I traveled to Iceland last year, read a bunch of stuff, and found a few books while I was there. Top of that stack was Smile of the Wolf, by Tim Leach.
Kjaran, a wandering skald (a bard), and Gunnar, a retired Viking raider who has made his home in Iceland, encounter a “ghost”, with fatal consequences. The outcome of that start a feud that drives the entire novel. The early part of the book is so transporting. I’m there, in Iceland, in the 10th century. So well done. Here’s the first paragraph:
In the distant lands where men worship the White Christ, I have heard that a ghost is not such a dangerous thing. They are creatures of no substance, who may wail and howl but cannot hurt a man. But in my country, the people are warriors even in death. Our ghosts are not shadow and air, but walk- ing flesh. They wield their weapons with as much strength as they did in life, and more bravely, for they have nothing left to fear. And so, when we heard that Hrapp Osmundsson had crawled from his grave and begun to wander his lands at night, no man in the Salmon River Valley would leave his house after dark without a good blade at his side and a shield on his arm.
The early parts of Smile of the Wolf capture the grim beauty that is both the Icelandic terrain and the pagan northern world view. It mirrors the classic Icelandic sagas in many ways, but where the saga characters are usually pretty opaque, we get inside the heads of the characters and get a detail and color the sagas don’t provide, yet the cadence and speaking voices can be suitably terse or blunt.
The narrative and the prose really work for me. The initial scenes with the “ghost”, and events that follow, are magic. The gradual progression of the resulting feud, leading up to the critical inflection point in the novel, has the same fatalistic unfolding of the sagas.
Eventually, one of the characters is Outlawed, which in medieval Iceland meant any man could kill you – so outlaws either left Iceland, or lived in desolate areas no one came to. I loved the Outlaw sequence. Many of the sagas feature people being outlawed, but none that I have read really explore what that means to the individual beyond being constantly on one’s guard to avoid being killed. I thought Leach added a lot of color, with the cave, the farming, the thieving, the cold, the rough medicine (for example, having your fingers amputated).
Many of the sagas (and Smile of the Wolf) feel like American Westerns to me. And of course what’s more Old West than Outlaws? But it feels an interesting difference to me. The American Outlaws feel as though they have chosen their life, and being an Outlaw means one places oneself outside the law. It feels an active, individual choice in a way – I Choose to disobey the law. In the sagas, being an Outlaw is in a way not about choosing to disobey laws, it is that society places you outside the law, the laws do not protect you. You are outside the law, and can be killed. But society is doing it to you, rather than you doing it to society (a fewrelated articles on being an Outlaw in Iceland, if your interests run that way.)
I also found very interesting the treatment of Christianity in the latter half of the book, and the inner life that might lead a pagan who follows the old gods to convert. Again, many books have explored the intersection of the Viking world with Christianity, but usually Christians are portrayed as pious, meek, and not necessarily fierce in battle, and the conversion process has always felt like it was just words, for convenience or under duress. The priest Thorvaldur who joins their Outlaw band is just a fierce a Viking as anyone. And the Christian God of SotW is not the God of love and mercy, that God is the God of Revenge, and feels like a bit like just another god. (also interesting: the Christian God and the White Christ seem pretty conflated in Kjaran’s head….). The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell (or the TV show), and the relationship between Uhtred and Alfred is an interesting comparison.
I'm still grappling with the ending.
Kjaran’s unwillingness to kill the child Sumardil rings true to me. But the final Holmgang, I’m not sure…the mythic/heroic symmetry of it appeals. But would that character really have done that? Not sure… The phrase from the book, “easier to kill a man than to bury him”, comes to mind – it seems many novelists feel a need to kill their main character, rather than let them live their life out and explore what that might mean. (I’m thinking also of my reading of James Salter’s wonderful The Hunters, for example).
I read SotW with a friend on my social reading app, Bookship. They found parts of the book less convincing than I, and wished that some of the characters had been more explored – which I can’t argue with – they are fascinating people, some more explored than others. But in the large, I found the book transporting, and perhaps the best modern capture of the spirit and worldview that is the Icelandic sagas.
Pretty much since high school, I’ve had what W. H. Auden called “The Northern Thing”, a fascination with Vikings, Scandinavia, and their conflicting views on Fate (everything is predetermined) and Free Will (you must fight to death, and never give up, even as your fate is predetermined) (and do see Auden’s translation of the Elder Edda mentioned below!).
I’m not sure precisely where it started, but it was somewhere at the intersection of Tolkien, Dungeons & Dragons, and the teenage male fascination with death and destruction. That led to a college flirtation with becoming a medieval studies major (I read Old Norse and Old English for a brief time), before succumbing eventually (and probably for the better) to Mathematics and Computer Graphics.
This year I had a chance to travel to Iceland, the land of Fire and Ice, and the home of the medieval sagas I loved even as a teenager (ok I was kinda “not like the other kids”). Iceland also happens to be the home of Jolabokaflod, the “Yule Book Flood”, the tradition of giving books as gifts for Christmas. My kind of holiday (read about my trip here).
In preparation for my trip, I wanted to re-read some of my old favorites, as well as a new books that would give me context and re-kindle my interests in all things Norse. Myths, Sagas and some recent fiction, here’s what I read, plus a few promising books I found while I was there.
The Myths.
