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

Map 4. The Faroe Islands

maP 4. the Faroe islands 126 reading BaCkWard in order to understand the Faroese language debates, it is important to spend some time contextualizing the position of Iceland and Icelandic language and literature within the European cultural milieu in the nineteenth century. Although there are some technical details of Faroese alphabets in this story, the key point is that the proponents of the two main spelling proposals used different logics to promote different ideas of Faroese identity . The choice was between two versions of being Faroese: either Faroese within the North Atlantic, or Faroese with a Danish heritage. literary heritage in the north atlantiC In a book with an unexpected coupling of two different parts of the world—Egypt and Iceland in the Year 1874—the American scholar and literary figure Bayard Taylor described riding on horseback from Reykjavík toward Mount Hekla accompanied by Geir, a seventeen-year-old Icelandic boy. Although they spoke in English, occasionally Geir hesitated over an English word, and so he asked Taylor what the word was in Latin. When the conversation turned to literature, Geir asked Taylor’s opinion of Lord Byron and Shakespeare, whom he had recently read. The young Icelander was also enthusiastic about the German Romantics, especially Schiller, and then switched from speaking English to German in order to discuss them in greater depth. Taylor was deeply impressed by this linguistic and scholarly virtuosity, all the more so because Geir had never visited an Englishor German-speaking country, in fact, had never left Iceland.2 Despite the visitor’s amazement, the quality of this exchange was not unusual, nor was Taylor’s reaction to it out of the ordinary. Since the visit of Joseph Banks in the late eighteenth century, foreign travelers had been regularly astonished by the linguistic abilities of Icelanders. When eighteenthand nineteenth-century travelers presented themselves to local Icelandic officials upon their arrival on the island, they were frequently greeted in their native languages—English, Danish, German, or French. Other Icelanders they encountered, especially the local priests, spoke to them in Latin, which was often more embarrassing than reassuring to the struggling traveler, and evoked self-critical appraisals of the travelers’ own Latin proficiency.3 To communicate with the farmers they lodged with throughout the country, the visitors were at last forced to employ the services of reading BaCkWard 127 a bilingual interpreter. Despite living in turf houses (often described as “earthen huts”) with dirt floors, these farmers were generally literate and able to tell the travelers stories from the early settlement period of Icelandic history, that is, the stories of the medieval Icelandic sagas, which had attracted so many visitors to Iceland in the first place, especially during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In explaining this experience, which travelers found to be quite different from what they had encountered in other foreign travels and among their own farmers at home, the visitors often referred to the long literary tradition in Iceland, dating back to the writing of the medieval sagas in the thirteenth century. Icelandic saga literature is a composite tradition of many different genres. Some of the stories are legendary and fantastic in nature and feature warriors with superhuman strength, battles with giants, and journeys to the Far East, India, and even to imaginary lands. The largest number of sagas, however, fall into a genre known as the family saga, which deals in a mostly straightforward and realistic manner with stories of the early settlement of Iceland in the ninth and tenth centuries. Feud is the main subject of these sagas—disputes of honor between families. They recount stories, often over multiple generations, of families falling out with each other over stolen property, marriage arrangements, or insults to one member. Typically, the dispute begins with a relatively small incident—for example, the unauthorized riding of a favorite horse in Hrafnkels Saga— and escalates to involve more and more participants on each side, with the stakes increasing with every exchange of blows. Ultimately, mediators and men with legal knowledge are brought in to resolve the conflict, which could have brought death even to distant cousins of the original disputants by the time it had run its course. These stories, which are supposed to have been based on even older oral traditions from the settlement period,4 had been rediscovered by Europeans , mostly by scholars in Sweden, Great Britain, and Denmark, beginning in...