The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  Gunnar gave Skriðuklaustur to the state in 1948, and moved to Reykjavik. He spent his final years translating his own works from Danish into Icelandic. (Many people believe the original translations by his contemporary Halldór Laxness are better.) When the Nobel committee decided to bestow the 1955 prize for literature on an Icelandic writer, it was Laxness they chose – although Gunnar had been nominated in the past and there had been rumours the honour might have been jointly awarded.

  Is the literary legacy of Gunnar, although carefully managed by the estate at Skriðuklaustur, receding like the glacier beneath which he farmed? Skúli tells me that writers live through their books, and thus he is dedicated to keeping Gunnar’s books in print, his words in circulation. Gunnar’s works were translated into many languages in his lifetime. Today a few books are available in English in scholarly editions, but only The Good Shepherd, his slimmest volume, in paperback. Will his fame be restored by the rumoured Hollywood film?

  The Skriðuklaustur building was designed to last and has outlasted its purpose, gaining a new one as a cultural centre. As well as housing his literary archive, Gunnar stipulated that the double walls of basalt and the turf roof should offer shelter to visiting writers.

  Gunnar was not the last writer to live in this valley, nor was he the first. The grounds at Skriðuklaustur once supported the last Catholic monastery in Iceland. Bishop Jónsson of the Augustinian order founded the building around the year 1493. For just sixty years it was a centre for worship on the road north – with the Reformation in Europe, the building fell into disrepair and was soon forgotten. Because klaustur means ‘cloister’ people suspected there had been a religious building here. A recent archaeological dig uncovered the double dry stone wall that protected the holy inhabitants from the cold and a graveyard for the community they served. Some had been buried with books open across their chests. The skeletons have all been removed now, taken away to be used for research into medieval disease, but Gunnar’s sheep would have grazed above them.

  On the first day of sunshine after two weeks of rain, I walk down to the faint line of stones and close-cropped grass that indicates where the monastery walls once stood. The few fragments of stained glass that have been found here (one piece has a man’s face painted on it) suggest the monastery was as ambitious in its own time as Gunnar’s house. Only five monks’ names remain in the record, but the community would have included lay helpers and the sick they cared for. The refectory very likely provided better, more nutritious food than the local people were used to – though I doubt as good as the cakes Elizabet in the museum café bakes. Looking back towards Gunnar’s house, I realize with a shudder that it is completely hidden behind the slope. The twentieth century has vanished.

  I stand for a few moments on the spot that was the calefactory, one of the few heated areas in the monastery – a place for activities that could not be safely done in cold conditions, such as blood-letting and (apparently) writing. I pay silent tribute to my forerunners, imagining the dedication that would have led them to work in this isolated place.

  At the head of the valley is (another) Snæfell, an extinct volcano whose peak reaches high above the snow line. Small cirque glaciers pocket its slopes. One morning as the sun is rising I cycle up the valley, following the river’s course towards its source in the Vatnajökull highlands. I know I won’t reach Snæfell in a day, but at least I’ll get closer to it. Where the valley forks I pass Valþjósstaður, the small farmstead on which Gunnar grew up, voraciously reading every book the pastor lent him. In the soft dawn light, the long spur at the head of the valley seems to be emerging from another element, like a submarine surfacing, the sea still streaming from its sides. After a few miles the road becomes a dirt track. Snæfell’s peak disappears from view as I get closer to it, and other mountains tower over me. A journey planned by looking ahead soon lengthens. I think of Benedikt’s words: ‘All directions so high up in the mountains are “in along”, towards an unknown goal that retreats as one advances, but still remains and is the ultimate end.’

  At noon sunlight reaches down into the valley, gilding larch needles and drying matted grass which has snagged on the fences as flood waters receded. I rattle over a wooden bridge, the first chance I’ve had to cross Jökulsá í Fljótsdal, intending to cycle back on the opposite side of the river. I take out my map. Individual farms are usually named, even on Iceland’s national maps, since they hold as much significance as markers in the landscape as towns do elsewhere. I’ve passed all the inhabited farms, but this map also notes in ghostly grey the names of abandoned farms of which only a few stones remain, several of which lie ahead of me up the valley.

