In Iceland

I am currently in Reykjavik for the Iceland Noir festival. I arrived in the middle of a “seismic swarm” of hundreds or thousands of earthquakes, portending a volcanic eruption. A town on the southwest coast, Grindavík, may soon have a magma trench underneath it and was therefore evacuated. As I rode the airport bus to town through the morning darkness—the sun not rising until nearly ten—I kept expecting to see scenes reminiscent of the climax of The Northman, where Amleth confronts his uncle on a field of lava. But I only saw the creation of a local wit, who had arranged red fairy lights going down a hill, made to look like a fiery flow.

Still, it felt like an expectant darkness. A darkness with potential, where the landscape lent itself to the epic. And there was just so much of it, at such a late hour. I could easily imagine early inhabitants of the place starting fires in the hollows of the hills, hiding from the punishing northern wind and sitting in a circle, telling stories. I could see them explaining the spectacular phenomena around them as giants leaving footstep craters behind them, or dragons rising from the earth.

I have attended a few festival panels now on the landscape and its inspirations for more modern literature. The Westfjords, in particular, are apparently a wild and enchanting muse. However what has come through for me most is the love of the Icelandic language, filtered as it is through these conversations conducted in English. Icelandic, at least in its written form, is almost unchanged from its medieval origins. So people sitting around telling stories these days would have much the same material to work with as their forebears. In more recent centuries, I’m told it has been a custom in the most rural parts of the islands to sit together and read aloud over your evening’s knitting or whittling—in circles lit by paraffin lamps.

It is a struggle to keep the language alive when it is only spoken by the three hundred thousand some inhabitants of the country, and when that country is awash in American and British cultural products. The television here is dominated by British channels, and even on the state stations it is hard to come across Icelandic, except in the subtitles. I was so happy yesterday when I got to attend a screening of Kuldi, and got to bathe in Icelandic for ninety full minutes.

I got the sense that Iceland punches above its weight in a cultural sense, partly because their is such a strong love of—and anxiety about—the language. The writers and actors here have to keep up with the competition, so Icelandic carries its own on the airwaves. It helps that the land and the language both are dramatic in themselves.