to corral the dogs, Þröstur and Jónni alternated between irritating each other and staring at me. Finally, Þröstur signaled for me to follow him and his brother. We went out into the sunlit evening, and they took me on a long hike over a grassy field studded with tiny wildflowers that nestled in the hummocks. The field ended where a rocky, crumbly basalt rise took us up onto a heath from which we could look back and see the small farmhouse and the river beyond. Pressing onward, we came to a diaphanous waterfall which fell thirty or forty feet like maiden’s hair from a high outcropping of yet more blocklike basalt. I was struck by the stark, unforgiving beauty of it all, a playground to indulge the wanderings of the imagination. I immediately thought of the title of a 1930s-era book by Rachel Field: All This, and Heaven Too.
The boys must have thought me odd as I stood at the edge of the bluff, looking down on their home and the river beyond—a silver ribbon glinting in the evening sun. I had done some reading before my arrival to acquaint myself with the history of the area. The thirteenth-century Vatnsdal Saga tells the story of the sons of Ingimundur the Old, the first settler in this valley, who had come from Norway as the result of a prophecy. He eventually got into a dispute with his neighbor Hrollaugur regarding salmon fishing rights in the river. Apparently Ingimundur sought a peaceful settlement of the dispute, but Hrollaugur reacted violently and slew him.
I looked at Þröstur and Jónni, two descendants of ancient settlers in this far-flung, hard-bitten land. Iceland had never been invaded, had never gone to war, and had never experienced mass immigration. It was a homogeneous culture with one language, one ethnic group, and a state religion (Lutheranism). The boys were inheritors of this legacy. A thousand years ago their forebears were roaming this landscape. If resurrected today, they would immediately recognize it as home. I wondered how aware Þröstur and Jónni were of this, or to what extent they took this cultural and environmental largess for granted.
Later in the evening, Hjördis put coffee and cake on the table. I sat in relative silence with the family and ventured a few hard-won words in Icelandic. No one showed the slightest impatience or frustration with me. Now and then Eggert would crack a slow, glacial Icelandic smile at something I said. Páll, who had the lion’s share of English vocabulary, meager as it was, seemed the most intent on trying to communicate. When he reached the limit of what he was able to say in English, he’d cry out, “Orðabók!” (Dictionary!), and madly page through it to find what he was looking for.
And so I ambled my way through my first day with my new Icelandic family. Before coming to Iceland, I had wondered how I would sleep, or know when to sleep, without the cue of a sunset. I soon had my answer. When night arrived, the sky dimmed a bit as the sun skirted the horizon, prompting the sheep and dogs to quiet, cease their roaming, and lie down in the fields. Birds disappeared from the sky. The land itself seemed to draw a finger to its figurative mouth, as if saying, “Hush now.” My job was to acknowledge the arrival of the quiet hours. Toward midnight I slunk off to bed, lowered the black-out window shade, and slipped into a deep sleep.
If it is conventional wisdom that farmers get up at the crack of dawn, or earlier, then Eggert and family were having none of it, perhaps because, this time of year, there was no dawn to crack. I was the first one up. Around 8:30, Eggert arose, greeted me, and then showed me how to fetch breakfast from the fridge and cupboard. þröstur and Jónni followed, barefoot and in their underwear, and finally Hjördís, Soffía and Páll. Eggert introduced me to súrmjólk, a kind of fermented sour milk, which one glopped onto cornflakes or muesli. I was skeptical, but it beat the pants off liver and lamb’s blood. This is when I started to take serious note of the eating habits of Jónni. He hoovered everything he could lay his hands on, to the extent that his mother eventually had to move things out of his reach. This only aggravated the overweight lad, who managed to simultaneously belch and fart while raising his shirt front and slapping his belly. He looked at me, in a bid, I thought, to seek my approval, or perhaps shock me. I thought it politic to smile passively while looking away, not knowing what he might be capable of if I were to get on his bad side. He had the look of the demon in his narrow eyes.
