Culture in Iceland

Many Icelanders can trace their family tree back to the country’s first Viking settlers who rowed over from Norway and, since written Icelandic has changed very little down the centuries, they can also quote huge chunks of the Sagas. Fans of the Iceland football team electrified stadiums during Euro 2016 by performing the Viking Thunderclap, too. Icelanders are proud of their heritage, but they are also forward thinking, enjoying a cultural identity characterised by independence, egalitarianism and effortless style.

Iceland has a fantastic storytelling tradition. Many tales and anecdotes belong in an oral tradition, and concern the huldufólk, meaning hidden people. These are not the same as elves, who live amongst humans. Spend any time in Iceland and it’s easy to see how the island’s remoteness could lead to a belief in folk living in the wind and the storm, just out of view, but watching. Not every Icelander believes in the huldufólk, mind you, but most are happy to accept their place in the country’s cultural identity.

Perhaps Iceland’s most famous stories are the Sagas – big, bloody, muscular works that also brim with wisdom and sing with poetry. They document the real people and events of Iceland’s age of settlement – the 9th, 10th and early 11th centuries – and have the jump on Shakespeare, with their sprawling families, doomed love affairs and long lasting feuds.

After the excitement of the Sagas, Icelandic literature became concerned with sacred verse and rhymed, epic poems for a few hundred years, but at the beginning of the 19th century found its literary groove again, with romantic, realist and naturalist poetry flowering throughout the century, alongside short stories and plays. Most famous of all Iceland’s writers is Halldór Laxness, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. He wrote everything from poems to essays, but his novels Independent People and Iceland’s Bell are most widely translated. The former is also a fascinating insight into Icelandic life in the early 20th century – dark (literally and metaphorically), tough and little changed since the first Norsemen arrived, but also full of poetry and ghosts; a contemporary Saga, in fact.

Let’s not forget that this is the nation that gave us Björk, too. When this musical innovator and creative genius was born in 1965, she belonged to a nation of just 200,000 people – demonstrating again how this tiny island seems to be a cultural hothouse. Björk has released nine studio albums, but not content to simply write amazing music, she combined her love of nature with her formidable creativity to design an app that allows children to compose intuitively, launched around her Biophilia album of 2011. In fact, her earliest memories of music and composing are intimately connected to her home country. She said during an interview with Wired Magazine in 2013: “Being brought up in Iceland, I’ve always had a relationship with nature... Living in a capital in Europe, but you’re still surrounded by mountains and ocean. My relationship to music was probably strongest just walking outside to school and back. It was a 30 minute walk and I would sing to myself. Very quickly I started mapping out my melodies to landscapes.”

The Icelandic design industry is thriving, encompassing everything from fashion and furniture to product design, and employing several thousand people. It’s a key contributor to the post banking crisis economy but, like the visual arts and music, very young – the word for design, hönnun, only came about in the 1950s. It means Icelandic designers are riding an utterly unique wave of creativity, sometimes referencing traditional crafts, with contemporary takes on knitwear and blankets, and always demonstrating a very Icelandic sense of independence and daring. A lack of materials is a challenge – almost treeless Iceland doesn’t have a ready supply of timber – but designers are resourceful, too. Fish leather is used to make wallets and notebooks, children can play with fishbone model making kits and young designers are reconnecting with Iceland’s tradition of using everything and wasting nothing, by making playful objects such as masks from waste materials like hessian sacks and foil.

Sources:

[1] The Observer