Experts in self-sufficiency, Iceland is particularly well positioned when it comes to unexpected global crises. It’s an island mentality not rooted in nationalist pride, finds Louis Rogers, but in an ancient dialogue between langauge and landscape that continues to evolve today.
Text and photography by Louis Rogers
A few weeks after I left Iceland in August, a new word appeared in the language. Heimkomusmitgát – a portmanteau of the words for homecoming (heimkomu) and asepsis (smitgát) – was a neologism for the six-day quarantine, bookended by two Covid-19 tests, that anyone arriving in Iceland would have to undertake. The regulations were introduced in response to a resurgence of cases, but when I visited I just had to take one test: a swab reaching improbably far into one nostril, yielding results that were transmitted 12 hours later by a notification on the appreciably well-designed tracing app (I was all clear). Heimkomusmitgát is one of a collection of new terms that have entered everyday use over the past few months, the most notable, of course, being kórónuveira – a novel word for a novel virus.
New words in Icelandic really are new in that they are entirely homegrown. When a new piece of technology or cultural phenomenon appears, the word for it is not just imported from English or another language and given a Nordic lilt. Instead, a new word is built from scratch out of Icelandic etymologies and phonetics. Often, old terms that have fallen out of use are drawn up from the depths of linguistic obscurity and given new life. When the computer needed naming, the old Icelandic word for a prophetess, völva, was melded with the word for numbers, tölur, to become tölva – denoting a machine that handles numbers in some mystic, nonhuman way. A monitor or screen, meanwhile, is a skjár, the ancient word for the window of a traditional turf house.
The Hallgrímskirkja was designed in the 1930s by Guðjón Samúelsson, who holds a fairly uncontested monopoly on prominent Reykjavík buildings – he’s also responsible for the National Theatre, the University of Iceland and the Sundhollín Swimming Baths. Samúelsson’s designs draw on Icelandic materials and natural phenomena, with the Hallgrímskirkja influenced by basalt columns and the shapes of cooled lava.
All this linguistic blacksmithing takes place in a nondescript block of the University of Iceland, near Reykjavík’s short-haul airport, where the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies is based. The scholars and lexicographers there are dedicated to collecting and standardising evolutions in the language, or “preserving it, strengthening it”, as Ari Páll Kristinsson, head of the language department, tells me. Iceland has been coining its own neologisms since the 12th century; today, Ari describes it as a kind of “sport”. New words are gathered here after being coined by writers or broadcasters, and are also submitted directly by all kinds of people, not just experts but “anyone who wants to”. Recent suggestions that have gained currency include jarm for meme, kraftkría for power nap and gjarnastjarna for wannabe. There’s something of the spirit of a radio call-in to this crowdsourced quick-wittedness, but Ari and his team are doing nothing less than establishing the tissues of meaning that cohere a famously sparsely populated island.
I am staying on the outskirts of Reykjavík, not far from the university. The city is quiet at the moment. With the depleted numbers of tourists, tours to the natural attractions beyond the city – the Northern Lights, the popular Golden Circle package of waterfalls and geysers – are running once a day or less frequently or not at all. For a first-time visitor, the suspended state of the mid-pandemic city chimes with its steady grey weather and the constant hours of summer light. Cool, muted, well-lit, it is like a model ready for inspection.
My days in Reykjavík are unhurried and I take my time getting my bearings. Peering over everything is the 75-metre poured-concrete spire of the Hallgrímskirkja church. Its entrance, like every entrance, is guarded by sentry pumps of hand sanitiser. From the church I walk into town, down Laugevegur, past eye-wateringly steep coffee prices, through the wood-and-metal houses of the historic centre, and out to Grandi, the old industrial shipyards and fish-processing district, which, I hardly need to say, is now a fashionable hub of restaurants and galleries. The artist Olafur Eliasson has an open studio there, where I wander alone between hulking pieces of salvaged driftwood as complex mobiles stir above me. Back in the centre, I join a cautious crowd listening to a teenage punk band with thick bowl-cuts playing an impromptu gig outside the bus terminal. I eat fish and mashed potato. Each evening, I swim lengths and sit in the rooftop hot tub under thin drizzle at the Sundhöllin public baths.
