The Almost Nearly Perfect People Page 16

  Iceland’s ambivalent relationship with Denmark sheds an interesting light on the bizarre ‘investment’ spree embarked upon by Iceland’s entrepreneurs between 2006 and 2008. Many of Iceland’s most notable acquisitions were from its former colonial masters, Denmark. Along with Copenhagen’s two main department stores, Illum and Magasin du Nord, Icelandic businessmen also bought the Danish capital’s most venerable and grand hotel, the Hotel d’Angleterre, along with Danish media companies, and Sterling, the Danish airline (bankrupting it within two years).

  Judged on objective economic grounds, they couldn’t have invested their money more stupidly if they had tried – department stores have long been considered the white elephants of retail, for instance, and both of Copenhagen’s had been losing money for years – so one can only conclude that there must have been another agenda at play. Were these purchases a weird form of post-colonial revenge? Evidence that this might be the case came during a football match between Iceland and Denmark at around this time. In the middle of the match, the Icelandic supporters began chanting ‘We’re coming for Tivoli next’: they were threatening to buy Denmark’s historic amusement park, arguably the most sacred of all Danish cultural sites and its most popular tourist attraction. It was like the French chanting about buying Westminster Abbey at an England–France rugby match.1

  ‘There was this strange attempt to colonise Copenhagen by Icelanders buying shops, banks, running a free newspaper – and the shops were the symbols of Danishness,’ agreed Gísli Pálsson. ‘Of course the Danish reaction was to say, “How can this go on? This is all going to collapse.” To which we said, “The Danes have always treated us like this.” There was a cultural war with that tinge of post-colonial tension. There has been a love/hate relationship for quite a long time.’

  ‘The Danes were always asking me why we were buying Illum and so on,’ Terry Gunnell told me. ‘They were furious that the old colony was buying up these things, and were playing Monopoly with their institutions.’

  In fact, Danish–Icelandic colonial history has undergone significant revision in recent years. While anti-Danish sentiment was usefully whipped up in the cause of independence at the end of the nineteenth century, Icelandic historians have softened towards their old rulers. The Danes allowed the Icelanders to maintain their culture and language, in stark contrast to the Swedes’ treatment of the Finns during the same period, for instance.

  ‘Thankfully there is now an awareness that it was, in fact, the Icelandic farmer elite which was keeping us down more than the Danes,’ said Skaptadøttir. ‘The Danish king tried to initiate improvements, but the farmers wanted to maintain servitude until the beginning of the last century. When I was at school we were still being taught that the Danes were the bad guys but, these days, I don’t think young Icelanders know anything about that history. And when I speak to Danes, they are completely ignorant of it, particularly the young. They don’t even know where Iceland is. They were, like, “Do you mean Estland [the Danish for Estonia, pronounced similarly to the Danish for Iceland]?”’

  ‘There has been a love–hate relationship between us for a long time,’ said Pálsson. ‘We were a colony, of course, and the economic system was bad for us: there were people who were jailed. The Danes suppressed singing and dancing here, but they kept on singing and having fun. Overall, though, the Danes didn’t really treat us that badly. Still, Iceland takes immense pride in winning at football over Denmark, for instance, which they wouldn’t over, say, England.’

  Pálsson felt the Norwegians were the Icelanders’ more natural kin: ‘In many ways I think we are more like the Norwegians than the Danes,’ he said. ‘We have this emphasis on nature, roots, the past, the Vikings, Lutheranism, puritanism. The Danes are sometimes too playful, too much about hygge for our tastes.’ He also pointed out an unexpected connection with Finland. ‘Both of us feel marginalised; we are out of the Scandinavian domain. We have this myth about the Finnish male being depressed and drunk, and maybe we have some of that. Alcoholism is a growing issue.’

  Danes, Swedes and Norwegians can generally understand each other’s languages, but Icelandic and Finnish stand apart. When Icelanders attend Nordic conferences, I am told they invariably end up in a corner speaking English with the Finns. (Perhaps this is why these two nations are the best English speakers out of all of them.)

