The Alþingi of that era consisted of wealthy landowners and senior clergy, who were around 5 percent of the population. The other 95 percent supplied them with labor that was cheap or free, under a system of bonded servitude—the vistarband—that lasted for roughly five centuries. Icelanders earning wages at the shore, potentially starting their own enterprises or becoming independent … this was a major threat to the oligarchy. It required a legislative solution—and it got one, in the above-mentioned laws.

Yet some Icelanders defied the laws, and continued to work for foreign operators. In 1528, word reached Icelandic authorities that fishing camps had begun forming on the Westman Islands. A squadron was dispatched to raid the camps and forcibly transport workers back to the mainland. To prevent this happening again, further laws were passed that forbade anyone to reside at the seashore once the season had closed.

I say “the season” because fishing itself was not abolished. It continued, but in service to landowners who sent their laborers to fishing camps to fish on their behalf. Through the vistarband (see post below), every laborer had to be domiciled at a farm, and once the cod was salted he was legally obliged to head back there to begin the summer work—again, in service to his master.

The season of which I speak ran through the winter. Yes, you read that right: through the winter. Anyone who has experienced Iceland in winter will no doubt be shocked by this—storms can be fierce, and in those days there were no forecasts. The loss of life was staggering. There is probably not a single family in Iceland that has not lost an ancestor to the sea. Even getting to the camps was its own hazard—the cod was in the south, and men walked from as far as the West Fjords, a journey of up to two weeks, in winter, badly clothed and with scant provisions. In 1588, thirteen men died in a single storm on their way to a camp, sent there by the landowners whose interests they were serving.

It probably does not need saying, but the oligarchs kept all of the profits of those fishing ventures, while the men (and sometimes women) who risked their lives reaped none of those rewards.

One the most nefarious aspects of this system is that it throttled the Icelandic economy for centuries. From roughly the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, while mainland Europe became industrialized, Iceland remained stagnant. The oligarchy had made a choice between economic development and the social order that kept it on top, and it made that choice consistently for four hundred years.

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Yesterday, August 29, Icelanders voted on whether the government should resume accession talks with the European Union. The NO side won, 52.8 percent to 47.2, on a turnout of 82.5 percent.

Note that the vote was not about whether or not to join the EU—it was about what joining might look like, with a second referendum promised on whatever deal was secured.

The campaign waged by the NEI camp hinged on Iceland’s supposed loss of sovereignty if talks were allowed to continue. We would become slaves to EU regulations, the EU would take our fish, our energy, our resources, and draft our children into a European army (that does not exist but will soon exist, according to the NEI-sayers). Our national wealth (!) would be used to pay off the debts of other EU countries. Everything in the EU is in decline: in France there is rampant poverty; in Germany everything is going to hell.

But let’s not kid ourselves. All that propaganda and fearmongering was really focused on one thing: maintaining the interests of the Icelandic elite through its primary instrument, the Icelandic króna.

Today’s Icelandic elite is primarily made up of the “quota kings”—individuals or families who have been allocated quotas to fish in Iceland’s waters by the government. In other words, to utilize a resource that by rights belongs to the entire nation. This is Iceland’s version of Big Business—the large fishing companies. Big Fish, if you like.

Those fishing companies sell their catch primarily in euros, but pay their workers in krónur. Every slide in the exchange rate of our unstable currency works out as profit for the quota kings. Further, if inflation gets too high in Iceland, they can lean on their people in power to devalue the currency, make it less valuable, so that they can sell more of their goods to foreigners. Their workers, meanwhile, are paid in krónur, and have to contend with the spending power of their salaries declining, as well as their savings. They also have to live with double the interest rates on their mortgages and loans compared with most countries in the EU.

Meanwhile, the companies owned by the elite operate in a completely different financial market than the rest of us. They do their accounting in euros, pay themselves and their executives in euros, and keep their funds in offshore accounts.

And so it is unsurprising that those people—not only the quota kings but anyone who profits from Icelanders using the króna while they themselves use the euro—ran a massive, and almost certainly very expensive campaign (though actual figures are obscured) for people to say NEI. I also observed instances of apparent astroturfing in a number of Facebook groups whose members were highly susceptible to fearmongering.

In short, they ran a highly orchestrated campaign to keep the masses misinformed and afraid.

One of the NEI campaign’s main catchphrases was that Iceland is great as it is, and whatever problems we have (they did concede that we have some) we can fix ourselves, “closer to home”. Yeah, right. Icelanders have been trying this DIY method since 1944, when Iceland became independent from Denmark. At that time, our two currencies were nearly on par (1 Danish krone equalled 1.36 Icelandic króna). In the 82 years since, the Icelandic króna has lost a whopping 99.99 percent of its value in comparison with the Danish krone, due to inflation and repeated devaluations.

Also in those 82 years there have only been two terms when the Icelandic elite or their stooges have not been in power. During both of those terms, the elected government attempted to gain authorization to negotiate a deal with the European Union. They know that one of the best ways to get Icelanders out from under the heel of the oligarchy is to make that alliance—given that the deal is favourable, which we don’t even know because the NEI-sayers don’t even want to see what might be offered.

The question I keep coming back to, and which I am examining in my upcoming book, is why Icelanders keep voting for people and systems that work against their interests—again, and again, and again?

I wrote a bit about that here.

In the meantime, while I’m pissed as hell at the outcome of yesterday’s referendum and the endless subservience of my countrymen- and women, I’m going to focus on the fact that we have a democratic process that works. At least that’s something.

The passage that opened this post, about the Icelandic elite’s suppression of economic development, is taken from my forthcoming book, The Shape of Silence. Please subscribe follow my process, and to be informed about its release.

To learn more about the oppression of Icelanders via the vistarband, you might be interested in my webinar on the subject.

Life under vistarband

Or my books on Iceland and the Icelanders.

All my books

Or some related posts I have published here on Substack.

Like when I wrote this post back in March, August 29 seemed decades away. Yet here we (almost) are!

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Yes, this Saturday is when we Icelanders head to the polls in a referendum that will decide whether or not our government will resume accession talks with the European Union.