I think I can summarize my first week with Eggert and family by saying that I didn’t do much of anything. I certainly didn’t work. Nor did I see anyone else doing what I had assumed would be backbreaking labor to keep the farm humming. Eggert fiddled with a tractor, Hjördís bustled about the house, but I couldn’t account for the activities of the children. The result was that I spent a great deal of time wandering the heath, climbing cliff faces, combing the banks of the river and writing in my journal. Sometimes Þröstur and Jónni would accompany me, plucking leaves and flowers from tiny tundra plants and telling me to taste them. I did so only after they did. Once back at the house, I tried to engage the two boys by constructing small, fun games in English for them. One such game involved drawing simple pictures on index cards, with the corresponding word on the reverse side. Spreading the pictures out on the floor, I placed a candy on each of them. Whoever could give the English name for the picture would win the candy. This worked well for a while, until jealousies (mostly on Jónni’s part) arose and the boys began slugging it out. I left the scene when they laid manic siege to the remaining candy.
That first week of repose suddenly ended when the farm sprang to life. I was called into an expansive field with the entire family. Apparently, they had been waiting for the cut hay to dry. It lay everywhere, as if it had fallen from heaven. Þröstur manned (boyed?) the tractor that pulled the bailer. As it spit out the bales, Eggert, gesturing, showed me how to chase them down, fling them onto the hay sled—which Soffía pulled with another tractor—and snug them in. I was soon running with the best of them, although it was a challenge to keep up with Hjördís, who was slinging bales with ceaseless energy and finesse. The day had begun chill and overcast, but my exertions soon had me shedding my sweater and long-sleeve shirt. The bales grew heavier with the passing hours. Shortly after noon we took a break for lunch—more sheep’s liver and blood—and then hit the fields again. Four o’clock coffee break. Back to the fields until seven or so. My God, this was only my first day of work, and I was sapped. After supper—fresh trout, potatoes, and tomatoes—I stripped down to shower. My clothes were full of hay, as was my hair, my nostrils, my ears. It was the hardest, dirtiest work I had ever done. And the summer still lay ahead of me.
And then—balance. In the still-early evening, Jónni ran to my room, waving his arms and whooping, “Steini og Olli!” which meant nothing to me. He grabbed my hand and towed me into the living room, where Eggert, Hjördis, and the three other children were already seated, in an arc of hard wooden chairs, all facing the television, their faces written with avid eagerness. Now I know what all Jónni’s fuss was about. Steini and Olli was how the Icelanders referred to Laurel and Hardy (Stan and Ollie). This was just my cup of tea, and a lovely familial coda to a day of hard work. As the duo’s antics began, Þröstur came over and unselfconsciously sat himself on my lap. All of us laughed and laughed at the physical humor of the duo.
At the time of my visit, there was only one television station in Iceland. Thursday was a TV holiday—no programming. The reason: to encourage people to spend time with each other, and visit each other’s homes, without the electronic intermedium of television. What a lovely idea. I concede this while acknowledging that an attempt at such a policy in the United States would mean civil war.
And so, we sat and watched Stan and Ollie, chasing each other, getting bopped on the head, riotously piloting a biplane. Beyond the good spirits and the laughter, I was warmed by the simplicity and intimacy of our Norman Rockwell-esque scene. I was now being treated not as a guest but as a member of the family.
Of all these individuals, Eggert was the most interesting and packed the most surprises. His rustic side was mightily apparent. He dressed in frequently tattered and farm-stained clothing, shaved only on occasion, and, in the fields, when the urge came upon him, he unzipped and pissed into the hay, not even bothering to turn his back. In short, he was a farmer through and through, unselfconscious, hard-working, capable. One day I accompanied him down to the river so he could check his net for salmon. As he navigated the rocky bank, he fell into the frigid water. My jumping into the glacial flow to save him wasn’t the best idea, because then there would be two drownings. As I frantically ran back and forth on the bank, Eggert threw me a reassuring wave from the water as he pulled himself to shore along the net. My God, he was smiling! I helped him up the bank and both of us plopped back into the grass. I laughed only after I saw that he was laughing.
