The Ice Museum

by Joanna Kavenna

  Brooding on the quayside, away from the groups, was Richard Burton, staring at the view. Burton was preparing to spend a summer in Ultima Thule. It was the custom to throw a Thule in at some stage in the travelogue, like Mrs. Alec Tweedie, modestly alluding to the ancient place, before moving onto the contemporary wonders of the lava plains. But Burton levelled an exacting gaze at the question of Thule. Burton was certain he could solve it, the millennia-old mystery. It was the sort of challenge he was likely to enjoy—an explorer in sinewy middle age, he had stamped a hundred firsts onto the unwitting sands of Arabia and the Middle East. He had sauntered to Mecca; he had been the first European to see Lake Tanganyika. He had played the part immaculately—the Victorian enthusiast, the autodidact of the Arabian sands, effortlessly fluent in an array of languages, writing up his travels in wilfully baroque prose.

  Shortly before his arrival in Iceland, Burton had submitted his fire and impatience to the hands of a painter, Lord Leighton. The portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Leighton could make beauty burn on the canvas, the luminescent folds of an orange dress spring to life, flicker and never fade, but with Burton he stuck to his darkest shades, mixing them into a sludge colour on his pallet. The explorer sits against a black backdrop, wearing a sombre suit, his arm resting on the deep red of a chair. His beard is full and impressively groomed, bunching from his chin onto his tie. He casts a haggard cheek towards the painter’s brush, a cheek with a jagged scar from a spear wound, and turns his eyes towards an unknown point. The only light is the brilliance of his face, his glare.

  Burton had been strangely worried about his appearance on the day of the sitting, concerned that he might be painted as a scarred maniac. Don’t make me ugly, there’s a good fellow, he had asked Leighton, flashing his vehement stare at the painter. Don’t paint my necktie or my tiepin, he had added, capricious demands which Leighton nearly obeyed. The painter twisted the necktie into the shadows, leaving only a glint of metal. He gave Burton the eyes of a mesmerist; saving the viewer from the force of the look, he turned the eyes away.

  It was a dark portrait and it made a strange man of Burton, like a supernatural visitation, looming out of the blackness. It suited the solitude and vehemence of Burton’s style, his refusal to parrot prevailing opinions, as he prepared to solve the old question of Thule. Burton was painted by Leighton during the time he was preparing to travel to Thule. He wanted to clear up the darkness that had been ‘heaped by a host of writers upon Thule,’ he had decided. He recognized that Thule had been Britain to the Romans, Scandinavia to later scholars, and had done general service as synecdoche for the northern lands. But he was certain that Thule was applied to Iceland, and to Iceland only, from the earliest stages of its exploration. Iceland was the place Burton called Thule, the land he thought worthy of the old epithet.

  Finding the arrival in Reykjavík slightly tepid, Burton slipped into fantasy, staging himself a joyful pageant. As his ship docked into a grey harbour he lined the Ancients up on the quayside, like a cross-temporal welcoming party. Guest of honour was Pytheas, who ‘evidently referred to Iceland’ in his account of Thule, thought Burton. And he recalled the words of Pomponius Mela, who described Thule as a land famous in Greek and Roman poems, where the winters were dark and the summers bright with constant sunshine. Mela had mentioned the Orkney and Shetland Isles, and the Scandinavian Isle elsewhere, so he couldn’t have been thinking of them when he mentioned Thule, said Burton. From this, Burton claimed, Mela’s Thule was Iceland, though his maps were uncertain.

  Writing his Natural History, Pliny the Elder had named a host of islands near Britain before he turned to Thule. Ireland, Pliny wrote, lay beyond Britain, and other than that there were smaller islands: the Orkneys separated narrowly from one another, the Hebrides, and the seven ‘Acmodae,’ which might have been the Shetlands. The most remote of the recorded islands was Thule, and ‘at one day’s sail from Thule, there is the frozen ocean,’ wrote Pliny. Burton marshalled Pliny into his welcoming party, though he had written about Thule in his section on Britain, but this, Burton decided, had been charming ignorance, and a sensitive interpretation would make Pliny an advocate for Iceland-Thule. And though Claudius Ptolemy had placed Thule further south, his measurements were bound to be wrong, wrote Burton, so it was best to ignore Ptolemy’s longitudes and latitudes, and just assume he had meant Iceland too.