It feels kind of huge, even bigger than a parliamentary vote. Maybe because Icelanders have been going round and round in their own little election pool since the founding of the Republic and haven’t managed to get up out of grooves that I believe were laid centuries ago. We’ve been at the mercy of the Independence Party and their cronies for almost that long.

But now there’s a new day—for only the second time in over 80 years the IP is not in power, and this democratic government wants to try something new. And I’m here for it!

After all, when the most vehement opponents to Iceland potentially joining the EU are the fishing quota operators and the large-scale businessmen who do all their accounting in Euros anyway—yes, you read that right, they don’t even have to exist within the same economy as us lesser mortals—you know there’s a firm argument for joining.

No doubt it is evident to you that I am firmly in the JÁ camp—so firmly in fact that I have already voted. (Though that has less to do with my zealousness and more with the fact that, since I now live in a rural postcode, I would have to drive 40 minutes back and forth to the polling station on voting day, whereas if I vote early I can just pop down the block to the Akranes magistrate and do it there.)

The debate has been escalating sharply in the last couple of week, with all op-eds and Icelanders’ Facebook timelines filled with arguments for and against. Some nasty words have been said.

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So apart from the fact that the oligarchs think it’s a bad idea for Iceland to join the EU, here are my personal top three reasons for saying JÁ on Saturday would be a smart move.

See what kind of deal we’d get

The referendum is not about joining or not joining, it’s about whether to resume talks that were suspended in 2013. I find it ridiculous to say NEI to something we don’t know what is yet. If negotiations do not go in our favour—and I fully trust our government to keep our interests firmly in the foreground—then we can always say NEI to the deal. We’ve got nothing to lose, and possibly a lot to gain. And I shake my head at the NEI-propaganda that keeps claiming the government will cheat us out of that second referendum. That’s fearmongering at its most extreme.

Security

In these tremulous times we need alliances. For decades we’ve been far too reliant on our relationship with the United States and our joint defence agreement. With DT in the White House and his much-documented coveting of our next door neighbour Greenland, not to mention his wild instability and flat-out craziness, we need to shift our alliance to a bloc that we can actually rely on. Also, we are part of the European family. We share values and ideologies. I’d much rather be in cahoots with the EU these days than with the US.

Economic stability

Let’s face it, the Icelandic króna is a dud. It’s a tiny micro-currency, subject to all manner of fluctuations. It’s really hard to live in an economy that uses such a small currency, especially if you do business globally. Imagine trying to make any sort of business plan when you have no idea what the exchange rate is going to be one year from now. You may fix a price for your services, and in the meantime inflation shoots up but you still have to keep to the same old price. Sure, the nay-sayers are going to point out that with the Icelandic króna you can just devalue the currency if the economy takes a nosedive … but devaluing the currency is just another way to make the common people pay for the shenanigans of the wealthy. If things get out of hand, the movers and shakers in this land simply devalue the króna to make it once again attractive for foreigners to buy their products or services, and meanwhile us commoners find that our spending power is suddenly a lot less, and our savings have been devalued, as well. Meanwhile, those who would have us enslaved to the króna do their business and balance sheets in Euros, as I mentioned above. Two economies within the same country—what is this, Cuba?

Interest rates

In comparison with most (all?) other Western countries, we Icelanders pay for our homes two- or three-times over.

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Anyways, the viral video showing Rabbi Schmuley and his IDF son following and harassing Samúel Guðmundsson and his girlfriend along a street in Akureyri, certainly picked up some momentum last week. In the end Piers Morgan invited Samúel and Schmuley onto his show to continue their little fracas, and what a crazy, unhinged spectacle it turned out to be. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of them “won”.

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If you watch the video, you will hear Schmuley declaring that Iceland tourism is finished, kaputt, over … all because Iceland is no longer supposedly safe for American Jews and therefore Americans will stop coming here en masse. 🙄 This prompted one of my Facebook friends to download all 5700 comments that were then under the YouTube video and use AI to analyze the commentary. His finding: 91 percent of commenters sided with Samúel, and between 100 and 200 specifically said they were planning to visit Iceland and/or had already bought tickets as a result of this. Samúel’s sanguine nature in the face of Shmuley’s aggression seems to have cast a glow over all Icelanders, with loads of remarks like “Respect for Iceland” and “I love Iceland” among those who commented.

And so, whether this little escapade spells the end of Icelandic tourism remains to be seen. I’m inclined to think not.

Another news item, tangentially related

The Palestinian owners of the café Lava Sweets in Keflavík reported that a group of Israeli tourists entered the café three days ago, demanded to know why they had a picture on the wall with the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” on the wall, directed abusive and intimidating language at them, then went and removed the picture from the wall before walking out. This is visible on the café’s CCTV footage.

Subsequently the café’s Google reviews were targeted, with a bunch of one-star ratings suddenly appearing. (Update: apparently Google has since removed those reviews, after they were reported and the news went viral.)

This is not an isolated incident: numerous people in Iceland who have been vocal about their support of Palestinians have been threatened and intimidated, some even receiving death threats.

Enter Dorrit

One person who has been inadvertently dragged into this is Dorrit Mousaieff, Iceland’s former first lady, who is Jewish. Schmuley went off on a tangent about how Iceland used to love Jews (i.e. Dorrit, who was very popular) but now they hate them (because of how he was allegedly treated … according to him because he is a Jew, not because he is a mega asshole 🙄 ). Dorrit evidently did not appreciate being dragged into this by the good Rabbi and went on to debunk Schmuley’s claims about Icelanders as Jew-haters. She also sent a message to the owners of Lava Sweets, saying she wished to personally apologize on behalf of her countrymen. Need I say more about why she was popular?

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Meanwhile, as our referendum approaches

The debate about whether or not Iceland should reopen talks with the European Union is heating up. On August 29 we will head to the polls to cast our votes on whether to resume accession negotiations. This is not a vote on whether or not to join the EU—that will happen when talks are concluded and a deal is on the table, for Icelanders to accept or decline. That is, if the nation votes JÁ at the polls next week to reopen talks.

Somewhat related, I was interested to read this Facebook post by Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir. Þórhildur Sunna is a human rights lawyer, a former Icelandic MP and member of the Council of Europe, and current Global Director of Courage International. She was on a radio programme this morning discussing Iceland’s possible accession to the EU and what this might mean for this country’s acceptance of asylum seekers.

