Category Archives: Architecture

Colonial House Building 101, an Icelandic Novel

Gunnar Gunnarsson, Novelist and boy from the colonies, left Denmark (the colonial heartland) in 1939 to build a farm on Iceland (the colony) that would provide in a physical form the cultural direction of his novels. His friend the North German architect Fritz Höger, who volunteered to design Gunnar’s farmstead, had in mind something like this …

Half-Timbered Danish Farmhouse

Den Fynske Landsby, Fyn, Danmark. The working courtyard in front follows the ancient Norse (and thereafter Icelandic) architectural model of a tun, an open air working room between buildings. Gunnar’s farmstead was to have a large an open tun between buildings, which was abandoned when the additional buildings were never constructed.

A German architect building a Danish-style building on Scandinavian soil for a man who lived his life between the German and Danish worlds would be a way of making peace with the Prussian takeover of Schleswig Holstein (Höger’s area of Germany) from the Danes. It was, of course, the time of an ascendent Nazi Germany, so the idea of a country house built by a German architect would contain some notions of German country houses, and in this case, a Tyrolian one (dominant at the time, with the annexation of Hitler’s Austria fresh in everyone’s minds, and all) …

Telfs, Austria

Note the balcony. It provides a commanding viewpoint. A central part of Höger’s design was to build a large terrace in a roman or Italian extension of this model. An absolutely key part of German culture is that Germans like to live outside. Their terraces are their summer homes. It’s not quite like that for Canadians, like myself, or Icelanders, who lives in countries a bit less amenable to lounging around in the cold. Still, what was done was done. What Gunnar had in mind was a totally different idea of living outside, much like this …

Landhus Farm Barn, Fljótsðalur

This is a variation on the icelandic version of the previous two architectural methods: build the house out of the materials of the earth itself; your whole life is lived within and on the land. In such a situation, a terrace is rather redundant. Gunnar was committed to the idea of human habitation fitting into the land as if it were not even there, or as if it were an extension of it, like this…

The Foundation Walls of a Former Turf House

Overlooking the Lagarfljót

What he got is more like that than other houses in Iceland …

Gunnar’s House Seen from Down the Hill

True to Gunnar’s vision, it changes colour with the seasons. True to Fritz’s, it is made out of cemented, rather than stacked stones. Fritz had in mind cut, square blocks of good German rock. There is no such rock in Iceland. The local boys settled on round stones from the river. Score: Germany 1; Iceland 1. A draw.

Thing is, Gunnar’s whole idea was that architecture, and especially how it fit into a landscape, determined the soul of a people and their ways of thinking. He was dead set against putting non-Icelandic architecture within Iceland, as it would, he felt, damage the people and their ability to survive. Now, one reason his farming venture failed is that there was war (started by his readers, the Germans), and a resulting invasion of Iceland by the British and the Americans, who paid so well for labourers to build their infrastructure that there were no surplus young men to care for animals like this …

Icelandic Ewe Demonstrating Ancestral House Roof Clambering Technique on a Hay Bale

Go, girl!

… and in this way the war ripped out the economic underpinning of Gunnar’s farm. What’s more, the rough and ready construction methods the young men learned on the American and British bases had a kind of effect that eventually led to this…

Definitely Not Gunnar-Approved Architecture

Thrown together for reasons of utility and nothing else. That is what farms look like throughout Iceland. There doesn’t appear to be the money on many to build anything better and, besides, it works. This kind of raw utilitarianism would not have appealed to Gunnar, and he would have feared that it would have led to sloppiness. He might have seen this, for example, as a consequence …

Sheep Pigging Out on a Haybale

But what Gunnar did not foresee was a permanent divorce of Icelanders from their land. A tiny fraction of the original rural population now has to grow more sheep, cows and horses than ever before … something has to give. The solution has been German, rather than Icelandic, industrial farming methods, capitalized on American industrial farming models. Has all this led to the wealth and security Gunnar was trying to create with his tun-based farmstead that would bring German agricultural models to the land and separate Iceland from colonial overlordship by teaching farmers how to get more wealth from their land, and keep it rather than giving it away to colonial capital managers?