  The Venerable Ancients—Burton dragged them to the quayside, forcing bunting into their hands, enlisting them in a ghostly procession of long-dead experts, waving banners: ‘You are now in Thule.’ Saxo Grammaticus, Cluverius, Harduin and Dalechamp, Bougainville, Hill, Penzel, Pontanus, Thilo, Mercator and Mannert, listed Burton, an incantation of names, as he stood in the harbour surveying the cracked lava plains of Iceland. All of them thought that Iceland was Thule. Burton could see no reason to doubt the reality of Thule. Iceland might have been discovered by Pytheas, or even by the Carthaginians before him. ‘The old tradition of Thule, though different ages applied the word differently, was never completely lost,’ Burton thought. Though the official rediscovery of Iceland dated from the Norse arrivals in the ninth century, there was evidence to suggest Irishmen had been going there in the century before, if not much earlier.

  At least as early as the eighth century, wide-eyed clerics had been stepping onto this cracked land, casting themselves to the ground, seeing devils in the dark piles of lava. Seafaring Irish monks arrived on clerical outings, looking for an empty place to pray. They found pure white plains, dark hell pits; they scrambled around on the beaches, struck by visions of men dressed entirely in white, imagining Judas Iscariot chained to a rock, suffering eternal torment. Latin-muttering, margin-illuminating monks, trying to escape their blue-black cows, the wet pastures of Kerry. They found islands where tables were laid for dinner, covered with fish and grapes; they found themselves intoxicated by the smell of fruit on these opulent islands, but they would turn a corner, and find a devil urinating on their boat. They reported back from Iceland, which they called Thule, describing it as a place where the sun shone through the night in the summer, so bright that you could see the lice in your shirts, they reported. It was a confusing land the clerics found, full of mysteries, and they used it like a hermitage, sitting on the rocks, hearing the voice of God in the rumbling of the glaciers.

  Burton drew in a later source, as further proof of his theory. There was Christopher Columbus, who might have sailed to Iceland, which he called Thule. From the dusty evidence, it seemed that Columbus might have sailed in February 1477, before his expedition to the New World. He knew Seneca, he knew the lines about the coming time when ‘the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among the islands.’ Columbus found that Thule was as large as England, and the sea was not frozen, though the tides were rough, and the waves rose twenty-five fathoms twice a day. It was a place where the English went to trade. Columbus’s claim to have reached Thule had been almost as controversial as Pytheas’s original story. He was doubted because he had claimed the waves around Iceland were astonishingly high, because he placed the island too far north, and said that he sailed far beyond its coasts without being stopped by ice. Columbus was accused of being a braggart, who couldn’t hear of a place without claiming to have reached it. Others suggested he had arrived in Iceland, but had exaggerated the details to make his journey more compelling.

  Burton was part of another, later, list of names, brought in as an expert witness for an Icelandic Thule. Writing in the 1940s, the Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson used Burton as part of his argument that Thule had been Iceland. Stefansson believed that the ancient Britons had heard of Iceland, or even reached it in their boats, and told Pytheas about it when he arrived in Britain. And Stefansson was convinced that Columbus had been to Iceland. Sailing through sluggish seas, Columbus might have been surprised by a sudden storm, and in the chaos of the swell, waves smashing o
nto the deck, might have overestimated the height of the waves. Stefansson had a handful of points to back his argument that Iceland was Thule, but his main proof was Richard Burton. Richard Burton, wrote Stefansson, had believed that Iceland was Thule, and Burton was ‘known to some as a great figure in the history of nineteenth-century travel . . . admired as belonging with Caesar among those who can both do things and write about them.’ The summing up for Iceland appeared conclusive, wrote Stefansson.