I won’t get into her specific answer (you can read it in the FB post I linked to above if you want), but was interested to hear her claim that the greatest threat to the freedom and democracy on which the European alliance is built is not the influx of asylum seekers to the continent, but the current administration in the United States, who are working tirelessly (and not at all surreptitiously) to amplify far-right extremism in Europe. This is a woman who has been on the front lines politically and knows her stuff, and I do not doubt her take is correct.

And now, a bit more on my experience with psychedelics for healing trauma

I have noticed there is interest in this topic—I’ve had some comments and an uptick in subscribers—and since it is something I am deeply engaged in processing right now I am happy to write more about it. However, it will have to be behind the paywall because I will be sharing deeply personal notes and aspects of the journey, and this way I have better control over who sees my content. I hope you understand.

One thing I am exploring now is how the trauma I have carried in my nervous system is related to the conditions my ancestors laboured under—and whoo-boy, is there a lot there. If you want to know more about how the Icelanders lived in centuries past, check out my Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days.

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All of my books

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Yesterday was one of those rare Icelandic days where the sun shone all day long, with not a raincloud in sight, today has been partly cloudy, and tomorrow the forecast is … rain.

Not unusual for August, or any time in Iceland, really, but what’s particularly galling about it tomorrow is that we are having a full solar eclipse—the first visible from Iceland since 1954, and the first visible from the west of the country (which includes Reykjavík) since 1433!

You can believe we’ve been stoked about this event and awaiting it with great anticipation … and not just us but foreign visitors, too … accommodation in the west of the country has been sold out for months, and good luck getting a rental car this week.

Given all this, the weather forecast has been a source of much nail-biting, and our worst fears seem to be coming to pass. RAIN in the afternoon, just when the eclipse is due to happen. 😩

This is approximately what we’ll be missing:

All right, apparently we can still experience the eclipse even through the clouds, meaning it will get dark. So we’ll not be cancelling our eclipse parties and sitting indoors with long faces staring at the walls. Like little troupers we’ll be out there, eyes turned upward, rain notwithstanding.

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Speaking of foreign visitors

… we had one stirring up quite the stink around here.

The dude in question is one Rabbi Schmuley who apparently is a rabid Zionist and supporter of all things genocide. And, well, he kinda walked into the wrong country. Icelanders, you see, are overwhelmingly pro-Palestine, and most of us condemn in the strongest terms the atrocities happening in Gaza. Also, we don’t appreciate being gaslit and told that black is white, up is down, murdering children by the tens of thousands is self-defence, and criticism of the heinous slaughter of innocents is antisemitism. That shit doesn’t really fly around here, as the good rabbi duly discovered. In response, he had an absolute conniption and began shouting obscenities at people left and right—like at this guy, Samúel, who was brazen enough (irony) to say “f*ck Israel” to this asshat’s face, and was subsequently followed and harassed for nearly ten minutes:

The next day, Schmuley decided to take his sorry ass to a club, and this happened:

Now, I may be way off base here, but isn’t a rabbi supposed to be some kind of religious leader, a “they know not what they do” and “turn the other cheek” kind of guy? I thought people like that were supposed to advocate for peace and kindness, not run around with their phones up yelling at people, to say nothing of being cheerleaders for genocide. But then I guess it’s all in line with what we see coming out of a country that’s run by a wanted war criminal. 🤷‍♀️

Meanwhile, we have plant-based journeys

And a number of you have expressed your interest in the posts I linked to last time, and in exploring that route.

(The rest of this post is for paid subscribers.)

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Literally, Verslunarmannahelgi means “Shop Workers’ Weekend”, but is usually translated as Commerce Day weekend in English. The idea to give shop workers an extra day off came from Denmark, though they abandoned it long ago. Iceland, however, has kept it since its inception here 1894. What began as Monday off has metastasized into a three- or four-day national celebration, where droves of people head out to one of many festivals held throughout the Land … or to their cottages, or camping, or somewhere out in nature where they can sit around campfires and sing songs, like I did this weekend.

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The most popular destination is Vestmannaeyjar, the Westman Islands, where the festival Þjóðhátíð í Eyjum has been running for more than 150 years. It began in 1874, when bad weather stranded the islanders and kept them from reaching the mainland for Iceland’s millennial celebrations that year. Rather than miss the festivities, they held their own, and have done so every year since then, minus two years during World War I and two years during the pandemic. It was even held in 1973 despite the fact that a volcano had erupted in the Westman Islands in January that year and buried part of the town under lava and ash.

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The population of the Westman Islands hovers around 4,000 peeps and during Þjóðhátíð it roughly quadruples. People arrive from all over the country to camp in Herjólfsdalur, a valley where a temporary town of tents and rope-strung “streets”made by the locals appears for the weekend. Well-known musical acts entertain guests for three days, and a new festival song gets written every year. On Sunday evening a massive communal singalong ends with a line of torches lit along the mountain above the valley, one for every year the festival has run. By all accounts this is spectacular … I’ve never made it there myself, though I have always wanted to go—and, with any luck, will one day.

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On a more personal note (and this part is for paid supporters), this weekend marks a sort of anniversary for me.

Exactly one year ago, during Verslunarmannahelgi, I was alone at my cottage. My husband was away, visiting family. I had not been invited. It was then that I understood that our marriage was probably over.

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It’s still raining. Has basically not let up since I last wrote.

Apparently there is a weather system over us that has settled in quite comfortably and has no intention of moving. That system sees fit to dump bucketfuls of rain on the west side of the country, while giving amazing weather to the east. This has literally been the status for over a week. I’m surprised the island hasn’t tipped to one side what with all the people who have headed eastward. The traffic is all one way these days, and campgrounds over there are full.

This migration to find the yellow orb is not a new thing here in Iceland. Að elta sólina—to chase the sun—has long been an Icelandic tradition. Very often those who are spending holidays in-country don’t plan ahead, they simply get in their car and drive to where the sun is, with their tent in the trunk or camper in tow.