  ‘Icelanders always say they are like the Finns,’ said Gunnell. ‘It’s the humour and the drinking, the darkness. They don’t have a pub culture yet like the Danes do. They can’t have one drink on the way home from work: if you try that they look at you like you’re an idiot. They are bingers, like the Finns. This is a country where beer was banned because they didn’t want everyone to be drunk, but you could buy spirits because they had a trade agreement with Scotland.

  ‘There was a wonderful exhibition recently at the Culture House [the museum housing the sagas] about Icelandic culture. There was lots of stuff about connections with Scotland, the Hebrides, Ireland, Braveheart images, and so on. And tucked away in the corner was something to the effect of “Oh yes, and a lot of us came from Scandinavia.” They like to play at being on the edge.’

  As for the Danes, they are almost entirely oblivious to the broodings of the Icelanders over their colonial past. I have only occasionally detected a slight note of guilt among older Danes when talking about Iceland, but that was mostly that they felt bad about Icelandic schoolchildren still having to learn Danish. This isn’t even true – Icelanders have to learn a Scandinavian language, and most choose Danish because of the close links between the countries.

  ‘The more I live in Iceland, and teach about the people, the more I realise that whatever you can say about them, you can also say the opposite with as much conviction,’ said Gunnell. ‘The Icelanders have no problem with their paradoxes. There is a character on a popular satire programme here who is supposed to be the typical Icelandic little guy, with big sideburns, who has something to say about everything. He starts his speeches attacking something, and by the end is saying completely the opposite. That is the Icelanders.’

  * * *

  1 To give you an idea of how deeply Tivoli is enmeshed in the Danish consciousness, when one Dane spots that another’s flies are undone, he will draw their attention by saying, ‘I see Tivoli is open!’

  Chapter 4

  Elves

  BEFORE TRAVELLING TO Iceland, I made a vow to myself that there were two subjects that I would not mention: Björk and elves. I imagined that the Icelanders would have little patience for yet another foreign fool asking about these things, and thought it polite to refrain.

  As it turned out, Björk did crop up occasionally (at one point I got very excited when I thought I had spotted her buying a knitting magazine in a local newsagents: it wasn’t her). Generally though, it was more a case of having to steer the conversation away from the subject of the most famous living Icelander.

  The Icelanders’ belief in the existence of fairy folk, on the other hand, was too good to resist. It soon became apparent that elves are still an important part of what it means to be Icelandic, whether the Icelander in question believes in them or not. I started to conduct my own straw poll on their existence. I tended to ask the question in a jokey way, but the majority treated it quite seriously: many said with a straight face that they definitely believed they existed, and a couple claimed to have seen ‘something’ when they were children.

  Every decade or so, the Icelandic people are asked about their feelings about elves, or the ‘hidden people’, as they call them, and the results are broadly consistent. In 1998 a poll revealed that 54.4 per cent said they believed in elves. Another, carried out as recently as 2007, revealed that 32 per cent believed the existence of the hidden people was ‘possible’, 16 per cent said ‘probable’, and 8 per cent were certain that elves existed. Many Icelanders even felt able to specify the type of elf they believed in: 26 per cent believed in flower elves; 30 per cent in house elves; 42 per cent in gu
ardian angels. To put this into perspective, only 45 per cent of Icelanders believe in God.

  According to first-hand accounts, elves look like humans, but wear traditional, home-made clothes, subsist largely on sheep-farming, and never, ever watch television. Icelandic elves live close to humans, inhabiting the landscape. But, if that landscape is disrupted in any way, the elves will set out to cause disruption.