Snorri Sturluson is largely responsible for much of what we today think of as Norse mythology. Blond Valkyries carrying the fallen in battle to Valhalla, the one-eyed Odin and Thor’s Hammer. Sturluson wrote three of the northern world’s medieval masterpieces, the Prose (younger) Edda, the Heimskringla (the history of the Kings of Norway), and Egill’s Saga (one of the classic Icelandic sagas). (btw Egill was quite the asshole, see this hilarious recap on the Grapevine, a great Icelandic website). The Prose Edda is not to be confused with the Elder Edda, which, for maximal confusion, was NOT written by Sturluson. The Prose Edda, originally written as a treatise on poetry-writing (and to gain favor with a young King Hakon of Norway), is one of the main sources for much of what we know of Viking mythology, containing tales of Odin, Thor, Loki, and other gods.
Now, Sturluson, in addition to being a writer, was, as we might say today, an “operator”. Cunning, powerful, legalistic, and always looking out for himself. As you can imagine he did not come to a good end. All of this and more is captured in Nancy Marie Brown’s masterful Song of the Vikings, which tells Snorri’s tale alongside the Norse tales he captured (or created, your call).
We think of Norse mythology as ancient and anonymous. But in fact, most of the stories we know about Odin, Thor, Loki, and the other gods of Scandinavia were written by the 13th-century Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson. Notice I said “written” and not “written down.”
The Elder Edda (not written by Snorri) contains a collection of mythical writings from old Norse mythology. My favorite is the Havamal, (“the sayings of the High One”), purported to be the pithy sayings of Odin. This is the home of cheery thoughts such as
“Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”
(In case you are wondering about that “burnt” bit, legend has it that the Vikings chieftains sometimes had their wives burned/buried/cremated along with them).
The Sagas
The sagas are the treasure of Icelandic literature. Written in the middle ages, most of the anonymously, they vary from mythological adventure stories to quasi-historical extended family sagas, and are sometimes referred to as the first prose (non-poetic) novels. Here’s a few of my favorites I (re-)read:
Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. A retelling/reconstruction by Poul Anderson. This is a classic grim Viking tale, “brothers to the death”, “defiance in the face of fate”, “blood & treasure” mythological saga. A bit hard to find these days, but look a bit online for a used copy. (And if you love this, go for Anderson’s The Broken Sword right afterwards).
Njal’s Saga is essentially Iceland’s Iliad. It tells the story of a spiraling series of conflicts that result in fifty year blood feud between Njal and various of his enemies. Like the Iliad, Njal’s saga can be quite gory (including Njal’s family being burnt alive in their house), and is something of a meditation on vengeance and its effects. It also offers insight into medieval Iceland’s byzantine legal system (one of the world’s first), and the workings of the Althing, the world’s first parliament, which occurred annually at Thingvellir, which we visited.
Grettir’s Saga. One of the last of the great Icelandic sagas. Grettir’s Saga is a mix of the historical (Grettir’s father escapes from Harald Fairhair, the King of Denmark), to the mythological/fantastic: Grettir’s doom is set when he fights the draugr (an undead zombie) Glam, who, as Grettir is killing him, curses Grettir to become unlucky and weak, which leads to his eventually becoming an outlaw, and to his death. Grettir’s saga has striking parallels with Beowulf, with Glam standing in for Grendel. Good fun, if you like that sort of thing.
Sometimes reading the old stuff can be a bit of a grind. So I mixed in some modern stuff, some of it with an historical/saga angle, some not.
One of Iceland’s more famous authors is Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I read her Last Rituals, wherein a young German student with a dark interest in the Icelandic sagas and magic is found murdered, with strange symbols carved into him. A procedural murder mystery, I enjoyed it but found myself wanting a bit more depth in characters and in Icelandic backstory. Still I was reading in translation so some of that may be the translation. In this vein, but more enjoyable for me, was:
Where the Shadows Lie by Michael Ridpath. Boston, Iceland, Tolkien…pretty much hits all my highlights. A fun Icelandic romp. A Boston detective with Icelandic heritage heads to Iceland and ends up investigating a murder involving J.R.R. Tolkien and a lost Icelandic saga. My kind of book…
Also in a similar vein, although I did not get to it (yet!) is The Flatey Enigma by Arnar Ingolfsson.
Lastly I read some modern Icelandic fiction, without the saga backdrop. Sjón might be Iceland’s most famous writer, both for his works and for his collaborations with Björk. The Blue Fox is poetical fairy tale about a Reverend hunting a blue fox, intermixed in a tantalizing way with the story of an abandoned child, apparently with Down’s Syndrome. Lyrical, bleak and mysterious, it’s also a quick read.
Likely Iceland’s most commercially successful novelist is Arnaldur Indriðason, author of the Inspector Erlendur series, the first of which is Jar City. I re-read Silence of the Grave, the 2nd in the series – a brutal, yet fascinating mystery. It explores domestic violence, the tension between countryside and city Icelanders, between Icelanders and the British & Americans, and drugs and the dark side of Reykjavik. Of particular interest to me was the exploration of the post-WWII presence of the Americans and the tensions and grievances it created. (As an aside, and not meant as any insult, but Iceland is perhaps the most “Americanized” of the European countries I have been to, and I got a sense for how that might have happened from this book).
Books I found
Books are a big part of Icelandic culture (they are one of the most literate countries). And they have some great bookstores….and yet… books are $%!@ expensive in Iceland. A small paperback usually runs about $26! So, haunting a few bookstores, I found some really interesting books….that I decided to get when I was back in the states. :).
