Iceland Eyes

Immortal Caifornia: a delve into Steinbeck's novel To a God Unknown

2024-10-11T03:35:00.061+00:00

Note: this essay obviously not about Iceland, but it does speak to the deep connection between a people and their land, a bond that is possibly even stronger for immigrants and newcomers who chose a place as their new home, as my Icelandic parents did California. Also, there are a few typos in the text, so please excuse:)

The days when our father took my sister and I out to the beaches of our hometown, Pacific Grove, were special days. Not because they were few and far between but because every moment we got to spend on the windswept beaches of Asilomar chasing waves and climbing the tidepool-rich rocks was delicious. Pabbi would stroll the sands while we splashed in the near-Arctic waters of the Northern California coast.

He would call out to us to remember the undertow, the sucking force of which would easily sweep a grownup off their feet and into the deeps of the Pacific, to be eaten by the horrible monster that my sister and I were sure lurked below the waves. He explained the drop-off to us in simple language, describing the spot where the surf broke as the edge of an underwater ledge which terraced down into the Monterey trench, one of the...

...deepest undersea canyons on the planet. To this day, he would say, men catch deep-sea fish never before seen by humans, grotesque prehistoric creatures swept accidentally to the surface of the Monterey Bay. Our father knew everything.

On the rocky outcrops scattered along the beach he showed us the life of the tidepools, taught us how to tell the difference between a stinging anemone and an innocent urchin and how an anemone would quickly fold its short tentacles into its center if tickled with a stalk of seagrass. My sister and I would try to drop bits of shell into them, scoring points if the shell floated into center of the little purple puffs and fooled them into closing as if on a bit of lunch. We would also hunt hermit crabs, taking one or two home with us in plastic containers of seawater - the ones with the best adopted shells - and letting the rest run amok on our palms until they dropped off and fell back into their pools.

We enjoyed a freedom not always typical in the US, the freedom to roam and discover and take risks that our Icelandic parents had had in their youth. We were also often the only people out on the beach on cold and windy days, Icelandic summer weather days that seemed to rejuvenate our father and broaden his smile. When it was time to leave he would call to us and we would run with our day’s cache against the wind and to the car where he would brisk the sand off of our legs, leaving us chafed and red and sore. These are memories which will never leave me and which come alive again each time I scent an ocean breeze.

The landscape of a person’s youth never leaves them. Though most specific memories fade and many more are jumbled into concepts or mixed together to form a kind of interpretative recollection independent of time or actual fact, the overwhelming impact of life as a child stays with us forever. Whether the type of person who savours their personal history, sucking on memories like hard candy, or one who keeps eyes forward, relishing the idea of new and different tastes to explore, the backdrop of childhood remains like a template to which we refer for definition of self.

Consciously or unconsciously, the places, people and events of our early years supply the basics, the simple truths, to which all our histories and moments are added. Mountain, for example, may be represented by many different images and locations to a travelled adult but its core value, its simple truth, is the one given to it by the child within the adult: the highest point in town, raced down on a bicycle, perhaps. Tree to a grownup is a fir, a maple, an oak, a forest, an environmental concern, and always in the back of the mind the one in the front yard of one’s childhood home, climbed or swung from. In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes,

After we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are…We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams.

Bachelard is specifically identifying home as the house in which one finds one’s first memories, but home can also be a reference to the landscape of childhood; we say I grew up in such and such town (or city or neighborhood), identifying ourselves with a population or we say I was raised by this or that lake (or seashore or mountain), identifying ourselves with physical features of the world immediately surrounding us. There is, as Bachelard notes, a comfort in being able to place-set ourselves, to find the template of our history close at hand and apply it to all the unknown situations into which we wander. We recognize tree by its basic qualities, learned in childhood, giving us a sense of safety in the known; from there we can wander into the more unknown territory of defining the more specific qualities of the tree in question.

The template of youth exists in all of us. “An intelligent being cannot treat every object it sees as a unique entity unlike anything else in the universe. It has to put objects in categories so that it may apply its hard-won knowledge about similar objects, encountered in the past, to the object at hand,” writes Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works. The “hard-won knowledge” is of course that which we struggle for in childhood, the identification and naming of the basic template objects in our environment. The existence of the template does not, however, mean that it is consciously recognized.

In fact, it is most often deeply buried in layers of fresher memories, which become the new reference-points for learning. This makes sense at some level, since we are continually adapting to an ever-changing world; yet, in another sense, we are distancing ourselves from the core truths which all humans experience. In other words, the process of re-referencing denies us access to the sensations, magic, wonder, and mythos of childhood, the time of life when we discover the core aspects of being human, as individuals and more importantly as members of a vast system of life.

Carl Jung called these core themes “archetypes of the collective unconscious,” universal memories which exist within each and every human on the planet, but are so often repressed or forgotten. Joseph Campbell, the world-renowned mythologist, expands on Jung’s premise by suggesting mythology as the living repository of these common archetypes, and by describing the role of the artist as that of awakener or revealer, kin to the religious leader yet not bound by the rites and dogma of a set faith: “In the way of the method of art, the features of an environment become transparent to transcendence, which is the way of the vision of myth.”

A living mythology within a society or a community is not simply a cannon of stories to entertain or moralize, is not some holdover from a naïve past, but is a path in and of itself. “A mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime – birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death.” To Campbell, mythologies and their attending gods, parables, and metaphors are not only societal-based, but are inherent values to be realized in every individual. The function of the artist is to remind us of these values and of our connection to a greater whole.

Joseph Campbell spent time in Pacific Grove, California, moving there in the winter of 1932. There he met and became friends with two men who were to influence and be influenced by him, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. Steinbeck was a native of the region, having been born in nearby Salinas thirty years earlier. Ricketts was a marine biologist who worked out of a lab in Monterey, on the street that is now known as Cannery Row.

These three men and Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, spent many hours together discussing Carl Jung, Taoism, Spengler, and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers (who lived reclusively in nearby Carmel), each adding to the others’ knowledge of symbols and the intrinsic connectivity of all life. Campbell himself acknowledged that the year he spent in Pacific Grove was a valuable one, admitting that he had learned as much or more about myth from Steinbeck as Steinbeck had from him. Pooling their extensive individual knowledge, the group came to see the interconnectedness of existence as the truth that humans grow to forget. They struggled to “find a universal commonality, a source, a way of tying together human experience, nature, myth, symbol, and mysticism…and words for the connections they felt.”

During this year Steinbeck was working on his novel To a God Unknown, reading it aloud to Carol, Campbell and Ricketts and unabashedly filling the story with the kind of essential symbolism which would bring the reader to recognize, remember, his or her relation to the very physical world in which we live. The following year Campbell left Pacific Grove after falling in love with Carol, and Steinbeck published his novel. Their “year of crazy beginnings,” as Campbell termed it, was over. For Steinbeck, though, the sense of wonderment and interconnectivity with nature that had taken root in him as a child was renewed and confirmed during that year, giving his writing a spirit it had previously lacked.

My personal recollection of that historic spot is vastly different than the world these literary and philosophical giants roamed:

We used to go down to Cannery Row with our Icelandic visitors, letting them wander about the souvenir shops and soak in the history of the once flourishing sardine cannery business which ground to a sudden halt the year the sardines stopped coming into Monterey Bay thirty years earlier. In the mid-Seventies, when we lived there, the abandoned canneries still stood like derelicts, leaning their wooden frames and rotting piers into the bay. Though the oldest standing was no more than fifty years old, they seemed in their disuse like relics of some glory we were supposed to remember. My father would tell our guests about John Steinbeck, about how this was the Cannery Row, the one the book was written about. And though my father had probably never read the story himself, let alone our visitors, there was a kind of pride of knowledge in his voice. The grownups would kind of nod in recognition of the name and look around a little more intently, because there was a history to the street.

It wasn’t much to look at in those days, with graffiti covering the fronts of the canneries and windblown trash collecting in corners. My father would point to a general location across the street and tell them that that’s where Doc Ricketts’ lab had been before it burned down. The guest would stare and nod some more. I had to walk that falling down, famous street so often, hearing the same story, that, at age eight, I discovered that I hated tourists. By that time I had read my first Steinbeck book, The Red Pony, a gift-with-deposit given out by the bank my mother worked at. It was a horrible story for a young girl (the pony dies and has its eyes plucked out by vultures) but it stuck with me, and I felt contempt for the foreigners wandering around my home town who hadn’t felt the love and pain that I’d felt reading that book. John Steinbeck was my author, from my town. By the time I read Cannery Row, all full of my tidepools and my beloved bay, the deal was done. No one knew what I knew about Pacific Grove, about what secrets Steinbeck had invited me to share, about the once-happy street we took all our tourists to. I owned the whole area and, in a sense, still feel I do.

John Steinbeck was the grandson of westerers, meaning those from the east who traveled west to search for a new life and take advantage of the prosperity virtually guaranteed in the rumored land of plenty that was on the far side of the Rocky Mountains. His paternal grandparents, John Adolph Grosssteinbeck from Dusseldorf, Germany and Almira Dickson of Leominster, Massachusetts, met in Jerusalem in the 1850’s where each had gone with missionary families.

John Adolph and his brother courted Almira and her sister, and in a double wedding, both couples were married on the Mount of Olives. After a series of fantastically dramatic adventures, including shipwreck, Bedouin attack, murder, rape and mauling, John Adolph and Almira (virtually the only two of their respective families to escape the Middle East unscathed) returned to the States. Now called more simply Steinbeck, they moved from New England to Florida where John Ernst, the author’s father, was born. Eventually, John Adolph westered his family to California where he bought ten acres of land near Salinas and, after trying out both the fruit and dairy business, established a flour mill.

On the maternal side, Steinbeck’s inheritance was Irish. Samuel Hamilton, his grandfather left Bally Kelly, Ireland when he was seventeen and emigrated to New York City, where he met the Irish Elizabeth Fagen. They married in 1850, and a year later Samuel traveled around the Horn of South America to California, where Elizabeth joined him via the Isthmus of Panama. They settled first in San Jose, a busy agricultural crossroads sixty miles south of San Francisco, and eventually homesteaded a ranch in the Salinas Valley, near King City. Olive Hamilton, the author’s mother, left the ranch when she was fifteen to prepare for a teaching credential. Three years later she began teaching in King City where she met and was married to John Ernst, who had developed a second family flour mill there. Shortly after marrying, the young Steinbeck couple moved to Salinas where John Ernst Steinbeck, writer, was born in 1902.

Much has been made of Steinbeck’s special relationship to the landscape of his youth: Salinas and the long, fertile valley it lay in; the river of the same name which young John suggested was hardly a river at all as it disappeared each summer until the rains fell again in winter; the low rolling Gabilan Mountains to the north and the seductive, living Santa Lucias to the south; the summer house in Pacific Grove, just blocks from the beaches on which John and his two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary played. It was more than simply his surroundings, however, that influenced the development of Steinbeck’s lifelong respect for nature. Jackson Benson, Steinbeck’s official biographer and a highly respected authority on the more esoteric details of the author’s life, writes:

Steinbeck’s father felt the constant need to be plugged into the soil, to feel its vibrations. Even the smallest things in nature were important. Man must conserve, for man was part of the pattern, the chain of life. On the other side, Steinbeck’s mother had the sense that all things about us are enchanted, if we had by the eyes to see…To these influences must be added the majesty and power of the landscapes of the central California coast – its redwoods and rugged mountains, its river valleys and rolling hills, and its remarkable shoreline of rocky cliffs and windblown cypresses and pines, bays, estuaries and beaches.

From his father, then, he received a Teutonic sensibility, an often cold but very respectful and logical sense of man’s place in and need for nature. From his mother he inherited the Gaelic charmed vision, full of leprechauns and fairies and spirits. Add to this mix his awkwardness and often boorish obnoxiousness as a child that left him virtually friendless, and what resulted was a loner who found solace in the natural world surrounding him. “It was in response to this pattern of social failure and separation that he developed a rich inner life…Fabricated from materials supplied by the attitudes and values of his parents, the foundation of this inner life was a special relationship he developed with nature and with language,” writes Benson.

He often rode his pony into the surrounding countryside to be amongst those things he felt he could find communion with: wild animals, a clear running brook or a grove of trees. As an adult he recalled his childhood as charmed, magical. He found secret places tucked into the dramatic flanks of the Santa Lucia Mountains, and just as many in the pages of the books he read. Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, a gift from his aunt, had a fantastic appeal to young John, proving for him that magic was real and that heroes’ hardships were necessary to gain the ultimate prize of self-understanding and greatness. Remembering his school years, he commented that certain books “were realer than experience – Crime and Punishment was like that and Madame Bovary and parts of Paradise Lost and things of George Eliot and Return of the Native. I read all of these when I was very young and I remember them not at all as books but as things that happened to me.”

From childhood, then, John Steinbeck was developing the sense of myth and the belief in some greater truth that was to be his personal contribution to the dedicated discussions in that “crazy year” of 1932 with Campbell and Ricketts. He was a Californian in every sense of the word: barely two generations removed from Europe, of hardy, willful stock, educated, adventuresome, restless, and dependent on the land for survival. For Steinbeck, though, what the land provided him was not simply physical sustenance, but food for the soul. His survival depended on his being able to merge with the hills and with the tidepools and with the magic things that lay inside the supposedly inanimate objects of nature.

In his essay “The Uniqueness of California,” James J. Parsons states, “When contrasted with the humid East, the extraordinary character of the California environment can scarcely be denied; nor can the extraordinary character of its culture. Inevitably the temptation had been strong to link the two in the direct cause and effect of environmental determinism, arguing that the California land and climate breeds special forms of religious, political and social organizations.”

He goes on to suggest, though, that the “continued flow of restless immigrants” has had just as strong an effect on the unique cultural qualities of the state. The Hamiltons and the Steinbecks journeyed to this new, open land to make, through their own hard work, a better life for their progeny; the fertile soil and temperate climate was not their birthright but a thing to be respected and earned. In this sense Steinbeck was not an inheritor of land but of an attitude towards the land, a concept still fresh for those Californians who understand the true bounty of the state.

From his teenage years Steinbeck dedicated himself to becoming a writer. Though he found various ways of paying the rent over the years, he never stopped writing. “He loved the words, the shape, the sound, the history of meaning; he delighted in the magical properties of language; he even got satisfaction from the touch of pencil and paper.” He attended Stanford University but never graduated; he was an erratic student who missed classes, failed to study for exams and learned to drink booze and smoke grass in the best university tradition.

He went as often as he could to San Francisco to “indulge in as much sweet-scented sin” as he was able on his meager budget. Though a lousy student and a reckless, moody friend, Steinbeck’s dedication to writing never failed him. Benson notes that his ever-realistic parents knew of his passion to become an author by the time he was in university but were understandably skeptical about his realizing that goal. “They weren’t opposed to his plan, but they were realistic about it. They knew that even if their son applied himself diligently – a characteristic that he was not known for – his chances of becoming an important, well-known writer were very slim.”

Stanford University was not pleased with John’s spotty attendance and poor grades. He in turn knew he was slipping behind and rather than admit failure “chose” to join the working world, eventually landing a job at the Spreckels Sugar Factory where his father worked. He continued to enroll himself at Stanford, but rotated his scholastic education with that of the laborer; he would often spend a semester at Stanford then a semester at Spreckels, where he was a carpenter’s apprentice, sugar beet harvester and bench chemist. During this period of both hard labor and monotonous detail work, Steinbeck gained a broader, clearer view of life and most probably an education more relevant to his writing than that on offer in the classroom. He discovered the world of the migrant laborer, mostly Mexicans, Filipinos and Japanese, as well as the rhythms of the laboratory.

A few years later, after a miserable stint in New York City, he took on a caretaker position at a lodge by Lake Tahoe in the Sierrra Nevada Range, and there he learned, during harsh alpine winters, the exact nature of total solitude and the true effort involved in writing a novel (he was working on his first published story, A Cup of Gold.) By 1929, he had met Carol Henning, whom he was to marry, and had moved into his family’s Pacific Grove cottage. His father gave him a meager allowance that nonetheless allowed John to focus on his craft full time.

Steinbeck, then, had the imagination and dedication to become an author, but can he be said to have been a specifically California writer? According to Stoddard Martin in his book California Writers, he was. Following in the footsteps of nineteenth century writers Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce, none of whom were native Californians yet who were able to recreate in novellas and short stories the adventures of the post-gold rush era, were Jack London and John Steinbeck. Their works took on the greater social significance lacking in the earlier writers, but they inherited the essential theme of landscape as character.