  By the time he turned his attention to Thule, Stefansson had a long and controversial history of Arctic exploration behind him. He had proposed excitable theories about what might lie around the North Pole, imagining it as a region rich in minerals. In 1913 he had led a catastrophic expedition on the Karluk and had left his captain and crew when the ship became frozen in the ice. Many of those remaining on board died after the ship was sunk by the pressure of the ice. The survivors were forced to struggle towards Siberia. Stefansson returned safely, having spent years among the Inuit populations of the north. He needed the force of Burton’s personality behind his theories, the icy glare of a convinced Victorian, surveying the sources.

  At midday, Johannes the poet was sitting with a beer, biding his time. We were in a bar around the corner from the Town Hall, where young Icelandic couples were spread across sofas, drinking coffee and reading the papers. Johannes was small and dark-haired, wearing a tattered blue suit, a grimy white shirt falling out of his trousers, a style of deliberately debased formality. Johannes wrote skittish verse about life in the north. His hands were stained with ink, as if he had recently tipped an inkpot across them.

  ‘I write in the tradition of the Sagas,’ he said, immediately, as I sat down. ‘We all in Iceland write in the tradition of the Sagas. It wasn’t so long ago, everyone knew all the Sagas; they sat around in the evenings reciting them. On the farms in the valleys, there wasn’t much to do. They called it the Icelandic Library, the old men and woman reciting the Sagas to each other, to their children and grandchildren, and of course eventually they knew them off by heart. I write in this tradition; as an Icelander it is inherent to me,’ he said.

  ‘You asked me about Thule; I have even written a poem about it. I wrote one about Thule, because it is the most ancient reference to our nation, it shows that people knew about our country even before Christ. My poem is about the idea of a perfect land, and how that might be, and how Iceland has never really been a perfect land, because of the violence of the rocks, and because of the difficult history of the people. It’s been a hard time, for the people. They lived well, though the Vikings were rough and vicious, until they were taken over by Denmark, and then after that the country slid into a decline for centuries, until the nineteenth century, when our poet Hallgrímsson took up literary arms for Iceland, and tried to stir his countrypeople up. He just wanted them to care, he was an amazing man. Jonas Hallgrímsson. I’ll find you a poem by him too.’

  That was how Johannes talked, a thick stream of words, with no real sign of stopping. It was perhaps the coffee; it was perhaps the overflowing bar, with the Icelanders draped scenically around; it was perhaps the length of the days, the awareness that the daylight would continue through the night that made Johannes so verbally energetic. Johannes opened his notebook, coughed into his ink-stained hand, and said, ‘This is my poem about Thule:

  A LAND THEY WEREN’T QUITE SURE ABOUT

  UNCERTAIN AND DERANGED

  LOST FLAMES OF FIRE COATING THE ABANDONED ROCK

  AN UNKNOWN LAND, UNTIL THEY CAME.

  A GREEK IN A WARSHIP WAS THE FIRST,

  HE ADMIRED THE ICE AND THE SUN AND TURNED AROUND

  THIS LAND WAS TOO MUCH FOR HIM.

  THE VIKINGS DRAGGED THEIR BOATS ACROSS THE SEA

  THEY WANTED ANOTHER LAND

  FREEDOM THEY CRIED WHEN THEY SAW THE ROCKS

  FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM

  FREEDOM.

  ‘That’s just the first verse; there are another fifty-two. One verse is just the word freedom, repeated thirty-four times. I like the word “freedom,” ’ he said. ‘If you come to the café in November I am doing a poetry week. My subject is Liberty through Poetry. Sometimes, when I feel like it, I will organize a poetry evening, with a free salmon supper for anyone who can recite one of my poems from heart. This is no mean feat; I never write anything less than thirty stanzas long. I believe in the oral tradition. The Viking poems were originally recited—like your tradition, your Anglo-Saxon poems, with the scop—the poet. The scop was such a great thing to be, a poet sitting by the fire, with a beer, and then suddenly they’d call on him to make up a verse about anything—usually the same old things, of course—a battle or a dead warrior—and the scop would launch into something—I think that’s a wonderful thing to do. At my recitals we try impro-poetry—where the audience decides the theme, and I jam with it, and I set a limit of forty-two stanzas to my improvisation. I like to improvise in iambic pentametres, but it’s hard, you can imagine.’ He laughed.