Smile of the Wolf looks really interesting. Essentially a modern fiction novel wrapped in the skin of a medieval Icelandic saga. Fish Have No Feet, from Booker International nominated Jon Kalman Steffanson, offers a unique insight into modern Iceland and the ways in which it has been shaped by outside influences. If you want some dark humor and Icelandic slacker culture in a modern setting, try 101 Reykjavik (the name of this book, as well as the main area of Reykjavik, as well as a movie made from the book). Be warned: it sounds like it’s not for everyone.
But Iceland is! Everyone seems to speak English there, so (assuming you speak English), it’s an easy place to visit, and it has a rich literary history as well as a rich actual history. Enjoy!
(P.S. In between starting and finishing this post, I read the first few chapters of Smile of the Wolf. Wow. If anything I wrote here sounds interesting to you, start with Smile of the Wolf. Bracing like a shot of the “Black Death” the Icelanders are found of drinking.)
I started reading the Viking sagas in high school, after being infected with the Dungeons & Dragons virus. Or, was it the reverse? Can’t remember. I read Old Norse (The Saga of Hrafnkel the Priest of Frey) and Old English (Beowulf) in college, and perhaps only a fun collision with point-set topology ended me up as a Math major instead of a medieval studies major. 40-odd years later, I’m going to Iceland, the land of Fire and Ice and Viking sagas and the Black Death (the drink, not the plague). Thanks to wife, daughter and son for finally getting me to do it, and for their significant others for coming along!
Waiting for the galactic bus
After a short red-eye to Reykjavik, we huddle in the rental car line outside, in the dark and 30 degree weather, for the better part of half an hour waiting for the rental car shuttle. 30 minutes doesn’t seem that long til you are freezing. We’re later to discover that the rental cars are a short 5 minute walk away, but in the dark in a foreign country on the wrong side of the airport, these things escape you….finally it comes, and we get our car. Kristen has booked a car/SUV for 7 people. And indeed it will hold seven people. Just not 7 people plus their bags. We ponder a bit, then decide to make do. People hold their suitcases on their laps, and away we go, in the dark.
The Blue Lagoon
Our first destination is the Blue Lagoon. We’d been thinking to do it at the end of our trip, but, then we re-organize, thinking to do museums in Reykjavik the last day (which is when we fly out), to make better use of time. We’ll later learn that the National Museum is closed on Monday, when we try to get in…sigh. The Blue Lagoon has generated high expectations, and well, it outperforms them. After a quick shower (you must do so without your swimsuit on, but there’s shower stalls for privacy), we take the indoor wading exit out into what is essentially the world’s large geothermally-heated hot tub, and, wow. Wow does that water feel good after a long plane ride. The sun hasn’t come up yet (it’s almost December so the comes up around 10:30AM). But the sun is coming, and the color gradient of the sky is simply indescribable. Pictures don’t do it justice. There’s not a cloud in the sky and the gradient is so pure it’s like it’s drawn in Photoshop. The water varies from warm to scorching depending on where in the 100m lake/pool we’re in. There’s a swim up bar — we get a free drink — but it’s 9 in the morning so I opt for a smoothie instead of the beer I see others drinking. We all get our faces pasted up with the mud bath they offer, and we look pretty funny. But none of us has a camera. A man and two young women are speaking English near us, so I ask “Would it be weird to ask you to take our picture and email us?”. They are happy to help. We chat, and find they are from Massachusetts, about an hour from where we used to live. Father & daughters on a trip, presumably from the same flight we just got off. (the above is the picture they took).
After an hour or so in the water (seriously, none of us wants to leave), we hit the road, for our next destination: Thingvellir on the Golden Circle. I’ve downloaded Google maps for Iceland, and we’re using GPS. We exit the lagoon and trundle off into the dark, toward Reykjavik and then on to Thingvellir. I hang a right out of the airport, and … in about 10 minutes I am feeling twitchy. Google maps is chattering away instructions like it knows where we’re going, but the thing is, as I like to say about GPS, “you’re never lost but you never know where you are either”. I’m twitchy. We come over a rise and I see the ocean. That doesn’t feel right. We’re supposed to be going inland. Folks in the car convince me I’m up in the night, and we keep going. Then we get directions that take us down a small residential street in an industrial looking smaller town, and now I’m pretty sure something’s gone wrong. We keep going, but eventually pull over to look at the map. Yep, we’ve gone wrong. Shoot. But it looks like there’s a way back that doesn’t involve retracing the last 20 minutes. OK off we go. Up into some hilly terrain, and crap, now it’s snowing and I’m slipping around….I come over a rise and skid slightly. My heart jumps. Nobody else notices anything….and then one more turn and laying at our feet is blue sky and the most beautiful lake. Sometimes the wrong turns are the best.
After pictures we head off for Thingvellir, a couple hours drive. We look for food, getting hungry. Of all the things in a foreign country, finding food on the road might be the most unsettling. We’re in the middle of nowhere, and people want food. And there’s six of us, which means there are about 8 different ideas for food. Eventually we see an IKEA beside the freeway, and think, well THEY have food, Swedish meatballs and such (as all of them do in US). Right??? So we wander in. I expect we are the only tourists to have been here in some time. We eventually find the food area. They have….let’s see. Semi-congealed pizza. Hot Dogs (hot dogs seem the ubiquitous road food in Iceland :)). A bakery with bread and such. We make do, then back on the road.