Though the Wild West was no longer as wild after the turn of the century as it had once been, the relationship of men and women to the dramatic California landscape was virtually unavoidable to its native writers. Martin notes, “A culture grows out of a sustained relationship of a people with an environment, not of a flash-in-the-pan succession of mining camps and boom-towns. Only when women began to appear as other than whores-with-hearts-of-gold, and families began to form and communities take root, did California, as a culture begin to exist.” The “Western” literary style evolved as the culture did, and what had initially been for most an adventure at the edge of the world became a challenge to survive and thrive in “a position remotely analogous to that which the Celtic fringes of Europe held through the Dark Ages.”

Martin also claims that “temporally, California stands in a ‘symbolic relation’ to the twentieth century” as the hearty and foolhardy alike, left with no more West to Go, were forced to forge a community identity. Edmund Wilson commented that “California, since we took it away from the Mexicans, has always presented itself to Americans as one of the strangest and most exotic of our adventures; and it is the duty of the literary artist, precisely, to struggle with new phases of experience, and to give them beauty and sense.”

This is a very important point in understanding Steinbeck’s classification as a specifically California writer. Given that the Californian has been in a constantly evolving relationship with the environment, as opposed to a constant struggle with the more firmly established cultures of the eastern seaboard and of Europe, the western writer’s protagonists are more likely to face their conflicts with nature than with society. “Steinbeck’s hunger, his compulsion to tell the significant stories of people situated in and on, but not apart from, this land became one of his recognizable signatures as a novelist.” Stoddard Martin describes the categorizations of American literature thus:

It is reasonable to argue that a culture as eclectic as California’s, made up almost entirely of newcomers and with virtually no tradition in English before 1840, has had little chance to produce a distinctive literature. From the outset it should be understood that these California writers exist within the larger body of American literature, and in a more intimate relation than, say, English or Russian novelists of the late nineteenth century existed within the larger body of European literature. At the same time, American literature is not a monolith: the writers of the South are customarily regarded as reflecting the history and climate peculiar to that region, and there are still some who regard the literature of New England as the only true American ‘literature.’ Leslie Fielder has characterized the disparate strains in American letters by reference to the compass. The Eastern, by writers such as Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald, who aspire to the European and mannered; the Northern, by those, such as Robert Frost, who celebrate a modest ascetic rural order; the Southern, by the Poes and Faulkners and Tennesee Williamses, who see imaginative fertility amid material decay; the Western by Hemingway in some phases and even such an eccentric as Ezra Pound, who pit themselves against Fate and the elements in pursuit of increasingly elusive frontiers.

The Californians of the early part of the last century were all of these things, (Stoddard Martin calls California “the melting-pot of the melting-pot” which is the United States) but were also people who had arrived, made it to the edge, and were determined to cultivate a society out of the raw materials of the land. John Steinbeck was not himself a homesteader or a prospector or a cowboy or a farmer, but his people had been. His task as a Californian, as a writer, and as a believer in the overwhelming magic and mysticism of nature, was to bring to life the spirit of both the people and the land to which he belonged.

To a God Unknown was published in 1933 after a five-year creation process in which it evolved from a play written by Steinbeck’s Stanford friend, Toby Street, into the homage to myth and symbolism it became. Street had had the idea of a man obsessed with the forest surrounding his Mendocino home. His passion for his land becomes nearly sexual and when his possessiveness of his college-age daughter emerges, the two obsessions twine and hint at an incestuous perversion.

Street was unhappy with the play and in 1927 allowed Steinbeck to attempt a novelization of the story. Though initially supposed to be a collaboration, Street was busy studying for the bar and Steinbeck ended up working the story for the most part by himself. He called his version “The Green Lady,” an allusion to the feminine aspect the forest took on for the protagonist, Andy Wane. After two years of sporadic work on the story, he made the key decision to relocate it to a landscape he knew much better than the wild Northern California woods of Mendocino, namely the Salinas Valley.

He created a multi-generational saga by adding the figure of Andy’s father, the patriarchal Joseph, and changed the spelling of the last name to Wayne. In this new draft Andy’s obsessions take on a nearly pathological bent as he attempts to merge his very being with the surrounding forest. The tale had two halves, the first detailing Joseph Wayne and the second Andy. Steinbeck wrote to a potential publisher that the story “is a fairly close study of a paranoiac mind and of primitive instincts of a modern man.” Despite this faith in his “study” the novel was rejected for publishing time and again.

Now named “To the Unknown God” in reference to a Vedic Hymn (“Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?” is the hymn’s repeated invocation,) the unaccepted manuscript began to sit ill with Steinbeck, causing serious moments of self-doubt which he had never known before. It was not until the “crazy year” with Ricketts and Campbell that he began to understand what was lacking in his novel. He discarded the second half of the story, with Andy Wayne’s dark compulsions toward his trees and rejected the original “natural disaster” of fire for one that had more relevance to Central California, namely drought.

He shifted the energy of the story from perversion to faith, though the central pantheistic theme remained. Joseph Wayne, a naturally patriarchal and nearly god-like figure became the sole protagonist. He allowed for Joseph Wayne’s “rite of passage to the sacred center of the world,” and, according to Robert Demott, put more emphasis on the “archetype of the eternal woman” in direct response to Campbell’s falling in love with Steinbeck’s wife Carol. Demott surmises that the scene in which Joseph’s brother Benjy is killed by a jealous husband is a direct stab at the (platonic) affair between his friend and his wife. Whatever the motivation, the story had gained a force it had lacked before, and by February 1933, was accepted for publishing under the title To a God Unknown.

The book tells the story of Joseph Wayne’s migration to California from Vermont in 1903. He is a thirty-five year old bachelor with three brothers, Thomas Burton and Benjy, and a strong but aged father who remains nameless: he is simply father. Graced with a long white beard and wise eyes, he is the patriarch of his clan an seems initially to be the physical representation of the Christian god, bestowing upon Joseph a blessing when he states his intention to go west: “May the blessing of God and my blessing rest on this child. May he live in the light of the Face. May he love his life.” The old man claims to have received the same blessing from his father, stating “a custom so old cannot be wrong.” These words set the tone of the novel, revealing a religious aspect as well as a sense of heritage.

But the blessing has a unique wording that sets it apart from traditional Christian benedictions and that gives it a more mystical quality: “live in the light of the Face.” We can assume that the old man is referring to the face of God, but the capitalization of the word face hints at some unknown presence, something that may be greater, older and brighter than the Judaeo-Christian god. There is also in the phrase “a custom so old it cannot be wrong” a hint of not only history but of the mythic as well, strengthening the feeling that the Face in question is somehow older than time and timeless. Furthermore, the fact that Joseph’s father says “and my blessing” as if he is an equal of the deity gives the benediction an almost sacrilegious feeling, allowing as it were for more than one god. Joseph states later in the story, “My father thinks he is almost a god. And he is.” So within the first three pages the pantheistic and mythic are suggested to the reader, though in a subtle manner.

The blessing has great importance to the story, not only because it shows Joseph Wayne’s connection to his father, a man he resembles in every way (hinting that he too is “almost a god”), but also because it introduces the old man as a powerful being, powerful enough to find Joseph across an entire continent when he passes away and enter the great oak tree under which Joseph builds his house. In the letter that Joseph receives telling of his father’s death, his ultra-pious brother Burton writes “He said he could live as long as he wanted, but he wished to see your new land…he talked a great deal about floating over the country…He talked about the mating of animals. He said the whole earth was a – no, I can’t see any reason for saying it.”

The old man felt he had the ability to stave off the one inevitable factor of life: death. And yet he did continue living beyond the flesh, trading his mortal body for the strength and power of a California Oak tree. Poet and classicist Robert Graves, in The White Goddess, writes, ”The oak [is] the tree of Zeus, Juppiter, Hercules, The Dagda (the chief elder of the Irish gods), Thor, and all the other thunder gods, Jehovah in so far as he was ‘El’, and Allah. The royalty of the oak tree needs no enlarging upon.” As far as mythology is concerned, Steinbeck had no other option than to allow his father-god to reside in an oak, for no other tree would have been powerful enough to house the soul of a god.

The valley in which Joseph settles is called Nuestra Senora, “the long valley of Our Lady in central California.” Steinbeck’s choice of name is relevant on two levels, the first of which is the reference to the Hispanic heritage of the area. A Californian is in constant contact with the Spanish language, specifically because of the overwhelming preponderance of towns, cities and land features with Spanish names, and more subtly because of the great number of Mexican-Americans in the state, many of whom live their entire lives in California without ever speaking English.

Legally a bilingual state, all official documents and most public instructional material must be printed in Spanish as well as English. One hears Spanish and sees it nearly every day. In To a God Unknown, the Mexican Indian heritage of the area supports Joseph’s paganism by allowing for the existence of unseen forces in the landscape. Joseph befriends Juanito who tells him that his mother, an Indian, “said how the earth is our mother, and how everything that lives has life from the mother and goes back into the mother.”

He later tells Joseph that the spring that trickles from the massive “altar” stone in the center of the sacred fir grove is rumored by the local Indians to come from the center of the world. The grove itself and the open glade in which the massive and mysterious rock stands is a place where “the old ones” still come, according to Juanito. These references ring familiar to Joseph, just as the rock “seemed to be shaped cunningly and wisely, and yet there was no shape in the memory to match it.” He senses the rightness of the Indian natural philosophy, something he recognizes which springs from Jung’s archetypal unconscious.

In The Return of the Vanishing American, Leslie Fiedler identifies the Native American as a crucial aspect of literature of the West. He writes, “the heart of the Western [i.e. literature of the West] is not the confrontation with the alien landscape (by itself this produces on the Northern [literature]), but the encounter with the Indian, that utter stranger for whom our New World is an Old Home.”

He continues, “The Western story in archetypal form is, then, a fiction dealing with the confrontation in the wilderness of a transplanted WASP and a radically alien other, an Indian – leading either to a metamorphosis of the WASP into something neither White nor Red…or else to the annihilation of the Indian.” He suggests that in this mythological confrontation, one of the characters must be eliminated, and that if it is the White who is ritually or symbolically removed, a New Man, new kind of American hero may emerge.

The relationship between Juanito and Joseph fulfills this theory. Joseph’s cultural heritage merges with that of Juanito, releasing in the white man some deep understanding of the mythology of the world. Joseph, has no sense of having turned his back on the Christian god, but rather incorporates him into a larger pantheon of deities. Steinbeck does not turn his back either on the Judeo-Christian god, allowing the character of Father Angelo, the local Catholic priest, to chastise Joseph for his dabbling with pagan elements. In the following passage he catches Joseph making an offering of wine to the oak tree:

Father Angelo smiled wisely and a little sadly at him. “Be careful of the groves, my son. Jesus is a better saviour than a hamadryad [a wood-fairy].” And his smile became tender, for Father Angelo was a wise as well as learned man.

Joseph started to turn rudely away but then, uncertainly, he swung back. “Do you understand everything, Father?"

“No, my son,” the priest said. “I understand very little, but the Church understands everything. Perplexing things become simple in the Church, and I understand this thing you do,” Father Angelo continued gently. “It is this way: The Devil has owned this country for many thousands of years, Christ for a very few. And as in a newly conquered nation, the old customs are practiced a long time, sometimed secretly and sometimes changing slightly to comply with the tenor of the new rule, so here, my son, some of the old habits persist, even under the dominion of Christ.”

Father Angelo is like a link between Joseph and Juanito, between the ancient ways of original Californians and those of the newcomer. Though the Indian in many ways encourages Joseph’s pantheism, he eventually suggests that his friend seek the council of the wise old priest, who’s “prayer is through the Virgin. He can get what he prays for.” This is a telling quote, which leads into the second, and more important relevance of the name Nuestra Senora, namely the overwhelming presence of the Great Mother in To a God Unknown. For Juanito, the old priest’s Catholicism works precisely because of the importance given to the Mother of God, who is the source of all life and to whom we return at death.

Steinbeck was very blatant about the presence of the Goddess in the landscape of Joseph Wayne’s valley. Aside from the name, he also describes his protagonist’s entry into the valley in voluptuous, erotic terms: “Joseph became timid and yet eager, as a young man is who slips out to a rendezvous with a wise and beautiful woman. He was half-drugged and overwhelmed by the forest of Our Lady. There was a curious femaleness about the interlacing boughs and twigs.” Joseph passes “trembling leaves,” senses “the land’s throbbing,” travels a “smooth, rounded track,” feels “his body flushing with a hot fluid of love” for his land. In a dramatically erotic passage, Joseph makes love to his land:

His possessiveness became a passion “Its mine,” he chanted. “Down deep its mine, right to the center of the world.” He stamped his feet into the soft earth. Then the exultance grew to be a sharp pain of desire that ran through his body in a hot river. He flung himself face downward on the grass and pressed his cheek against the wet stems. His fingers gripped the wet grass and tore it out, and gripped again. His thighs beat heavily on the earth…For a moment the land had been his wife.

Joseph has a many-leveled relationship to his land. At times he sees it as a reflection of himself, of his father, as a wife and as a child. But the primary metaphor is that of the Great Goddess. In an article entitled “The ‘Great Mother’ in The Grapes of Wrath, Lorelei Cederstrom writes, “The Great Mother is a force for change in the individual and in society; this change may involve growth or destruction, rebirth or death, for both are within her domain.”

Though the article focuses primarily on The Grapes of Wrath, Cederstrom identifies the Great Mother in To a God Unknown as “a personification of the Earth itself.” Joseph, she notes, “can be seen as a priest assisiting in her mysteries, as he works to ensure the fertility of the earth. He views these preiestly duties as ‘the heritage of a race which for a million years had sucked at the breasts of the soil and co-habited with the earth.”

Joseph may also be the sacred consort king of the Great Mother; he is married to the goddess, reigns for a period of time until he is sacrificed to her in a ritualistic fashion. Joseph ultimately sacrifices himself at the altar of the great rock, letting his blood flow to feed the spirits of the stone and the Lady in whose valley he dwelt and reigned. This purely pagan sacrifice joined with the Father’s Christian prayer to the Virgin have the effect Joseph so desperately desired as he watched the country dry up and seemingly die: the rains come.

“He lay on his side with his [slit] wrist outstretched and looked down the long blsck mountain range of his body. Then his body grew huge and light. It arose into the sky, and out of it came the streaking rain. ‘I should have known,’ he whispered, ‘I am the rain.’”

He merges finally in sacrificial death with the center of the world and returns to the arms of the Great Mother.

But it is exactly this that the dour and pious Burton doesn’t understand. He accuses Joseph of idolatry, and kills the oak tree which his brother seems to worship; in that act he destroys not a tree but a living essence of the gods. Burton sees only “the pagan growth” in Joseph as the ultimate sin against his God. “You have left God, and his wrath will strike you down,” shouts Burton. This curse from the follower of the jealous Judaoe-Christian god is the antithesis of Joseph’s blessing, and Burton makes sure that it comes true when he kills the oak by circling a deep gash around the girth of the tree. When the tree dies the spirit of the blessing suffers as well, leaving Joseph’s tribe and the valley itself unprotected and endangered.

Note: this is an incomplete version of a longer literary review of John Steinbeck's To a God Unknown which was written for a Masters level course in Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland in 2003. The final draft is lost, unfortunately. Though the bibliography could be reconstructed, the books and authors referenced should be fairly clear without going into that process. There are a few surviving footnotes, however, which are presented here:

Benson writes, “Steinbeck was not a particularly attractive youngster. In his reclusiveness and shyness, he developed a protective arrogance that alienated many of those around him. He tried to gain affection and acceptance, but often failed. Only a few outside his family showed much warmth toward him…His rebellion took on a somewhat different form from that of most young people: despite conflicts with his parents, he maintained his affection for them and instead developed a resentment for the community as a whole.”

“Getting to California [in the mid-nineteenth century] was an undertaking of major proportion which must have exerted a significant selective influence on its early settlement. It was the more footloose and restless of the adventurers who came, whether from East of the Rockies, from Europe, from Chile, or from China.” Durrenberger.