That said, with increased prosperity and lower airfares, many folks now chase the sun out of country. Travel agencies have reported an explosion in sales of package tours to the south of Europe in the last three-or-so weeks, as holidaying Icelanders shout the hell with this and board flights to sunnier climes en masse—heatwave be damned.

It seems to me that this ability to make spontaneous plans is coded into our DNA as Icelanders … in fact I wrote about it in my Little Book of the Icelanders. To wit:

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One thing about the Icelanders is that they have serious problems planning things in advance. They like to do things on the spur of the moment. To be spontaneous, like.

This can be a really endearing quality, really creative and fun. It can also be horribly frustrating. With many Icelanders I’ve known, getting them to commit to something six months or a year down the line is like trying to pull teeth from a horse with a pair of tweezers.

My husband and I belonged to an online home exchange site for a while, and we frequently started getting requests in September or October for the following summer. That just boggles the mind of most Icelanders. For them, planning something that early is insane. I mean, think of all the things that could happen in the interim – your goldfish could die, or your house burn down, or a volcano go off. Hell, you might even get a better offer!

This dread of planning could simply be attributed to the fear of losing independence. It might have deeper and more complex roots, though, hailing back to the days when nothing could be planned ahead of time on account of the climate. In the Iceland of yore, life was all about flexibility and spontaneity. If you planned to go out fishing and the weather suddenly turned bad, you simply had to make other plans. If you planned to go to church on Sunday, and the weather turned out to be warm and dry, plans were cancelled so everyone could go out in the fields and make hay. If you planned to go school but suddenly a ship came in with a bellyful of fish, the school was closed and all the kids were sent down to the harbour to preserve the catch.

And so, while the lack of advance planning can be frustrating, it can also be great. Spontaneity and flexibility are excellent qualities, potentially resulting in wonderfully creative vibes and quick decision-making. And those things can be incredibly valuable, as long as they’re channelled in the right direction. It’s when you’re trying to pin someone down to a specific time and place – and not succeeding – that they can drive you crazy.

Interested in more observations about the Icelanders? Check out my Little Book of the Icelanders and/or my webinar on Icelandic history and generational trauma called Life Under Vistarband.

Little Book of the Icelanders

Life Under Vistarband

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Not that I’ve had any specific plans thwarted, mind … I’m staying mostly indoors anyway dealing with all the moving-related stuff. You know how it is: bare lightbulbs hanging from ceilings, boxes everywhere, can’t find a damn thing because you can’t remember where you packed it, organizing and re-organizing drawers and cabinets, endless trips to IKEA (taking much longer now) and the local hardware store, borrowing step ladders, painting walls, figuring out how the hell the new oven works, figuring out how the hell the new coffee machine works, figuring out how the hell the new dishwasher works, figuring out how the hell the new induction hob works, screwing screws, hammering nails, drilling holes, measuring things, countless hours online looking for things you need—lights, blinds, shelves, hooks, furniture.

The last three days I have been painting a room—thankfully only one of the rooms was in acute need of a coat (or three) of paint because this made me realize how much I detest painting walls. Truly, I do not want to think about the number of hours of my life I have spent painting walls in places where I sometimes wound up living in for only a few months. (I have previously told the story of when I moved back to Iceland at the age of 31 I had lived at 29 different addresses in my life so manymany walls were painted.) At this point I do not want to paint another room as long as I live.

BUT this round of painting is now done and in the process I devoured Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me on Audible. In fact, I don’t think I will ever enter that room again without thinking about that book and Arundhati’s voice reading it. She is one of my favourite authors, her book The God of Small Things in the top five of my most treasured books ever. It is a very rare book that brings me to tears, and that one did. I sobbed. It’s not a happy book, but oh the exquisiteness of the prose. Amazingly it was her first novel, and she went from poverty to millionaire status on the back of that book. A remarkable story of a life and how it was shaped by her abusive mother. I wish I could have written about my own mother with the grace that Arundhati writes about hers.

But … that was not my only listen

I also listened to myself—specifically myself in an interview on the Thoughtful Travel podcast. The episode is called Cultural Deep Dives and, well, the title says it all. This is actually a part of a longer chat I had with the host, Amanda, at the start of the year. We had reserved this part to coincide with the release of the book I was (am!) working on, about Iceland’s hidden emotional history. You may recall my posts last winter and spring about the book and the parallels I was discovering between Icelandic history and my own family—the trauma-generating systems in which our nation was steeped and their ramifications that are still felt today through intergenerational trauma being passed on.

My plan was to release the book last in May but a few weeks beforehand I received new information about my grandmother’s status back when she was in foster care in the early 1900s. It turned out, which I did not know, that there were different “grades” of foster care, and that my grandmother was not a niðursetningur, as I had thought, but a tökubarn, which was a different classification, with different implications. This was significant enough that it called for a review and revision of the book … unfortunately meaning that the window I had to get the book out before my life turned upside-down was too narrow, so it had to be put on the back burner. As soon as I get properly settled I can resume work on the book—something I long to do.

In the meantime, if you are curious about this part of Icelandic history, I do have a webinar that goes into the finer points of all this, called Life Under Vistarband.

Check it out here

And here is the Thoughtful Travel podcast episode. My interview starts at around 16 minutes.

Cultural deep dives

*This post may contain affiliate links.

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As for my brand-new, shining, small-town life

… Is mostly awesome, though frankly it is not without its What in the flipping hell have I done!? moments.

I had one of those the other night.

It was evening, I was looking at the boxes around me that were spilling their contents and all the stuff I still had to do, and it hit me that I’d moved to a town where I have no close friends, no family, no special ties … nothing.

Honestly, I felt pretty forlorn. It was not a good feeling. It was a feeling that I remembered from my early adulthood when I moved around all the time, constantly trying to escape something. I started wondering if I was back there again—if I’d never be free from all of that. And it felt like this awful void, a cold fist around my heart.

But that passed quickly because I remembered how far I have come since then, and I knew what I needed to do.

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Eight days after that whale died, the tenth animal of the season was hauled up the ramp at the whaling station in Hvalfjörður. Someone in the crowd on the dock switched on the loudspeakers, and Iceland’s national anthem played out over the carcass while it was winched ashore. Men shouted áfram Ísland!—go Iceland!—the kind of thing you’d hear at a football match. One of the whaling station’s workers picked up the dead animal’s penis and swung it toward the news camera, then posed for a photo holding it.