The road to Thingvellir
It’s snowing on and off again and the road to Thingvellir is beautiful one moment and treacherous the next. The light here is just indescribable. Photographers talk about the “golden hour” when the sun is low, just after sunrise and before sunset. The sun rises at 10:30 here this time of year and sets around 4. And never gets high. It’s always the golden hour unless it’s dark. Thingvellir is the site of the world’s first parliament (930 AD) and figures prominently in many of the Icelandic Sagas (and it’s the scene of the Bloody Gate in Game of Thrones). It’s also home to many of the legal actions in medieval Iceland. In preparation for the trip I’ve re-read a number of the sagas, including Njal’s Saga, scenes of which often occur at Thingvellir, and which features many facets of the byzantine medieval Icelandic legal framework (for example, a lawsuit is dismissed because the plaintiff only called 5 witnesses, instead of the required 9 (see my reading list for Iceland). And, it is where the tectonic plates meet — you can snorkel here, believe it or not. But not this time of year. Damn it’s cold and windy. There’s a huge lake next to it, and, here’s the golden hour on full display. Straight from the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, I say.
The golden hour
We’d hoped to do more of the Golden circle today, but it’s getting dark, we’re tired, and it’s still snowing on and off, so back to Reykjavik we go, to our downtown AirBnb. The road is still snowy and treacherous, but we arrive ‘home’ without incident. At this point, by the way, we have memorized the Google Maps mantra, “take the second exit from the roundabout and continue straight” — we must have gone through 20 roundabouts both to and from Thingvellir, it seems the Icelanders prefer roundabouts to stoplights. After a 20 minute struggle in the apartment to find the location of both the garage door opener and the garage, we’ve found it, unloaded everything, and gotten into the place. It’s awesome. Classic Nordic white decor, with a picture of (apparently) Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones lighting a cigarette for our AirBnB host, who appears to be a canonical Icelander, with a huge grin, big flowing hair and a beard. There’s six of us so I dub the doorway the Icelandic Boot Invasion, with all our boots. Our balcony has a stunning view of Hallgrímskirkja. We find a rather boutique-y food court (Hlemmur Mathöll, which contains a neat restaurant, SKÁL!), across the street from us. Everyone gets what they want (arctic char and a cold Icelandic beer for me), with a minimum of fuss. Beginning to realize everyone speaks English here. We hit the supermarket for some breakfast food, then back to the AirBnB, and I crash, hard. Driving in a foreign country is exhausting, you’re constantly on guard for something unexpected.
And that is the end of Day One. My daughter, our lead scheduler, has the schedule pacing of a Greyhound.
Today our plan is to circle the Snæfellsnes peninsula, which I have dubbed Snuffleupagus for lack of clearer pronunciation. Up north and pretty much an all-day drive. But first, breakfast. Kristen leads the charge on cooking pancakes, but it takes 10 minutes or so to figure out the stove. It’s an induction stove, which means you need the right pan to conduct the heat and we can’t figure out how it works. Eventually we get it, and proceed to burn the crap out of the first set of pancakes and the pan. I figure we’re going to have to buy a new pan, but miraculously afterwards all of it comes clean. And boy did the pancakes taste good, good job Kristen! (We rented our house in Hawaii for a while, and the pans always got destroyed — I always assumed it was from incompetent cookers, but we’re pretty competent, and it happened to us — I guess it’s just the unfamiliarity. And then off to the races again.
The first interesting thing we run into is perhaps the longest tunnel I’ve ever been in. The Hvalfjörður tunnel is about 6km long, and it goes deep, over 500 feet down. Down and down and down, then up and out. We stop for gas and coffee in Borganes, the gateway to Snæfellsnes — we’ll return here on a loop later in the evening. The first gas machine doesn’t take a credit card. Eventually figure it out, then it wants a pin for my credit card, which doesn’t have one. My debit card works, eventually. Sheesh. and it’s cold out here! Inside we all wander around getting coffee. I glance up to hear Erik give a yelp and literally start sprinting away from something…what the hell? Turns out he’s dropped his coffee onto his (porous) shoes and scorched his foot. He later says, “I stopped running when I realized I couldn’t run away from the pain in my foot” :). By now we are all laughing hysterically and trying to clean up the mess and drawing bemused glances from all the Icelanders hanging out in the convenience store section of the gas station. Damn Americans. The view from outside the gas station over an enormous lake or inlet is breathtaking. Erik: “I’m kind of pissed off the views from their gas stations are so amazing”.
Our first destination today is the Basalt cliffs of Gerðuberg. Michelle and I each independently remark how much the terrain here reminds us of Utah. It’s desolate and beautiful, even though we’re not far from sea level it looks like high desert plains. The Basalt cliffs are super cool, tall columns of entirely square, tall chunks. We’ll see similar again later, elsewhere. Off we go, through mountainous sea level terrain (the contradiction is entirely meant here), with the astounding light shining on everything. We make an unplanned stop at Bersekerseyrara (“Berserker’s Ears”), a small inlet with a black sand beach, on our way to Kirkjufell, a small town with a cool waterfall and an eponymous small offshore mountain, which apparently can be climbed if you are intrepid (we are not, yet).