Not quite yet. There’s more than one way to lose your sovereignity. Perhaps the process of decolonization is not complete and something can still be learned from Gunnar’s attempt. Heck, it could have been him holding that protest sign. Perhaps Gunnar’s time has come.

Gunnar Gunnarsson Secret Agent: Part II

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When the Icelandic writer Gunnar Gunnarsson returned to Iceland in 1939, with fame and fortune and a reputation greater than most other North European writers, he built the house that houses me now at Skriðuklaustur farm. His goal was no less than to save Iceland. The question of “from what?” is a good one — and one important to ask and to answer in the early 21st century.

Icelanders Standing Firm Against the Wind

Hofstaðir, March 20, 2013

A drive to protect his homeland had been a major motif of all Gunnar’s novels, essays, reading tours and his innumerable literary and political lectures from before the First World War up through the beginning of its sequel. They took him down roads few followed, tangled him up with German nationalist ideology, Danish communist ideology, Scandinavian pan-nationalism, nordic cultural politics and English globalism, and left him as a riddle. It’s not that hard to unravel, though, and goes to the heart of modernism and the developments that came out of it, including the time you and I live in today.

Competing Beer Signs and a Bit of 1960s Who-ha

Not exactly Gunnar’s idea. Reykjavik, March, 2013.

Gunnar was a conservative man, who in his own life climbed several social classes and learned some hard lessons about being a colonial subject along the way (and carried some of its brittleness along with him). In the new colonialisms that are springing up around the world as I write these words and you read them, including new political structures based around oil, water, religion and the melting of northern ice, Gunnar’s words of warning and mock-modesty to a gathering of students in Copenhagen in 1925 are as much to the point now as they were then.

I am embarrassed to be speaking out publicly on a matter which by many will undoubtedly be labeled as a Utopia and thus probably rendered inconsequential, despite that we and all our surroundings are nothing but former Utopias, but since I have been requested to do so I have not wanted to refuse the request. There may be as much liability in silence as in speech.

The Northern Kingdom, 1925

By this point in history, Scandinavian politicians had given up on pan -Scandinavianism. Not Gunnar. Seemingly, not some students, either. The point about silence being culpable remains a good one, however slyly it may originally have been said and however much it might be turned on its head, to say that there is as much liability in speech as in silence.

In a way, as a rural intellectual and literary artist (as was Gunnar), I know what he means. One has things to say that come from a great distance from urban intellectual structures and one must try to find a way to translate them, with words that remain elusive and at times just don’t see quite up to the job. This guy knows it, too, I suspect.

Bragi Benediktsson Shelters from the Wind Behind His Weather Station in Grimsstaðir

A Chinese Billionaire wants to buy this land for a golf resort. It looks more like the setting of a Biblical parable or a northern military outpost. As a point of interest, Bragi would have been four years old when Gunnar came back home.

Still, Gunnar was worrying a bone. It’s worth looking at what he found and had sunk his teeth into. I’ll be doing that here over the next few days, as I argue that Gunnar was acting (at least in his own mind) as a secret agent, even a double agent, in Iceland’s interests (as he understood them). He was doing so in complex literary ways that fit none of the regular literary genres. Fiction? Short story? Parable? Political tract? Essay? Poetry? Saga? All of them at once is more like it. None of his literary endeavours were really fiction or literary as the terms are understood today — to our poverty, by the way, not his.

Some of Gunnar’s Books in the Skriðuklaustur Artist’s Residence

And some novels on the bottom shelf. What a change in worlds.

Still, poverty. Gunnar had known incredible poverty from childhood, he had a very clear view of it, and he wanted to dispel it. Part of this poverty was the poverty of lack of access to influence structures of power, including the ruling social classes. More precisely, Gunnar knew poverty well enough to know that it could be a strength, as long as it did not lead to powerlessness, foreign occupation, exploitation, and starvation. Those were all within Icelandic experience as well, and he believed he had found a way to dispel them by writing in Danish, the colonial language, and using it and his immense popularity within Germany as springboards to influence German public opinion and ultimately German foreign policy in the crucial years leading up to World War II.

Gunnar’s Book “Advent” Was the Perfect Cover for a Secret Agent

Literary, a Christian parable, autobiographical, romantic, and heroic, Advent was first published in German in 1936, in Danish in 1937, and in English in 1939. For a book that has gone on to sell a million copies, it is intriguingly non-narrative. There is, I think, a message in that for writers everywhere.

