The End of Iceland's Innocence: The Image of Iceland in the Foreign Media during the Financial Crisis

The New Vikings—Yesterday’s Heroes, Today’s Villains

– 118 – THE NEW VIKINGS YESTERDAY’S HEROES, TODAY’S VILLAINS ‘The Viking financiers have sought refuge abroad. Their public relations experts say rehabilitating their images will have to wait until the financial blood-letting stops.’ Dallas Morning News, December 10, 20081 Iceland, the land of the sagas and homeland of the Vikings, has, in part, enjoyed a dual and contradictory reputation: that of giving the Western world the most accomplished literary texts of the Middle Ages; and that of being the descendants of people who, through their aggressive warlike ways, terrorised towns and villages from Paris to Constantinople. Dominated by the Danish for over five centuries and afflicted by calamities of all sorts, Iceland attained independence in 1944; then, in the 20th century, the country achieved unprecedented prosperity, propelling it to the top of wealth indices. According to the foreign press it owed that extraordinary growth to the liberalisation of global trade, from which a group of young entrepreneurs profited so skilfully that foreign journalists quickly associated them with the Vikings. Here is how Jim Landers, for example, described that new generation of financial warrior in the Dallas Morning News: Over the last six years, a group of about two dozen young, U.S.-educated financiers took Iceland on a Viking voyage of acquisitions, grabbing airlines, banks, mortgage lenders and securities traders from Texas to Hong Kong.2 1 Jim Landers, ‘Iceland’s road to bankruptcy was paved with U.S. ways’, Dallas Morning News, December 10, 2008. 2 Ibid. – 119 – The term new Vikings (Viking entrepreneurs, Viking financiers) first appeared during the prosperous years preceding the crisis of 2008; it generally refers to a group of young businessmen who controlled Iceland ’s economy and extended their power abroad, taking advantage of the liberalisation of global trade and the privatisation of Iceland’s banks at the turn of the 21st century. In 2007, professor Robert Wade used the term in a controversial speech he gave in Reykjavík, entitled ‘New Vikings’,3 in which he cautioned against the excesses of those financiers and the risks they were incurring. The term quickly acquired pejorative and ironic connotations as the empire built by the new Vikings collapsed. Sarah Lyall looks back at those businessmen after the fall, stating that ‘like the Vikings of old, Icelandic bankers were roaming the world and aggressively seizing business, pumping debt into a soufflé of a system’.4 Roger Boyes described them as a generation who adapted the pillaging of Vikings to our own time: ‘If there are still Vikings in this Iceland, they are the financial marauders setting out for Britain or mainland Europe, not to pillage and plunder but to snap up a chunk of fashion house’.5 As the term new Vikings entered the language, warlike vocabulary started to appear in official discourse. Prime Minister Geir Haarde was said to have responded to negative comments from foreign financiers about Iceland, making it ‘clear he would defend the financial system with all the tools in his armoury’.6 Similarly, the Chairman of Landsbanki, Björgólfur Guðmundsson, declared that ‘the island needed a war chest to “protect the economy and economic management from setbacks”’.7 3 Emiliya Mychasuk and Emiko Terazono, ‘Viking saga’, Financial Times, October 9, 2008, p. 20. 4 Sarah Lyall, ‘Stunned Icelanders struggle after economy’s fall’, New York Times, November 9, 2008. 5 Roger Boyes, ‘Skating on thin ice’, Australian, October 10, 2008. 6 David Ibison, ‘Iceland fends off hedge fund attack’, Financial Times, April 18, 2008, p. 6 (italics added). 7 Björgólfur Guðmundsson, quoted by David Ibison, ‘Iceland wealth fund is proposed’, Finan­ cial Times, April 25, 2008, p. 2 (italics added). – 120 – These nouveau riche Vikings awakened an atavistic interest in victory , the traces of which had long disappeared from the island. This inclination reappeared in a new form, which was alluring despite its pitfalls: ‘tales of fast cars, yachts and penthouses, accounting scandals and Russian money did not seem to hamper the country’s love affair with its self-made men’.8 The new Vikings led an openly flashy lifestyle, which Icelanders were not accustomed to, but which had its appeal. Such extravagance was both mind-boggling and fascinating for Icelanders and foreigners because of its scale: ‘The bankers partied by flying in Elton John for a Reykjavik birthday bash. They dined at Nordic/Asian fusion restaurants where entrees started at $50...