Kirkjufell
Kirkjufell peak bears a striking resemblance to Chinaman’s Hat on Oahu where we live. Kirkjufell is also home to another gas station/convenience store and a distinct fish smell — we suspect it’s a fishing village, mostly. There’s a semi-truculent semi-goth teenager running the counter, when we ask for the restroom keys. But he’s wearing a Nike shirt, and actually he’s probably not truculent, he’s probably just a teenager. Hot dogs are the food of choice here, apparently. Seems to be what other travelers are getting, but we pass. The combination of the Nike shirt, the hot dogs, and ubiquity of English finally hits me here and I realize Iceland seems far more Americanized than any other European country I’ve been to. As the trip goes on I’ll observe what a large percentage of everyone (Icelanders and tourists alike) are wearing jeans. We hang at the waterfall for a bit — it’s crowded, with a busload of Chinese tourists slipping on the ice — truly surprising to me how far they have come, Iceland is far enough but we’re in a pretty remote part of Iceland by now.
Game of Thrones enthusiasts, you may recall in Season 7 that Jon Snow and his band are hunting for a mountain that the Hound says is shaped like an arrowhead. That would be Kirkjufell.
A few pictures and off we go.
Our next stop is a cool lighthouse at the end of a long, very small road which spurs off the very long, small road we were already on. It’s snowing again, and sleeting. I realize I’m driving on black ice when the SUV starts slipping. I pass one car (a small sedan) that stops on the way back — the driver, perhaps Japanese, perhaps American of Japanese descent, says in flawless English, “The road is pretty slippery up there” — no kidding — then drives off. Not sure what to make of that, we decide to keep going since we’re in an SUV. We slip/slide our way over a few more rises on the way down to the shore, when over the last rise, over the black ice, we come face to face, in the middle of nowhere, with a tow truck trying to extricate a car from the ditch. The tow truck driver wanders over (he’s Icelandic, of course), and explains in blond and smiling and 100% flawless English that we should probably turn around, unless we want him to tow us out as well. OK, message received. We turn around.
On to the next stop — another lighthouse, the Gestatofa. The lighthouse is done in cement Brutalist architecture. It’s just a tall slab of concrete — no romance at all, not like an Outer Banks or Maine lighthouse. We see a few more along the way, and after the upcoming churches I name Iceland the land of Fire and Ice and Beautiful Churches and Ugly Lighthouses. This road is also bad, but we make it back up to the main road without incident.
From there we hit the famous Black Church of Buðir. Built in 1848 (after two previous churches were destroyed). It’s strikingly isolated — there is really nothing else around it — but it’s build on a slight rise going down to the sea, so the view feels infinite.
Not far from the Black Church is a cool waterfall which we climb, Bjarnarfoss — you can see the Black Church from the top. The climb was steep and cold and a bit wet and a good bit of rock scramble, but nobody gets hurt and the view is astounding.
Off we go, back to Borganes. We want to stop at the grocery store for some food, and at the state liquor store where you must buy your alcohol (see, I told you this was like Utah!). But first we must trek for an hour or so on a small, dark, two-lane road in the snow and dark. It’s quite nerve-wracking, having cars coming at you on a two lane road in the dark in a foreign country with the crappy windshield wipers smearing the windshield, and the oncoming cars flashing you. Everybody’s flashing their high beams at me. Can’t figure out why. I don’t have my high beams on, and I don’t have my running lights on. I can’t figure it out (and never did) — are they being polite? telling me to turn my lights down? telling me my fly is unzipped? Never figure it out.
Finally we get back to Borganes. Good lord alcohol is expensive here. The beers are all $4–5 each (not per six package, although they are sold in six-packs the price is misleadingly listed by the bottle, and it’s apparently kosher to just pull one out). A bottle of Icelandic aquavit (the Black Death), is probably ~$60, American gin and whiskey at least $50 a bottle it seems. Borganes is also home to the Settlement Center museum and restaurant. We pull up to the museum, it’s snowing and icy (you’re perhaps sensing a pattern here). We open the car door and IMMEDIATELY a cat jumps into the car. We flush the cat out, and head in. We decide to have dinner at the restaurant first. I’m driving and there’s 0 tolerance for drinking and driving here, so I have Egil’s MaltExtrakt, which basically like some kind of local malt root beer they’ve been making here for a hundred years. Sweet. Tastes like root beer. I have a delicious lamb tenderloin, others have a mix of “meat stew” (lamb stew), or soups. The bread and butter are astounding. Icelandic butter is just….different. Of course we haven’t eaten a solid meal since morning… The museum has two exhibits, one about the history of the settlement of this part of Iceland, including it’s most famous resident, Egil Skallagrímsson, the “hero” (I use the term advisedly, as Egil was an asshole, as well as a famous poet and warrior) of Egil’s saga. The other exhibit is about Egil’s saga, and Egil’s “exploits”. Yeah. Asshole with anger management issues and a gift for skaldic poetry. Off again, once more through the long tunnel, back to the house, a beer and about 10 pages of Silence of the Grave, a mystery by Arnaldur Indriðason, one of Iceland’s most famous authors, which I am re-reading as part of my ‘Reading my way to Iceland’ campaign. 10 pages and out like a light.
And that was the end of Day Two. Whew. You’re probably sensing the pattern.