California is still for many the ultimate land of opportunity. According to an article published in 1966, 1,460 new residents crossed the border into California each day. Though seriously outdated, the figure still holds a certain shock value. An article written for the Population Reference Bureau notes that “in a sense…California…affords a cross-section of the nation. It is composed of a larger foreign-born element than any other state of the union except New York.” Also, referring to the fantastic hopes and often miserable reality which newcomers experience, the article claims, “California has always been part fantasy and proud of it. Where else is the range so broad between fairyland and nightmare.” Those newcomers who stay usually discover that though the streets of the west are not paved with gold, the climate alone is something to be thankful for.

Benson says his job as bench chemist was “essentially a matter of running perfunctory tests on the beet distillate.” This was not his first brush with the physical sciences; he and his sister Mary had enrolled as teenagers in summer courses on zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, but he must have discovered the routine monotony that is lab work, as well as the importance that is placed on exactitude in the sciences.

Image by Adam Gerritsma

16 Fascinating Facts About Icelandic History

2017-07-17T12:00:00.010+00:00

Abraham Ortelius' map of Iceland, ca. 1590

16 Fascinating Facts About Icelandic History

You thought you'd done your research on Iceland? Well, guess again. Here's a list of fascinating facts that you may have missed along the way:

1. Iceland was originally covered in forests as far as the eye could see.

According to accepted history, a seafarer named Garðarr Svávarsson sailed around the entire island in the later 9th century and proclaimed that it was "wooded from the mountains down to the sea."

Currently, about 2% of Iceland is forested. The Forestry Service of Iceland concurrs that at the time of settlement as much as 40% of Iceland was covered in trees. They were destroyed by both natural (volcanic) and human causes.

2. The Norwegian who arrived in Iceland around 870 AD were not the first inhabitants.
There is written evidence that Irish hermits, or papar, had settled the island at least a century earlier, sailing over in their small currachs. The story goes that the hermits "chose" to leave Iceland with the arrival of their noisy new neighbors, leaving a number of monkish artifacts behind

In addition, genetic research has clearly shown that over 60% of Icelandic women are descended from Celtic/British Isles stock, and not Scandinavian, though when and how these women came to Iceland is still up for debate.

3. Via one Irish princess named Melkorka it's possible for many Icelanders to trace their lineage to...
...Irish kings as far back as at least 100 BC.
Wikipedia (referencing the Chronicles of Ireland, among other sources) makes it possible to click back thousands of years through Melkorka's recorded ancestry to the time of near-mythical royalty of ancient yore.

Thought to be mute, Melkorka (born around 910 AD) was bought from a Rus trader as a concubine by Höskuldur, one of the original settlers, and bore him a son, Ólafr. When Höskuldur's wife heard her singing to her son, she was confronted and confessed to being the daughter of Muirchertach, an Irish king, who later accepted Ólafr as his grandson.

4. The famed Icelandic sagas were written from 300 to 400 years after settlement era that they describe.

Interestingly enough, this was the same period when heavy internal fighting was taking place in the weakening Icelandic Commonwealth.

There is evidence to show that the writers tried to give the sagas a realistic feel by dressing the main characters in period clothing as they assumed it was worn centuries earlier. This could be likened to a modern costume drama depicting, for example, the first British settlers to what was to become the USA.

5. Widows had rights and power in Icelandic society.

Though women were ruled by men, and could by law be given to other men by their fathers, brothers and sons who were over 16 years of age, strong laws protected them. The Grágas book of laws from the early 12th century details punishments for offenses against women, and it was considered totally dishonorable for a man to violate a woman's rights or body in any way.

More importantly, when a husband was away, or if a woman had been widowed, she gained rule over the homestead. The Sagas describe women who held behind the scenes power over the men in their lives, though they were not legally allowed get involved in politics or leadership. There are also stories of quite a few women with very active love lives and multiple lovers.

6. Icelandic pagans cut a deal when they finally accepted Christianity.

When it was (reluctantly) accepted in 1000AD, three concessions to the pagan way of life were allowed to remain: the exposure of infants (they were left outside to die), the eating of horse meat, and the private worship of the old gods. These were all later rescinded, but last two are in effect again.

7. In-fighting amongst powerful chieftains, or goðar, broke up the original Icelandic Commonwealth allowing Norway to take over.

Both greed amongst the ruling clans and bribery by Norwegian King Hákon caused blood feuds and power plays throughout the Sturlung Era in the13th century. Thousands of men died in battle, resulting in instability that left the island open for takeover by the king.

So though the original settlers left Norway to create a more democratic society based on rule of law and vote, it fell apart within 300 years, bringing the Icelandic people right back to where they started: owned by a Norwegian king.

8. Two separate, devastating plagues killed half to two-thirds of the population of Iceland in the 1400s.

Some estimates say that between 20 to 30 thousand people died in that century. First came the Black Plague in 1402, which in the course of two years decimated whole communities at a time. A second, unknown plague arrived in the later century killing off many of the survivors.

Some records say that people died while carrying people to their graves, and were simply buried along with. Along with the fact that their new ruler, Denmark, (who took over from Norway) had little need for their fish and wool, Iceland was fast-tracking to becoming Europe's poorest country.

9. For centuries, England and Iceland traded beer for sulfur (among other things.)

Despite the lack of attention from their Danish rulers, during the "English Era" of the 15th century (and actually well beyond it) English merchant ships sailed to Iceland for goods, mainly stockfish (unsalted, air-dried fish, most often cod) but also wool, saltpeter and sulfur. In exchange they brought items like beer, honey, grains, sugar and fabrics, to name a few.

In 1509, when Henry VIII gained the throne, his first act as king opened up free voyages to Iceland, 'considering that Fysshe and other Commodities of that Cuntre be muche behovefull and necessarie towarde the comen Weale of this Realme.' This trade most surely kept Iceland going during its harshest times. Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I, 'was not unmindful of the value of Iceland trade,' and it's said that during her reign the native Icelandic sheepdog was popular in court.

10. Almost all clergy and most powerful men in Iceland had multiple wives and many children.

Though absolutely forbidden by Rome, it was common practice for priests and clan leaders to "keep" women and have as many children as possible up to at least the Middle Ages. Their daughters were given to friends as goodwill offerings and as payment in business deals, and according to new research, girls often chose to join cloisters rather than be parceled out as gifts to much older men.

A recent archaological find in Skríðaklaustur (article in Icelandic) in the east of Iceland found a priest buried with multiple women and children in his grave.

11. After bouncing back from the plague years, again a quarter of the population of Iceland died during the Laki eruption of 1783-84.

Poisoned gasses and a thick constant ash cloud from the volcanic fissure destroyed nearly all vegetation and killed half of the livestock population (80% of sheep!). As a result, a quarter of the human population (estimated to be at that time around 50,000) died from poisoning and famime in the years that followed. The imapct of the eruption was felt as far away as Egypt and India.

12. In the 1800's a third of the population gave up on Iceland and moved west.

By now a bleak, deforested, windswept island, Iceland had little to offer its people except more volcanic activity (including the Katla and Hekla eruptions, both located in the populated southern region) and sheep die-offs in the 19th century.

A massive emigration to Canada and the northern US regions took place, and whole Icelandic communities were created which still exist today. Though nowhere near an easy life, these Vestur Íslendingar understood the harsh winters of the northern praries and were able to make the best out of their new country.

13. The Icelandic language was mapped out for the first time by a Danish man in the mid-19th century.

Rasmus Rusk was a linguistic genius, having mastered at least 25 languages in his lifetime and written lengthy treatises on many of them, including Icelandic. He based his grammatics on a mysterious book, the First Grammatical Treatise, by an anonymous author of the early 1100's.

This renewed interest in Icelandic as a unique language helped revive the literary heritage of the people, which had been lost after the era of Saga writing. It also built up interest in Icelandic translation services abroad. During the 400 years after the Black Plague era, basic survival had been the most important thing, but Rusk's work helped to shine light back onto the amazing literary and cultural history of Iceland and its people.

14. Romanticism influenced the Independence movement in Iceland.

The literary Romantic movement in Europe jump-started social change throughout the continent. Industrialization was creating a new middle class who were learning to read and write and to have an influence on the world around them, and poets and painters of the time encouraged a kind of returning to roots and to the land, for average people to retake ownership of what God has given them: their country.

Young Icelandic men who went to Denmark to study were coming home with ideas of independence, and a returning of the land to the Icelandic people who were then to care of it. A quiet but constant revolution took place during the mid-1800's, and by 1874 Denmark granted Iceland home rule. 44 years later, full sovereignty was given, and in 1944 Iceland severed all economic and political ties with Denmark and declared itself a Republic.

15. All of the trees in Reykjavik today were planted in the past 130 years.

Old photos of midtown Reykjavik, including the area around the town lake, are almost completely devoid of flora. Reykjavik itself didn't start to really grow until the late 19th century, so it wasn't until that time that the city planners began to consider planting trees and gardens. A Horticulture Society was established in 1885, and since then has been instrumental in turning the capitol from a barren series of rocky hills into the green and blooming city seen today.

16. The vast majority of products and goods seen in stores today only became available in the last 25 years.

Until the 90's it was hard to find more than just three kinds of cereal here (Cheerios, Corn Flakes and Cocoa Puffs.) The only kinds of pasta were macaroni, spaghetti and, rarely, lasagne. There were only two flavors of skyr: plain and blueberry, and only whole milk and undarenna, or whey. The only candy available was local Icelandic kinds and one type of chocolate from Poland: Prince Polo. Small shops were sprinkled all around, and in the neighborhood around Baldursgata, for example, were five shops, a bakery and a fishmonger until the late nineties.

The past 25 years have seen a shocking explosion in both imports and local commodities on offer which some people have likened to the consumerization of Eastern Europe around the same time. There are stories of older folk who, until recently, had no clue what a cucumber was, or why a kiwi even existed. The move from a fairly insular welfare state to an international consumer society, as well as the late shift from rural to urban living, has changed the face of the country dramatically. Though hard to believe nowadays, until very recently Iceland was an extremely isolated, and in many ways innocent, culture with a very simple way of life.

A view of Stapafell mountain from the town of Arnastapi, with Snæfellsjökull glacier in the background.

Springtime in Reykjavik, with Pretty Blooms and Hints of Blue Skies

2017-05-14T14:44:00.001+00:00

I'm reposting a retro Iceland Eyes photo from 2009.

I really enjoy this shot, and felt lucky to have gotten it when the daffodils were just beginning to wilt after their early spring bloom. That meant that they didn't look so tall and wonderful anymore from a distance but instead drooped from their box at the top of a flight of stairs, seeming to smile a last bit sunshine down towards me as I got up close.

I'm also glad I got a shot of this iconic large old wood and corrugated-iron house, probably built
around the turn of the last century and located just at the top of Frakkastígur ("Frenchman's Lane," named after the hospital built by the French for their seamen.)

If you're a sucker for history and maps like me, you'll enjoy this report which highlights the history of the block this house is on. It's one of a series commissioned by the Cultural Heritage Agency of Iceland, and is a detailed, fascinating glimpse into the development of Reykjavik and other regions around the country. Another fun website (if you're a cartography nerd like me) is Borgarvefsjá, an interactive map of Reykjavik with all sorts of options under the Opna valglugga button at top left.

(An aside: The text and sites I linked to are in Icelandic, but don't let that stop you! For the websites, if you're using Chrome on a desktop just right-click on the text and select "Translate to English." For pdf's you'll have to copy/paste the text into Google Translate. It won't be perfect, but what is in this world? And considering that Icelandic is so rare, it's a miracle that Google offers it at all. Actually Google started having work done on translating between English and Icelandic as early as 2000. Why? Not sure, but I know the woman who was doing it for them out in Mountain View. Now there's no excuse not to get your Icelandic on!)

I'm sure many if not all of you who've come here have walked past this house on your meanders through Reykjavík. It's just around the corner from where we live, and for as long as I remember it's been in this lovely, yellow, weathered dress. Even Google Maps shows it that way. Finally, though, the owners had to change the cladding, switching out old yellow for new plain grey. Maybe they'll paint it again, but corrugated iron needs to weather for a few years before it's coated with color, so for now it is as it is.

Anyway, the text for the original post was written when we were just beginning to feel some hope that we'd survive as a nation, post-crash. So much has happened in the meantime that the sentiments I expressed back then seem a little naive, especially as our path seems to be leading us eerily closer to where we were ten years ago.

There's a phrase here, which came about after the global financial collapse, where we say that something is "so 2007" - as in it's ridiculous, expensive, gaudy, consumerist, short-sighted, elitist and greedy. I think we can all agree that the consequences of our góðæri (boom, or "good times") were barely worth the risk. I certainly hope this time we can manage to avoid the profit/græðgi-trap and cool our heels, keeping our hearts warm and compassionate so that we can one day really create the egalitarian society we so hope to be...

From 2009: Springtime in Reykjavik, with pretty blooms and hints of blue skies, is finally here after our long winter of discontent.

New life is pulsing, quickening, in the warming earth and in our hearts. Elections have brought hope to many that our little island nation will survive our recent disgrace and grow again, if ever so humbly. We can't escape our pasts but are forced instead to review missteps, misdeeds, selfish living and a collective disconnect from the land we live on. But Nature, in her wisdom, always grants a new spring, a new chance to plant and nurture, sow and reap. The lessons never go away. They are revisited on us until we get them right, until we learn to cherish, selflessly, all that truly matters in our lives. What we run from comes back to us in ways we never imagined, offering new chances to bloom, and to grow.

In closing, I'd like to wish everyone around the world gleðileg vor! (happy spring!), from our home to yours 🌺

It's Like We've Always Known Winter This Way

2017-03-05T13:07:00.002+00:00

Out at Seltjarnarnes on a lovely crisp winter's day

(This post is published solely on IcelandEyes.com. If you've found it reposted without permission on a click-bait blog with any other title or a URL that doesn't include the words IcelandEyes, please do yourself a favor and visit the original Iceland Eyes website instead:)

I've taken quite a few Iceland Eyes photos out at Seltjarnarnes over the past twelve years, including shots of midnight golf and walks along its beach, that it feels a bit like cheating to share another one. It's such a photogenic spot, though, and so close to the Reykjavik city center where we live.

This isn't the greatest picture in the world, but I chose it for a few reasons. For starters, it shows
the snow cover we were graced with a week ago when Reykjavik got more of the "white rain" in one 24-hour period than ever recorded and which, very surprisingly, is still here. It's a crispy, dry, packed snow as temperatures have stayed below freezing for the last seven days. Having that combination, frost and heavy snow, at the same time is actually so common here in the south of Iceland.

Another reason I'm sharing it is because I took it at the sundial that's at the highest point in Seltjarnarnes at just about 5pm. It showed me that the sun was sitting at exactly southwest in the crisp blue sky, which for some reason I found pretty cool. In addition, that our glowing orb of light and life was that high off the horizon in the last days of February gave me hope for the near return of summer.

We're getting used to the constant snow by this point. It's almost as if it's been here for ages. I'm starting to be on familiar terms with the bumps and ditches that have formed in the hard pack on the roads around my neighborhood, navigating them with pro dexterity as I drive around town. Channels and grooves and paths have been etched by cars and carriages and feet on common travel routes. Kids are nearly blasé about putting on their snow pants and thick winter gear each morning, and the yellow stains left by pets are becoming a ubiquitous sight. Cross-country skis that've been stored away like relics have been dusted off and taken for runs out at the many nature trails that surround the city, and photos taken, thousands upon thousands of them, of our lovely winter wonderland.

I'm happy for tourists who picked this time to come, as it's a rare thing to see our land so well-covered, bright and clean, with clear aurora-filled night skies to boot. This is how Iceland is advertised as being, and how we'd most like to see it. A week ago everyone was freaking out because of the weather, and now it's as if it's always been this way! And if the Icelandic Met Office's forecasts are right, we'll get to keep it all for a few more days until it'll all unfortunately melt away...

Our little island, all white, taken by NASA satellite on March 3rd.

New Snow and Madia, My Other Name

2017-02-27T14:30:00.001+00:00

Our backyard in the heart of Reykjavik, all prettied with fresh snow

In the States I spelled my name Madia instead of Maria. It was a phonetic thing that my dad says he suggested to me when I was going into 8th grade. I'd been kind of a book geek up until that summer of '80 and was socially hung up on the fact that Maria was not a common name, and that my real name was pronounced with the Icelandic rolling R which no one in Cupertino, California seemed to be able to master.

