The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days

by Alda Sigmundsdottir

  Iceland was, and is, a dangerous place. Even today, with all our modern gadgets for reaching remote places, tracking locations and suchlike, accidents happen frequently. Just imagine what it was like back then. A fog or blizzard might sweep in without warning, and a lone traveller would become hopelessly lost. Sometimes people fell off cliffs or escarpments, or into rivers. Or they simply wandered around aimlessly, trying to find their way home, until they died from hypothermia or starvation.

  Then there were the disasters at sea. Those open rowboats in which people fished until the 19th century were completely vulnerable in sudden storms, or even just rough seas. And even if the sea was smooth and conditions relatively good, people could still die. One of the most memorable scenes I have read in any book is in the Icelandic novel Heaven and Hell, by Jón Kalmann Stefánsson. A man, rowing out to sea with his crew mates, forgets to bring his sea parka. The omission isn’t discovered until the boat is too far from land to row back in time, and he freezes to death before their eyes, with them being unable to help him. Harrowing - and probably all too real in the Iceland of old.

  So how did people cope with all this death? One theory is that people’s frequent moves - from farm to farm, sometimes as often as once a year - stemmed from the fact that they wanted to escape their feelings of grief. And who can blame them? There was no trauma counselling back then, and people probably had no idea how to even begin working through their emotions. Even if they had, the open expression of bereavement would probably not have been welcome inside the cramped quarters of the baðstofa. Besides, debilitating grief was likely not a luxury in which people could indulge, as it interfered with the business of survival. People had no choice but to shut down emotionally and soldier on. And write things like this, which is taken from an actual journal: “There is frost outside, yet it is calm. My daughter died last night.”

  47 Grief box

  Indeed, it is rare to find anything written about people’s responses to grief in the Iceland of old. It is a dark and hidden subject.

  There is so little written about it that one might be tempted to think that Icelanders back then didn’t feel much of anything. That maybe they had developed a thick skin over the centuries and, like animals, could just let their offspring die without dwelling on it too much, or feeling it too much.

  But I have heard one touching story that negates this theory. A home was being dissolved by the authorities after the man of the house had died, similar to what I described earlier. The family was going to be split up, the children sent to different farms. Knowing this, their mother decided to create a box for each of them, into which she put objects to remind them of her, their family, and of home. Things like a lock of hair, a piece of cloth that smelled like home, a letter from her, their mother, and so on. The box wasn’t very big because they weren’t allowed to take many possessions with them - after all, space in the old turf houses was very limited, and each person could only have so much. She told them that when they felt overcome with grief, or completely alone in the world, they could take their box, go someplace where they were alone, and touch the objects one by one, remembering that they were loved.

  48 Death superstitions

  There is no greater uncertainty in this life than death, and what happens to us afterwards. It is not surprising, therefore, that superstition abounded in the Iceland of old when it came to dying.

  For example, folks believed that if you saw your own ghost, it meant that you were about to die (seems logical). If you tripped in a graveyard, it meant you were about to die. If you and another person thought the same thing, and the other person said what you were thinking before you did, it meant that you were about to die - unless you said the words, “I am not more quick to die than God wants me to be”. Then you were OK.

  If you did something in a disoriented state, or something that was opposed to your usual conduct, it meant you were about to die. If there was the sound of breaking or snapping in a farmhouse, the master of the house was about to die. If the fire went out at the farm between the fardagar (those few days a year when everyone moved house or changed their place of employment) and Midsummer Night - so between approximately 14 May and 24 June - the mistress of the house would die.

  If straws, pieces of string, or bits of paper unintentionally landed in a cross on the floor, or if a light went out without cause, someone was about to die. If a mole was heard chewing on something in the wall, someone would die. If a raven crowed on the roof of a farm where there was a sick individual inside, that person would surely die. And there didn’t even need to be a sick person. Someone would die.

  If someone heard the sound of bells in the distance, or heard a ringing in their ears, a person would die. If someone saw a falling star, they would soon hear of a person dying, and the news would come from the direction of the falling star. If something they ate at a farm made them feel sick, someone at that farm would die (maybe of that same food that made them sick?).

  If it rained into a grave at a funeral, it meant that another funeral would soon be held.

  If two men died at a farm within a short period of time, a third would surely die before a year had passed from the death of the first (um, maybe of the same ailment?).

  If a cat refused to sleep in the bed of a sick person, it meant the person would die, especially if the cat was used to sleeping there before. However, if a cat made a point of sleeping in the bed of a sick person, it meant that the person would get better.

  If you saw a light in a church, or heard voices from a church, or saw ghosts in a church, someone would die before too long.

  The list goes on. In fact, the sheer length of the list of superstitions speaks volumes about the omnipresence of death. If there were so many signs of dying, then surely dying happened all the time.

  Above all else, the Icelanders believed in destiny. They believed that a person would - and indeed would have to - die if their time had come. The Icelanders even have a word for this: feigur, meaning “someone who is about to die and there is nothing that anyone can do about it”.