Day 3 is the Southern route. The main activity is Ice Climbing on Sólheimajökull glacier, but we’re going to hit some of the top spots along the way. We’re up early and driving in the dark, again. And it’s snowing again. Much of this route is divided highway, so the snow and smeared windshield is slightly less nerve-racking. BTW. If you ever go to Iceland, rent a 4 wheel drive vehicle. Seriously. It’s worth the extra money. We’re hurtling down the freeway in the dark at 9am in the morning, when out the side of the car we see a church lit up, and in the graveyard in front of it, all the headstones have Christmas lights on them! It’s a bit surreal — it’s hard to imagine that happening in the states. Do the Icelanders have a different relationship with their dead than we do?
Eventually we get to Seljalandsfoss, today’s Waterfall #1, just as the sun rises around 10:30. It’s — well — everything is beautiful here. I’m starting to feel a bit repetitive. But this one, after an icy climb on an iced-over metal stairway, you can take a rock path to walk behind it. Then up and down another completely iced over metal stairway. I avoid crashing. All the way to the bottom of the last stair, and when I take my first step off the stairs, I slip and fall. Dammit! I thought I’d made it. 🙂 But no harm done. Back in the car to Waterfall #2, Skogafoss. Which is — you guessed it — beautiful, although perhaps slightly less impressive than Seljalandsfoss. We’re starting to get close to time to go Ice Climbing, but we’re pretty sure we can squeeze in a visit to the Black Sand beach, which is really the thing I wanted to see more than the waterfalls. So we make a run for it, me hurtling down the freeway at probably 30–40% over the speed limit (Icelandic speed limits feel quite low, especially for Americans).
Sjeljalandsfoss
Offshore we can see the Westman Islands, which we learned at the Egil’s Saga museum was the location where some Irishmen (Westmen) were chased and killed as part of some feud or other. And where in the 1970s much of the town was buried by lava flow. And where there’s a super-cool looking foodie restaurant with amazing cocktails called Slippurinn which we did not make it to…Maybe Westman Islands on the next trip…. Anyway the black sand beach is amazing, and the beach is so wide and deep and the horizon so vast it’s breathtaking. And more Basalt columns. And it’s also the filming location of Eastwatch-by-the-Sea in Season 7 of Game of Thrones.
Back in the car. No time to lose. we’re late for the Glacier. I lead-foot it to the Glacier, we arrive pretty much to the minute when we needed to.
Now we’ve got our crampons and climbing gear on, and we’re hiking up the glacier, in a group of about 15 people. We’re on Sólheimajökull (“Sun’s home glacier” — ironic as this is one of the darker places in Iceland according to our guide). Now damn this is cool!! Hiking on a glacier. The ice pack has an eerie blue color, with black lines throughout, and with piles of black dirt lying all over the place. At first I think they’ve put it on the trail we’re on for our footing. Then (facepalm), our tour guide explains this is volcanic ash, deposited periodically by volcanoes. It’s layered all throughout the ice, and can be used for dating. The glacier is receding, as you may have heard — a few hundred yards in the last few decades. We’re up and down, then finally rappelling down into a flat area, while one of our guides starts setting lines at the top. This is where we’re going to climb. And it’s starting to rain/sleet/snow, and getting colder and darker.
Ice climbing
Ice climbing turns out to be surprisingly hard. The crampons on your shoes have two teeth that stick straight forward, and you kick to seat them in the ice. Then you have two ice hammers you slam into the ice above your head, and pull yourself up. Then step up, kick into the ice to set your feet, and do it again. I’m not quite sure why, but for some reason this clicks for me, and (on belay and with a fair bit of lifting from one of the guides, I make it up ~40′ of ice to scramble over the ledge and on top. My back and arms will be sore for three days afterwards. Eventually we all make it to the top, some getting pulled up by a group of us on a rope. We trudge down in the cold sleet and the dark, and eventually leave the parking lot in the dark. More driving in the dark. Eventually we find a brewery that has wood-fired pizza. We each order a large, and almost every single large got eaten in it’s entirety in about 15 minutes :). The pizzas are pretty unique — Brian’s pizza has bananas on it, mine blue cheese, dates and bacon. Unfortunately, I’m driving again, so no beer for me but Kristen and Bryan get a sampler and the beer tastes good! More nerve-wracking driving on two lane roads in the dark and snow, 10 pages of Silence of the Grave (which I would eventually finish on the plane ride home), and then passed out again.
Day Three. The Whirlwind is winding down.
We had left one day mostly unplanned, thinking we might not be able to get everything in on the days we’d planned, since we abandoned the Golden Circle on our first day after Thingvellir, we went back for it. The main attractions being Geysir, a volcanic (duh) geyser, and Gullfoss, a truly amazing waterfall. More driving! (As you can tell, we didn’t spend too much time in Reykjavik). Geysir is pretty fun, although it’s a long drive to get there. It has a large tourist shop, which we spent awhile milling around in, and had lunch there. Mostly soups (I had Icelandic salmon on a bagel — quite tasty). And some very good cakes and pastries. Then up an icy path to watch the Geysir go off, once every 10 minutes or so.
Gullfoss is a short 10 minute drive away. It’s not really a waterfall — really more like a family of 20 or so waterfalls..really quite amazing. But it’s cold and overcast — in the summer I bet it is even more amazing….
We head back, stopping along the way for some pictures with Icelandic horses in a field. They’re a bit differently shaped to what we’re used to here — much shorter legs, shaggier and more muscular and stocky than their American counterparts. And, apparently, quite friendly with random American tourists who approach their fence in the middle of nowhere without any food to give them.