Iceland’s minister of industry, who oversees fisheries, watched the footage and asked the men to behave, in her words, like grown adults. It was not, she said, the kind of conduct that reflects well on the nation abroad. (As though that were the main issue.)

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Here it would be easy to make this into a story about a few ignorant asshats on a dock, but unfortunately it is much bigger than that. The real story is about the fact that there is one man—an individual in his eighties—who has the right to hunt whales in Iceland, a right handed to him by a single political party that has been in power almost consistently for the last eight decades.

That man’s name is Kristján Loftsson and he owns Hvalur hf., the one company in Iceland licensed to hunt fin whales. Loftsson has held that license, in one form or another, since commercial whaling resumed in 2006 (nb. prior to that date Iceland hunted whales under the pretext of “scientific research”).

Fin whales are the second largest animals on the planet and are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Iceland is one of three countries left that still hunts them commercially, alongside Japan and Norway.

Hvalur hf. loses money most years and has for a long time. What keeps it afloat is that Loftsson also owns one of Iceland’s largest fishing operations, HB Grandi, built on the quota system that hands a fixed share of the nation’s fish stocks to a small number of companies, essentially forever. That is a large, overarching topic in and of itself, and in fact quite incredible not only in its innate corruptness, but also in how impossible it has been to wrest that system from the hands of a few wealthy individuals and back into the hands of the people.

Briefly: the fish in Icelandic waters belong, on paper, to the nation. In practice they belong to the handful of families who were allocated quotas decades ago and have been trading and inheriting them ever since. (If you can get a hold of, or stream, the series Verbúðin, Blackport in English, about the inital implementation of the quota system, I highly recommend it.)

Icelanders call these people “quota kings”, with the sort of droll resentment you reserve for something you’ve stopped expecting to change. The Independence Party has protected this system through every government it has led, and the families who hold the quotas have returned the favor with the money that keeps that party’s campaigns funded. Loftsson sits comfortably inside that arrangement. When his whaling license needed renewing in 2024, it was renewed for five years, automatically extending every year after that without further review, on the signature of a fisheries minister from the Independence Party.

And the insane thing is … there is almost no market for what Loftsson is selling. Icelanders don’t eat whale meat in any real quantity. The people who order it are mostly tourists in restaurants, possibly thinking they are partaking of “Icelandic tradition” and not understanding that this is novelty. Most of what Hvalur has produced in past seasons has gone to Japan, where demand has been falling as Japan’s own whaling fleet expands. There is a real possibility that this year’s catch, like recent ones, will sit in a freezer with no buyer at all, or wind up being made into pet food.

So the obvious question is: why. Why does a belligerent geriatric man keep ordering the killing of a vulnerable species, at a loss, for a product almost nobody wants, using a method that his own government’s veterinary authority has documented as failing to meet Iceland’s animal welfare standards? And dragging Iceland’s reputation through the mud while he’s at it, with absolute defiance and impunity?

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Before I get to that analysis, a brief note: I keep writing about people like Kristján Loftsson and the Independence Party as though their power were self-evident, almost like a force of nature. But it’s not self-evident. I think there’s a reason Icelanders keep watching men like this override the public will, and I don’t think the reason is apathy. It’s more a habit of deference built into people who grew up in households and systems where questioning authority was unsafe—something learned generations ago and never unlearned. I explore this further in my webinar on Iceland’s hidden emotional history, Life Under Vistarband.

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The rest of this post is for paid supporters.

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In case you haven’t kept up, I’ve recently gone through a major life transition. I got divorced and have now moved away from Reykjavík, upp á Skaga as the Icelanders say—“up onto the peninsula”, the peninsula being a neck of land north of the capital area just beyond Hvalfjörður fjord.

Admittedly it’s not much of a peninsula when you consider other nearby peninsulas (Reykjanes, Snæfellsnes) but that’s what they call it. 🤷‍♀️

Some of you have been asking why Akranes and I’ve given a few answers, such as the steep housing prices in Reykjavík, my desire to get closer to nature, etc. all of which are valid and true. (In fact, as I write this on the sofa I can hear the soothing sound of the ocean through an open window—utter bliss.)

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But there’s another reason that perhaps I haven’t been quite candid about, which has to do with learning to listen to my insight and intuition.

So here is another side to this story: one evening a few months ago, in the midst of the upheaval and uncertainty that this major life change has inevitably brought, I was thinking about the future and where I should live it. I’d been looking at places in Reykjavík and somehow nothing was clicking with me. I felt anxious and more than a little unsettled by this limbo-like state … in fact, it was bringing up a lot of old trauma for me, as I spent my childhood being perpetually uprooted and never feeling like I could form attachments or feel settled or safe.

Then, just before bed, I was struck by an odd thought: What about Akranes?

I don’t know why that exact idea came to me at that moment. Perhaps I was thinking of my summer house, and that Akranes is about halfway between it and Reykjavík, so a home in Akranes would give me easier access. Or maybe I was reflecting on the fact that a handful of people I know have moved up here from the capital over the last few years. Or musing that I have always wondered what small-town life in Iceland would be like and thinking I might like to experience it for myself.

Whatever it was, I went to bed and slept unusually well. I had wonderful dreams, and when I woke in the morning I felt lighter and more optimistic than I had in weeks. Akranes: why not?

But when I mentioned the idea to my daughter she cried in dismay: Nooo, that’s too far from me! and I realized she was right, I didn’t want to be that far from her.

So I went back to looking in Reykjavík and grew increasingly despondent since all I was finding was … well, nothing that felt like the setting for my next chapter.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I went for my regular hair appointment. My stylist started telling me about a mutual friend of ours who had moved upp á Skaga, and once again the idea lit up in my head.

I realized that, even though my daughter and I are in contact every day, we’re not always seeing each other. I also realized that I was making Akranes out to be a lot further and more inaccessible than it actually is, and that the distance was mostly in my head (as distances tend to be for those who live in the capital—there’s a wry joke that it’s always further from the capital to a location outside of it, than it is to the capital from that location).