Not all interactions with Eggert were so dramatic. We spent many sedate, companionable hours together where no one’s life was at stake. For example, one day he took me up onto the heath in an old Land Rover to count his sheep. We drove along the rocky hardpan ground in silence. (I had learned that small talk wasn’t a thing in Iceland.) But every so often, another vehicle would approach from the opposite direction. Once the drivers drew alongside one another, they turned off their engines, and Eggert leaned out the window and said “Jæja,” (Well…) as preamble to what might amount to a fifteen-minute conversation, while I kicked back, looked out over the heath, or closed my eyes for a bit. I recognized Eggert’s behavior—talking to anyone who came along—as reflective of the medieval Icelandic sagas, where ancient Icelanders out on horseback would encounter one another in the desolation and ask what the news was. And so the tradition continued.
On that same day of sheep counting, we came upon a dead ewe, on its back, bloated, with its peg-like legs pointing to the sky. Eggert took a pointed, hollow steel rod from the Land Rover and gestured for me to follow him. We approached the dead animal, and I watched as Eggert speared its belly, which resulted in a rush of gas through the rod. Eggert deftly pulled a lighter from his pocket and ignited the gas. He stood there holding the torch, leaving me astonished at the sight. My honest amazement seemed to please him, but in an understated, self-effacing, Icelandic way.
Yes, Eggert was all farmer. And yet…and yet…that evening he sat down at the kitchen table, took out a notebook, and began to write. He looked up at me and said, “Dagbók” (Diary). I sat down opposite him and noticed what looked to be a lyric on the opposing page. Noting my curiosity, Eggert turned the book around and pushed it toward me. He allowed me to copy it.
ORT TIL KONU
Óðum dvínar ást til mín
ert á vegi hálum
Bættu seinna brotin þín,
bara í karlamálum
WORDS TO A WOMAN
Odes, my love for you fades
You are on a slippery path
Make amends for your transgressions later,
Only in matters of men
I didn’t understand the Icelandic at the time, but I do now, and every time I read it, I am moved. Not just by the beauty of the poem, but by the memory of Eggert’s willingness to share it with me.
Eggert’s earthy exterior, his blow-the-snot-out-your-nose-and-onto-the-ground take on life, his scratch-your-belly-and-belch-proudly gratitude for a satisfying meal, and his indulgent treatment of his children endeared me to the man in an admittedly oblique way, since his habits were so foreign to mine. Again, what it told me was that I could do no wrong in his home and should simply relax and savor the moments—the occasional respite from the steady wind; the break in the cloud cover confirming that there was, indeed, a sun; the appearance on the table of fresh trout, which, only hours before, had been swimming happily in a nearby lake; and Þröstur’s trusting gesture when he mounted my lap for an evening of Steini and Olli.
There were also moments that weren’t so wondrous. On my first Friday with the family, I was awakened from sleep by riotous screaming and pounding. If this had been Ireland, I would have sworn a banshee had entered the house. I leapt out of bed and there, in the kitchen, were Eggert and Hjördís sitting opposite one another at the table, drunk out of their minds on the Icelandic national liquor, Brennivín (Black Death). Their faces were blotched and bloated, and they were exclaiming to the high Nordic heavens, demonic alter egos of their reserved daytime selves. I hovered for a few moments as they poured, pounded, and caterwauled. Then I quietly turned, went back to bed, and curled the pillow around my ears. In the morning, Eggert arose late. When he saw me, he smiled in silly embarrassment and, with a finger, made circling motions alongside his head as he rolled his eyes.