We’re back to Reykjavik early enough to tromp around town. We wander past the penis museum (ahem, excuse me the Icelandic Phallological Museum. Seriously.), but keep going. We’re headed for Hallgrímskirkja, a modern church built near the center of the old town. The architecture is amazing. We take the elevator ride to the top, and get wide-ranging views over Reykjavik. Then we’re off to wander the shopping district. Icelandic wool sweaters are the thing, but they are not cheap — the store I went in, they ranged from $200–500. Ouch. We wander off to Kaffibarinn, where Michelle gets hot chocolate and Kristin and I get Úlfur IPAs which are local and delicious. Then into a bookstore. Good lord it’s worse than the alcohol. Paperbacks run 32 KR (~$26), hardbacks even worse. I see a copy of Smile of the Wolf which looks like a tasty modern version of an Icelandic saga, but decide I can wait to get home and get it for 1/3 the price…I could never live here. Beer & books are too expensive!). We wander more, eventually ending up at a craft beer place. We have a look at the menu, and — I am not making this up — they are selling Treehouse Beer from Charlton, MA, not far from where we lived in Massachusetts, and which is pretty much impossible to obtain the US unless you drive to their facility in Charlton and get it. We defer on the Treehouse — I get Humar (Malbygg brewery) which is a lovely double IPA from Iceland. Home to our AirBnB, where we watch Seth Myer’s comedy special on our hosts Apple TV — so funny. And yay for the internet!!! Then to bed.
Up on the last day, the sprint is almost over!
Today’s museum day — we rejiggered the schedule to use time better, and today’s National Museum of Iceland day. Sitting in the car, waiting for everyone to bring the bags down, I check their hours. Shit. They’re closed today. Oh well. More for the next trip. We go for the Settlement Exhibition (confusingly named similarly to the one in Borganes but with different content). It’s fun — they’ve excavated a Viking long house from the settlement era and built a museum over it. Lots of video displays and exhibits, but not much in the way of actual artifacts except the long house foundations. But very interesting. Then around the corner for lunch at a restaurant one of Erik’s friends recommended. It’s either lasagna or soup — I go for the soup. It’s actually quite amazing. A lentil soup, but with the flavor of butternut or mushroom soup. And the sourdough bread and Icelandic butter are heavenly.
It’s raining hard now — we sprint for the car, and hightail it out to the airport. Advice: It’s much faster to walk from the rental car return than it is to wait for the shuttle bus. We hang out in the duty free area, shopping and eating and just loafing around. BTW — if you are buying anything alcoholic to bring into Iceland, or take out of Iceland, get it in duty free ( they have it coming and going ) — and it’s infinitely cheaper than outside, either way. And they have pretty much everything I saw in Iceland, in the duty free).
We suddenly realize time has gotten on ….we need to get to our gates. We hustle. Shit. We still have to go through passport control. Starting to feel pressed for time. Then Michelle gets pulled for extra security, which costs her about 20 more minutes. Eventually we all make it, but next time, I would relax on the other side of passport control…..
And back to Boston, where, ironically, it is even snowier and colder than in Iceland.
Iceland is a fascinating and beautiful place, especially if you are interested in either Viking history or the outdoors. The light in the winter is simply amazing, and hard to put into words. The people were uniformly friendly in our experience, and literally every single person we interacted with spoke fantastic English. I found Iceland to be much more Americanized than most European countries. I wonder if that is the legacy of the country being occupied by the British in WWII (which I did not know until I read it in one of Indriðason’s books), and then by a significant US military presence after the war. Our main regrets were that we were unable to see the Northern Lights (never really happened while we were there, you are at the mercy of the weather), and missing the National Museum, and not spending a bit more time wander Reykjavik. But those are just great reasons to go again some day!
Recently I had the chance to jointly read Dune with my son Erik, Evicted with my daughter Kristen, and (gulp) Thucydides with a dear friend in Utah and one of my nephews. I reconnected with people I care about in a really meaningful way. I read books I wouldn’t have otherwise read and got more out of the books I would have read anyway. It was like our own private book club.
Reading is better with friends.
Social media is awash in book-related content. Goodreads and Facebook reviews, Instagram photos (check out #bookstagram for a cuteness overload), #fridayreads on Twitter, the list goes on. But there’s no good place to share the complete experience of reading a book.
Sure, I can write a review on Goodreads when I’m done — and it will be lost in the ocean of other reviews there. And it’s after-the-fact anyway. By the time I’m done reading, I’ve forgotten most of my special moments or insights. Sure I can post on Facebook — but nobody has any context for why I’m posting, and it’ll be lost in the sea of noise that is Facebook. I may not even be friends with the people I want to share with.
Reading a book together is a unique way of strengthening a relationship or getting the most of out a book. It deserves a purpose-built, books-aware experience, where you can share your thoughts and reactions as they happen, not two weeks later when you’re done with the book. An experience that creates companionship and context while you’re reading. An experience that helps you learn from other readers.
Introducing Bookship.
Bookship is a mobile app purpose-built for sharing your reading experiences with your family, friends and co-workers. Perfect for your book club, or just staying in touch with your friend across the country. Better still it creates a reason for you to stay in touch with them! And it’s as easy as snapping a picture or posting a note.