Even though the US boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games, the name of Romanian
gymnast Nadia Comaneci, who scored a perfect 10 in the 1976 Games, was being mentioned as the favorite that year. I remember making the connection between her name and mine, how similar they sounded, and how much more beautiful Madia sounded than Maria.

When Dad encouraged me to try out the new spelling, I did: at the start of each new class in 8th grade I raised my hand and explained to the teacher how I'd be spelling my name, and how to pronounce it. This took serious guts, making a spectacle of myself in front of all my peers, but I was tired of the cocoon I'd been hiding in and wanted to emerge as a butterfly, finally. It didn't hurt that my sister, Addy, had coerced me into trying out for cheerleading that year, and had coached me so well that I'd made the squad. I was a New Person, book geek no longer, a twelve-year old reinvented to fit the social stage of Hyde Junior High, and later Cupertino High School.

The new name stuck. Out in the States I'll always be Madia Roff. I never changed my name legally, so there's been confusion when the true spelling has been found out. Friends I've known for years who see my drivers license, and the name Maria on it, suddenly get all jumbly and can't pronounce my name. Mardria, Madradia, Madiria, they flub. And then there's the boys I went to junior high with, who thought I was a snot for trying to be different. At the last high school reunion I attended in 1996, I had to chuckle at the fact that the "popular" boys, sixteen years later, still called me Maria, with childish obstinance, and in a pre-teen teasing tone. How cute.

Nowadays I can go to the States and say my name like an Icelander says it, and people say, ahh, ok, no explanation necessary. Unusual names are so common now, and in major metro areas people pride themselves on being international enough to get it the first time around.

Not a big fan of being in front of a camera, but...well here's me ~.~

A Pretty Snow Scene, Just for Thor

2017-02-10T11:34:00.003+00:00

I feel like I'm expecting that call any day now, the one where my father Thor clears his throat then firmly instructs me that it's time to post a new photo on Iceland Eyes, the last one's getting old. He had that authoritative way about him, but couched in a kind of absolute certainty that what he liked, what he appreciated in this world deserved his full attention and support. So when he felt that
I was neglecting this thing he loved, this silly blog of mine, he let me know. He was my greatest fan.

It's been just under six months since his andi left his body after the strangely specific yet freak fall that caused such irrevocable head trauma. We'll never know what exactly happened during the last few minutes before he fell, and because of that I can sense in myself a strong desire to create a narrative that makes the whole scenario more heroic, less mundane, than it might have actually been. But I'm allowed that, because he was my hero, and always will be.

The nennergy (an IceEng word I've coined) to write here has been hard to find, so I hope my more constant visitors can forgive the long weeks between posts. But Pabbi would want me to keep sharing and keep taking amateur photos and keep looking forward into the future. Never give up! It's how he lived his life, so I will too.

I'd like to share what I wrote for friends and family, though, while he was in intensive care. For all the awesomeness and bright-future-y talk here in Iceland, and all the new construction and all the tourists and such, our health care system is in dire straits. The very building that Dad was in, Landspítali Fossvogi, is literally crumbling in some parts, and seemingly in desperate need of doctors.

But the people inside it, the nurses and doctors, are golden. When you're a traumatic-injury-intensive-care-patient family member, you experience a wrenching of your reality that's hardly describable, and only survivable because of the patience and overwhelming compassion of your loved one's caregivers. We all knew that Dad wouldn't wake up again, wouldn't ever be the same again, but we were graced with eleven days to say goodbye, while the nurses made his passing as comfortable as they could.

What I didn't ever expect, though, was the deep bonds that would form between those of us who ate, slept, worried, hoped and waited in the family sitting room at the hospital. There were never more than five families at any time, but they were people from all across the country, from all walks of life, and even those who had to fly here from abroad, whose relatives had come here for a nice touristy visit and had fallen, or had fallen gravely ill. All these people, caring for each other, will always be remembered...

And dear Dad, out there somewhere, part once again of the dust of time, exploring the universe like the true adventurer you are, I'll keep on posting and keep on writing and keep on looking forward the way you always have. And someday, somehow, we'll meet again... 💕

From Dark Days to Shiny Times, Iceland's Seen It All

2016-12-08T17:18:00.002+00:00

A quiet moment at the rink, which is usually filled with wobbles and happy laughter

(This post is published solely on IcelandEyes.com. If you've found it reposted without permission on a click-bait blog with any other title or a URL that doesn't include the words IcelandEyes, please do yourself a favor and visit the original Iceland Eyes website instead:)

This year's skate rink down at Ingólfstorg is a far cry from the one I posted a photo of a decade ago. It may be a bit smaller, but it's definitely got more atmo, with all the shiny lights and music filling the Advent-season air. Back in the 2006 post, I mentioned that a storm has come in, a proper wind-and-snow number that walloped the island, Arctic-winter style. This skating rink ice may
be the only frozen stuff we'll see this year though, as all forecasts point to an unseasonably warm and rainy December here in Reykjavik.

Since the gifting season is upon us, I'd like to recommend an amazing novel I had the pleasure of beta-reading: Heroes Road. Written by a super-prolific and ever-encouraging writer friend, Chuck Rogers, this alt-history swords-and-sorcery adventure is totally entertaining and absorbing. I definitely recommend this book for fans of the GoT-genre, and those who love getting all-immersed in great writing, memorable characters, a battle or three and a surprise ending that may just have a bit to do with our beloved Iceland. This excellent jólagjöf (yule gift) for the ævintýrafólk in your life (and yourself!) is now available in print at Amazon.

I'd also like to thank Expat Focus for short-listing Iceland Eyes as a Recommended Blog for the global expat community. I love the blurb that contributor Scar wrote up, and am super glad to be part of the Expat Focus community!

Getting back to the theme of old posts, though, while looking through the Iceland Eyes archives (over 720 posts!) I also ran across a piece I wrote in 2004, in this blog's freshman year. I'd just done a bit about the huge jólatré that Norway gives us every Christmas in which I accused them of crimes against our unfortunately-miserable ancestors starting in the Middle Ages:

Every year since 1952 the city of Oslo has sent Reykjavík a beautiful Norwegian Christmas tree. The glorious evergreen, usually at least ten meters tall, is placed lovingly in our city-center park, Austurvellir, and ceremoniously lit in early December to start off the holidays in style.

The sight of such a large piece of forest in the middle of town is both inspirational and intimidating. It is a reminder that we have close cousins just over there to the east a bit, and that they are thinking of us, but also that these same generous frændfólk (relations) used to own us back in the old days and would unfortunately forget to send supplies to us all too often, setting off many many decades of famine and trauma. The tree is like a guilt offering, given that during those destitude centuries our forefathers and mothers were forced to decimate all of Iceland's once-thriving forests just to survive. It is a beautiful tree, but there's a hint of gloat or pity about it. It would take hundreds of years of dedicated arboreal TLC plus global warming to ever grow a tree this large on our now-barren little island. It's like giving a girl a precious silver-backed antique brush and mirror set when you've just shaved off her hair.

A good friend and reader corrected me by noting that it was the Danish who were guilty of neglect. In an effort to correct my assumption, I wrote the following:

I had been thinking of the early times, during the 13th century, when "Iceland was far from being self-sufficient in overseas shipping so an agreement had to be made with the Norwegian king on necessary shipping to Iceland. The Norwegian king, however, did not always succeed in meeting his obligations with respect to a minimum shipping trade." *

I had always been under the impression that the Danes were specifically and purposefully repressive to Icelanders but that the Norwegians simply forgot us, often when we needed them most. Proud Icelandic chieftains had agreed to swear allegiance to Norwegian King Hákon, but refused to allow their country to become a Norwegian State. Still, a tax had to be paid annually to Hákon, and it was my understanding that the King didn't always hold up his end of the deal with his new "friends". In the 14th century, volcanic eruptions decimated a huge portion of the population, both human and livestock, and Icelanders needed help more than ever before.

But by 1380, Denmark took over Norway and acquired Icelands' fealty in the bargain. And the years after that were not pretty, my friends. By the end of the 18th century, "poverty and deprivation increased enormously. A virtually hopeless struggle for the acquisition of bare necessities sapped the nation's courage and enterprise." It would be another 150 years before the Icelandic people managed to shake the yoke of oppression the Danish monarchy collared them with. In 1918, Iceland, after a long struggle, gained full independence, though the King of Denmark was still the King of Iceland as well. By 1944, Iceland was finally a totally self-sufficient Republic, 57,000 people strong.

And now we go to Copenhagen to go shopping and to live a comfy socialized lifestyle, and think of ourselves as owning a bit of the Danish culture. Forgive and forget, maybe? Ask a random Dane in Denmark what they know about Iceland, though, and they'll screw up their face a bit and say, "Björk?"

We are the little cousins with bravado and courage and a more than a tinge of absurd self-importance. But the thing is, we survived all the devastating volcanoes and the ships that didn't come in time for winter and the Black Death and the hostile takeover of our land and commerce by mainlanders. And we deserve to be proud and we deserve that Christmas tree and we deserve to be able to pop on over to downtown Copenhagen for some shopping, culture and inexpensive beer. We've somehow clung to this land for over a millennia and it's ours, goddamit, in all it's flawed glory. Now if we'd just dig up a little of that old fighting spirit and find a way to keep our own greedy, repressive native bad boys in check...

* all quotes from Iceland: a Portrait of it's Land and People" by Hjálmar R. Bárðarson

So there's a bit of history to help keep things in perspective. This now-glittering plaza layered with man-made ice, bustling with visitors from across the planet, on the very spot where, to the best of our knowledge the very first Norse settlers made their homesteads (btw, great post, filled with info and links! :) is a testament to how far we've come in such a very short time.

Now, in our current politically unstable era (both locally and globally) it's crucial that we all remind ourselves that though modern civilization seems to be an ongoing process of shifts and changes, catastrophes, disasters, clashes and failures, it's also the product of an ever-evolving will to betterment, and a hope that our futures are more amazing than what we know today.

Truly, what we imagine, we can, and do, manifest. So let's keep bright thoughts in mind this Solstice season, and make our best and most joyful dreams come true!

Norway Demands to Own an Icelandic Child - in the 21st Century

2016-10-06T11:08:00.000+00:00

Leifur Eiríksson standing guard

A classic shot, and a memorable view for anyone who has traveled here to Reykjavík. This statue of adventurer Leifur Eiriksson ('Leif Eriksson') gifted to Iceland by the US in memory of his travels back in the day, stands brave and tall, silhouetted against an early winter twilight. Son of the famous Eiríkur Rauði, or Erik the Red, who settled Greenland in 986 A.D., and an ancestor of mine 27 generations back, he was also the
grandson of one Þorvaldur (Thorvaldur) Ásvaldsson who fled Norway for Iceland in the Settlement Era and never looked back.

Norway, however, is definitely in the news again here in Iceland, and not in a happy way. I was hoping to find something on the consistently excellent Iceland Review website, one of the most long-standing and influential English-language print and online magazines in the country, or in the Grapevine, but it looks like neither has yet written about the messed up case of the Norwegian Child Welfare Services (Barnevernet) demanding that they be able to take an Icelandic citizen, a 5 year old boy, from his mother and grandmother, with an official deadline that he be handed over in two months. They intend to place the little guy in foster care with some Norse family who will be paid to store him for 13 years. Yes, you read that right. Just in time for a miserable Christmas in the company of strangers!

I don't have the time to go into the whole saga here and now, and I don't see news on this scandal translated into English yet, but we the public are shocked, and are demanding our Minister of the Interior do something, and right quick, so that this child will not be stolen from his family in some modern-day Dickensian nightmare.

I did, though, run the text of an article in Vísir about the situation through Google Translate, and I have to say it came out better than I thought it would, albeit a bit choppy and with some words dropped here and there. I recommend you do the same. Be sure to check out this detailed article and interview about case the from the award-winning newspaper Stundin as well.

Please don't get the impression that this is a stand-alone situation where the enlightened, socialist Norse know something about the child's family that the general public doesn't. Iceland is a small country. Word gets around. Yes, the mother (Elva Christina) is young and as a matter of fact went to summer camp with my own daughter, and yes she had a scary run-in with the very dark underworld of "perfect" Norway when she moved there with her mother, older sister and her toddler son. And yes, she ended up in a six-month Norwegian rehab program (where, rumor has it, there's usually partying going on full-force.)

But she's been sober for a year now, and she's opened up her entire life to the scrutiny of the public, press and Icelandic Child Services because she has nothing to hide. She messed up, she asked for help, and she's finding her way through life one healthy day at a time.

Her ability to perform perfectly as a young mother isn't even the crux of the situation, though. It's this: both her mother and her older sister (who moved out to Norway as well with her husband and their twelve year old daughter) went through all the proper evaluative and administrative steps to have the boy placed legally in their care (after the Norwegian authorities decided that, because Elva had asked for their help to get herself out of the underworld she was stuck in, that she was unfit to parent her son.) Though there seemed no justifiable reason to do so, the Norse authorities decided that, instead of being adopted by his immediate family, whom he wanted to stay with and whom he'd known all his life, he was to be removed, placed with a family paid to take him in, and to only see his mother twice a year, for a few hours at a time and under supervision, for the next 13 years.

Faced with that Helena, his grandmother, flew her daughter and grandson home to Iceland this summer. Norse authorities want the boy back.

That's the raw bit of this story. That's where Norway's demands are exposed for what they are: kidnapping.

And once again, if you think this is a unique situation, it simply isn't. Go ahead and run "Norway child services" through your search engine. You´ll get headlines like, Norway Child Welfare Services faces growing global protests and Norway is Taking Children From Their Parents and Sparking an Outcry, and even, from the mighty BBC, Norway's Barnevernet: They took our four children...then the baby.

Or you can watch this documentary by Australia's award-winning current affairs show, SBS Dateline, entitled Norway's Stolen Children? for a chilling view into what some are calling a modern-day version of a totalitarian state, cloaked in the mantle of some romanticized ideal of Scandinavian socialist perfection.

It's anything but.

If this happens, it'll not only break the hearts of everyone involved, but it will destroy this boy forever. He's definitely old enough to have firm, clear memories of his mother and grandmother, the scents of them and the feel of their love for him. If he's taken away, he'll be being told, directly and/or indirectly, that these women, and his aunt and uncle, are bad people. This will contradict every ounce of deep love he has for them, and he'll never be able to truly trust his feelings again. Children are forgiving creatures, and if we let them their presence can heal us and give us hope for the future. To destroy the inherent bond of familial love with the violence of unnecessary, forced separation, to cast doubt on the pure heartfelt feelings of a child and demand that he or she deny and mistrust their own emotions, is destruction of the kind that bleeds down through the generations, unhealed.

The pain this boy will feel if he's taken from his family will never be soothed, the hole where his mother was will never be filled, though for the rest of his life he'll try to do just that, in any way he has to, and with whatever long-term repercussions. I feel like I can state that to be a fact.

This can't be allowed to happen. And if I have any say in it, if protests need to take place, if a wall of bodies needs to stand guard at this family's home, I'll do my best to make sure it doesn't.

If you'd like to state your opinion to the Icelandic government, please feel free to write to Ólöf Nordal, Minister of the Interior, at: postur@irr.is, visit her on Facebook or find her on Twitter at @olofnordal.

[Update December 12th: Little Eyólfur will NOT be sent to Norway! This is huge news, and though no further details have been released, it's an absolute blessing for the child that he won't be removed from the extended family that loves him less than two weeks before Christmas. It feels strange wishing congratulations to Elva as this should never have happened at all, but Congratulations all the same! : )

[Update October 7th: Vala Hafstað has just published an article on this scandal for Iceland Review.]

Elva Christina and her son. Photo by Anton Brink for Visir

A September Evening in Reykjavik

2016-09-27T10:50:00.002+00:00

The intersection of Laugavegur and Klapparstígur

I took this photo back in September 2011 when I was out for a late evening walk in my neighborhood on Skólavörðurholt.

This intersection doesn't look too much different today. The greenish house there center frame, which is always called the Hljómalind House) has transitioned from the popular but totally grotty coffee house/pub it was in the photo (fire hazard, terrible plumbing) to the much more upscale but still charming Kaffibrennslan bistro (which btw I used to work at when it was down by Hótel Borg where, incidentally, my father worked as a porter when he was only 13:)

The art deco facade of Hótel Borg, from Austurvellir town square

Today the old timber and corrugated iron building in that first photo has been revamped inside, a far cry from when it used to be the Hljómalind record shop downstairs run by Kiddi Kanína in the 90's. He was the first manager of Sigur Rós, and the story goes that their song Hjlómalind, is named after the shop. Later it was a very convenient after-party house for when the hard-core bars Sirkús (the little blue house next door in the photo, now torn down) and Bar 22, (kitty-corner, now Bravó and Kíkí) shut down their thumping music for the night.