Þröstur was the one child who seemed to want to be close to me. He did his share of staring, but he would also speak to me in elementary Icelandic accompanied by corresponding gestures. One day he asked me for help. He had gone off on horseback to tend to the sheep and had gotten caught in a downpour. When he got home, Eggert and Hjördís were in a nearby town for supplies. Þröstur came to my room and asked me to help him out of his rain-soaked undershirt, which was clinging tightly to his washboard body. I managed to peel the thing over his head and noticed a long, pink scar across his belly. He left the room, and it wouldn’t be long before I learned the reason for it.
One day we had a visit from Gylfi, a psychologist from Kópavogur, a suburb of Reykjavík. Gylfi was urbane, friendly, sophisticated in his tastes, and he spoke excellent English. He immediately engaged me, and we went for a walk along the river. “Don’t fall in,” I teased. Gylfi raised his eyes. “Oh, did Eggert fall in again?” We both smiled. Noting the gulf in status and education between him and Eggert, I was tempted to ask how the two had formed a bond of friendship. But I didn’t have to. Gylfi talked about Eggert in glowing terms, citing his generosity, his quirky ways, his love of family, his robust embrace of life, his willingness to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. This was Icelandic egalitarianism at its best. Iceland was the most classless society I had yet experienced. A land of psychologists and volcanologists, yes, but also a land of unsinkable farmers who wrote poetry. And they all seemed to get along. In this tectonically active island nation, they were all truly in it together.
That evening, Gylfi stayed for supper. I watched as Hjördís brought in a magnificent bird on a serving platter. When Eggert carved into it, I noted the darkness of the meat, almost black. I turned to Gylfi. “Swan,” he said, licking his chops in anticipation. I mentioned that it was against the law to hunt swans in the United States. “It’s not legal here either,” said Gylfi, who went on to explain that Eggert didn’t like to do things the legal way. “He believes it takes the fun out of it.”
This attitude toward laws and regulations extended to the Vatnsdalur River that ran through Eggert’s property. As Gylfi explained it, in capitalist America the rivers belong to everybody; but in semi-socialist Iceland, the farmers own the portions of the rivers that traverse their land. The state pays these farmers a lease fee and in turn regulates fishing licenses for foreign tourists, who paid upwards of $200 per day for the privilege. So Eggert profited from his ownership of a section of the Vatnsdalur River. But there was a flip side: he was limited in how many fish he could take for his own consumption, using only nets. After telling me this, Gylfi smiled and remarked, with a twinkle in his eye, “But that doesn’t stop Eggert. He knows exactly how to bend a pin to create something that’s not technically a hook…”
(The swan was delicious.)
I added Gylfi to my pantheon of Icelandic friends and was saddened to see him leave, although he was good enough to extend an open invitation to visit him and his family. Before he left, he answered a question for me. I made a remark about þröstur’s scar. Gylfi nodded and told me, in a matter-of-fact, non-judgmental manner, “A couple of years ago, while haying, Þröstur fell under the hay sled. Eggert was driving. They removed Þröstur’s spleen, and now he’s on medication for life. Eggert has never forgiven himself.”
That night, when Eggert sat down to write in his dagbók, I looked at him in silence, and I wondered at the things he harbored but would never be able to tell me. And it had nothing to do with language. Asking Eggert to share any kind of personal pain was akin to asking a glacier to spit fire.
My rhythm on Eggert’s farm was now well established: get up at a civilized hour, eat súrmjólk and cornflakes, do the haying, eat lunch, four o’clock coffee break, do more haying, have supper, maybe some more haying, shower out the hay, and look forward to a quiet evening wandering the landscape, reading, watching the meager offerings on television, teaching Þröstur and Jónni a bit of English, and scribbling in my journal. There was also the occasional ancillary chore: replacing floorboards in the barn, weeding the potato garden, painting a post. In short, there was always something that needed doing, and thus little excuse for boredom.