Long story short, I called the mutual friend, we had a long chat, I made a point of passing through Akranes on my next trip from the cottage and had a look around. I found that I liked what I saw.

I went a couple more times to look at apartments and both of those times I had that same feeling as I had that first night when the idea had occurred to me. Somehow I felt that the place was beckoning me. I felt like I could truly come home to myself in this environment.

And like with all things that are meant to be, once I made the decision everything fell into place. Honestly, everything about buying this apartment and moving to Akranes (barring a few incredibly stressful days last week that had to do with cleaning out the old place) has gone so, so smoothly. It’s been nearly effortless, like a plan unraveling.

I’ve now been living here for five days and—ok—in that time there has been an occasion where I questioned whether I’d done the right thing, and whether small-town Iceland was really for me, a place where I felt like I was being judged as an outsider. More on that below.

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Every year on June 17th, Iceland puts on its finest and celebrates the fact that it exists as an independent republic. For a country that spent roughly six centuries under foreign rule—first Norwegian, then Danish—the right to simply be itself, on its own terms, is a thing to celebrate.

The story of how Iceland got here is…

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The old steam bath at Laugarvatn was my favourite place in Iceland in those days. Every summer I used to rent a cottage from my union (labour unions in Iceland all own cottages for their members to rent) that was near Laugarvatn, and every day for the week of that stay I would drag my peeps to the old sauna. I know it doesn’t look like much from the photos, but it was magic. Steam baths at the local swimming pools are all good and fine, but there is nothing like sitting right above a bubbling hot spring and bathing in the steam. The quality and intensity of that steam is different, and it does something amazing to your skin and your mind.

I don’t recall exactly when I wrote this, but it was probably in the early 2000s, before the tourism boom started in earnest:

Steamy secret

The small town of Laugarvatn, southwest Iceland, has one of the best-kept tourist secrets in Iceland: a rustic old steam bath that is actually a small hut built over a bubbling hot spring. It’s been there since the 1930s or thereabouts, and is situated on the banks of Laugarvatn lake, which provides the perfect opportunity for a bracing (read: ice-cold) dip following a steamy session in the hut.

Most Icelanders regard the gamla gufan (old steam bath) with tremendous affection. Part of the attraction is its rustic charm – the changing rooms are small and showers cramped, and the only way to control the heat in the hut is by using rocks left by the door that, when strategically placed, determine the size of the crack between the door and the frame. The heat varies, too – depending on the direction of the wind or other inexplicable factors it may be hotter or cooler from one day to the next, or one section (there are two) may be hotter than the other. The floor is made of wooden planks evenly spaced to allow the steam to waft up through, and the hot spring beneath is clearly audible, with sounds ranging from a soothing bubbling to a tantrum-like raging and rolling. Indeed, alarming thoughts are occasionally voiced among bathers that it might actually begin to erupt. (A fear that is totally unwarranted, I hasten to add.) (Touch wood.)

Despite being situated midway between Þingvellir and Geysir, and thus being smack in the midst of the Icelandic tourist industry’s post popular tour, the Golden Circle, the old sauna has as yet not caught on with foreign visitors. However, all that is about to change. Slated for major development, it’s due to close this autumn and to re-open next year as a Blue Lagoon-type spa, run, in fact, by the Blue Lagoon people. In other words, if you want to experience it’s rustic charms – you’d best hurry!

The old sauna was located on private land and by this time I started frequenting it was run by a consortium called Hollvinafélag gömlu gufunnar, or “Friends of the Old Sauna”, who were basically volunteers who kept it going. I suppose that ultimately wasn’t sustainable, and when the Blue Lagoon folks got a whiff of money … well, that was that.

I do believe I took these on an analog camera, hence the absence of picture-perfect shots:

Now this the old sauna has been replaced by the upscale Laugarvatn Fontana spa and the price raised about 1000% so even the cottage-goers in the area can’t afford to go there beyond giving themselves the occasional treat. 🤷‍♀️

A quick reminder that my online course Going Indie, which teaches you how to publish your book and get it up on sales platforms at minimal or even no cost, is 50 percent off until the end of June. Just use the coupon code IWRAUTHOR at the checkout.

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We met several others walking their pooches, which got me thinking about how much the culture of dog ownership has changed in Iceland in a relatively short period of time. When I was growing up, and in fact until quite recently, dogs were banned in Reykjavík. Not even joking.

Before I dive into that, a brief announcement: my Going Indie publishing course is 50 percent off for the entire month of June! If you’re not up to speed, I have built a successful career around publishing my own work, and put everything I have learned into an online, on-demand course that you can now access for USD 99. It teaches you everything you need to know to publish your book independently. Just use the coupon code IWRAUTHOR at checkout.*

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Ok, on the subject of dogs, allow me to dip into my Little Book of the Icelanders (2nd edition) to illustrate what the culture was like here in the past.

From the LBI:

If you have visited Iceland over the past decade or so, you may have noticed a good number of dogs about. Not that this would be particularly noteworthy to people who are used to dogs in their local surroundings, of course – but in Iceland, this proliferation of canines is quite a new trend. As recently as twenty years ago, it was rare to see people out walking their dogs in Iceland.

Given what a common sight dogs are now, you might surmise that the Icelanders are a nation of dog lovers. Think again! Antipathy towards canines is deeply rooted in the Icelandic national psyche. A large proportion of Icelanders just does not like dogs. They distrust them. They are afraid of them. They do not want them off-leash anywhere. And they absolutely do not want them in enclosed public spaces, like banks, shops, offices, on public transport, or anywhere else.

So why all this hate against man’s best friend?

Well, I’m pretty sure it harks back to the old days when the Icelandic population lived in turf houses and hygiene was a rather, shall we say, alien concept. In those days it was the job of the farm dogs to clean the askar – wooden bowls with lids that were the primary vessels from which to eat. Every Icelander had his or her own askur (singular of askar) and when people finished eating, the askur would be handed to the nearest dog, who would proceed to lick it clean.

Of course what people did not know is that dogs tended to carry tapeworm, which was then passed on to the humans and became a major source of disease, and even death.