After that some acquaintances of mine opened the hippie-organic Kaffi Hljómalind, that was later booted out under grumbly circumstances. They re-opened a few houses up the street and did their best to keep things going, even holding yoga and meditation sessions in their new basement, but they got chucked out there too, to be replaced by a candy store, of all things. Today that location houses the everything Apple Macland store where a friend as well as a former student hold court.

The reason the hippie café was tossed out of the house in the photo is because property developers had swooped in and bought the block, and had intentions of tearing down pretty much everything on it and building something shiny, new and horrible. They were stalled by local protestation against redevelopment at the expense of historic Reykjavík. While waiting for things to move forward, the Heart Park mysteriously appeared, as if overnight, on the open lot behind this house:

The old Heart Park, or Hjartagarðinn

It was much-loved for the few years it existed, but eventually it was ripped up and redevelopment marched on:

Looking north from Laugavegur over towards Smiðjustígur and Hverfisgata

This photo was taken from a little wooden observation deck set up so that the curious could see what was going on behind the walls of the construction site. I took quite a few photos while it was ongoing, which I'm glad about, because these are scenes of Reykjavik that'll never been seen again now that the new Hilton Canopy hotel, restaurants and shops are getting their finishing touches on this same lot.

That said, I'm actually impressed with what's been done to preserve the look and feel of the local architectural style while totally renovating what was, in many cases, very degraded and dangerous old structures, underfunded and poorly built in the first place.

For a closing photo, here's a shot of the mountain-top mural that you can see at the top of one of the buildings in that first pic. That building still stands, but the mural is gone. Once again, I'm glad I took a photo when I did...

Lovely Wildflowers at Seljalandsfoss

2016-07-04T16:31:00.002+00:00

Everyone who was visiting the falls at the same time seemed very happy and friendly. Fun and easy road trip!

Nights and Evenings Down by the Sun Voyager

2016-05-27T00:08:00.000+00:00

Has everyone had enough of politics for the time being? I have, so here's a pretty shot taken a few weeks ago down by the bay. The sky turned red right around 10 pm, so I bundled Óðinn into the car and zipped the few blocks down the hill to the Sólfarið (Sun Voyager) sculpture to try to catch the light. I didn't get quite the dramatics I was hoping for, but this is still lovely.

Back in the 90's I had the strangest experience at this very spot. I wrote about it a few years back, and in the interest of getting as far away as possible from current affairs, I'm going to share it here now. I hope you enjoy the read:

it’s decades ago, i’m a jaded baby, and i’ve been drinking. summer night
on the lava rock, down by the big bay with that treacherous looming mass of old-school mountain across the water, esja, rubbed smooth by winds and rains and snow, gully-lined and recently planted with the kinds of things that stick in this blasted place, some semblance of how it used to be before the crass and destructive race of us came to stay.

but that low mountain is nothing more than a scene set for this memory. the real action takes place at the sun boat, stretching its aluminum prow upwards into the endless summer twilight. there i go, tipsy, alone, wrapped in a thrift store vintage dior of wide knee-length black wool, black stockings, black cowboy boots, pre-emo, or what we used to call alternative. i’ve met the boys of the night and they are hopeless and desperate and dour, frisky at 3am and just as gutless. i have faded from the party (which party doesn’t matter...it’s all the same in this town, on this kind of night) and ghosted off by myself to hear the whispers of the sea. i grew up alongside a different sea.

i stand, as is my practice, in mountain pose. tonight there is no wind and the sky is clear, i can see the outline of summer houses there over the wide water, and i’m more than alone. i stand. i am still.

we're not supposed to be still. it’s a dubious situation, fraught with the terrors of a constant Now. i stand and watch the sea, small waves lapping at the well-placed rocks (this little city’s coastline is the work-in-progress of an artisan of unrecognized genius...for over two decades now he has found and moved and placed ton-weight boulders in an astoundingly orderly fashion along seaside walking paths with nothing more than his instinct toward beauty and a small yellow bulldozer.) i see tiny whitecaps emerging and remerging with the salty deeps. i place myself directly in line with the prow of the scale-model skeleton of a ship of the type our ancestors emigrated here in. a circle of smooth paving surrounds the sculpture, with a thin ring of rougher concrete separating it from the organized boulders that slope into the dark northern waters. i stand on the concrete, heels and toes together, hands in pockets, warm and content. behind me on the seaside thoroughfare cars whiz by at a four a.m. frequency, not so many then in this mini metropolis. all is good. i'm in the elements, the light breeze lulls me, i'm alone and fully happy, reminded of what i think i must have wanted as a child standing on scaled rocks laden with tidepools all those years ago on the edge of another world, with a very different ocean as my dear friend.

in my stillness the water comes alive. i see a dance of ballroom proportions, duets of water fairies in perfect takt, just below and somehow of the surface of the cold arctic briny. they don’t waltz on top of, nor really below, but are the water itself, maybe a few human feet deep and i am mesmerized! in my stolid state they are the only things alive, there is no city behind me, there is no man-eating mountain in the northern distance, there are only lovely dancing díses and a pair of human eyes as witness. i accept that this show is for me, and at the same time that this happens always, this perfect ritual. they don't disappear. minutes pass. they emerge even more distinctly, the music they sway to fills and blossoms, they arc and twine in sacred couples, trailing lovely silken elvish dresses in their wake. i know i am blessed to witness this! long moments pass in clock time, i am still, the sun flows eastwards to its dipping point where it will rewaken as a sunrise. a respectful smile fills my heart. i am in awe.

how is this happening, how does this beauty show for a soul so late into a hopeless party night? i ask in silence, but the sprites don’t answer.

i hear footsteps behind me, and i'm tempted to turn around, but i don’t. “are you ok?” someone asks. a woman. “is everything alright?” she is close to me, very close, she is right behind me and i can sense her moving in to my bubble of stillness. “yes, i’m fine,” i answer without turning around. i can’t take my sight from the sea, my reply is almost a whisper, my human voice is chilled and unused, but i know the stranger can hear me. she moves into my line of sight, and i see that it’s a police woman. she smiles at me. “are you sure?” and i smile back. i can see right away that she is a gentle person, though i don’t know why she’s there with me at the edge of the city, where the boulders meet the ice cold sea. she says, “we got a call. someone saw you, someone thought you might be....someone thought you might be thinking of....” i look at her with my newly sober sight, questioning, curious. “we were worried that you might be thinking of...jumping in...”

stillness, stillness at night, stillness dressed in black at the very edge of a cold cold ocean, is a suspect state. and there’s no way to explain, in the endless twilight of a nordic summer night, what i’ve seen. i give in to a more mundane reality and say a silent goodbye to the lovely forms of the waters. i think i know in that moment that i'll never see them again. i pause, then turn to the policewoman and smile. she smiles back and nods her understanding, and so i start my quiet walk home.

Iceland at a Crossroads: Elections, Elves and Old vs New

2016-05-24T15:27:00.001+00:00

That's literally 10kg of plastic waste in a net tacked to the wall. There's even a white toy pony in there.

A couple of days ago this temporary wall was covered in street art and today it's got this great infographic instead.

Street art rocks (and we've got some masterful spray artists here) but I like that someone thought of utilizing this space to get a message across. Plastic is such a huge issue and plenty of cities across the globe have banned lightweight plastic shopping bags and even, in the case of San Francisco, plastic-bottled water being sold in public places. Here in Iceland we've had to pay 15 - 20 króna for plastic bags since forever, though it's just in the past few years that shoppers seem to be really getting into bringing their own bags when going out for groceries. Change takes time, and
getting un-junked from the 20th century Age of Plastic single-use, disposable, "convenience" mentality is no exception.

if you've been here to Reykjavík you've walked past this site, at Laugavegur 4-6. Back in the day it was where the Nike house was, which then got torn down and replaced in 2011 by a cute old-timey wooden building which housed the Timberland shoe store. Now that's been removed too, and a huge hole has been hydraulically hammered out of the bedrock, something the local residents, shopkeepers and guests have been being traumatized by all winter:

Look, we made another hole! Now what were we gonna do with it?

Faithful readers know I have a thing for construction sites and gaping holes in our hill, so it won't come as a surprise that I snuck past the site barrier and snapped a pic of what was going on behind it. See, this plot of land has held a fascination for me since I was a little girl visiting our relatives here from California. My Amma Ásta lived just up the holt on Óðinsgata, and I wandered around town as often as I could, checking out the fascinating shops and wonders.

Just below this construction location, at the intersection of Laugavegur and Skólavörðurstígur where Kofinn café and Sushibarinn are now, was a butchers shop, replete with hanging sides of lamb and sheeps heads in the window. When I was five I found that fascinating! And there was a book store across the street at Skólavörðurstígur 2, Bókabúð Lárusar Blöndal. I loved to hide out there, reading and looking at postcards (they had to close shop in 2001 after nearly 60 years in the same spot due to rising rent.) Also close by was the recently closed shop Vísir, just across Laugavegur, with its magical selection of Icelandic sweets and licorice.

But there's always been something else about this intersection, and this plot of land, that's held my imagination. A little research informs me that the building standing there now, Laugavegur 2, was built in 1886, and hasn't changed much in the past 130 years:

Laugavegur 2, back when it wasn't quite so busy here.

Before that building was built, though, there was a farmhouse on this plot formally named Hólshúsið, but called Snússi, and before that, earlier in the 19th century, a little turf house called Litlibær. There's not much recorded history reaching back farther than that though, when what we now call Skólavörðurholt was a barren, rocky expanse considered too far away from the true town center to the west to be of any worth. Compare this treeless, undeveloped view from the top of Skólavörðurstígur, taken only around 136 years ago, with the same perspective today in this classic shot from the top of the church tower and it's easy to see what they meant:

Did something happen at this crossroads long, long ago? Something dramatic, that may have left an imprint on the land itself? I'm thinking something to do with the original settlers here, or maybe even farther back than that (some of you know that I suspect this island has a much deeper history than the ones we've inherited from our Norse viking ancestors). Was it a ceremonial spot? Or the site of a murder, maybe? Or was it, as I've dreamt a few times now, the entrance to an elven realm?

I guess we'll never know.

What 's obvious though, is that we're facing changing times here, on all levels. The trash issue I started this post with is definitely something us locals have to deal with immediately. I joke that the best financial investments a person could get into here in Iceland are waste management and invasive species control, but what I'm really saying is the capitalist-consumer mania we've been hypnotized by for the past two decades has to stop.

We have to snap out of it and WAKE UP. We've got presidential elections coming up in June, and the sole voice of sanity regarding our human future on this gorgeous island is Andri Snær Magnason, award-winning writer and the man behind the amazing book Dreamland - a Self Help Manual for a Frightened Nation (2008) and its award-winning accompanying documentary film, Dreamland.

How wonderful of our forefathers and mothers to turn the bleak expanse in the photos above into the lush, colorful and welcoming arctic capital that Reykjavik is today, but we're on the verge of tipping past the point of being able to handle the consequences of our more modern, worldly and greed-based choices.

Being eco-friendly and sustainable doesn't mean being passive, hippie, barefoot grass-feeders. It means designing and creating infrastructure that supports a new-millennial, 21st century model of care-taking and civic maintenance. It doesn't mean fewer jobs or tightened belts or lack or want or repression. It means being innovative to the extreme, utilizing our natural landscape in the most efficient, practical and beautiful ways possible, just as Icelanders have historically found ways to do. Dedicating ourselves to the modern eco-movement is one of the sexiest and lokkandi (inviting) things we could do on the global stage. We'd be the darlings of the world again for daring to reach into a New Future.

The long and short of it: I may never know what really went down at this main Reykjavik crossroad, and what choices were made when, and by whom. I may have no say in how the very granite bedrock beneath our hill is being broken up for underground parking, rattling the psyches of the locals (those seen and unseen!) to the core.

But I do have a say in how I vote, and who I believe to be the most responsible and respectable representative of our island on an international level. At this crossroads in our history, I choose Andri Snær Magnason to be our leading light into a responsible and beautiful future for Iceland.

What will you choose?

Meditating Under a Volcano: at Snæfellsjökull

2016-05-09T18:45:00.001+00:00

Óðinn under Snæfellsjökull a few years ago

It's obvious from my past few posts that I'm not exactly non-political. But at the rate that things are changing here, I'm pretty glad I haven't written up anything since our first lady, Dorrit Moussaieff, was revealed to have links to Mossack Fonseca in the Panama Papers leak.

If I'd have jumped on the news that her husband, our president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson decided to run again for office, edging out the frontrunners with his older conservative constituency, or that our former PM Davíð Oddsson, a man deemed responsible for the 2008 crash, then said he was running, upsetting the polls even more, the public seeming to now have to choose between
two old fogies they knew well, or that in between those two events the sitting president had to claim no knowledge of his wife's finances and admit they lived, for the most part, in separate spheres of reality, then I'd have wasted a lot of time at the keyboard.

Because as of earlier today, the president backed out of the running, fulfilling again the claim he made in his New Years Eve address that he'd retire the position this year. This move on his part was, in my humble opinion, a set up between Oddsson and Grímsson as a means of allowing the president to gracefully back out of the race now that his wife is definitely connected to offshore accounts (link is to a great Guardian article from May 2), something he'd recently heartily denied. And of course it's timed very well with tonight's second data reveal on Mossack Fonseca by the ICIJ, which may very well cause even more chaos here on our disturbingly corrupt island. As usual, Paul Fontaine at the Reykjavík Grapevine has put it all together very nicely in his coverage of the emerging situation.

So in the meantime, until the next vinkill emerges, I think this is a great time to chill out, breathe deep and meditate on what we're grateful for right Now, and what we'd like to see for the future of our island and for ourselves.

A Nice View, and Me Trying to Avoid Delving Deeper Into Our First Lady's Affairs

2016-04-28T16:55:00.000+00:00

A view from Hallgrímskirkja

Find the clump of trees in the lower left corner of this photo, and that's where I took the last post's cat pic. It's a shady corner of the the garden behind the Einar Jónsson Museum, a favorite spot for locals to ponder and chill, adults, kids and cats alike. As a matter of fact, the cat in the previous photo is one of four who live across the street, in the building with the red roof and all-glass corner 'penthouse.' They come across the street with their human, who enjoys
sitting in the garden in good weather while his feline friends meander through the foliage, entertaining and posing for tourists, which our beloved Míó used to love to do as well when we lived in the light blue-roofed building dead center of the photo above, just behind the top of the tall pine tree.

if you've been to the top of Hallgrímskirkja you'll recognize this scene, looking due-west over the Reykjavik city center and our Tjörnin town lake. I really like this aerial view, though the northwest (no reference to Kim and Kanye's recent visit intended ; ) perspective in the photo from this 2005 post is much more frequently photographed.

But as I wrote after my last visit to the top of the tower in 2012, "locals' complacency" is a real thing that keeps so many of us, in whatever gorgeous and special place we live, from taking advantage of the sites and wonders that visitors seem to enjoy so much. Back then, four years ago, it was my son Óðinn who was celebrating his 6th birthday and wanted to go up, so we did. I took a shot towards the southeast, and then looking directly down at the decorative paving in front of the church, which out of context, very few people recognize. It's always nice to get a new perspective on things by changing your vantage point, and in this case it was my kid who reminded me to do it. He goes up to the top of the church tower every once in a while with his buddies from the 'hood, but I think it's time for me to take another trip up myself. After all, I only live a few hundred meters away : )

And now I have to admit that I'm rehashing older post material in a futile attempt to not go any farther into writing about politics as I've done in my past few posts. I have to, though, link to this 2001 interview with the recently deceased father, Shlomo Moussaieff, of our First Lady, Dorrit Moussaieff. I also really want to link to this 2006 article about "concentrated wealth" featuring Dorrit as the "owner of the eponymous shop [in London] and a legendary dealer of diamonds." In these articles Dorrit is portrayed as either a flighty party girl in deep with the international jet set, or one of the most influential diamond merchants in the world. I think the takeaway message is that she's both, depending on what angle you view her story from.

