The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days

by Alda Sigmundsdottir

  The enforcement of this decree in Iceland was the responsibility of the local minister. He regularly made the rounds of the humble abodes of his parishioners and tested the children to see if they were up to speed. If he found them lacking he was authorised by law to have them removed from their parents and placed at some other farm where their education would be more attentively seen to. Not surprisingly, children dreaded these visits. Probably for good reason, too, since I’m pretty sure your average minister would have had a limited understanding of dyslexia or other learning disorders, and that children thus afflicted would not have met with a great deal of compassion.

  The ultimate test of the children’s achievements was the confirmation, which took place in the year when they turned fourteen. This was a major rite of passage, and officially marked a child’s transition into adulthood. (The confirmation still exists today but has been turned into a kind of materialistic parody of itself. For one thing, no person of sound mind in our day and age would agree that a child of fourteen should be considered an adult. But it was a different era then, and children grew up far more quickly - mentally, if not physically. I say this because children today go through puberty earlier than their peers in the old days did - likely due to all those improved living conditions. Or something.)

  So back in the day, people were officially adults at the ripe old age of fourteen ... albeit adults that had pretty much no authority over their own lives. But at least they could read.

  5 Pecking order

  Before I go further it might be a good idea to talk about social structure among the common folk in the Iceland of old.

  It went something like this: Farmer - Croft Farmer - Freelancer - Farmhand - Dependent of the District - Vagabond.

  Farms were grouped into districts called hreppar. To qualify as a hreppur, a district had to have at least twenty farms known as lögbýli, or “legal farms” - so named to differentiate them from the croft farms sometimes situated on their land. The district collected taxes and had various obligations towards its citizens, such as making sure they had a roof over their heads and did not starve to death. They could starve almost to death, but not fully. In that sense the hreppur was kind of like a welfare bureau - although a rather ineffective one, it must be said.

  THE FARMER was the head of the legal farm. A whole bunch of people lived on a farm, including the farmer’s family, farmhands, possibly freelancers and vagabonds on occasion, and dependents of the district.

  The concept of personal liberty didn’t really exist in the Iceland of old, and the farmer had pretty much full and total control over the people who lived on his farm. For instance the farmhands were not allowed to leave the farm without the farmer’s permission ... although, to be fair, the farmer was not allowed to leave the district either without the express permission of the district administrative officer or the local minister. (God forbid that people just be allowed to wander about at will.) The farmer was entitled to any money that a farmhand in his employ might earn, even if it was earned away from the farm, say in a fishing station somewhere.

  So essentially the farmhands had the legal status of children in relation to their farmer-father. In return, the farmer was obliged to treat his farmhand-children well, which meant housing, feeding and clothing them.

  Now, you might perhaps think that a farmer would have carved out a pretty secure place for himself in Icelandic society. Not so. He was usually a tenant farmer himself. In fact almost all farmers in Iceland were, and they leased the land on which they lived for a year at a stretch. At the end of that year, the farmer could (and frequently did) move to another farm. He could also be evicted by the landowner. Roughly half of all land in Iceland was owned by wealthy landowners, the other half by the crown and/or the church.

  THE CROFT FARMER generally sub-leased a little piece of land from the legal farmer. The legal farmer was officially responsible for the croft farmer’s welfare, meaning he had to support the croft farmer if he fell on hard times and ensure that he did not become a burden on the district. In other respects, the croft farmer was free to manage his time and affairs, and that of his family.

  FREELANCERS were an interesting class of people. To be viable as such you had to be financially solvent, which in practice meant you had to own the equivalent of ten cows (the currency by which things were measured back then). Make no mistake: this was a hefty sum. To set up your own farm you only had to own the equivalent of three cows, so you can see what this meant. The logic behind it was that your ten cows were like your health and infirmity insurance, since if you were your own boss you had no one (read: no patriarchal farmer figure) to take care of you if you fell on hard times.

  On the whole, being a freelancer was pretty sweet, because if you were able to establish yourself as such you could earn a nice sum and have the flexibility of doing your own thing - in other words not have to abide by the laws imposed on farmhands. For example if you sold your services during the busiest weeks in the summer - haymaking season - you could earn more money in just that period than a regular farmhand made in a year. The main problem you faced as a freelancer was where to live between jobs ... and some folks got pretty creative when it came to that, as I’ll explain later.

  FARMHANDS. If you didn’t have three cows to start your own farm you had to find yourself a position as a farmhand. That’s right. You had to have a place on a farm. Once you had it, you were obliged to stay there for a year, but were graciously permitted to move to another farm at the end of that year, provided you had secured yourself a place. This “farmhand year”, for lack of a better term, stretched from May to May, and at the end of it there was a four-day period in which people were allowed to move to their new positions. These days were called fardagar, “moving days”, and as you can probably imagine there was a lot of bustling activity in the Icelandic countryside at that time. Farmhands made up twenty-five percent of the Icelandic population in the 19th century, and people of this rank were not permitted to marry unless they had the financial capacity to start their own farms - which very few people did. And the wage gap sure was alive and well back then ... male farmhands received a wage equal to the value of half a cow per year, while female farmhands received a wage of ... nothing. That’s correct. Nothing.