When it was discovered that the cleaning services provided by the household pooches weren’t all they were cracked up to be, dogs were instantly branded as filthy, disease-bearing beasts. Soon after that the urban drift began. Icelanders moved into towns and cities and sought to dissociate themselves from their humble origins in the turf houses, which many considered a humiliating testimony to their colonial past. The business of the dogs and the tapeworm was one such shameful association, and dogs, it was commonly agreed, had no place in town life. They belonged in the country with the peasants.

In fact, they belonged there so much that it was considered necessary to pass a law to keep them there. And so, in 1924, a ban on dogs came into force in Reykjavík. Under this ban, no canines were permitted within the city limits. At first many folks ignored this statute (Icelanders and their independence, remember), which led to such incidents as law enforcement showing up on people’s doorsteps, dragging their dogs out into the street, and shooting them.

I’ll leave you to ponder that for a moment.

In 1984 the Reykjavík City Council bowed to mounting pressure and agreed to grant a temporary exemption from the law. That exemption stayed in effect for four years, at which time a referendum took place on whether or not dogs should be allowed in the city. Out of 68,525 voters only 8,777 turned up at the polls, and the proposal to lift the dog ban was voted down with a 60 percent majority.

And so it was not until 2002 that the ban on dogs in Reykjavík was finally amended, permitting people to keep dogs in the Reykjavík area.

So, yes. Iceland has a rather complicated relationship with doggos. Happily, though, things are changing fast, and last year marked a major milestone when a law was passed giving home owners in apartment buildings the right to own and keep dogs and cats. Prior to this you needed to have the signed consent of 2/3 of the residents in the building, which was not always easy to obtain. Many elderly people who moved into assisted living had to give away their beloved pets due to this rule, which only served to exacerbate the loneliness epidemic, as well as health issues, among this age group … and finally resulted in the law being changed. 🙏

*This is an offer I created specifically for participants on the Iceland Writers Retreat but I’ve decided to make it available for all of you who follow this newsletter until the end of June … hence the code. 😁

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It was from 2011 and on opening it I remembered it was sent to me by Sigrún Davíðsdóttir, who at the time was one of Iceland’s most rigorous voices in financial journalism, and a regular contributor to RÚV, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.

Sigrún and I were writing about many of the same things post-economic meltdown and were sometimes in touch. This file was a piece that she had done for the current affairs programme Spegillinn and it was about the moral collapse—siðfall—of Icelandic corporate leadership in the years before the crash.

Like so many of us, Sigrún was working through the question of how the leaders of the banks and various large companies had been so ready to break the law in the service of narrow interests and at the expense of employees, minority shareholders, deposit holders and the wider society.

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The klíkur

She had been talking to Icelandic and foreign sources who had worked inside those institutions, and had found something interesting. Foreign employees, she said, often found Icelandic workplaces to be unusually relaxed compared to what they were used to. Manners were informal, hierarchy seemed soft or even absent, and there seemed to be a sense of jafnræði—equality, or parity—that on the surface was highly appealing.

Yet one non-Icelandic source, who had held a senior position in one of the banks, told Sigrún that this feeling was nothing but an illusion. Underneath the relaxed surface, he said, was the absolute rule of the CEO and a handful of people around him—the klíka, or clique.

This clique did not seek ideas from outside itself, it kept information to itself, and it promoted people who looked and thought like its members. Those people might be competent and hardworking, but they were never independent. In the years leading up to the crash this tendency had intensified in the banks, where the management cliques had grown more homogeneous, more tightly bound, and less interested in any view from outside their own walls.

A foreign source inside one of the banks remarked how badly Icelanders received criticism. Rather than engaging with the substance of a critical remark, Icelandic managers would immediately go on the defensive and pivot to the question of motive. Why was this person saying this? Were they envious? Were they trying to damage someone? Was there a hidden agenda? The actual content of the criticism was drowned in speculation about tangential issues. This individual had quickly learned that Icelandic managers did not understand the usefulness of constructive criticism. That angle simply did not exist for them.

Sigrún also spoke to an Icelandic banker whose views were similar. In hindsight he realised that there had been no real discussion in his bank about direction or strategy. The people who rose in the organisation, he said, had been relatively weak figures with backgrounds and views similar to that of the leadership—diligent, certainly, but not independent people with independent opinions.

Rannsóknarskýrsla Alþingis—the Special Investigation Commission Report into the Economic Collapse, colloquially dubbed the Black Report—confirmed what only a few people inside each bank had actually known: that the catastrophic loans and the rest of the disaster had been visible only to a small circle of senior figures. They had played with the lives and job security of thousands of decent, hardworking employees, who had been unwittingly complicit in a larger scheme that they could not even see.

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The goðaveldi

This is probably not new information to anyone who followed what was happening post-crash. However, Sigrún went on to examine this in a broader context that in my view reveals something thought-provoking about Icelandic society.

She related a story from the mid-1990s when she visited an Icelandic enclave that had formed in Hanstholm, Denmark, where around 400 Icelanders were then living. A rift had formed in this small community between two individuals—a kind of leadership feud that had ended with one of them moving away. When Sigrún expressed surprise at this factionalism, someone explained to her that this was how things worked in small Icelandic communities—there is always one strong individual who runs everything. Þetta er athyglisvert, she wrote, því þetta er í eðli sínu einkenni goðaveldsins. This is striking, because in essence this is a feature of the goðaveldi.

For those who are new to the term: goðaveldið, usually rendered in English as the reign of the goðar or the age of the chieftains, was the system that governed Iceland during the Commonwealth period, roughly from 930 to 1262. Power rested not with a king but with a small number of regional chieftains—the goðar—each commanding the personal loyalty of the free farmers in his region. Allegiance was personal rather than territorial; a farmer chose which goði he followed. A goði held power through reputation, alliance, and the willingness of others to back him. The system collapsed in the thirteenth century in a long, vicious feud between a handful of dynasties.

The theory Sigrún was referring to was that this system had never actually ended. That in Icelandic companies, and in Icelandic society more broadly, the structure of power still rests on strong individuals surrounded by yes-men who do not question them. Icelanders like to see themselves as a nation of independent people, but the behaviour, she wrote, is often the opposite—fylgispekt, followership, toward leaders who must not be doubted. Criticism is deflected or invalidated by being labelled “ulterior motive”.