  In 1995–6 a University of Berkeley folklore specialist, Valdimar Hafstein, interviewed a number of what he called ‘elf-harried’ roadworkers, who claimed to have had their work disrupted by the hijinks of the hidden people. It happens every year, apparently. Machinery mysteriously stops working, workmen are injured, or have foreboding dreams, things fall down, the weather suddenly turns hostile (naturally, elves get the blame – how else would you explain sudden changes in the weather on an Atlantic island?). These incidents gathered momentum in the early 1970s, most famously with the attempts to move a so-called ‘elf rock’ to make way for the road from Reykjavik heading west. Following numerous incidents of an elf-orientated nature, a clairvoyant was called in to get their permission to move the rock. He claimed to have succeeded in obtaining this, but shortly after, a bulldozer accidentally fractured a pipe that was supplying water to a trout farm: 70,000 trout died. Everyone blamed the elves (although I happened to notice in Hafstein’s paper on this that the executive engineer of the project was also the president of the Icelandic Society for Psychic Research: I know that Icelanders are multitaskers, but this does seem a tad suspicious).

  Then there was the ‘elf hill’ close to a Reykjavik suburb, which the local authorities attempted repeatedly to re-shape in the 1970s and 1980s, eventually being forced to give up. One worker was quoted as saying that he had a ‘sort of fear of something’ whenever he powered up his bulldozer, while TV crews found their cameras didn’t work properly when they pointed them at the hill.

  Hafstein speculates that the reason elf activity is usually centred on new building work ‘demonstrates supernatural sanction against development and against urbanisation: that is to say, the supernaturals protect and enforce pastoral values and traditional rural culture’. It isn’t clear whether he means this literally or that the Icelanders are projecting, but does add that they are working out ‘pressing concerns of cultural identity, nationalism and social change’. They are, in other words, afraid of the modern world.

  We’ve met Terry Gunnell already, but what I didn’t tell you is that he is a senior lecturer in folklore at the University of Reykjavik. He has immersed himself in the ethnology of the Nordic countries for decades, so is quite used to foreign journalists sitting and smirking at him in his office as they ask questions about ‘the little people’. He was quick to point out that everyone has their myths and superstitions.

  ‘It is just a way of understanding the landscape, no different from how people understand the landscape in Birmingham,’ Gunnell, in his forties with a ponytail, told me. My eyebrows duly raised, he continued: ‘You don’t let your kids play on the streets of Birmingham because of the danger of them being taken by paedophiles or terrorists or whatever, but how many are actually victims of these things? They are used to frighten your children. It is the same in Iceland. Don’t go into the mountains because something will get you. Don’t go near the waterfall because there are trolls there.’

  Iceland, of course, offers an especially broad palette of potential kiddy death traps, more even than Birmingham. ‘When your house can be destroyed by something you can’t see; when you turn on the tap and you get the smell of sulphur and you know that not far below is magma, and you look up in the sky in the evening and you see these amazing lights, it instils a potent sense of nature’s unfathomable power. When you can see the wind take the snow and make it into shapes, and you can be knocked off your feet by the wind, it’s not surprising that you have the sense that nature has this power. You get the same kind of legends across Scandinavia and Ireland going back to the Viking times, and even the Bronze Age.’

  But Iceland did seem rather especially fixated on its elves. ‘Yes,’ Gunnell admitted. ‘The most common story is that someone played with fairies as a child. But the key thing is that a large number of Icelanders don’t not believe.’

  By way of an example, Gunnell described a scenario in which an Icelander is planning to build a jacuzzi in his back garden. To do so might require moving, say, a large rock. A neighbour might lean over the fence and say something to the effect of ‘Are you really sure you want to do that? You do know that’s an elf rock, don’t you?’

  ‘Most would rethink,’ said Gunnell.

  Just before the kreppa hit the fan, Iceland was planning to build an ambitious new opera house. The location had been decided: Borgaholt Hill, home, according to legend, to many of Reykjavik’s elves. A proper, grown-up firm of architects, Arkitema and Arkthing, had been commissioned and, in deference to the indigenous paranormal inhabitants, had drawn up a design inspired by the subterranean dwellings of said elves. You wouldn’t get goblins dictating the course of a road in Ireland, or major international corporations employing troll intermediaries to get permission to build power stations in Sweden.