  There was a story of a man, for instance, who had planned to ride into a raging river but was forced by his travel companions to turn back because it was too dangerous. Soon afterwards, the man became gravely ill. It was pretty obvious that he wouldn’t make it, yet he struggled to give up the ghost. This “death war” (as the Icelanders call it) went on for a long while, and the man was clearly suffering. Finally someone had an idea to fetch water from the river into which the dying man had planned to ride. A few drops were sprinkled on him, and he died almost instantly. Conclusion: it had been his destiny to drown in the river that day, he had been feigur, and since that destiny had been arrested, he could only die by having water from the river sprinkled on him.

  49 Last rites

  When someone died, they had to sigh three times for it to be considered, well, valid. If they did not, that meant that they probably weren’t dead, even if they appeared to be.

  When that third sigh had passed from the dying person’s lips, someone would quickly go to the skjár - you remember, that makeshift window in the roof - and remove it so the soul could escape. When the soul had (presumably) flown into the vast blue yonder, it was time for last rites. The person’s eyes and mouth were shut, and also, if possible, the nostrils. The corpse was then laid on its back, and the hands were crossed over the chest. When rigour mortis had set in, the corpse was placed on a plank and wrapped in some kind of shroud. This was then fastened in two or three places, and the whole bundle carried into some other room where it waited to be placed in a coffin, if one was available.

  I say “if” because, well, they weren’t always available (remember the lack-of-wood dilemma). So peasants were often buried sans coffin - and sometimes even sans plank. This was especially common when there were epidemics, or times were especially hard and lots of people died.

  Sometimes there would be no room at the farm to keep a dead body. In such cases it was often taken
to the church right away, and leaned up against a wall somewhere. This was considered to be a pretty stellar solution, because not only did it solve the space issue, the holy spirits wafting around the church would prevent evil spirits from entering the corpse and turning it into a zombie.

  It was fairly common practice to keep a vigil over the dead body until it had been placed in the coffin (or put on the plank, or whatever). This vigil would usually last for three nights at the farm and three nights in the church. Usually two people kept vigil over the body - normally young women. The light was kept on if it was dark outside, and it was essential that the light did not go out. The corpse did not need to be watched over during the day, but definitely at night.

  A body was usually transported to the church on horseback. The coffin or body was then carried through the lychgate while the church bells rang and people sang hymns. There was generally no sermon in the church - only singing. Afterwards the coffin or body would be carried back out of the church and in a circle around it before being placed in the grave. In some places, like the island of Grímsey, the coffin was turned around in three circles after it had been carried out of the church.

  If the dead person was an executed criminal, or someone who had committed suicide, burial in a church yard was not allowed. Nor could the body be carried through the lychgate - instead it was lifted over the enclosure surrounding the yard. Neither could such delinquents be buried inside the church yard - their grave had to be outside of it, and preferably some distance away.

  Today when someone dies, there is a funeral, and almost always an erfidrykkja afterwards. This is a get-together where the guests meet, talk, and enjoy refreshments. The same was true back in the day, although our erfidrykkjur today pale in comparison with those in the past. They could be pretty rambunctious, replete with eating and drinking ... as in, real drinking, and plenty of it. Though to be fair, such feasts were usually only held if the deceased person was someone of means.

  In the late 19th century, something called húskveðjur - “house farewells” - became common. Guests would arrive at the home of the deceased early in the day, eat something, and then bid farewell to the deceased person, who lay in an open casket. Afterward the entire congregation would head to the church for the burial, and then return to the house, where rice pudding and some kind of meat dish would be offered, followed by coffee. Occasionally there might be alcohol served, though nothing in comparison to the erfidrykkjur of earlier times.

  The húskveðjur were abolished in the mid-20th century after a “grave tax” was levied on all burials. Its purpose was to fund the construction of a new cemetery, mortuary and chapel. The idea behind it was that the húskveðjur would no longer need to be held in people’s homes, but rather could be held in the chapel. And this is exactly what happened - húskveðjur were abolished in the early 1960s, but exist today in the form of kistulagningar. The kistulagning is essentially an open casket ceremony, held a couple of days (or sometimes a couple of hours) before the funeral proper. Those closest to the deceased then come together and say their goodbyes privately. This helps to remove the sting of grief, allowing people to release their deepest feelings among their closest friends and relatives before having to face the funeral guests, which typically can number upwards of a hundred people. Today, you see, we Icelanders enjoy a luxury that our forebears did not - we get to honour our grief, and give it the space it needs.

  50 The role of hope

  I mentioned earlier that it was a wonder how people managed to survive, emotionally and physically, with all the hardship and grief in the Iceland of old. What kept them going? Why didn’t they just … check out?

  Well, one theory is that they did check out - or at least some of them did. Those who couldn’t take it simply died off, while the more robust among them carried on - the classic tale about the survival of the fittest. In that way, hardy resiliance became bred into the constitution of the Icelandic people.

  But even so, there was one single ingredient that people had to have if they wanted to keep on living. They had to have hope. Hope that things would eventually get better, that they would see brighter days. Yet … where to find it when there was so much death, grief, adversity and oppression all around?