  The maps of Iceland are changing, and not just to incorporate abandoned farms, new data on glacial retreat or islands created by lava bursting from the sea bed. Icelanders, with the stubborn spirit demonstrated in the sagas, have begun to sculpt the land. Since the millennium a dam has been constructed across the Jökulsá á Dal and Jökulsá í Fljótsdal. (There were protests against this movement of rock and water. All Iceland’s musicians up in arms.) If Paul and his team kayaked down either of these glacial rivers from Vatnajökull today they’d enter a reservoir the size of Manhattan, and at its northern tip find their way blocked by the tallest concrete-faced rockfill dam in Europe. Below the Kárahnjúkar Dam the rapids are much reduced. The river’s discharge has been halved, now that it flows only with water from its tributaries. Any overspill is diverted through a concrete chute to the canyon edge, where it tumbles 100 feet. This huge man-made waterfall, high even by Icelandic standards, is not named with the traditional -foss suffix. Instead, it is called Hverfandi – the Vanisher.

  And it does vanish. For most of the meltwater from the glacier that fills the reservoir is diverted away, running through underground tunnels and down a 420-metre vertical penstock towards a power station constructed deep within the mountain, where it rushes through turbines to create electricity.

  While the first part of the Prose Edda is an introduction to how to worship the gods, the second part explains how to write poetry. Poetry is not just an instinct that runs in the veins of mountain shepherds like Benedikt. It was originally distilled by dwarves from honey and the blood of a wise man, and so has liquid form. The Edda relates how Suttung the giant took this mead and hid it deep inside a mountain. Odin, the god of death and also of victory, longs for the mead, which turns everyone who drinks it into a poet or scholar. He bargains with Suttung, promising that he will do the work of nine men all summer for one sip. Giants are devious creatures and, when the summer is over, Suttung refuses to pay Odin. Another giant, Baugi, offers to help Odin steal the mead, and he begins to drill into the mountain. When Baugi declares that the tunnel has reached the cave, Odin sends a puff of breath into the entrance to test it. Splinters of rock fly back in his face – it does not lead to an opening. Odin realizes that Baugi is Suttung’s accomplice and plans to imprison him in the mountain. It is an unwise giant who tries to trick a god. He demands that Baugi continue drilling. When he reaches the cave at last, Odin turns into a snake and slithers in to drink the mead.

  The switchgear house is camouflaged by a traditional turf roof, and emerges from the hillside in such a way that it would be almost invisible to a passenger on the daily flight from Egilsstaðir to Reykjavik. But within this mountain, the giants of the twenty-first century have been working. I imagine the blast routine: drill, insert dynamite, retreat, detonate, return, clear rubble, drill.

  I get off my bike and rest between two pylons. There’s a persistent thrum from electrons drifting along the wires. Only here, where they leave the switchgear house, are the massive transmission lines in proximity. The electric current is so strong that the two lines must be run through different valleys for safety. But they are both heading for one destination, an aluminium smelting plant on the fjords. Aluminium is a soft, silvery-white, lightweight metal. The name is derived from the Latin term for alum, alumen, meaning bitter salt. It is use
d for many things, including aircraft fuselages and the shiny case of my laptop. It is also the only material humans – at the time of writing – can currently use to read quantum information. It seems an appropriate, if controversial, future for those silver glacial waters.

  The water that has been discharged down the tailrace spews from a small tunnel into the Jökulsá í Fljótsdal. As the river grows wider it flows more calmly, leaving its silt in the valley. From my position under the pylons I can see both Skriðuklaustur and the switchgear house, as well as the great mass of mountain between them. The mountain glows with the autumn colours of crowberry and blueberry leaves. It dwarfs everything beneath: the sheep, the farm buildings, the road that travels along the river. I consider the turbulent water, generating power deep in the rock behind my home. What urgent messages is it carrying? Will anyone hear them? The pylons march upwards and away, above the river, above the forest of larches. I stand in awe for a second, then (the default reaction of every tourist) I take out my camera. The view is too wide for the frame, so I borrow a technique from Levick, the photographer who documented Antarctica’s Admiralty Range. Instead of taking a single shot I move the camera sideways: snap, and snap again, five times.