Advent appealed to all groups of Gunnar’s audience, and had a special political message for each of them. Let me take a moment here to show you some portions of the German one. This is the story of a shepherd Benedikt who returns every year to the highlands, as Icelanders still do every year, to gather in sheep that others have abandoned to the cold. Alone except for his animal companions, he goes where no others will go, heroically overcoming the harsh elements. We should remember that no book was published in Germany during the rule of the Third Reich that did not further its political aims, and what were those in 1936? The same as the always were: the annexation of Germany’s territories divorced from it by the Treaty of Versailles after World I, firstly, as well as the annexation of Austria and all Germans to the East, secondly (for example in the Ukraine and Russia), into a Greater Germany. They were, in the sense of the Regime, lost sheep, that only a true leader dared to bring home. The imagery of the book, however, is not particularly German, as that is understood today. Take a look:

Alpine Imagery in “Advent in the High Mountains”

Germany is a largely flat, rainy, foggy country. The imagery here is from its edges: Austrian, Bavarian, Czech and Polish — exactly the objects of Hitler’s eye. Not only that, but this peasant figure is a common folk motif from the Mountains of Giants in Silesia — the old man of the mountains, said to have sprung from the land and the trees themselves, the ancestor of all Germans. Accident? No, not in the Third Reich.

This kind of identification of land, heroism, personality, and politics differed little from Gunnar’s return there to set up his farm (or ideal country) in 1939. It’s a story in which his farm was a kind of novel (and political vision), just as “Advent” was a kind of farm (or political vision). There really was very little difference — they just operated in different spheres, that’s all. Well, there was one difference, of course. That difference looked a bit like this…

German Mountain Troops on a Skiing Break, 1936

The photo was taken in Garmisch-Partenkirchen during the Mountain Division’s early build-up in 1936, on the site of the 1936 Winter Olympics, on the slopes of the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in the Bavarian Alps. These troops were instrumental in the assaults on Greece and Crete. Hitler sacrificed them all.

Gunnar, nationalist that he was, was not a National Socialist. His vision was nonviolent and inclusive of all points of view — and Hitler’s was neither. The German people? No, Gunnar’s audience wanted the rural ideals that Gunnar did. They wanted to return home to the land from the nightmare of exploitive urbanization and industrialization. For the most part, it was simple and sincere, rather Utopian, as Gunnar seemed to have realized deep down, and as strangely complicit in and mis-used by the National Socialist program as was Gunnar himself. The path to that realization, however, was a hard one for all.

Back to the Middle Ages: 1945, Hand-Printed Russian-Occupied German Stamp

Ironically, if such a word can even be used for such horrors, the retrogressive nature of Hitler’s agrarian-political vision, forged in the poorhouses of Vienna, hardened in the trenches of the First World War, and cynically enabled by the German military classes in the 1920s, led in the end to the simplest, physical expression of the core of its vision: destruction of modernity and the true creation of a new agricultural peasantry. So much for fantasy written as the world.

Well, that was Hitler’s vision gone wrong. Gunnar’s was far more wordly than that, and escaped much of the tragic fate of Hitler’s. The parallels with Hitler are strong: nordic romanticism, strong central leadership, the shaking off of colonial chains, re-definition of culture on the most elementary of local terms, and so on, but it ends there. Gunnar was neither a Nazi nor a violent man. In fact, he had more in common with his American contemporary, Ezra Pound, than anything, and even in comparison to Pound, Gunnar was an angel. Pound was just a brilliant fool, caught in a hard place by his own folly and pride.

US Army Mugshot of the Poet Ezra Pound

Pound, a staunch American nationalist and a naive supporter of Mussolini’s centralized leadership, stayed in Italy during World War II, in part to retain contact with his daughter, who was raised by peasants in the Italian alps. “What thou lovest well,” he wrote, ” remains. The rest is dross.” He paid his way during the war years by broadcasting rambling speeches over Radio Rome, encouraging American GIs to give up the war by explaining to them such things as the poetry of ee cummings. He paid for that by arrest on a charge of treason, and eventual incarceration for 13 years on a charge of insanity. Was he a fascist and a Nazi? No, not really, but even so he went miles further down the road of complicity than Gunnar ever did.