One evening, the skies opened in earnest and the rain drummed the earth. After supper—horse meat and potatoes—Eggert and I sat down to write in our respective notebooks; Þröstur and Jónni were on the floor playing a card game; Hjördís was sitting in an easy chair, sewing; Páll was buried in a paperback; Soffía was folding laundry; and in the background, on the radio, the reassuring strains of Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze. The only thing missing was an angel with a harp hovering over the scene.
The week expired but opened a door to something new. On Saturday, Eggert bid me accompany him and the three boys to a barn set well away from the house. I hadn’t yet seen the horses, except for the pony Þröstur sometimes rode off on to tend the sheep. We went inside and I counted six animals—all stocky, with full bodies, short legs and flowing manes. Eggert asked if I knew how to ride. I felt that, as a citizen of a country with a legendary frontier legacy, I needed to preserve face, so I threw him a jaunty, self-possessed assent, as if to say, Ride? What a silly question. Of course I can ride. I’m an American!
Eggert selected a stallion from one of the stalls. It was coal black with red eyes and jogged nervously in place, snorting steam. My anticipation, and my confidence, started to wane as Eggert led the animal outside. I mounted it, with Páll giving my ass a generous boost with his shoulder. Even though Icelandic horses are squat, one doesn’t realize how high off the ground one is until one is sitting in the saddle looking down. I took the reins and got my toes into the stirrups. But how did one say “Giddyap” in Icelandic? I looked down at Þröstur, who commanded, “Sparka!” as he pointed to my foot. I kicked the animal’s haunches—and we were off like a shot. In a panic, I dropped the reins and wrapped my arms around the horse’s neck. We galloped across a field and headed straight for a tall retaining wall. This was it, then. Death in Iceland. But just short of the wall, the stallion stopped, its chest heaving. Eggert and the boys came running up to me. “Cowboy!” whooped Páll. But I was shaken and weak-kneed. As I dismounted, I had the presence of mind to ask Eggert the horse’s name. His response: “Djöfull” (Devil).
Nothing else in the ensuing weeks put my life, or my dignity, at risk. In some odd way, despite the language difficulties, I fit in. And I fit in because I had been accepted without hesitation or reservation. I smiled when I considered the possibility of those friends and acquaintances having been right about walking into a trap. What if I had been lured to a remote corner of this foreign place only to be set upon, stripped of my possessions, and murdered? When one thinks of it, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. Instead, I learned that most people are good, most people are helpful, most people are curious, and they are widely distributed in the world. Eggert and family were certainly no exception.
On one of my last evenings on Eggert’s farm, I left the house for a solitary walk. Þröstur caught up with me and indicated that he wanted to come along. But I discouraged him. I needed to extend myself, alone, within the limits of this world I had stumbled into, to see what I really felt.
I walked across a small bridge, crossed a barren field, and ascended a steep, rocky rise onto a prominence. As I stood there, I slowly turned and took in the panorama of endless nothingness. I could see only one other farmhouse, which had belonged to Eggert’s father, a legendary farmer in that part of the country. I looked down at Eggert’s home and recalled something Gylfi had told me during one of our conversations: when winter came on, Hjördís moved to a nearby town to work as a nurse. The children went to their respective boarding schools. This left only Eggert—snowbound and alone, in winter darkness, the flip side of summer’s eternal sun. I pictured him sitting at the kitchen table, writing in his dagbók, while the wind howled and the snow accumulated, waiting patiently for the return of warmth and light. Especially light. And, of course, his loving family.
I had no choice but to ask myself, Could I do it? Could I live here? What about a year? Could I live here for a year? I didn’t have an answer. But for now, I smiled, and I allowed myself to be embraced by a landscape, a culture, and a family that had taken me to their hearts in their understated, taciturn, Icelandic way, where, again, small talk was unnecessary. And when small talk was removed from the equation, what was left was meaningful talk, and gestures of affirmation and welcome. These continued to be my thoughts as I flew out over the cold Atlantic for home.
