Mae's Food Blog: Iceland

The overpowering theme of this book by the only Icelandic Nobelist — Halldor K. Laxness — is hunger. It’s a hunger that modern readers have almost surely never experienced. Especially in spring (a season of hunger for farming people everywhere that’s been forgotten by people like us) the lack of fresh food or perhaps the lack of any food is unimaginable. The food that was put away in the fall (or the money put away to buy food) may not last until the first produce of spring comes in.

In Independent People, the entire focus is on one sheep-raising family who are trying to make a living from a farm in the wilds of Iceland. Sheep are their livelihood and their obsession. The author describes their spring expectations:

“They would feel reasonably sure of surviving the winter, and of getting enough rye meal, refuse fish, and coffee to rear the kids on, those at least that didn’t die (the others were forgotten), always provided that they restricted themselves to the customary one meal a day in the spring.” (p. 17)

The central character, Bjartur of Summerhouses, lives in this extremely isolated area some time in the early 20th century, beginning before the First World War and continuing until shortly afterwards. Bjartur is a semi-secret poet and his verses are part of the novel. He seems naive in many ways.

His story, in brief: his first wife dies, he remarries, several children are born, and some other people live with the family on the farm. They always seems isolated by the distance from the isolated farm to the small settlement nearby, the incredible distance to Reykjavik (where none of them have ever visited), and the unimaginable distance to the wider world, which hardly seems to them even to exist. Eventually, they are made rich by the war and its need for the local resources, and then made poor by the aftermath when their products were no longer demanded by the wider world.

Bjartur has a number of fixed ideas that vary between comic and tragic.

“You should beware of believing things you see in books. I never regard books as the truth, and least of all the Bible, because there’s no check on what they can write in them.” (p. 64)

In a recent introduction to the English edition of Independent People, here is a summary of this character: “Bjartur is for me one of the great twentieth-century literary characters—one of the immortals, like Humbert Humbert or Jay Gatz/Gatsby or Gregor Samsa or the four Makioka sisters. He is petty-minded and heroic; brutal and poetic; cynical and childlike.” (p. xvii) I don’t agree with this comparison, but I’m including it because it’s probably more standard than my own views.

Bjartur isn’t the only character in the novel whose desperate poverty and eccentric views define him — here’s a description of one of the others, a Bailiff:

“His trousers were so worn that the original cloth no longer held the patches and was giving way at the stitches. Turned up over the bottoms was a pair of yellowish socks, undyed, and the down-at-heel horsehide shoes on his feet lent support to the theory that he was newly returned from a thoroughgoing inspection of the stables, stronger testimony being provided by the smell. In clothing and general appearance Bjarter of Summerhouses was far superior to this tramp-like Bailiff.” (p. 104)

Also, a description of Bjartur’s second wife:

“She would go drooping off home just before nine to boil the fish, but very often she could not get the fire to draw. She brought him his fish, rye bread, and coffee out to the meadow. ‘There’s no need to be stingy with that muck,’ he said of the sugar, for he always spoke slightingly of sweet things.” (p. 38)

And a description of some of his fellow farmers and craftsmen:

“New men on the croft, famous master builders who turfed the ewe-house walls in such a fashion that the courses took on a herring-bone pattern; a journeyman carpenter with foot-rule, pencil, and saw, mental arithmetic in his eye; the fresh scent of shavings blending with the smell of autumn’s mud and rain; boisterous conversation at meal-times, fragrant snuff, poetry, merchants and co-operative societies, sheep, sheep again, interesting information from irrelevant quarters, unknown phrases, brawls, sweet coffee.“ (p. 239)

The novel Independent People is one of those sagas of the early 20th century that now seems to develop with painful slowness. Characters die. Children grow up and try to understand the world around them. Life is hard, and from their earliest years they all have to work in terrible conditions, sometimes with their clothing soaked and freezing, sometimes when they are too tired to continue, etc. etc. The character sketches vary between irony (even satire) and sympathy. Their concerns are sometimes taken seriously and sometimes — I think — viewed as primitive or even childish. It’s not a book that satisfies current tastes any more, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it except for historical curiosity, as it’s extremely long, repetitive, and overburdened with descriptions.

Birds and Sheep

A pair of phalaropes we saw in Svalbard, another island in the far North.

Birds are everywhere in the landscape of this novel, and I was fascinated by the author’s descriptions of them. Though I did not see the specific birds on my trip to Iceland, I did see many in Norway. Of the many species named, I especially like hearing of the phalarope:

“On every pool of the river there was a phalarope to make her a bow; no bird in all the marshes is so courtly in its demeanour on Midsummer Eve.” (p. 193)

“Soon the marshes would be green and humming with life the same as they were last year, with the phalarope preening itself in courtesy on the surface of the deep pools. And the little waterfall up in the mountain would be flowing backward in the sunny breeze.“ (p. 246)

Of course there’s also constant mention of the sheep.