  ‘You should try our beer, Thule beer, it’s very good, brewed in the north, in our second city Akureyri,’ said Johannes, handing me a bottle. ‘I never write without having drunk half a crate of the stuff.’

  There was something gently preposterous about Johannes. There was something gently preposterous about our encounter, as he sucked at his ink-stained fingers and spilt his beer on the table. His hands were shaking; I wasn’t sure if it was nerves or an excess of frenetic energy. He was staring earnestly at his bottle of beer. ‘Could you recite me a poem?’ I asked.

  He sucked pensively for a while on his beer bottle before saying: ‘No, it’s the summer. There’s no time in the summer. It’s in the winter I get really verbose. In the summer, haiku, maybe a sonnet. Only in the winter can we do epics. There’s not much to do in the winter in Iceland. Perhaps people are glad of a chance to sit still for a while. We have a writer,’ he added, ‘called Halldór Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, we are very proud of him. He was no poet, of course, our only poets are Hallgrímsson and me on my best days, but Laxness wrote all about the countryside, and he said that it’s all very well thinking the countryside is full of the past, full of the memories of former Icelanders, and seeing the landscape as a great symbol of Iceland, but there are days when all we notice is the sun, the sun shining on the hills. On these days, the sun is stronger than the past. You can’t always be banging on the drum, you know, some days you just sit and enjoy the warmth on your toes.’

  Laxness loved the damp bogs where the farmers tended their sheep, the winds sweeping along the treeless hills, the sound of rain on stone. No Icelandic writer better evoked the vastness of the valleys, the broad winter skies, stained a deep blue, the simple lives of the people. His characters were disturbed, at times, by the strangeness of the land around them; in Independent People a farmstead seems to be haunted by an ill-favoured spirit, and the farmer finds his life slowly destroyed. They sometimes longed for escape, though when they stood on a quayside watching the ships being loaded, holding tickets to the USA, they found they couldn’t leave; they turned their horses around, and galloped back to their cold valleys.

  Later, Johannes rubbed my hand with his ink-stained palm, told me to read his poems, and then disappeared onto the street.

  I left Reykjavík, under a cloud of rain. I drove out towards Thingvellir, the centre of the weird Icelandic Thule, once home to the Viking Parliament, the Thing. The road wound past scree mountains oppressed by mist, the valley floors scattered with shrubs and slender birch trees, the soil a vivid shade of orange. In a sudden sunny interval, the geothermal town of Hveragerði steamed under the scree. Small bakeries were selling dry cakes and salmon rolls, but the restaurants were shut, their blinds pulled down. The skies darkened and clouds hovered above the small town. The road ran across a plateau, as rain began falling in thick streams onto the dank grass. Across the farmland and the mud ridges I saw clouds of smoke rising slowly from Geysir ahead, mingling with the rain and the mist
.

  Geysir was a village engulfed in a geothermal haze. Through the mist the barrack-shapes of two hotels and the white concrete walls of a petrol station were dimly visible. At the field of the geysirs a few tourists stood in the rain, waiting for one of the boiling pools to erupt and blast a column of water out of the sand. Smoke was rising from the ground, drifting with the wind. The ground was multi-tone: red sulphur sand streaked with blue, brown and yellow, soft grey-white silica; coral-like rocks; rusty moulds, coated with water from the explosions and lashed by the driving rain. I stood over the steaming pools, watching the water bubble. The rain drowned out the soft gurgles and splutters from the steam pools. There was a rock kettle, with steam bursting out of a funnel, and a brilliant blue basin, with a puddle of water bubbling inside it.

  At the Geysir Hotel they were serving up salmon in the restaurant, and when the rain started to fall harder everyone retreated there to watch the drifting clouds from a distance. The napkins were folded into towers on the tables. ‘Like the geysir spout,’ said the waitress, smiling, as I sat down. The food arrived, and no one much noticed it. Everyone was fixed on the view through the window, sitting at an angle to the tables.