  DEPENDENTS OF THE DISTRICT. So people were legally obliged to find themselves positions on farms, but alas, it sometimes happened that there were no positions to be had. This was especially true when times were hard, like after the Lakagígar eruption in 1783, which killed about a quarter of the Icelandic population, wiped out about eighty percent of all sheep, and fifty percent of other livestock. People who could not find positions had nowhere to go, and became welfare cases. These “dependents of the district”, as they were called, were then randomly placed on farms in their area, and the district paid for their upkeep. And if you think that people could just kick back and have a top nice time of it as they collected their welfare ... think again. That upkeep the district paid turned into debt that the poor hapless dependents were required to pay back. Just how that was supposed to happen was a mystery ... remember that female farmhands earned no money. And until such a time that they did repay their debt they were virtual prisoners of the district. They were not permitted to marry for the next ten years, for instance, unless their debt was settled.

  VAGABONDS. These were the people who did not fit any of the above categories. I’ve decided to devote a whole separate section to them later in this book because, well, they’re kind of fascinating.

  6 Waking sticks

  By far the most important time of year for indoor work (and therefore the kvöldvaka) was the week leading up to Christmas. People had to work overtime to get everything done at that time, not only so they could give each other half-decent prezzies, but also because the farmers to whom they were accountable had frequently accumulated debts with the merchants in town. To offset those debts, the farmers needed to make deposits by the end of the year, and these deposits were in the form
of goods. Consequently their farmhands had to bust their butts in the handiwork department in the days leading up to Christmas.

  (Incidentally, it is very likely that this is where the legend of the Yule Cat originated. If you’re not familiar with the dreaded Cat, it is the pet of an old ogre named Grýla, who lives in a cave and eats naughty children. Legend has it that the Yule Cat will appear and eat any person who does not get a new item of clothing for Christmas. This is called, in Icelandic, að fara í jólaköttinn, literally “to go into the Yule Cat”, and figuratively “to become the prey of the Yule Cat”. As it happens, Grýla is also the mother of the thirteen Icelandic Yule Lads, which I guess you could call the Icelandic equivalent of Santa Claus, except they tend to be mischievous and nasty, which probably tells you a fair bit about the nature of Icelandic society back in the day. But I digress.)

  Yet folks are human, as we know, and tend to get sleepy even when they’re being told thrilling stories about ghosts and hidden people and bloodthirsty mass-murdering early settlers, so someone had to invent something to keep them working even when they were on the verge of nodding off.

  Enter the vökustaurar, literally “waking sticks”. You know when someone casually remarks that they need to put toothpicks in their eyelids to stay awake? Well, according to Íslenzkir þjóðhættir the Icelanders actually did that. They had these little wooden sticks with a small slit on one side that were sort of split down the middle, and they made it so painful for people to close their eyes that they had no choice but to stay awake, knitting or carding or spinning or doing whatever they were doing, all because grabbing a wee shut-eye hurt too damn much.

  Those of you who have read the first Little Book will know that Icelanders like to work in spurts, everyone working in unison like a well-oiled machine until the work gets done. I have heard it said that this is coded into the Icelanders’ DNA because of all the occasions when fishing boats would come in with the catch and people would have to go down to the docks and move like gangbusters to preserve it. But now I’m thinking it’s much more likely that it was conditioned into the fabric of the Icelandic nation with those little toothpick-like thingies that pinched your eyelids if you were about to fall asleep.

  7 Let there be light

  I’m sure you realise that normal daylight did not suffice to adequately illuminate the Icelandic turf houses of old, particularly not in the winter. Other light providers had to come into play. And naturally folks did not have the luxury that we have, of light at the flick of a switch. Back then light providers were enormously precious, and people went to vast lengths to conserve them.

  So how did people light their cosy turf farmhouses? Well, apart from your basic fire, the two main providers of light were candles and fish oil lamps. And both presented a functional challenge.

  The main problem with the candles, at least initially, was that they were supremely expensive. The first ones were made of beeswax, that had to be imported. Consequently they were used only in churches during special ceremonies. However, around the year 1400, people figured out that you could make candles out of tallow (animal fat). This changed everything. Candles could now be manufactured in their own kitchens, so to speak, and used for pretty much any occasion. Even so, they remained fairly precious (tallow wasn’t an inexhaustible resource), and possessing your very own candle was kind of a big deal. For that reason they were extremely popular Christmas gifts. As in, extremely popular. As in, pretty much the only Christmas gift worth giving (with all due respect to mittens, sweaters, and the like). You see, having your own candle meant that you could read or do whatever you wanted to that required light, when you pleased and where you pleased - you didn’t have to do it in unison with all the other people in the baðstofa. A candle was a small chunk of liberation.

