Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic

Notes

171 introduCtion Epigraphs: W. H. Auden, with Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 26; William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 13. 1 Quoted in Alex Ross, “Björk’s Saga,” The New Yorker, August 23, 2004, 49. Apparent connections between Björk’s music and the Icelandic landscape have been a theme in many articles and books about her; see, for example, Evelyn McDonnell, Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Björk (New York: Random House, 2001), 20–24. 2 The historian of science Skúli Sigurðsson has commented on the cultural notes 172 notes to the introduCtion constructions of remembering and forgetting in Icelandic life. In his view, Icelanders suffer from a technological amnesia that obscures the story of their rapid technological modernization after World War II and the large amounts of foreign aid received by the country, in favor of a preoccupation with the distant past when Iceland was independent and saw itself as isolated from the world. See Skúli Sigurðsson, “The Dome of the World: Iceland, Doomsday Technologies and the Cold War,” in Aspects of Arctic and Sub-Arctic History , ed. Ingi Sigurðsson and Jón Skaptason (Reykjavík: University of Iceland, 2000), 463–73, and “Electric Memories and Progressive Forgetting,” in The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, ed. Thomas Söderqvist (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 129–49. 3 Since my first visit to Iceland, the Saga Centre (www.njala.is/en) has opened nearby this site in Hvolsvöllur, about twenty-five kilometers to the north. The center bases itself heavily on the story of Njáls Saga and includes a Saga Hall where one can arrange a Viking Feast, complete with storytelling and staff in period costume. Thus, the museum appears to fill the perceived gap between the tourist expectations and the actual site at Bergþórshvoll. 4 There are, of course, historical and archaeological explanations for the general absence of preserved structures from the medieval period in Iceland. Turf, or sod, houses with wood frames were the usual building materials at this time. Well-built turf walls can last from about thirty to a hundred years, depending on the upkeep. Due to the rapid deforestation and soil erosion in the years after settlement, medieval Icelanders never moved from turf to wood construction , as people did in mainland Scandinavia. Furthermore, because Iceland lacked an aristocratic upper class that would build castles and possess rich grave goods of precious metals, there were no medieval buildings and only a few artifacts comparable with those of continental Europe during this time period. 5 The history of the term is discussed by Arturo Esobar in his Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). 6 For discussion, see Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 7 Although Iceland suffered from hyperinflation from the 1970s until the mid1980s (reaching a high of more than 80 percent in 1983), for several decades before the crash of the Icelandic economy in October 2008 the inflation and unemployment rates were low by western European standards: 4 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in 2005. Hagstofa Íslands (Official Statistics of Iceland), www.iceland.org/us/index.html. In the fall of 2008, the Icelandic economy plunged sharply, with the Icelandic króna losing about a third of its value on the international markets. Icelandic banks were nationalized and the notes to the introduCtion 173 trading in the króna was suspended in an effort to control the financial crisis. Trading resumed after Iceland obtained a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the first time a Western nation had done so since 1976. Economic conditions were largely thought to be responsible for the change of government in the January 2009 Icelandic elections, when the long-ruling Independence Party was ousted by a Left-Green and Social Democratic coalition. 8 Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Bergen, Norway: University of Bergen Press, 1969). 9 A few references to the very large literature on this topic include Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). See also Said’s Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). On the...