  Since Gunnar’s house is now a historic building, it has a conservation programme. Hjörtur comes every morning to repair the walls, where the concrete surrounding the basalt stones has begun to crack after nearly eighty Icelandic winters. This old man with watery eyes delicately chips away the crumbling concrete, and applies fresh mortar. It has taken him three summers to work halfway round the house, since he works only when the weather is dry. In my study on the other side of the wall, I am finding writing equally slow work. I build up an edifice of words, whittle them down, then add some more. The monks writing in their calefactory are long gone, so I think of Hjörtur as my accomplice instead.

  The day before my departure as I am heading out for a walk, I see Hjörtur packing up his scaffolding. He has finished painting the section restored this summer, and the white paint gleams around the dark rocks. The building will look its best in the snow, but Hjörtur and I will both have moved on to other employment and won’t be here to appreciate it. He hooks a cart laden with scaffolding poles to his van, and it bounces along after him down the driveway. We haven’t spoken a word, just given an occasional nod of greeting. All the same, we understand each other. I’m sorry to see him go.

  It was frosty this morning and the scree on the hillsides has a titanium sheen – a foretaste of the snow that will cover it a few weeks from now. I follow the narrow paths the sheep have trodden through the fields. Where they wandered too close to the cliffs above the waterfall, I detour and find my own way over the tussocks, the grass crunching beneath my feet. Mushroom caps glisten with rime. From the abandoned farm on the crest of the hill I can see down to the river in the next valley. The water appears to catch the sun, even though at noon it should lie in shadow. As I draw closer the steady gleam around the rocks resolves into sheets of ice that have formed overnight. The river usually billows so swiftly here its currents are hard to read, but now the ice gives away their pattern. Here a curve where the soft ice edge is continually nudged by the flow as it rounds a bend; here an ice-free channel formed by a persistent eddy. In the shallows by the bank, splinters of new ice as thin as larch needles are spreading out over the water. Under the ice the river continues to flow towards the valley, as dynamic as the ice is still, and yet where it moves most quickly it is indistinguishable from the ice in colour – tumbling over the crest of the waterfall, sending up white drops of spray.

  There is only one gravestone now in the small burial ground surrounding the cloister. It is carved with the name Jón Hrak. This well-known vagrant features in folk tales from many parts of the country – a fact which may indicate the extent of his wanderings. One poem goes:

  It is cold at the choir’s back, there lies old Jón Hrak.

  Everybody is buried lying East and West,

  everybody but Jón Hrak, everybody but Jón Hrak.

  Sure enough, the stone indicates that Jón does not lie east to west, as is customary here, but south to north. Maybe he died in midwinter, when it was too troublesome to bury him in the proper manner. Or perhaps those who buried him didn’t want him to come back to them from the dead, so they turned him in the wrong direction.

  Merchants walking across the ice cap to trade on the south coast; novelists who can’t decide where their home lies; shepherds astray in the mountains – Icelandic culture is infused with stories of travel. When names were needed for modern machines, the technology that enables our imaginations to travel, words were chosen that centred on the quality of roaming. Thus the neologism for laptop is fartölva, formed from the verb far, meaning to migrate, and tölva – ‘migrating computer’; its companion, the external hard drive, is a flakkari. The latter word can also mean ‘wanderer’ or ‘vagrant’. In the end, it’s the wanderers we rely on.