  As for the oil lamps, they were initially nothing more than small, flat stones - pebbles, really - with an indentation in the middle into which the fish oil was poured. The wick, stuck into the oil and then lit, was made of cotton grass, which grows in relative abundance in Iceland. As you can imagine, these didn’t provide a huge amount of light. Later, proper oil lamps made of metal, which also burned fish oil, were introduced. This fish oil reportedly had a disgusting odour, adding to the olfactory calamity that already existed inside the baðstofa.

  Kerosene lamps were not introduced to Iceland until the late 19th century and were met with a great deal of suspicion. They gave off so much light. Too much light. It just wasn’t right. Consequently they were denounced as a frivolous luxury that wasted fuel and furthermore could easily burn down the house (had it not been made mostly of turf). Candles, on the other hand, were the real deal, and had proven their dependability. Presumably no candle had ever caused a fire in the Iceland of old.

  8 Ceremony of light-time

  As I was saying, these light providers were incredibly precious. So precious that there was a small ceremony each time the light was lit during the darkest time. That time even had its own name: ljósatími, literally “light time”. The ljósatími, which lasted from around six to ten in the evening, usually began in mid-September, coinciding with a specific event such as the first sheep round-up, and lasted until approximately mid-March.

  This light-lighting ceremony in the evenings was invariably preceded by the so-called rökkurstund, or “twilight hour”. This was the interval between when it had become too dark to work without light, and before the lamp - or other light source - was formally lit. It had a two-fold function: to conserve the light source (after all, it wasn’t pitch dark yet), and also to provide a time of rest and repose. If people wanted to talk during the rökkurstund, they had to talk quietly. Children were sent outside to play if the weather permitted, or, if it did not, they had to pass the time quietly with their toys in the corner of the baðstofa.

  The rökkurstund lasted for about an hour. After that, to signal the beginning of the evening’s activities in the baðstofa, the mistress of the house would formally light the lamp. If she was indisposed, one of the female farmhands to whom she had entrusted the task would do so. In other words, it wasn’t done by just anybody, and it generally wasn’t done by men. The domestic sphere, even back then, was primarily a woman’s domain.

  9 Let there be daylight

  The absence of light was not only a problem in the winter, mind. Given the materials out of which the houses were built, it was also a challenge in the summer. The turf walls of the farmhouses were thick and therefore pretty good at preventing drafts and keeping in warmth, but that also meant that they kept out the daylight, and in air that was rancid and stale.

  A solution had to be found, and that solution came in the form of holes made in the roof of the baðstofa. Sometimes there was only one hole, and sometimes there were two. Obviously they couldn’t just be left open, though, because, you know, rain and snow and wind and sleet, and in those days glass windows were way way out of the price range of ordinary folk.

  So those crafty Nicelanders came up with something called a skjár, or “screen”. Basically it consisted of a thin membrane made of the amniotic sac of a cow, stretched over and fastened to the wooden ring from a barrel. Whenever a cow calved, great care was taken to keep the amniotic sac as whole as possible. It was then washed, stretched out and dried, then wet again and stretched onto the barrel ring. This circular “window” was then stuffed into the hole in the roof. If it snowed so much that the skjár became covered over (thereby preventing daylight from entering) it was removed (from the inside), the snow brushed off, and then re-inserted. If it was really cold and there was a lot of frost, half- or one-inch thick slabs of ice would be placed on top of the opening, and the snow packed carefully around the edges. Either that or the hole, with the screen in it, would be filled with snow in the evening in order to keep in the warmth, and then uncovered in the morning.

  Pretty ingenious, wouldn’t you agree?

  When someone in the baðstofa died (which happened as a matter of course) it was considered essential
to remove the skjár closest to the bed of the deceased so that the soul could escape. The skjár then had to be re-inserted upside-down to prevent the soul from coming back into the house and re-entering the body. In the unfortunate event that this happened, said body could be used to do annoying stuff like haunting, harassing, mauling or killing people. And no one wanted that.

  10 The high risk of pregnancy

  But hey, I wasn’t planning to talk about death quite yet. Rather, let’s talk about birth. More specifically: crazy superstitions relating to birth.

  Back in the days when Iceland was hopelessly poor, folks typically set out to have somewhere in the ballpark of six to sixteen children. (Although given that most people did not marry until around thirty years of age, they presumably would have had to turbo-charge their efforts.) Half of those children might reach adulthood - that is, if they managed to enter the world at all. Being pregnant in those days was a pretty risky proposition, you see. And to minimise risk, a woman needed to steer clear of many, many things, such as:

  Eating with a spoon that had a cleft in it, or her child would be born with a harelip.

  Running while pregnant, or her child would be prone to dizzy spells.

  Looking over the edge of anything at high elevation, or her child would have a fear of heights.

  Stepping over a cat in heat, or her child would be born an idiot or at the very least a very unfortunate person.