Hand sanitiser at the entrance of the Hallgrímskirkja encourages visitors to sanctify themselves before entering. Iceland’s initial containment of Covid was admired around the world, although it has suffered a robust second wave since September, reportedly due to a handful of tourists who ignored positive test results and declined to quarantine.
As things are half-open and half-empty, I spend more time taking in edifices and surfaces than interiors. I start to recognise the particular textures and materials that make up the city: corrugated iron, tarred and weathered wood, concrete, sea, sky, hot dogs, tarmac, steam, wild flowers, fishing nets. A Norwegian maths teacher – the only other person staying in my 16-bed dormitory – tells me that Icelandic is easy to learn: there are just 25 or so phonics with which the whole, ancient language can be pronounced. I start thinking about the city as composed of its own phonics: the same essential elements, repeated and reassembled on street corners, at the docks, at the base of the mountains on the far side of the bay.
The same maths teacher first points me toward the Árni Magnússon Institute. Something in his description of its relationship to old Icelandic manuscripts and terminology – like miners digging for natural resources – chimes with the material make-up of the quiet city. Perhaps it is the steam, which eddies out of solemn concrete chimneys next to the hot-dog stands in city squares. Reykjavík is built on fertile and volatile land. The hot water that bursts spectacularly from the volcanic earth further inland is controlled and rerouted to here; its appearance in the middle of a drab city square is like the surfacing of an ancient, mystic word within the name of a piece of mundane technology.
The main conduit of natural resources into Reykjavík is 40 kilometres to the east. While Ari Páll Kristinsson and his team plumb manuscripts for their raw materials, at Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Plant naturally hot water is drawn from the earth to be sent to Reykjavík, as well as converted into power. The plant is positioned where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet, near the dramatic rift at Þingvellir, which was once the site of Iceland’s parliament. Ninety-five percent of Reykjavik’s buildings are heated geothermally and all the hot water that issues from its taps and fills its swimming pools comes directly from underground. All of Iceland’s power is produced domestically and renewably. The bus driver who explains most of this to me as we trundle towards Þingvellir is frank rather than smug. An air of quiet, competent self-sufficiency, underscored by ingenious resourcefulness, surrounds the misty power plant. Everything they need is here.
The idea of independence is a potent one in Iceland, a remote island not overly favourable to human settlement. One of Iceland’s best known and best loved novels, by Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, is called Independent People (Sjálfstaett fólk). A 550-page epic, it is about one sheep farmer’s quest for financial and spiritual independence. Some version of this purpose seems also to drive the work at Nesjavellir and the Árni Magnússon Institute. The resourcefulness that characterises both places reverberates through the city; attune yourself to it, and it produces a curiously intense, islanded sense of place. It’s there in the sulphurous smell of the hot tap water; in the ancient letters still present on the road signs; in the sheer quantity of Arctic char in your fiskisupa (fish soup).
Off Ingólfur Square – the one with the steam chimneys – is a place that offers a cultivated, slightly theatrical version of this sensory intimacy with local resources. Fischer is a perfumery, half-shop and half-gallery, run by Jonsí Birgisson, frontman of Sigur Rós, and his sisters Lilja, Inga and Sigurrós. It is housed in a hut built by their father and painted black with pine tar. When you enter you are hit with a transfixing whack of Iceland, your senses plunged into its mossy earth. The space was designed by Greek architect and designer Eleni Podara to isolate and merge sounds and smells precisely as you move through it. Engulfing music by Jonsí and friends, suggesting the rumbling soundscapes of Iceland’s dramatic wilderness, mingles synaesthetically with redolent smells of smoke, earth, flora and fungi.
Þingvellir, approximately meaning “assembly fields”, was the site of Iceland’s parliament between 930 AD and 1798. It was chosen for the space it provided to accommodate, at one stage, every inhabitant of Iceland for an annual meeting, with forests to use as kindling, grass to graze horses, dramatic stony rifts to issue to laws from, and rivers in which to drown adulterers (of both sexes).