In reality, it's her mother Alisa who is the "mastermind and driving force" behind the House of Moussaieff, a woman who has been running an extremely tight operation for half a century, a business where what you know and don't know at any given moment could make or break you. After all, the House of Moussaieff is purveying the rarest of gems to the most wealthy, powerful and dangerous people in the world. In that kind of company, you make very certain that nothing's going to come back to haunt you, or discredit you or your very exclusive clientele.

But as the Reykjavik Grapevine recently disclosed, our president Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson's wife Dorrit seems to have [update May 2: does have] connections to offshore accounts via Mossack Fonseca, as revealed in the Panama Papers. The power couple has unfortunately denied any knowledge of this. Ólafur actually went so far as to categorically deny any potential involvement in an interview with CNN's hard-hitting Christiane Amanpour only days before the disclosure. I say unfortunately, because it's nearly impossible for them to deny knowledge of Moussaieff Jewelers Ltd's dealings without at the same time admitting to not having performed the due diligence required of a head of state and the owner of "one of the most discreet and exclusive High Jewellery emporiums in the world." I'll put it this way: in their shoes, I'd have set my legal and accounting teams to the task of digging for any possible connection to Panama or other tax havens the minute the leak was made public. That they didn't, and were "surprised" by the revelation, smacks disingenuous. It doesn't help matters that Dorrit moved her legal residence back to London in 2012, a move which some find suspicious (tax evasion?) and which basically just leaves a bad taste in the mouths of plenty of others.

Regardless, their story is just one more in what's turning out to be a whole lot of crumbling truths and bumbling in the affairs of our once-again inglorious leaders. It's true that any set of seemingly random factoids can be joined up and arranged to support any number of theoretical truths, so just humor me while I play connect-the-dots with regard to our increasingly bizarre involvement in the global game of wealth and power. Maybe, as one (repeat) presidential candidate, Ástþór Magnússon, claims, Dorrit's diplomatic immunity gives her the ability to move portable wealth in the form of diamonds around the world with total freedom, and maybe this whole affair between the House of Moussaieff and Iceland is a much more sordid scenario than anyone wants to imagine. Maybe it's all just as innocent as can be. Who knows. From where I'm sitting though, nothing would surprise me...

Truth comes in shades of grey...

Who is Iceland Actually in Bed With, or Here's a Picture of a Local Feline Because Cats and Internet

2016-04-17T21:00:00.004+00:00

A Reykjavik feline in its native habitat, totally not connected to the article

I got some interesting feedback on my last post, including an enlightening conversation with a friend who's employed as a diplomatic correspondent between a certain extremely high-level European country and Iceland, via their embassy here. He hadn't read my piece when we sat down to talk, but I gave him the general rundown, including some details that had yet to occur at the time of writing, including that Iceland finally (almost unanimously)
approving its national defense policy and within hours announcing that US military flyovers will resume posthaste, on their ever-ridiculous hunt for Russian subs.*

Word on the street (aka via this CNN article) is that Mother Russia is pumping out submarines like a mamma bunny, far too many for the over-taxed, thinly-spread American armed forces according to RT. Who knows but that the truth of the matter lies somewhere in between the propaganda.

But after talking to various sources, it's clear that some grand game is afoot, and our fat and juicy island is right in the middle of it all. Both literally and figuratively.

It's also interesting to note that we're the ONLY European country to have signed an trade agreement with China (and that that 2013 news is still the banner headline on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website) which, if you think about it might complicate our business within the NATO community given that China and Russia are technically, read financially, in bed with each other, along with the other BRICS nations (BRICS = Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). As per my last post, who are we actually, on the ground, when the shit hits the fan, beholden to? Big Q.

My source in the diplomatic community says that small countries like ours need to keep many irons in the fire given that we never know which way the wind will blow. I suppose I agree, unless we play so many sides against each other that a good slapping down by this or that master is in order, which may or may not have just happened with this recent first wave of Panama Papers disclosures. With many more to come...

*For the sake of grounding and disclosure, my father, Thor Roff, served in the US Navy, on the USS Great Sitkin, from 1960 to 1964, which ship was part of the Bay of Pigs blockade back in the day. I take no issue with military service or militaries in general, but question the US policy of soft occupation in countries across the globe, both occidental and oriental, southern and northern latitudes alike.

Iceland's MunnyKids, Russian Loans, Offshore Laundries, Contrailed Skies, Ancient Cults and Maybe a Sheik or Two

2016-04-07T14:59:00.016+00:00

Sailing from sunshine into shadows...somehow symbolic

When I found this street art in an alley by my house I was bummed that the bow was shadowed, and that the branches added a stormy sense of unease to the otherwise adventurous image. But then it occurred to me how perfect the symbolism was for the bit I'm about to share, written to day, and posted sans links on my Facebook wall.

What follows has been years in the considering, but this week's ridiculousness and sense of just-controlled panicky chaos from the 'ruling' parties here in Iceland brought it all home for me in a nicely wrapped bundle, ready to be typed and published and shared with the world at large. It's not the writing style most of my frequent visitors are used to, but it's as much me as anything else I've shared here on Iceland Eyes.

Iceland 2008: Our MunnyBoys (and girls too?) are still gambling at the Big Kids table, betting long and hard and fast and we're proud of them!* And even though respected rags like The Guardian had begun asking exactly where some of that cash being tossed about came from (could it perhapsies be Russian mafia dough?) no one really cares! They're on a winning streak, until they're not. In early days October,
the house of cards collapses, and all the cocaine and champagne in the world can't make it go back to how it was. Eyes go glassy. The party's over.

The banks fail and though in the ensuing years we've gotten all sorts of credit for having 'let them,' no one could have stopped the freefall, in retrospect looking suspiciously like a controlled demolition. Were we set up to implode for a soft takeover? It's been proposed.

But here, on the streets, in the towns, faces blanche. National shock-sobriety freezes everyone in their tracks, barely able to wonder what the fokk to do next.

Four days later, we accept a four-ish year $5.4 billion loan from Russia at 5% interest.

A confused populace wonders if we should be busting out the Rosetta Stone and learning the Cyrillic alphabet. Putin approves it, so does our PM. Can we trust these guys? Are we sold?

The story gets press-legs and runs around the major media outlets for a month or so, then disappears. Contemporary sources say it never happened.

By late November our bankster-loving and much-despised to-our-chagrin-legitimately-elected overlords formally accept $2.7 billion from the IMF, forcing us to publicly declare, on our knees, who our new masters are. We've been owned.

But soon, by January 2009, people are losing their homes, getting laid off by the ton, and we're pissed. We get out our loudspeakers, pots and pans, and gather pallets for burning. We chant in front of our dollhouse-sized Parliament in the freezing cold and bang our metals together, and light bonfires throughout long nights until the gamblers, who've staked our very gramma's pension and lost, creep back into their holes to plot their next coup. Some of us naively think we've won.

Fast forward to 2015.

ColdWar.20 is in full fury, a war of infobits, of words, of downed planes and proxy soldiers. It's a Hand-of-God kind of war, the battlefield being the entire planet as mapped out like a game of Risk. Everyone's involved, or can be if they've got thumbs to type with and a twit feed. The duped world populace has settled into knowing that international munnies are shifting endlessly, bits and digits, forever never reaching the account balance field of the banking app on their gadget. The audible sighs of all those who've given up hope cause the clouds to form in strange undulations, and the night skies begin to light up noctilucent as the frequency shifts to Highly Edgy for the 7 billion souls on earth.

But Iceland's doing fine. We pay off our IMF loan in full, unheard of in the annals of usury.

The MunnyBoys&Girls are stoked. Unknown to the masses, kept busy finding new and innovative ways to suck at the tourism teat, they've socked away all the loot they could last-minute online transfer just before the fail, korter í hrun, in warm islands, to lay there and incubate, to grow slowly with interest as the plot to make it magically double thickens. They rub their hands together in suppressed glee. The locals choose to have no or little clue.

But war is war, and a close look at a Risk board or any old map will show you just what fat and juicy little gulf stream-warmed island, too remote for migrants to cross into, but close enough for a weekend getaway, floats right there in between the conflicting parties. Lush fishing grounds surround it, with a tantalizing hint of undersea oil fields to boot. Some say there's even diamonds in them thar hills. Water, and plenty of it, running freely hot and cold. Electricity at the cheap. Stunning rhyolite hills and waterfalls. Beautiful men and fertile women with just the right amount of sass to keep it interesting. And on top of it all, location, location, location.

One day the population of cousins littering the edges of this magical, top-ten destination island read in the papers that the US navy is coming back to babysit our space again (one of the prices Iceland paid to receive $44 million in post-WWII Marshall Plan cash.) We go huh? and our shiny MunnyKids say they'd never been told a thing! The US says no more, falls suspiciously silent, but in the next days armed forces jets fly overhead leaving contrails in massive striped formations above our capital city, and the astute understand that whether or not those kids in office had been feigning ignorance, it didn't matter. Even with all of our stun-guns, billy clubs and mace gathered in the same space, we could never out-force the occidental power flexing its muscle in our skies. Owned again.

Or were we? In light of the Panama Papers, here's what I'd like to propose:

Some certain somebodies did take the Russian munnies, investing it and/or squirrling it away for a day when no one would notice it had ever existed. Maybe even the Mighty Putin himself had for a while there forgotten that he'd ever tried to help a fellow European nation through tough times way back when, and, being a busy man, had never noticed that some of the sleazier members of our island population had pawed at and pocketed the dough, wink wink.**

Or maybe it was pure gangster munny, not unheard of in this day and age. Maybe there were sheiks involved, again. Whatever went down, whoever loaned out the money, has not forgotten that they did. Maybe independent Iceland, seemingly so easily able to squirm away from owing anybody a gaddam thing all these years, isn't really so free at all. Maybe the next-gen suited-up punks from our local power families, who we elected back into office to manage us, actually sold their souls for an eastern-style black-market buck, with the intention of setting up our homeland financial system to make that munny double up in offshore accounts, as advised to by mysterious backroom parties. Then they'd feed the circling loansharks, take a tidy profit themselves, and everyone'd be happy, blessbless.

So to buy time to make their munny moves in order to pay back the Russians or sheiks from Arabia or shady high rollers of no specific nationality, they have to coyly put off any new American presence on our soil, at least for now.*** Everyone knows it looks far better to be a concubine of the States than admit you've gone down totting on an Eastern Mobster, but even the MunnyBunch understand that you can't serve two masters. One would have to wait while the other was gotten off, takk very much, ok?

Enter the Panama Papers revelations. It being a Cold War, and war being what it is, the disgruntled and rebuffed Western Power took our MunnyBoys down. The partly Rockefeller and Soros-owned ICIJ tapped into the current restless Iceland zeitgeist by revealing our pudgy PM, already heavily disliked for many moons, as a fraud, complete with a well-drawn headline illustration of him with a "who me?" mug next to some of the men the propaganda-run western world is told to despise the most. Our local baby-rich kids played their hand too long, possibly begging behind closed doors for just a bit more time before being reoccupied by our US masters, who, it turns out, never went so very far away at all...

But no, I'm sure this is just the plot for my next novel, seeping into my conscience, my seething writers mind, whiff by bit. I guess I'll just write it down as pure speculative fiction. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

~

* Once again, the glory of writing: while trying to find the linked 2005 speech by the Icelandic President, I discovered that the Walbrook Club where he gave this speech is located on one of the most historic and powerful plots of land in London. Not only is it where the Bank of London sits, but is also the Roman worship site of the very ancient Old God Mithras, whose all-male cult built a temple around 250AD, later excavated at Walbrook Street after WWII.

** In this article from Oct. 2008, just microseconds after the crash, the writer ponders why Iceland would look to Russia for a bailout when it's part of NATO? Indeed! He gathers some great quotes to shore up the tantalizing theory that there were wome serious shenanigans going down.

*** Here's another fascinating article, this one on how the US secretly debated stashing some nukes in Iceland. Fun times!

A post script: my cousin, who's been in the world of finance in the UK wrote this comment on Facebook: "Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction... I've certainly heard speculation of Icelandic idiots being used for Russian money laundering. This from guys working in the City."

And in a new development, Lilja Dögg Alfreðsdóttir has just this evening been appointed as the new Foreign Affairs Minister. As a former employee of the IMF in Washington DC, this fits disturbingly well into my little narrative.

The Panama Papers and Iceland's Once Again in the Global Headlines

2016-04-04T14:32:00.001+00:00

Two boys traipsing the rim of the volcanic crater Grábrók

The path of progress is never a straight line.

We Icelanders are once again facing some very dire times in lieu of the Panama Papers scandal that's splayed our increasingly intolerable PM (who's just declared that he's NOT going to resign, thank you very much) across the global headlines, side by side with some highly illustrious characters (which he, unfortunately seems to be reveling in!?)

I'll write more tomorrow after this evening's massive protest. Bless í bili!

What Do I Know About Blogging, Really?

2016-04-01T13:36:00.004+00:00

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This scene might bring back memories for those of you who've been here before. It's the road into Þingvellir, with the lake appearing as a thin sliver of blue just under the distant mountains on the right side of the photo. It was a very picturesque day!

A few days after this photo was taken, I found myself at Súfistinn café in the Mál og Menning bookstore being interviewed by a Finnish university student for her thesis on travel blog culture. She found me via Bloglovin' which I'd kind of forgotten about, but which seems to have kept up with the times with a clean new look and streamlined interface. Annika asked
some interesting questions, and I found myself digging deep into the way blog culture has changed over and again in the past 17 years.

I started my first blog in 2001, two years after Blogger launched. Since then, what a blog is has changed: it's gone from being a wordy, clunky, public diary (which you had to learn html to make any changes to), to being seen as a lame 'old-people's' social club when MySpace, Twitter, and the rest arrived, and then to hard-hitting journalistic platform and savvy media outlet to, finally, being the oversaturated, hack-written, SEO'd marketing machine it is today (I worked as a hack writer for an SEO builder, and was paid pennies to churn out 600-800 word articles with 24-hour turnaround, given only a title and mood to start with. Here and here are two pieces I wrote that were accredited to other people - without my prior knowledge - by the now-defunct company that hired my fingers to type.)

I told Annika, with all due respect to readers who're also still blogging old-timey-style (you know who you are;) that I felt like a dinosaur. And I'm actually ok with that.

She asked me if I felt that I'd influenced people with this project of mine, and I had to honestly answer yes. I told her about the comments and emails I've gotten from around the world, thanking me for sharing my Iceland,* and how I've been able to answer peoples' questions and even meet some readers for coffee or beer when they've come here to visit. I told her that even though the Reykjavík Museum of Photography (Ljósmyndasafn Reykjavíkur) doesn't consider my photos to be old enough to be promoted by them formally, I do feel like I've kept a visual diary of the city and all the changes its undergone in this crazy last decade that future generations may be thankful for (my friend Ari - who's been a guest photographer here - at Fótógrafí on Skólavörðurstígur has also done a lot of great work in this area.)

She also noted that a lot of the blogs she got links for were defunct, and I told her that it's been interesting seeing people start blogs, hit the ground running, get a lot of attention, then lose interest or even lose faith in the whole hyper-public social media circus, and all the spam and junk and spew that can go along with it. I don't get a lot of comments given how many readers I have, but I'm very relieved that I haven't gotten lame haters here, or too much comment spam. My blog, has, however, been stolen and republished, without attribution, on at least two click-bait sites. As in, my whole blog...all 700+ posts as far as I can see. Sigh.

Annika was also curious to know if I'd ever profited from Iceland Eyes, or had ever gotten advertisers. I've of course profited immensely in knowledge-gained and the international contacts (actually, friends!) I've made, and have gotten a few paying research and translation projects to boot through it, have been invited on to the BBC's World Have Your Say live radio show twice and worked with the Tokyo Broadcasting System on a news piece on whaling but nothing more. This way I'm óháð, or non-beholden to anyone. I've never gotten free goodies or any kickbacks for mentioning or linking to businesses or persons like some of these tumblr teens get (crazy good article on that slice of the internet that you, being over 25, have no clue about. At all.) It made me wonder though about press passes and the like, and if I shouldn't just start aiming at formal journalism. Something to consider.

