"The Flatey Enigma"

The historic church on Flatey Island.

The Flatey Enigma by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson is a very strange mystery novel. The setting is the Icelandic island called Flatey, which is a very small island in Breiðafjörður Bay in the northeast of the country. The novel was meaningful to me especially because I toured the small island on both of my recent visits to Iceland, in 2021 and 2022. 

The events in the novel take place in 1960, when the residents of Flatey lived a very different life than the summer visitors who now occupy the colorful houses and the only hotel on the island. Today, only one or two families still live there throughout the dark and very cold winters, but back then, as the author explains, the islanders lived a very challenging and different life -- I found this material to be the most interesting part of the novel.

A visitor to the island in 1960, as described by Ingolfsson, would find no rooms to rent and no restaurants. He could only ask for a bed and meals in a local household. The island’s inhabitants lived in rather cramped homes, and made a living from fishing, hunting, or raising animals, or by being employed by the government, for example as the operator of the generator-powered telephone exchange, which operated only a few hours each day. Some of the farmers raised cows, and shared the milk with people like the pastor of the church. They ate mutton from their sheep; they also ate fish and wild birds like puffins, wild birds' eggs, seal meat, dried fish, and in general, whatever they could eke out of the forbidding island and the even smaller nearby islands. A regularly scheduled ferryboat (still connecting Flatey to the mainland) brought visitors and also supplies from the mainland.

A key to the novel is a beautifully illustrated, hand-written medieval manuscript, called the Flatey Book, which was written and compiled by a scribe on Flatey in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. This manuscript, which in 1960 was in the Danish National Library in Copenhagen, contains the best and most complete text of several of the Icelandic sagas and other historic material. It was repatriated to the Icelandic national library in Reykjavik in 1971, and is still there. In Flatey in 1960, the library next to the church held a facsimile of the manuscript, which fascinated some of the characters.

Illustration from the Flatey Manuscript (source)

The novel begins with the discovery by seal-hunters of a dead man on one of the nearby islands. A rather large number of local people, plus one government lawyer who has just arrived expecting to work on some record-keeping, become involved in trying to identify the body and then to learn who killed him. What's unusual about this novel is that at the end of each chapter is a contrasting story of efforts to solve a riddle called "The Flatey Enigma," which is a few sheets of paper from the 19th century containing a set of mysterious hints. These papers had been tucked into the facsimile manuscript at some unknown time. Each chapter-end explains one of the 40 clues to the challenge, which is to complete a particular poem. Two main characters, who turn out to be scholars of medieval Icelandic literature, are engaged in a competition to solve this "enigma."  I don’t think any normal readers of the novel could possibly solve the enigma; I could scarcely understand the clues or even the solution. It makes for very strange reading! 

Houses on the island -- you can also see the nearby islands.

A lighthouse, visible on a neighboring island.

These girls were selling painted rocks to the tourists from the National Geographic Explorer,
which brought us to the island. They were enthusiastic about having their picture taken.

The Flatey Enigma is widely respected, and a spin-off was
a TV series that's actually a sequel to the novel's plot.

Flatey's inhabitants ate the foods that they could get from their environment, along with some imports brought in on the ferry boat. Here are a few quotes about food:

“Those are great black-backed gull eggs from the spring,” she said as he picked one up to examine it. “There’s no need to spare any of those eggs in these recipes. There’s plenty of them at this time of the year, and they’re fine for baking, even if they’re a bit old and have started to gestate,” she added. (p. 102)

“There’s no farming for them there, apart from their potato patch, but they go to Ketilsey and the skerries around there. They just about scrape by; it’s a long way to go, and there aren’t many eggs to be found. But they catch some seal and puffin there, too. They also do some line fishing and work at the fish factory when it’s in operation.” (p. 20)

“Ingibjörg received them with a ready dinner: boiled puffin breast with potatoes and a knob of butter.” (p. 47)

Finally, a description of the end of a meal that the hosts offered to the visitor:

"Lunch was now over in Flatey’s district officer’s home, and his wife placed a pot of coffee on the table. The men poured the boiling coffee into their empty glasses of water and snorted snuff. Kjartan also poured some coffee into his glass but declined Ingibjörg’s offer of sugar and milk. The men sipped the hot coffee, sighed, and burped." (p. 24).  

One of the characters in the novel is an alcoholic, and he drinks alcohol constantly, but the meals were always accompanied by plain water, and coffee (which obviously had to be imported on the ferry boat)! 

Most fun on the island: seeing puffins. I find it hard to imagine, but people still hunt and eat them.
One of the characters in the book complains because the tourists do nothing but gawk at puffins.

Blog post and photos © 2022 mae sander.