The perfumes at Fischer don’t so much transport you as root you. The Birgisson family use hand-harvested native herbs and Icelandic essential oils to create coagulations of vernacular sensations: “smoke in the air and tarred telephone poles”; “alpine fir, footsteps in frozen grass and salt liquorice”; “a beached whale is about to explode”. Perfume No. 8 is inspired by Jonsí’s crystalline memories of a childhood lived close to nature in the small town of Mosfellsbær: “Brand new sneakers, crushing fresh flower stalks against hot asphalt … Stolen rhubarb from a neighbour’s garden, peeled, slathered in honey and chewed on.” These scents are solidified and come in handmade tin boxes. Incense sticks, also made by hand, are mossy and vital, conjuring the damp forests south of the city where small wet birds hop between tree roots. The effect of all this evocative potency would be disorienting if it wasn’t so profoundly orienting: you are in a rarefied, Petri-dish smear of pure Iceland.
Being a visitor to Reykjavík is being a visitor to this intensity of locatedness. Fischer isn’t just a charming use of local produce; there’s something singular in the atmosphere it breeds, something indicative of the culture of resourcefulness in the city at large beyond it. I’m compelled but also bothered by the way the words resounding in my head sound so much like political euphemisms – “self-sufficiency”, “cultural preservation”, “purity” – especially in a country whose ethnic homogeneity is so apparent (93% of the population is ethnically Icelandic and all the largest minority communities are also white). I try to get a hold of what exactly is being produced, perhaps deliberately, perhaps collaterally, by this self-immersion. And in my thinking, as in my days in Reykjavík, I keep coming back to the pool.
On 18 May 2020, with Covid cases comfortably suppressed (before the second wave and heimkomusmitgát), Iceland reopened its swimming pools. Laugardalslaug, Reykjavik’s largest pool, opened at midnight to enthusiastic queues. While people in other countries waited for the reopening of pubs, restaurants, coffee shops or gyms, for Icelanders, it was pools like Laugardalslaug that were the much-missed centres of social life. All Icelandic towns, and many of the remotest and tiniest villages and hamlets, have their pools. Life revolves around them. The origins of this centrality, entwined in the history of Iceland’s culture of independence, happen to lie in another pandemic.
Fischer, a perfumery off Ingólfur Square, is dedicated to the emotive power of smells. Products made from natural Icelandic oils and herbs deliver the uncanny force of memory not your own, while for owner Lilja Birgisdóttir, they are reminders of “the world we were raised in, which holds a lot of power over our emotional life and wellbeing”.
The winter of 1918 was ferociously cold, even by Icelandic standards. As Spanish flu made its morbid way around the world, the worst hit people in Iceland were those living in foreign styles of modern housing in Reykjavík and its surrounding fishing villages. Unlike traditional turf houses – which were warmer but unfashionable – these newer homes relied on expensive imported coal for heating, the price of which had soared during the war. As a result, they were colder, more expensive to maintain, crowded with people seeking warmth, and, with all windows firmly shut, perilously unventilated.
That winter made a persuasive case for independence from habits of consumption and living that hailed from other places and other climates. So Iceland began investing in harnessing its peculiar and rich natural resources. By the end of the 1930s, 70 houses in Reykjavík were heated geothermally; this steadily increased over the 20th century to reach today’s near-total coverage.
With abundant hot water being routed into the city, long overdue opportunities for swimming practice began to present themselves. Reykjavík was, and is, a fishing city, and had suffered constant losses of its non-swimming fishermen. One periodical from 1892 reported that a foreman watching members of his crew floundering to climb back aboard observed, with a chilly, deadpan poise I can recognise: “Now it would have been good to know how to swim.”
