A Long Night’s Journey Into Spring: Savoring Thorrablot, Iceland’s Rancid Winter Feast

I have a pact with Ragga. When I point my fork at things on my dinner plate, she will tell me what they are. She will say “sheep’s head” or “blood sausage” or “sour shark” or “whale.” She will do this until I point to a thing she doubts I can swallow. In that case, we’ve agreed that Ragga will say nothing at all.

We’ve just found seats at Thorrablot, a banquet dinner held in towns all over Iceland. It’s a late-winter feast that hearkens back to the cruelest chapters in Iceland’s history, when volcanoes blackened the sky with ash, when famines swept the land and deforestation was so complete you couldn’t even warm your hands by a fire.

The menu at Thorrablot—a nauseating list of whey-soaked meats and near-rotten fish—explains how early Icelanders made it through the grim homestretch of winter. They squirreled away the dregs of the fall harvest, buried shark meat underground, and when spring still felt like a far-off dream, swallowed them down. It’s some of the worst food in the history of eating.

Alcohol, I’m told, helps. I believe the people who tell me this. I’ve had two gin and tonics by the time I arrive at Thorrablot, thanks to Ragga and her husband, Biggi, who invited me to their preparty. It was around their coffee table, over pretzel sticks and tall cocktails, that I announced to my hosts and their friends that I was going to be “adventurous” at Thorrablot. I will swallow that word with a forkful of sheep and a shot called Black Death.

Nobody goes to Iceland for the food. Even less of a draw: winter. In December, the sun arrives as late as 11:20 a.m. and flees as early as half-past three. The darkest day of the year is a mere four hours long. You can track the amount of sunlight Iceland gets—and many Icelanders do, down to the second—on the web. That’s how I know that there were seven hours, nine minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of sunlight on the early February day I set out for Thorrablot in Kirkjubæjarklaustur.

Kirkjubæjarklaustur sits on the southern fringe of Iceland, three hours east of Reykjavik. There isn’t much to the town—its name means “church-farm-cloister” and that about covers it. Only if you were a natural-disaster geek would you pull off the highway here: Kirkjubæjarklaustur is sandwiched by a fearsome volcano and the largest ice cap in Europe. Laki, the volcano, once erupted so passionately its ash blotted out the moon for months. Vatnajökull, the giant glacier, is ungirded by volcanoes. If there’s a more calamity-prone place on Earth than Kirkjubæjarklaustur, nobody lives there.

I drove east from Reykjavik midday, anxious to see Iceland’s hinterlands while the sun was making a showing. But the sky was a thick gray cap: no layers, no nuance, no movement. I pulled over a few times to take photos but deleted them. I might as well have been shooting a cement room featuring cardboard boxes.

Annie Ling

Something strange happens in the mind of a person deep in the interior of Iceland. It begins with the color problem. The palette of the land gives you no assurance of life. In fact, its mold-green moss and straw-yellow grass and the vast blackness of the fields that lava made all suggest this place either drains life, or ends it. Which explains why I quit taking photos. Not just because the images were pathetically grim, but because I was having trouble getting out of the car.

Outside, I felt bare in a way that had nothing to do with clothing. It was cold, but no more than New York in winter. There were no people to stare me off, let alone predators. So why did I know in my bones that...