Meeting Annika, then, was another great bonus for having spent a little over 30% of my life blogging for the (mostly unknown) masses. So here at Iceland Eyes, we'll just keep moving forward into the rainbow-filled future, grateful, one day, one post at a time : )

* Seen through my eyes, hence the name...though I get confused with being an optometrist, or people want to automatically say Icelandic Eyes, so I've thought for years about changing the name. Also, the body parts reference...eyeballs...maybe not so appealing. Alva's Iceland, instead? Maybe. And a move to Wordpress? I'm tempted! More on that later.

Things We Find in Our Garden on Easter Sunday

2016-03-27T12:53:00.000+00:00

Gleðileg páska! / Happy Easter!

Peace and Love to everyone, everywhere around our beautiful Mother Earth.

May the seeds you plant bear fruit, and may your life be full of joy and prosperity *.*

Let's Go on an Historical Journey Into Iceland's Viking Past

2016-03-17T12:50:00.004+00:00

The Black Church at Kjalarnes, which sits on land wrought with history.

I first shared this photo in March, 2008. When I mentally time-travel back to that season of my life I get this strange kind of psychic itch, like a sense that someday, eight years into the future, I'd be writing from a completely different perspective.

That month I was on the very verge of making a huge, crucial decision that would change my and my childrens' lives forever. I was gathering courage and lining up my ducks to be able to break with the living situation I was in and to start moving us into a calmer, happier life. A few months after this photo was shared I bought our freedom from a broken relationship, took over full ownership of/responsibility for the mortgage on our home, and started over again. Later that same year the financial crash happened, and plenty of people across the globe would end up being forced to do the same thing: rethink entire lives.

So here we are, then, nearly a decade later, in the ultra-modern year of 2016. But we're still battling archaic social structures and oppressive patriarchal regimes, just I had to do in 2008, and (here comes the segue into the Viking stuff ; ) like the first settlers to Iceland did eleven and a half centuries ago when they left the comforts of Norway. Things really haven't changed so much at all: everyone still just wants the chance to stretch their wings and grow and fly or, as was the case way back in the 9th century AD, to sail away in fancy dragon-headed row boats for foreign shores unknown.

We're told by Icelandic writers in their world renowned Sagas that that's exactly what happened in 871 (plus or minus a year or two): intrepid explorers set off, nobly escaping an oppressive monarchical regime with their womenfólk, horses, sheep, cattle, dogs, goats, chickens, and a few stowaway mice and rats (but no cats that we know of) to settle on this strange and brand-new, just discovered island, almost totally empty except for a godly cave-dwelling Irish monk or two, who in their spare time enjoyed carving crosses into the lava walls of their shelters. Seeing the mighty Norsemen and their strong braided-haired women, the weakly monks leap into their currachs, trusting Jesus and the currents to take them right back to Ireland. End of saga, part one.

But is that how it happened, really? If you read my post 16 Fascinating Facts About Iceland, you'd know, for example, that

"The famed Icelandic sagas were written from 200 to 300 years after settlement era that they describe. Interestingly enough, this was the same period when heavy internal fighting was taking place in the weakening Icelandic Commonwealth.

There is evidence to show that the writers tried to give the sagas a realistic feel by, for example, dressing the main characters in period clothing as they assumed it was worn centuries earlier. This could be likened to a modern costume drama depicting the first British settlers to what was to become the USA."

Propaganda is nothing new, as texts dating as far back as the Sumerian Standard of Ur from 4,500 years ago can attest. Were the Sagas written as a way to whitewash a different history altogether?

Recently, with new archeological findings in the south of Iceland, this subject has popped up again. I'm a firm believer in an alt history to the one we've been being fed for at least the last century, if only because so many of the 'facts' about history, timelines, and even the science of dating archeological finds have been proven to be either incomplete or just plain untrue. For more on this, check out Graham Hancock's work, starting maybe with this super-interesting presentation (video) on his latest book, Magicians of the Gods.

It seems that the more we learn via modern day info-sharing and technological advancements, including ease of travel to remote sites and such, the more we discover what we don't know about our human history. And I suspect that Iceland was occupied, even revered as a mystical home of the Old Gods and Spirits, long, long before the 9th century Norse arrived.

This is a theme I'm constantly looking in to and gathering data for. To begin with though, and to keep things grounded in prior research, I'm going to suggest reading this paper by Gísli Sigurðsson, Gælic Influence in Iceland (pdf) published by the University of Iceland Press in 2000. This article from the History Ireland website is also a very interesting starting point.

To dig deeper, check out the totally fascinating Warlords and Holy Men: Scotland AD 80 - 1000, by Alfred P. Smyth, 1989.*

In my opinion, though, the older the heimild, or source, the more unwhitewashed it'll be. If you agree, read The Gæls in Iceland (pdf) by W. A. Craigie, 1899. And bringing us back around to the photo above, there's a fascinating travelogue from 1873 entitled, On Some Ruins at Ellida Vatn and Kjalarnes in Iceland (pdf) which describes the historic settlement of the ridiculously windy Kjalarnes peninsula, where today the town is a hotbed of controversy involving asylum seekers housed there, but way back when was the seat of the first recorded onslaught of "modern" (i.e. invasive) Christianity in Iceland, which the locals found highly amusing:

"Stanley recalls the story of Stefnir Þorgilsson, sent by King Ólafr Tryggvason to Christianise Iceland in 996. Received icily by the heathens, he responded by destroying their temples. Bad weather forced him to shelter off Kjalarnes, which provoked heathen mockery in a poem, quoted by Stanley in Icelandic, alongside his own translation:

Vindr sleit band á landi / Geysar á með ísi / Allríckr freyr slíkom

"the Winds freed from their Chains on land / gushed forth with Ice / like the all powerful
Goddess Freyja"

That quote is from the super interesting The Vikings and the Victorians, by Andrew Wawn, 2002, in which he digs into Sir John Thomas Stanley's impulsive, Romanticism-fueled adventure to Iceland in 1789.

You can also read the original Kjalnesingasaga, or The Saga of the People of Kjalarnes online in English, translated by Ben Waggoner (btw, well done, Ben!) When you're here in Iceland you can go see an original 15th century vellum manuscript of that saga at the very cool Settlement Exhibition at Aðalstræti 16 in the city center, which was built over a settlement-era homestead discovered during construction of a new hotel (let's not get int the construction of new hotels here right now: / )

This church then, which is itself only 150 years old, sits on a chunk of land that changed the course of Icelandic history forever, being the seat of power from which the Old Gods and their groves and temples were destroyed by a ravenous New God from the south. Did this newcomer at some even earlier time share our island in a different context altogether many centuries earlier, when the original Gnostic Christians were forced to leave the Levant with their precious knowledge and treasures**? It could very well be...

So, this post is a bit deeper than the last, with more to chew on. But along with the future of our island, its hidden past is my pet fascination. That, and how we change over time and how today, me finding an old box of treasured photos from the first three decades of my life is like an archeological find all in itself - I've only got about thirty really good pics of myself with friends and family, and then a hundred or so less-perfectly framed and blurry ones on top of that to remind me of all the people I've met and places I've been, all the stories I've gathered, all the wrong hairdo's I sported while discovering who I felt I really was...

In closing, I'm very very glad to have Iceland Eyes, with its 700+ posts and photos spanning twelve years of my life, to remind me of how far I've come and of who I am today. And I'm going to leave you with a photo I took of the side of our looming Mount Esja across the bay. These are the faces of some of the Old Gods who still watch over us, who show each winter after snowfall. Just at their feet, at the root of the mountain, is Kjalarnes. And as the10th century inhabitants knew, these gods and goddesses, Freyja in her cat form included, don't take well to their sacred spaces being destroyed...

Old Gods and Goddesses on Mount Esja

*Almost all of the books I'm sharing are available in whole or part online via Google Books, but if you find yourself intrigued by any of them and reading more than just a few pages, you might want to support the authors or publishing houses and buy an e- or hard copy to own.

** There was once a link here, taking you to the first 40 pages of my MA thesis, based on The White Goddess, by Robert Graves to back up this statement, but alas, the link is dead:(

Spring Marches in Once More! (kind of...)

2016-03-01T15:43:00.001+00:00

Lounging in the wading pool at Laugardalslaug in the last days of dark nights

Today just really felt like the first day of Spring from the moment I woke up. Come March, the sun rises measurably earlier and takes its time setting in a long, drawn out, amazing blueness. As I've definitely mentioned here before, it's like someone has flicked a light switch, helping us emerge from the darkness of the ancient Norse month of Þorri and into the hope of Góa.

The reason I chose this photo is that soon this scene won't be possible...at least not until Tvímánuður ("Two-month") and nighttime darkness arrives again in mid-August. This photo is a few years old, and I consider myself lucky to have gotten it as taking photos at the pools is now pretty much banned. Still, this is the exact scene we experienced on Saturday night when I took my Óðinn and his younger brother Sindri swimming, with the exception that it was way more crowded: locals on dates (a popular thing to do...if it's a first date - or the first meet-up after the first drunken hookup - even better because skin, right?), locals hanging with their posses before going out on the town, locals post-workout (there's a World Class gym and the Laugar Spa - even better for dates! - connected to this pool, Laugardalslaug) and visitors trying out our famous geothermally-heated waters after a long day of exploring the island. Everyone seemed more than content.

So it's been a bit intense here on Iceland Eyes for the past few months, which I'll chalk up to post-holidayness and a restless nation clamoring for change. We'll still get some late season snow, I'm sure, but the first bulb-flowers are starting to poke up through the soil in our yard, and brighter skies always mean brighter hearts and souls, so there's that to look forward to : ) And in case you've never experienced it, or have forgotten what it's like, here's a photo I posted back in 2012 of a three-legged ginger cat at midnight on the Summer Solstice. Yes, it really stays that bright!

Lots of action, and a three-legged cat, in the Midnight Sun

Sometimes it’s a Different Kind of Power That Truly Matters: an Open Letter to Arion Bank

2016-02-27T16:58:00.003+00:00

The landscape up north, between Egilsstaðir and Mývatn. Lots of barren gorgeousness.

These days there's a lot of talk here about tourism-gone-rogue, with our over million visitors per year becoming less and less manageable as far too many of them continue to underestimate (in their attempts to take that perfect tourist photo?) how dangerous our landscape is.

Please play safe here during your stay!

Also in the news is the excellent profits made by our banks in 2015. Though financial stability and gain are symbolic of a healthy economy overall, there's never much joy in reading that kind of news for the average struggling Jón and Stína trying to make ends meet. But if your business, say an advertising agency or print shop or furniture supplier or interior design firm or
web development group, can find a way to suck off the teat of the banks as they close neighborhood branches to open new, shiny more remote ones, or as they go on marketing sprees, or revamp their online and mobile banking services, you might love their success. And if you're out there in the world imagining that we've figured out the formula for training our banksters to behave, you might admire us for our diligence.* After all, everything's a matter of perspective, isn't it?

Regarding perspective, I'd like to share a letter I wrote and sent to all the highest-set fólk at Arion Bank in March 2014. I've shared it on facebook, but was a little hesitant to publish it here. I suppose on some level it felt like I was writing myself into a certain reality, that by admitting my lack of wealth so clearly I was making it so, law of attraction-wise.

The situation prompting this letter was fairly clear: I had an overdraft that I was paying down as best I could in dire, post-crash times, but at some point an employee tagged my overdraft as being in default, and my account was sent to pre-collections. When I notified the bank that I had in fact paid a chunk of money into the account, Arion admitted fault, in writing, then proceeded to charge me approximately 1,700 ISK to reverse the mistake. Yes, they charged me to fix their error.

In re-reading it two years after writing it, though, it's clear that the take-away message isn't what I don't have, monetarily or otherwise, but what I do have and what I'd like to continue to grow and nurture within me: integrity, foresight, tenacity, compassion, and faith that these things are what living a good life are made of.

Back in 2014 I had to use my Sherlockian skills to discover the email addresses of the top level players at Arion. After cracking the pattern used for all in-company email addresses, I sent out this letter and was promptly contacted by the CEO's ombudsman, who apologized profusely for all that the bank had put me through. They've been very nice to me since, especially after another round of fail on their part last year, though what it took to get that nice was beyond acceptable.

Here then is the letter I wrote, which I think may have jarred the consciences of certain high-set members of the bank upon reading it back in 2014, and hopefully still does. In my opinion it's less about me or greed or banks, and all about what motivates us, and how, truly, we're all in this together...

Read on:

(My situation is clearly mapped out in my customer file, if you are interested in knowing the impetus for this letter, though it isn't necessary. I am one of many, with an all-too familiar experience.)

Good afternoon, Arion Bank officers and board.

Your bank owes me an apology.

I just want to let you all know, though, that I am aware that Arion Banki isn’t going to do anything for me except continue to send me collection agency threats (innheimtubréf) and charge me interest for the year that my overdraft has so graciously been put on hold. I am the little person on the street, the once-hopeful now-bad risk, the working, striving poor and helpless pawn in an international game of financial chess decades in the making. I am the sacrifice for others’ profit.

I am also highly educated, and considered in the top 5% of intellect in the United States, where I grew up. My parents moved to California from 101 Reykjavik in the Sixties to give my sister and I a better life, with greater opportunities. I started my educational career at one of the best universities in the US, studying a field of science that was brand new, and that few were even accepted to, psychobiology. I quickly realized that I didn’t want to be stuck in a lab coat, but wanted to experience the world, study the human experience, and write about it. That is what I do today: I'm a writer.

My handicap has always been that I'm not so hard-scrabble, hamster-wheel ambitious, and that I have a hard time playing by broken rules in corrupt scenarios. That said, I have tried to play the financial “game” here as best I can, and as honestly.

There were many times when I could have cheated, skimmed off the top, lied, swindled grant money and so forth, but have chosen not to. I've faced the financial crash experience as best I could, and hunkered down as a teacher to make sure my two children have had a stable, loving home during challenging times. I've helped my parents during their move back to Iceland after 40 years abroad, and feel that I'm an honest, caring, stable adult.

So I’m not a flake, or an idiot, or a cheat or a thief or a whiner or any of the other things the righteous wealthy like to call the less financially endowed. I am where I am because I’ve always believed in the goodness of people, though they have not always proved me right. I grew up with extremely wealthy people out in California, Saudi princes and top models and brain surgeons and Texan oil barons and, interestingly enough, the son of one of the founding members of the CIA. I've had dinner with a former director of the FBI. I know what money and power do and don’t do. I know they can corrupt even the most gentle soul, and I know that they cause a distinct change in brain functioning: the altruistic and compassionate systems of the brain are overridden by the hormonal rewards that profit and acquisition provide. It can potentially happen to any of us, at any income level, but there does seem to be an unfortunate correlation between a reduction in altruism and an increase in wealth and power.

I personally do not pray to the heavens for MORE MONEY or wish for INSTANT WEALTH. What I want to be able to do is honor my obligations and especially my financial ones. I entered into various contracts with various parties for a variety of goods and services, and my sole desire at this point is to be able to fullfill my end of those contracts in a timely and honorable fashion. The machinations of the top-level players in the global economy as well as in the local one have made that increasingly more difficult. This is a fact (and not the conspiratorial ramblings of a lazy, bitter worker as we the ever-striving middle and lower income groups are often made out to be.)

I joke with my mother that the stupidest move I’ve made in my life is not marrying an Icelandic fisherman or some international banker. Then I’d be set, yes? Pretty little woman behind the wealthy powerful man. I chose instead to be self-sufficient, and responsible and respectable, as I'm sure most of you women in power feel yourselves to be. Kudos to you for making it to the top. I did not, however, choose to enter into the world of finance. Another fail on my part, I suppose.

Arion is beholden to its shareholders and to its board. It is required to make a profit, regardless of how immoral some of its practices seem to smell. I am one of thousands of “customers” trapped in a vicious cycle of debt-and-interest by a non-transparent institution that proudly advertises profits* gained, in large part, off of the humiliation of those beholden to it. Honestly, one of the worst days in recent months was when I discovered that Arion now owned my mortgage, just when I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on paying off my overdraft with the bank, a four-year transaction which has been riddled with incompetence on Arion's part.

And yes, just today another innheimtubréf was shoved into my mailbox. Not because I’m stupid or irresponsible, but because I, with all good faith, chose to become a teacher and a translator, and to influence the next generation of Iceland not realizing seven years ago how very very lowly we are regarded by the power-holders of this country; because I have tried to make the best out of very difficult personal situations over which I had no control; because I didn’t marry for money; because to me nurturing myself as a writer and passing on wisdoms I've gathered was and is more important than living life in a laboratory coat, or even becoming just another hack with a business or marketing degree.