Reading is better with friends. Bookship is a mobile app for sharing your reading experiences with your family, friends and co-workers. With Bookship you can invite fellow readers to read along with you, whether they’re reading via a physical book, an ebook, even an audiobook.
With Bookship you can invite friends, family and co-workers to read along with you, whether they are reading a physical book, an ebook, even an audio book. Post and react to comments, thoughts, photos/videos, quotes, links and questions, all in an easy-to-use chat-style interface. Get notified when others post and keep in sync with them while you read by sharing your location. Dogear passages with a quick photo with your phone, even have Bookship extract the text from the page you took a picture of!
Whether it’s reading a great novel with your best friend across the country, a business book with your co-workers, or participating in a neighborhood book club, Bookship enriches your reading experience and your relationships.
Bookship is available now for iOS and Android, and it’s free to start. Get it here: https://www.bookshipapp.com
I recently reviewed the books I read last year. Some great stuff, but also too much “bookish junk food”. I’m committed to reading better this year.
(btw. I made a music playlist for this book. Salter always makes me think of jazz. Go ahead and push the play button on this while you read).
Some time ago I was wandering through a used bookstore in Manchester by the Sea and stumbled across Burning the Days, the memoir of the writer James Salter. The well known book reviewer Michael Dirda of the Washington Post famously wrote “he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.”. I opened the book to a random page, and found:
“I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know til the day I die.”
OK it’s two sentences.
Salter is an amazing writer, and behind that lies a fascinating, complex, insightful man. Burning the Days tells the story of his life, from the early days of learning about sex through to his early 70’s. The transience of all things is lurking on every page, but the book rings out with its joys as well.
In youth it feels one’s concerns are everyone’s. Later on it is the clear that they are not. Finally they again become the same. We are all poor in the end. The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare.
Before that, however is the performance. The curtain rises.
His description of becoming aware of sex is priceless. After a friend tells him stories, this:
Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue covers. Some had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. …fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.
Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,”, he said, “has come from books. I’d be in the darkness without them.”
I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg…. but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty page booklet in blue covers that described the real game of the grownup world.
At The Hawaii Project, we often say Books Change Lives. And they do.
His time at West Point was equally formative.
The most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same. My father had managed to do it, although, seeing what it was like, I did not understand how.
During his studies at West Point, a number of books figure prominently. But one book changed his life.
There was one with the title Der Kompaniechef, the company commander. This youthful but experienced figure was nothing less than a living example to each of his men. Alone, half obscured by those he commanded, similar to them but without their faults, self-disciplined, modest, cheerful, he was at the same time both master and servant, each of admirable character. His real authority was not based on shoulder straps or rank but on a model life which granted the right to demand anything from others.
An officer, wrote Dumas, is like a father with greater responsibilities than an ordinary father. The food his men ate, he ate, and only when the last of them slept, exhausted, did he go to sleep himself. His privilege lay in being given these obligations and a harder duty than any of the rest.
The company commander was someone whom difficulties could not dishearten, privation could not crush. It was not his strength that was unbreakable but something deeper, his spirit. He must not only have his men obey, they must do it when they are absolutely worn out and quarreling among themselves, when they are at the end of their rope and another senseless order comes down from above.
He could be severe but only when it was needed and then briefly. It had to be just, it had to wash things clean like a sudden, fierce storm…
I knew this hypothetical figure. I had seen him as a schoolboy, latent among the sixth formers, and at times had caught a glimpse of him at West Point. Stroke by stroke, the description of him was like a portrait emerging. I was almost afraid to recognize the face. In it was no self-importance; that had been thrown away, we are beyond that, stripped of it. When I read that among the desired traits of the leader was a sense of humor that marked a balanced and indomitable outlook, when I realized that every quality was one in which I instinctively had faith, I felt an overwhelming happiness, like seeing a card you cannot believe you are lucky enough to have drawn, at this moment, in this game.
I did not dare to believe it but I imagined, I thought, I somehow dreamed, the face was my own.
I began to change, not what I truly was, but what I seemed to be. Dissatisfied, eager to become better, I shed as if they were old clothes the laziness and rebellion of the first year and began anew.
To the anonymous poet mentioned above: yes, Books Change Lives. If they are good enough, and if we let them. On my reading, I was struck by how much this fictional company commander resembles the Leonidas of Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield, of which I’ve written elsewhere.
The first phase of Salter’s life is military, eventually becoming a pilot, and Burning the Days chronicles that life in ways that are by turns comical, heartwarming, and searing. This phase of his life leads to his first novel The Hunters, and flying the Korean War, and his true tales from that time open a window into the military experience few books can match.
The success of The Hunters eventually drives him to leave the Army and write full time. He discovers Paris. This leads him to write A Sport and A Pastime, an erotic chronicle of Paris, with an unreliable narrator. He goes into movies, writing screenplays for a number of films, most of them unsuccessful (I’ve recently become aware of how many writers of that era put food on the table by writing screenplays — Steven Pressfield is another). His stories of the movies, the stars, and set locations are thought provoking as well as interesting.
And always, there are the books. The books he’s writing, the books he’s reading — I’ve picked up 3 or 4 books other than his own, that meant something to him.
What a fascinating man and life. A fighter pilot, a man’s man, a serial womanizer it seems, and yet deeply introspective and caring. An aesthete, intimately aware of the transient nature of all things. Burning the Days is simultaneously elegiac and joyful, and will give you insightful perspective on life.