Leading up to Iceland’s independence from Denmark in 1944, swimming was endorsed as a national sport, celebrated not only for its practical applications for seafarers but, as scholars Örn D. Jónsson and Ólafur Rastrick have noted, as a “civilising” habit. Skinfaxi, the magazine of the nationalist Youth Movement, advised that, “swimming is the sport that trains all the muscles equally and keeps the body clean, but the cleanliness of the mind is grounded, in a sense, upon the cleanliness of the body.” Swimming lessons became compulsory for schoolchildren. The Youth Movement further championed swimming as a way of resisting corrupting distractions like alcohol and of achieving the bristling physique of the heroes of the Icelandic sagas. When the Sundhöllin, or “swimming palace”, opened in 1937 – designed in a winningly austere version of art deco by state architect Guðjón Samúelsson – it was taken as “one of the most impressive symbols of the nation’s self-respect”.
Today, the Sundhöllin is a pleasantly burbling social hub. Friends catch up chin-deep in hot tubs; teenagers dive into the deep end of the swimming pool; people of all ages sit simmering
in saunas; kids dare each other to try the ice pool. Righteous self-improvement does not seem very high on the agenda. It’s also a good place to be alone, an easy place. I sit submerged in geothermally heated water on the rooftop, looking out over low grey roofs, held between the steam rising up and the rain coming down. Here, you are steeped in the island’s essence, nestled in the city built from its terrain, even able to consume the cold, limpid water from its natural springs, channelled into the pool’s drinking fountains.
Later, reading Jónsson and Rastrick’s article, I’m struck by a term they use to characterise Iceland’s geothermal energy – “appropriate technology”. Popularised by E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, the term refers to technologies that are focused on utility rather than production, guided by local circumstances and needs, and which integrate sustainability and accessibility from the outset. In short, appropriate technology aims to be useful more than it aims to create capital. This idea echoed the way Ari Páll Kristinsson had explained the reasoning behind the “linguistic purism” of creating domestic neologisms. New words are made in Icelandic not simply for the sake of preservation, he said, but in the cause of “usefulness”. The “semantic transparency” of natively formed words gives them intuitive accessibility to Icelandic speakers. The self-composting language is its own appropriate technology.
In general, I am surprised that Iceland’s material and linguistic self-sufficiency do not seem more entangled in national pride or nationalist politics, but this probably says more about the island nation I’m from. If this is the case, though, I start to feel that it might be down to “appropriate technology”. Self-sufficiency is pursued in Iceland as a practical option, not a symbolic goal. It offers utility rather than ideology.
If it’s guided by appropriate technology, then that immanence you find in the Sundhöllin hot tubs, and which is laced through the city, must have its usefulness too, even if it encroaches on the ethereal. The evidence suggests it does: why else would so many people – young families, aspirant professionals, pink-faced pensioners, noisy tangles of teenagers – use the pool to talk and laugh and share each other’s company? Most obviously, the pool is a leveller. In nothing but your Speedos, most of the markers of difference that define divisions in the outside world are gone. (Iceland buys the most Speedos per capita in the world.) Everyone is fleshy, content and equal.
There is also a unique form of connection to be found in the pool – one not present in a bar or park – that is a valuable reminder of the world we share, of the simple and crucial fact of our coexistence. I think of the Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel and her obsession with swimming pools. In a body of water with another person, she observes, we are aware of the tissue connecting us, of the reciprocal rhythms of our bodies and movements, of the equivalent pressures and freedoms we live under. “I think there are a lot of similarities in perception – between being in a pool and being in the world,” she says. “We usually forget that we are immersed in air.”
There are more concrete and easily definable uses for naturally hot water, for old words and parts of words, for local resources like wood and turf and rhubarb, but the immanence these generate – a grounding, nourishing opposite to transcendence – is no less significant an offer. On the roof of the Sundhöllin I’m related to the quiet strangers around me, communing without communicating, consonant with the natural and nearby. Here I am. In a dislocating year, I’m grateful to have been able to use the Sundhöllin. ◉
When Iceland’s considerable precipitation seeps into the ground, it is heated by the volcanic activity produced by diverging tectonic plates, later reemerging through fissures at boiling temperature or as steam. The municipality of Bláskógabyggð, east of Reykjavík, contains a cluster of more spectacular hot springs, including Blesi, above, and Geysir, which gave all geysers their name.