I know Arion won’t do anything for me. Can’t do anything for me, except continue to automatically churn out computer-generated late notices, charge me (probably) illegal fees for its own mistakes, and chronically not call me back as promised.

But I can do something for Arion, and that’s this: I can remind you, Höskuldur, and the other seemingly detached heads of this bank, what it feels like to be on the other end of money, and how sometimes it’s not a lack of power that keeps a person in the poverty cycle, but the exact opposite:

Sometimes it’s a different kind of power, the power that comes with integrity, the power of an intelligence that refuses to be dampened down to play a corrupt game, that makes earning and keeping an honest dollar (or króna) so difficult.

I encourage you all to think for a few moments about what money and business power have truly brought you. Are you a better person today than when you were struggling to get along in the world? Or if you never had to struggle financially, when you were trying to get a beginner's toehold in the financial sphere, a seat at the VIP gambling table, so to speak? Maybe you are, I hope you feel you are. But were you a bad person then? What has changed to separate you from the masses? Do you have children or grandchildren who are now ‘poor’? Who are students, trying to buy their first home, trying to pay off a student loan? What do you advise them when they feel ill-treated by private or governmental institutions? Ultimately, who are you today, and what would you be willing to sacrifice to be that hopeful, dream-filled optimist you once were?

You owe me an apology, and you will give me nothing. I do hope, however, that you’ll take the time to find out what, deep down, you may just owe yourselves as well.

Best regards,

Maria Alva Þórisdóttir Roff

*The article linked is from March 2015, a year after I sent the original letter. At that time the bank's profits from 2013 had just been proudly flaunted.

So yes, like any other place on Earth, we've got our problems. But we've also got our glories and some extremely talented people, including acquaintances of mine Jóhann Jóhannsson who Wired magazine is calling "the next big thing in film music" and Everest's Baltasar Kormákur whose new show Trapped is getting great reviews. And it's awesome seeing Iceland featuring in the Wachowski's Sense8, a tv series I belatedly discovered last night and am in love with already, four episodes in.

And then there's the next-gen of creativity, like singer Sturla Atlas and his 101 Boys crew, who my daughter Vala Roff's boyfriend, Egill Ástráðsson, manages and helps produce (and she helps him, of course!! ~.^ ) Everything these millennials in my life do is pure clean genius...somehow effortlessly stylized and gorgeous, with an essence of inbuilt creativity and quality that us oldsters can only marvel at. Love them!

* Update April 14th: We had jailed some banksters, but someone changed the laws recently, and after barely scratching the surface of their sentences, they're pretty much free.

Still, Step Outside of the City and Find the Heart of the Land Again

2016-02-16T17:49:00.001+00:00

Looking over to Grábrókafell from its crater-kin, Grábrók (Grey-Pants). They last erupted ca. 1600BC

I made a little bit of a commotion with the last few posts, baring frustration at how systems (human systems) can get so complicated so easily, and how hard it can be for a society to find its way into the future with integrity and heritage intact.

On that note, I thought about how much of dire challenge it's always been to live here on this island. It's not just the cold, but the incessant volcanic activity as well. According to data gathered by Jón Frímann Jónsson on his website, Iceland geology, there've been at least 200 eruptions
in the past 1100 years (I counted each item on this list he's published). Most of those were in remote regions, affecting few if any, but some wiped out huge swathes of the population, human and beast alike, most due to starvation after toxic ashfall blanketed whole sections of the island. Add to that the decimation of the population after two separate plagues in the 15th century plus a millennia of subjugation under foreign rule and internal clan warfare, honor/revenge killings and blood feuds, and you could say it's a miracle that anyone's left.

Maybe we've earned every ounce of pride we feel in being Icelanders, having made it this long on this hyper-active chunk of lava, and maybe our opportunism is hardwired into our survivors-brains. Maybe, even though it seems imperative to take a long-term approach to how we're going to step into all the tomorrows in front of us, something whispers to us that we might not have an endless supply of them to experience.

Hekla or Katla could blow, or an earthquake could cause devastation at any time. Nothing unique about that, though: my family, for example, experienced first-hand two huge quakes out in California (the LA quake of 1971, and the Loma Prieta quake in northern California in 1989 that luckily did no damage to our property or persons.) And across the globe natural disasters strike in all sorts of different forms. We're all at the mercy of Nature, always.

But I think that given the intense geological activity here, the desolated landscape, the remoteness, the potential bitter cold and unpredictable weather, the lack of a wide range of flora and fauna for sustenance, it's understandable that we are who we are. The Icelandic psyche has a hardcoreness, a stubbornness, a pragmatism, an innovativeness that helped us survive this long, and that can hopefully be applied in more humane, compassionate and respectful ways in the generations to come.

For more on our volcanos, go visit Come to Iceland, the excellent tour booking portal, where you can read some bits I was commissioned to write (all the stuff under the main Nature tab : )

Also, here's an excerpt from my book, 88, a love letter to an island. I wrote it while a harsh storm was battering our island in November 2012, right around the Iceland Airwaves festival where poor festival guests were nearly blown out to sea...

cling is the word, and it’s always been so on our island. cling, and survive. clutch a bunch of shallow rooted grass in your hand and bury yourself under a low jagged-edged overhang of cooled magma. if you’re lucky you’ll survive. pretend you are a low footed fox, or burrow in like a sheep and try to keep a sheep’s eerie calm while everything loose blows away and out to our familiar briny deep.

here, under your porous and newly-formed shelter, it’s not bravery that will save you but an idiot’s luck and maybe the foolishness of the true believer...that’s all that’s going to save anyone on this blasted island. forget everything you’ve ever learned about ingenuity, courage, smarts, can-do spirit and the frontier mentality. all it takes to survive here is a coward’s ability to hunker down, and shut the fuck up, and wait out the worst. a survivor on this chuck of newly-birthed land is the one who digs a hole, and not the one who raises his house to the gods. here you burrow into the crumbly earth and cover your lowly and fearful head with any sod you can find.

this close to the very gaping maw of the polar hole we should forsake ridiculous fantasies of kissing the sky with towers dreamt of by boys, and built by men. a mamma says, come here and cower with me, and we’ll be safe. we listen to her, we crawl into her warm arms, returning to where we were as babes but now it’s her and the dank soil that comforts us. we hide with our mothers under the cover of sharp lava, filling our cowls with thousand-year old moss. we shun the men who try to call us out to their structures, and we stay in our shelter holes. we relax, and we begin to see the lovely trickle of a very small and constant stream of tears that leak from the geometric forms of the shelter wall. in stillness we see the very small: we see how lichen sprouts in cracks not longer than the wrinkle on our smallest finger, and how it wants to bloom, if only it could. and we wonder if it really is only time that makes everything possible - if time gives such a tenuous and tenacious entity as this growth the potential to one day overtake the entire overhang. and you imagine the place where you are laying, hiding from the plasma storm with your mamma, carpeted in some remote millennium with the progeny of this very same lichen, which may never ever give up. it is day 38.

Walking a crater rim. Can you spot the two humans? And is this a visual metaphor for life in general?

There's a Fine Line Between Opportunity and Opportunism, Isn't There?

2016-02-14T12:44:00.000+00:00

The view in front of our home on Njálsgata

Wow, ok, running with my recent time warp theme, I'm going to share the text from this post from exactly four years ago. There's nothing Valentine's Day-ish about it, except for the fact that I love my island homeland (California, I love you too!) and our fólk, and am sad when our darker side exposes uncomfortably. No one, and no country or nation or peoples is perfect, but I still believe we have a better chance, given our small population, to make our country a model state.

I encourage you to go to the original post and read the excellent comments from my most loyal readers, who've stuck with this blog through thick and thin, and two of whom
I've gotten a chance to meet live, in person, here in Reykjavik. It's one thing for me to comment on how I see things and it's another altogether to get outsiders' opinions, people who love our country and want to see us retain and maintain our rich and beautiful culture, and not get sucked whole into the capitalist consumerism seen all over the world.

I was discussing this with some friends last night, born-and-raised Icelanders who agree that the fine line between opportunity and opportunism has been crossed too many times in the recent past for anyone here to ignore. One guy said he felt the Icelandic attempt at democracy since gaining independence in 1944 could now easily be deemed a failure as, just over seventy years later, there seems to be no more independence for the common man or woman as there was under the Danish crown. He clearly sees his beloved homeland as an oligarchy, ruled by the same few families as always, under the umbrella of the same Independence and Progressive Parties that seem to muscle and connive their way to the top of the heap over and over again. I added my curiosity as to how the local Freemasons fit into the picture to our discussion. I've heard hints by men whose fathers are masons, and who've been invited to join but have refused, that my instincts about how that brotherhood influences state affairs is right on the money, although their website clearly notes that, "The Order of Freemason does not take a stance in national political or religious disputes. Discussion or agitation regarding these topics is banned at meetings and gatherings of the Order of Freemasons...The Order of Freemasons in Iceland is independent from all power holders other than the legal authorities of Iceland." I wonder why that's so specifically noted, and I wonder as well how that works with regard to the Five Points of Fellowship and the fact that the 'legal authorities' are so often masons themselves, or the wives of masons. I have no intention of being conspiratorial, but, well, powerful people do tend to stick together and assist one another, don't they?

Regarding the photo above, I took it just outside my home on Njálsgata the other day. Yesterday the same scene was lined with contrails in regular formation, five or six white stripes at a time jetting through our airspace over and over, always heading west. So now we know the Americans have begun their 'patrols' for dastardly Russian submarines (you have to read the Grapevine article I linked to there, another great piece by intrepid journalist Paul Fontaine.) Very like the US to show off while flexing muscle in such a fashion...

Here's the original text from 2012, then. Things have only gotten more complex, with more of the bedrock of Reykjavík being broken for new hotels every day, and that's a literal statement - we've got hydraulic breakers pounding away all over Þingholt, rattling goods on store shelves and challenging the sanity of the poor locals manning the tourist shops and restaurants, some who say the noise follows them into sleep. And of course our visitors have to listen to it too : ( I was sincerely hoping the elves who I've dreamt have an entrance to their hall right where new bedrock breaking is going on would rebel against this latest insult and bust the breaker, but maybe they've just left us altogether...

From 2012 then: It's sometimes uncomfortable to voice anything other than a Pollyanna viewpoint on current affairs, and so I usually avoid writing about current affairs! Occasionally, though, I just have to write what I feel, and this is one of those days, though I don't have the heart to go into details.:

The glamour/adventure construct that our PR men and women have spun in the past decade has paid off in tons more tourism and happily so, because that's where the money lay, right? I don't disagree at all, and find the average visitor to be a polite and friendly type, willing to help the natives see their homeland for all the glory it has to offer via their curiosity and cash. No cynicism intended: the traveler brings with them a new view and if they open their wallets, it's to share some of what they've got in return for local goods and experiences. Win win for sure! I hope we maintain an ethical, eco-friendly bent in the further development of our tourist industry, because that's why people come here, and not to get what they can get in any other Euro city, and probably for less.

Before we start pandering to Others and their dollars, though, we need to take care of our Own. Though a shiny new hotel might lure a thousand more weekenders into the city, it does little for the morale of the local who can barely maintain the roof over her and her children's heads. It may bring in summertime cash and create a few jobs, but it doesn't solve the problem of once-reasonable and seemingly practical student loan debts, taken by people who honestly wanted to better themselves and their society, that have now doubled since the crash with no discussion on the table of doing anything about it. A new hotel might make us feel superficially proud and even rich as a nation but does nothing for that overwhelming deep-seated feeling that we've completely lost our way and are wandering, ethically compromised, into strange unknowns, missing in our cultural hearts something we can't quite seem to name...

We can welcome our visitors with all the stuff and buildings and ads and magazines and luxuries we think they will need and enjoy, but when traveling nothing ever really surpasses a warm and contented smile from a local, does it? Let's not twist the faces of our single, hard-working mothers and ammas and grandfathers and men into hard-scrabble grimaces because they are just barely scraping by. There's an offended, indignant tone, a bitter swallowed anger that is stuck in the throats of so many Icelanders these days for the ever-mounting evidence of swindle, corruption, greed, violence, and social breakdown happening here, on our beloved wonder of an island. There is no glory in suffering, and there is no glory in wealth if it's at the expense of a distant relative, or the woman who scans groceries. At the expense of one's own people, born here or not.

Something has to give.

It's Like a Time Warp Happened and the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

2016-02-08T15:20:00.000+00:00

Our Tjörnin

I was looking through old posts, which is very entertaining for me as I always find something I'd forgotten all about. This is one of those things. The photo is of our Tjörnin town lake, taken from the western side and looking over to Skólavörðurholt. The lovely Fríkirkjan church and the National Gallery of Iceland are there lakeside on the righthand side of the picture, and up above and to the left of the Fríkirkjan spire is Hallgrímskirkja, dressed in scaffolding and webbing for renovation.

It's not the photo, though, that interests me today, but the text. It seems so

distant somehow, so long-ago, or maybe as if whatever I recorded as happening back then didn't, actually. Yes, Jóhanna sat as Prime Minister, and did quite a lot to ease us out of the trauma of the Crash of 2008, but after taking the kind of beating politicians have to deal with these days (regardless of their capabilities...the nature of the political game in the 21st century is war, and dirty, mean, media-fueled war at that) she chose to not run for re-election, and to retire from politics in 2013.

And guess what Iceland did next? We voted back in the same seemingly-extremely corrupt pack (quote from that link: "If the United States and Europe got drunk on easy money, Iceland was the guy at the party who was unconscious in the corner." Some people are even willing to go on record with claims that booze is definitely not the right metaphor or even a factor - cocaine and pharms being the more likely enhancers in question ; ) of capitalist, nepotistic, self-serving wolves who steered our nation directly into the iceberg that was the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

The same scoundrels made new promises in '13 and we, glassy-eyed with inflowing tourist money (see the link below to the LA Times article) and under-the-table AirBnb profits, bought into their latest get-rich-quick schemes and promises, to our current chagrin.

The other pretty dated information from my original post is the EU thing. I personally am glad we aren't in that union, which just seems like Trouble, with a capital T. I googled "EU news" to find a juicy current-affairs link, but there's frankly so much dissent and issue that I had a hard time choosing a story. Here's one, though, just to whet the appetite. Peoples who've been arguing amongst themselves, and warring hardcore, for nearly two millennia, don't seem like the kind of company I'd like our national psyche to be spending time with, no matter how diplomatic their exterior sheen.

[Update on Tuesday the 9th: In other temporal-travelly, reality-warping news, Iceland just found out via an official-sounding web site that the US Navy will be - excuse me, would like to be - returning here after wrapping up their 55-year "protective occupation" in 2006. My father was a Navy man, and his stepfather Stanley, who adopted him at an early age, was Army giving him US citizenship and the base was a huge part of his earlier life, so I have no judgement on that era at all.

I'm just a bit blown away that no one knew about this here. It's almost like someone's (my ; ) news alert for keyword "Iceland" made the Navy's article show up and there you have it, locals, whether you like it or not!

Who knows in all honesty what's really going on in global strategic politics/saber rattling these days to truly prompt this new occupation (yes, I'm going to call it that); all I'm going to say is this:

There's never been a question in my mind that we'd be occupied sooner or later, at the very least economically, if not via soft migration invasion or the more aggressive sort. I guess I was hoping it would be our oldest masters, the Norwegians in the end...]

Here's what I posted originally in 2009 :

Today a new Prime Minister takes over, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (definitely check out the link about her...very cool stuff!)

The Pots and Pans revolution (protestors banged on kitchenware incessantly for days outside the House of Parliament) that took place over the past two weeks was a resounding success in that the sitting two party coalition collapsed under its own weight, making room for a political shuffling. Not everyone is happy with the new government (hi Dad!) but the fact that the old *regime* folded so easily must say something about how tenuous the parties' collaboration had become.

Iceland is still in a muddle, and it seems that every day some news of corruption or of ethically unsound business practice is floating to the surface like so much pond scum. The Guardian revealed this week that Iceland may be fast-tracked into the EU which is cool, but a fairly humbling kind of continental triage.

The good news is, though, that Iceland is really inexpensive now, as this LA Times article nicely describes. Pack your bags and we'll see you all soon!