  ‘That’s because Iceland didn’t really make the jump into the twentieth century until 1940,’ explained Gunnell. ‘The money from the US base finally let them build roads and the cities started growing. The darkness was finally banished, but even up until the seventies, everybody had relations who lived in the countryside, where these myths were.’

  I asked Gunnell about a story I had heard in connection with the building of the controversial Alcoa aluminium-smelting plant in eastern Iceland. Was it true Alcoa had employed someone to liaise with the elves to make sure the site wouldn’t upset them? An ‘elf and safety’ expert, so to speak? (Stop me!)

  ‘It is a beautiful story,’ smiled Gunnell. ‘The country was split about Alcoa. Some wanted to make money quick, others were worried about long-term environmental problems, flooding, and so on. The pagans were already cursing it. You had millions of dollars involved and protesters willing to use any means they could with the media to get attention. So a natural move by them would have been to invoke the elves. Alcoa got in first and hired their own expert.’

  So it was a preemptive measure? ‘Yes. I remember I was being interviewed on Canadian radio with another elf expert and the interviewer asked the expert whether all companies did this in Iceland, and the expert said “Oh yes,” and went on to explain how much it costs, and how the fee depends on the size of the site, and so on. And I looked at him like, what?’

  Gunnell agreed with Hafstein that the willingness of Icelanders to believe in disruptive spirits sabotaging modern developments indicates a deeper tussle between the old rural values of the landscape versus the modern age. But he had another theory about why Icelanders were so prone to superstition: ‘Iceland didn’t get the Pietism movement [extremist Lutherans who worked especially hard to stamp out pagan practices in the Nordic region]. There was a major effort to wipe out these myths in Norway in the seventeenth century. I have talked to elderly Norwegians about them: actually, one woman tried to chase me away with a broom when her husband started talking about these kinds of [paranormal] stories. He was daring to tell a foreigner about this “rubbish”.’

  Iceland’s remoteness kept the missionaries at bay, and the Icelanders remained deeply superstitious (I haven’t even mentioned the giant worm that lives in Kleifarvatn, a 1,000-metre deep volcanic lake; or that one that lives in Lagarfljót, another lake, in eastern Iceland; or that the Westfjords still have a reputation for witchcraft). While out driving the previous day, I had stopped at the Caves of Laugarvatnshellar, where I had read about the story of a shepherd who had sheltered from a blizzard there with his sheep one evening. Having settled down to sleep, the shepherd had found himself being dragged around by his feet. He managed to wrestle himself free and settled down once more to sleep, but it happened again. ‘Someone’ didn’t want him to sleep there
. So, he rounded up his sheep and struck out for a village a few miles away. It turned out that the blizzard lasted for two weeks. Had he stayed in the cave, the shepherd would have been snowed in and he and his sheep would have starved to death. All of this was reported, on a plaque on the cave wall, not as ‘the legend of Laugarvatnshellar’, but as fact.

  But what of recent events? I hadn’t really thought this through, but as I looked out of his office window at an icy Reykjavik, I wondered whether Gunnell perceived any connection between the Icelanders’ willingness to believe in fairy folk, and their gullibility when it came to the preaching of the neo-liberal Icelandic economists and politicians.

  Gunnell laughed, but then paused. ‘Well, these are people who live very much for the moment, which is also connected to the landscape. You get this “Just get through the day” mentality. At Christmas time they would make prophesies about who was going to survive the winter – you would sit with candles and see who the wax ran to. You learn to take what you can from the landscape without thinking of the long term, just as with Alcoa. That’s why, when you look at Icelandic farmhouses and compare them to farms in Sweden, there is pride in the buildings in Sweden, while in Iceland they are just buildings to live in. They don’t care what they look like. And I suppose there was that same approach to all the borrowing: get what you can today and as for tomorrow . . . And, hopefully, you know, that same survival instinct, to just get through this day, might save them.’

  As I was getting up to leave, I half-jokingly asked Gunnell if he had ever seen any elves. He shifted in his seat and looked away.