  The visitor centre for the Vatnajökull National Park is a short walk from Gunnar’s house, along an avenue of balsam poplars. I’ve saved a visit here for my last day. The leaves still give off a sweet smell although, midway through October, they are turning yellow. As befits its mission of conservation, the visitor centre is a pioneering eco building, the latest ambitious project in a valley that seems to attract them. The sharp angles, the fusion of concrete and copper surfaces, the floor-to-ceiling window, wouldn’t be out of place on London’s South Bank. Alongside these elements, the architect has employed traditional features – larch cladding and a turf roof – and the manager points out a waterwheel installed in the fields below, which turns as it catches the cold springs running down the mountain. It is a reproduction of one that was created by a farmer at Skriðuklaustur in the nineteenth century. Revolving constantly in the steady stream of water, the farmer’s wheel ground grain night and day. His neighbours called it the ‘Wheel of the Universe’, because it reminded them of the dependable nature of the sun, moon and stars. Now, just over the mountain, the vast Kárahnjúkar Dam powers the electricity on which people are equally dependent.

  As the night flight from Egilsstaðir levels and sets its course westwards for Reykjavik, I open Ships in the Sky, which Skúli has given me as a parting gift. In it, Gunnar tells the story of his childhood and his evolution as a novelist. He continued to transcribe the rhythms of his first influence: ‘from the deep places of my sleep a voice came to meet me, which I instantly recognized. It was the glacier river speaking, stern and stimulating, fascinating in its rude relentlessness.’

  VI

  GAMBLERS

  BREAK-UP

  Jan Michalski Foundation, Switzerland

  South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Italy

  We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

  John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’

  I

  I wasn’t the only person on a quest to understand ice. I heard of sound artists who were making field recordings in extreme environments: Lake Baikal in Russia, Cape Farewell in Greenland, and even Antarctica. Then Scottish artist Katie Paterson, whose many remarkable works on time and space already included the mapping of all the dead stars, made the sounds of Vatnajökull accessible to anyone who dialled a specific telephone number. This reached a mobile that was connected to the glacier via a microphone submerged in Jökulsárlón. The fact that Vatnajökull had its own phone number somehow personified it, while the possibility of strangers dialling and always getting an answer made me think of the speaking clock, and even of chat lines. (There will inevitably be someone, somewhere who gets turned on by glaciers.) A glacial sími, an invisible icy thread.

  Reykjavik’s domestic airport is built on the marshes. The runway ends in a nature reserve where Arctic terns overwinter. There are little wooden bridges so pedestrians can cross the waterways, and great concrete bridges over the dual carriageway that leads to the city centre. Each time I pass through the city I come for a walk here, often when leaving or arriving,
often inappropriately burdened by luggage, to be reassured by the proximity of other travellers: planes, birds and cars. If I have enough change I stop for a coffee in the Nordic House, which looks out over the marshes. The building was designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto late in his career, and its long blue tile roof is shaped like a shadow of Mount Esja on the horizon.

  This morning I’m here for a conference, so the coffee is free.

  Artists and scientists, lighting designers and filmmakers have gathered to discuss the dynamics of darkness in the north. Presenting her work at the same session as me is Carmen Braden, a composer whose music responds to the environment around her home in Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Around 11,000 years ago a large part of the area was covered by Lake McConnell, a giant lake created by glacial melt; its influence still abounds in this lacustrine landscape. Here in a region Carmen identifies as ‘the taiga, the boreal’, the lake ice has different patterns of behaviour to the sea ice of the High Arctic. It undergoes a seasonal cycle of freeze-up (in October) and melt (in June), rather than cataclysmic change. Carmen has studied ice at different stages of this cycle, producing instrumental works and songs such as First Frost and, most recently, The Ice Seasons, which follows the growth and decay of ice through the year.

  Carmen has inherited ideas from the acoustic ecology movement which began to chart the relationship between humans and their environment through sound in the 1960s. She enthuses about the pioneering work of R. Murray Schafer, whose Snowforms, an a cappella work for child singers, drew on his memories of the ‘soft foldings of snow’ around his home in Ontario: ‘he used glissandi and humming techniques in the voices to create a sculpted, glowing soundscape evoking the snow’. The score of Snowforms is a beautiful object. Rather than a conventional stave with black notes on white paper, Schafer notated the fluid voices using white streaks and stars on a rich blue background. A series of looped lines cascading down the page bears the instruction: ‘chromatic descent, one voice after another, like snowflakes’. How much simpler this is to interpret than the traditional score – for its original child singers, and for someone like me, who doesn’t read music.