  We have already discussed the importance of stories. For the Icelanders of old, stories were an anti-depressant. That is why people clung to them, and by extension to the literary tradition. The Icelanders looked to those stories, internalised them, told them again and again, lived them. The stories provided hope.

  Faith in God was another factor. The perpetual message from ecclesiastical authorities was that if you believed in God, feared God, avoided temptation and took the high moral ground, things would turn out all right. Besides, if all else failed and adversity did prevail, you could always blame God. If your daughter died young, it was because “God called her”. If all your livestock died it was “God’s will”. There was a reason. It wasn’t just senseless or arbitrary.

  Also, people learned a certain humility from living with such a landscape and climate. How could they not? There was no bargaining with the landscape; people had no illusions of conquering it. They learned to submit to something greater and far more powerful than themselves. That submission is what humility is all about. And that, of course, is far more conducive to survival than any arrogance or illusion of power. Today we can defer learning those lessons in a number of ways, though eventually life brings all of us to our knees. Back in the Iceland of old, people were brought to their knees pretty much as soon as they could walk.

  The past of a nation is always inextricably tied up with its present. All its experiences become a part of its collective identity and soul. Today, Icelanders consistently rank among the happiest people on earth. In survey after survey they claim to be generally optimistic and content with their lot. Why? Why are people who live on a remote island far up in the North Atlantic ocean, who moreover have very little daylight for several months of the year, happier than, say, a person living in sun-kissed Spain or delightful Italy? Could it be that this contentment, this optimism, became ingrained into the very soul of the Icelandic people through centuries of harsh living, when they had to have hope to survive, even when it was completely illogical?

  I like to think so. Just as I like to think that Iceland’s powerful literary tradition stems from the kvöldvaka, or that the Icelanders’ issues with commitment stem from living with a capricious climate. One could draw any number of parallels between the present and the past. Yet I have no definitive answers, and I doubt anyone does.

  In closing

  I hope you have enjoyed this little gander at the psychology and history of the Icelandic people. If you have, please consider giving this book a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you share your love of books. This is an independently published project, and all help getting the word out is hugely appreciated. I also hope that you will join me on facebook.com/icelandweatherreport, or twitter.com/aldakalda, for more fun and no-so-fun facts about Iceland and the Icelanders.

  Thanks for reading.

  Acknowledgements

  I am deeply indebted to some people for their help with this project.

  To Christopher Condit, Clara Cunha, Ingvar Gíslason, Sylvia Hikins and Sarah Larsen, for reading over the manuscript and offering invaluable critiques and pointers.

  To Megan Herbert, the book's illustrator, for being such a pleasure to work with.

  And especially to my husband, Erlingur Páll Ingvarsson, for designing the book and caring about it with me. To say nothing of all the pep talks he routinely gives me, and his endless moral support.

  A very special thank you

  To all the people who helped out by supporting this project on Indiegogo. This is an independently produced effort, and a fundraising campaign was launched to help offset the cost of production. These people chipped in with extremely generous donations, and have my unending thanks, for their financial contribution as well as for their encoura
gement and faith in me.

  Donald Richmond

  Trudy Ditton

  Rev. Stefan M. Jonasson

  Sally Herbert

  Pierre L’Allier

  Katharine Wiley

  Sunna Furstenau

  Julia Malik

  SOURCES

  These are the most notable sources I used in the writing of this book:

  Ágústsson, Hörður. “Íslenski torfbærinn.” [“The Icelandic Turf Farm.”] Íslensk þjóðmenning, 1 (1987): 227-344. Print.

  Björnsson, Árni. Merkisdagar á mannsævinni. [Landmarks of a Lifetime, 2nd ed. Reykjavík: Mál Og Menning, 1996. 13-42. Print.

  Gunnlaugsson, Gísli Ágúst. “Um fjölskyldusögurannsóknir og íslensku fjölskylduna 1801-1930.” [“On Family History Research and the Icelandic Family 1801-1930.”] Saga (1986): 7-43. Print.

  Hálfdánarson, Guðmundur. “Börn, höfuðstóll fátæklingsins.” [“Children, the Pauper’s Capital.”] Saga (1986): 121-46. Print.

  Jónasson, Jónas, and Einar Ól. Sveinsson. Íslenzkir þjóðhættir [Icelandic Folkways]. 4th ed. Reykjavík: Opna, 2010. Print.

  Ólafsson, Guðmundur. “Ljósfæri og lýsing.” [“Light Sources and Lighting.”] Íslensk þjóðmenning, 1 (1987): 345-69. Print.

  Þorsteinsson, Guðmundur. Horfnir starfshættir og leiftur frá liðnum öldum. [Lost Working Methods and Flashes from Centuries Past.]

  Reykjavík: Örn og Örlygur, 1990. Print.

  “Ættarvefur Hans Jónatans.” [“Hans Jónatan’s Family Website.”] Ættarvefur Hans Jónatans. N.p., n.d. Web.