Financial crime, Sigrún ended by saying, is certainly not specific to Iceland. Yet what is specific to Iceland is the willingness to disregard every interest—public interest, the interest of ordinary employees, the interest of minority shareholders … in short, every interest other than that of the management clique and its hangers-on—and the fact that this willingness is as strong as it is.

Fifteen years have passed since that piece was written and broadcast, but this pattern is still very much alive and well in Icelandic society. It is visible in the arts, in cultural institutions, in politics, and in families. The strongman-and-followers structure and the reflex of treating any uncomfortable truth as evidence of the speaker’s malice rather than objective reality, is something many Icelanders will recognise from places very close to home.

I examine this more closely below.

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This post was published on 14 June 2006 on my erstwhile blog The Iceland Weather Report, that I w…

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This question has again come into focus after this weekend’s local elections, which revealed a sharp shift to the right across the country, with the uncontested winner in most localities being the Independence Party.

Reykjavík, Iceland’s largest and most impactful municipality, has for many years been a stronghold of left-leaning parties, in particular the Social Democrats (Samfylkingin). Not after this weekend. The Independence Party won there by a landslide on Saturday. A coalition is pending, that may or may not include the far-right Centrist Party—remember, the ones that have been surreptitiously flirting with MAGA.

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In truth, the result was not fully unexpected, at least not in Reykjavík. The Social Democrats have made some, erm, questionable decisions in the last several years, and I get why people were getting irritated. Personally I found their policy of þéttingu byggðar, increasing the population density in Reykjavík, more than a little misguided. I get the point—they want more people in a smaller area to save on transport costs, road maintenance and other infrastructure, but the way they went about it was bizarre. They gave out lots that were right on high-traffic thoroughfares on which developers built high-end apartments that few could afford, many of which—and this boggles the ol’grey matter—had no parking facilities. Sure, the future vision was to have this new public transport network called Borgarlína making it so people wouldn’t need cars … but the key word here is future. Right now getting around the Reykjavík area by public transport is an undertaking that few Reykjavík residents are keen to engage in, given that a ten-minute car ride can take an hour or more by bus. Consequently Reykjavík now has a) far more traffic than even two years ago and it is increasing, b) a sh*tload of unsold properties, because even if someone were to scrape together the funds, space in a below-ground parking garage can cost an additional ISK 40,000 (USD 325) a month, and there is no parking on the street anywhere nearby (see: thoroughfare).

So the movement to the right may have simply been a vote for change—any change. What is alarming is that it involves this shift to the right with all its hostile-to-humanity policies.

The implications on the national level, meanwhile

… May or may not be significant, but are worth looking at.

We are currently one year into a term led by the Social Democratic Party after it won big in the last elections and formed a coalition with the Reform Party (Viðreisn) and the People’s Party (Flokkur Fólksins). All three parties are headed by women, and the coalition is definitely left-leaning. Their promise, among other things, has been to wrest power from the hands of the elite and distribute our collective wealth and resources more equitably—which is the opposite of what the parties that won so big this last weekend stand for.

Many commentators now fear that last weekend’s results bode ill for the current government. Incidentally, this is only the second time the Independence Party has not been in a position of power since the founding of the Republic of Iceland in 1944. The other time was right after the economic collapse in 2008, which happened on their watch. Some are going so far as to predict that the referendum on whether or not Iceland should continue accession talks with the EU will be felled, and that these parties will be ousted in the next national elections.

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As you may have figured out by now I am fascinated by the way people and nations cope with trauma.

When I was studying Folkloristics at the University of Iceland, I was amazed at the scholarly interpretations of folk tales, and especially how tales of the hidden people are now considered to be responses to difficult events that people did not have …

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I don’t know if the story is true but it sometimes gets trotted out when we are talking about Icelandic naming conventions. In most of the world, a shared family name is the default way of signalling that people belong together. In Iceland, that signal does not exist, which says something about how parts of Icelandic culture have remained preserved in a societal time capsule.

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A brief primer for the uninitiated:

Icelanders use patronyms, or, increasingly, matronyms. This was common across the Nordic countries around the time Iceland was settled, and it is where all those Johnsons, Petersons, Jacksons et al in the English-speaking world originally came from. The difference is that everywhere else, the practice morphed into fixed surnames generations ago, whereas in Iceland it never did.

Under this system, a child’s last name is made by taking the first name of the father or mother and adding -son if it is a boy, or -dóttir if it is a girl. Taking the father’s name—the patronym—is more common, though matronyms have been catching on in recent years.

It works like this. Let’s say there is a couple named Jón and Guðrún. They have a son named Karl and a daughter named Katrín. If the children (or, rather, their parents) decide to use patronyms, the son becomes Karl Jónsson and the daughter Katrín Jónsdóttir. If they decide to use matronyms, they become Karl Guðrúnarson and Katrín Guðrúnardóttir.

When Karl has children of his own, his son will be Karlsson and his daughter Karlsdóttir, assuming patronyms. When Katrín has children, assuming matronyms, they will be Katrínarson and Katrínardóttir. So children do not share a last name with their parents, because their last name is built from one of their parents’ first names.

Meanwhile, some people have begun using both patronym and matronym, presumably to honour both parents. It is rare, but you do see it: Karl Guðrúnar- og Jónsson (Karl, son of Guðrún and Jón), or simply Karl Guðrúnar Jónsson.

As for why the mother and father have different last names to begin with—Icelandic women do not change their names when they marry. It is not a thing here. Foreigners who marry Icelanders are legally permitted to take the last name of their spouse if they wish, even if that name is a patronym or matronym. So you do occasionally encounter someone like a Jane Guðmundsson. Curiously, I have seen a number of such names adopted by foreign women who married Icelandic men, but none by foreign men who married Icelandic women. Surely, though, it is only a matter of time before we see a name like Jack Gunnarsdóttir, no? 😜

On this note, several years ago the nonbinary community began to scout around for a parental suffix that would give them a way to form surnames without the male/female denotation. More on that below, as well as on the curious notion of Icelandic family names (because yes, some do exist).

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Want to know more about the cultural quirks of the Icelanders? Check out my ever-popular Little Book of the Icelanders!

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