It’s important to straighten out the “nazi” word, or history will remain a cloudy pool and our collective future decisions will be made in a darkness that Gunnar and Pound, despite their failings and tom-foolery attempted, at the least, to shine light within. Gunnar’s publication in German was brave, foolish, dangerous and perhaps misguided and imperious, but was not done in any way to further Germany’s racial and military goals. It was done to further his own goals. Even the Americans did not share those. Advent went on from Germany to have a remarkable history. It even became an American Book of the Month Club selection, when the Americans needed some propaganda symbol of Icelandic independence and the heroism of lone sailors in the bitter cold of the North Atlantic, battling the German U-Boot threat from Reykjavik. Paper was rationed in the United States at that time; books were not published that without the approval of the Army. In that context, Advent must have had strong approval, indeed, as it was widely distributed.

Now Benedikt is Young and Wearing a Fur Version of an American Military Helmet!

And the mountains look like North Atlantic Waves. Amazing.

And that was Gunnar, Icelander to the core, negotiating a path between worlds, used by all, and seeking to retain is independence in between — not always successfully, but never without stoic pride. Ironically, the American occupation of Iceland, and the more damaging German occupation of Denmark, which led to Icelandic independence in 1944, a kind of child of the United States (while Denmark was still occupied by a more sinister invader) created the climate in the mid-1950s in which Iceland was deemed worthy of reward for a Nobel Prize — a country that had come out of the Second World War with its independence (just the kind of humanism that the Nobel Prize was set up to support). A deeper irony denied the prize to Gunnar, and gave it to the Icelandic communist Haldor Laxness instead (not exactly the primary goal of the Nobel Prize Committee). The gods must be laughing.

Odin’s and His Ravens, Thought and Memory

Sharing gossip about the world.

This conversation will continue tomorrow, with a closer look at the game Gunnar was playing with the Nazis. Thought and memory (or mind) … we’ll certainly be coming back to that, too.

Gunnar Gunnarsson, Double Agent: Part 1

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Yesterday I mused on the origins of story in lines that cut across pools of presence. Part of the story was the human response to them, that brought them together into art. (If you missed it, you can track through it right here.) Today I’d like to talk about Gunnar Gunnarsson, and how some of those lines are circles, and that they too have a story. Now, circles are very special lines. They have no beginning or end, no directionality and can can extend from every point into every conceivable shape, as long as it has no beginning and end. Circles are eternal. Their boundaries separate into inner and outer representations of … what exactly? Ah, that’s Gunnar’s game. Here’s a circle:

Air Caught Within a Seasonal Icelandic Pond

Intersection of Highways 848 and 87

And here’s another:

Iceland (Source)

Well, almost a circle. Sort of. If you took off the scrunchy bits. It has a circle-like edge, at any rate. Here, this might be closer:

Three Maps of Iceland

Two for tourists and one in words to keep tourists away.

That’s a copy of the text “Unser Land” or “Our Land” that Gunnar read on his spring 1940 tour of 50 cities in Germany, immediately after the sod was laid on the roof of his house and just before the German invasion of Denmark and Norway. Here’s how Gunnar starts off:

It rises majestically out of the sea when approached from the water. It grips the heart like a heroic song, touched with eternity, sown with destiny. There is nothing small about its appearance. Even though its face varies from place to place, it remains integral — a pure vision.

A pure (or untrammelled) vision? It’s like a shaman’s spirit stone or a statue of Mary with the Christ Child. Speaking of which, here’s one:

The Skriðusklaustur Madonna…

… in her glass box, with reflected light, and looking very Icelandic indeed (replica).

By “pure vision” Gunnar had many things in mind, including nature in its rawest, least adapted, least, shall we say, artistically crafted, farmed, developed, urbanized or written version and the Madonna. Now, even if we accept that Gunnar idealized his mother and lost her at the age of eight, and then bought the farm next door some 45 years later and set up his writing desk where he could look up the valley and see that childhood, which he called the purest image of eternity, and even if we accept that Iceland, the land, is alive and represents human consciousness just as the consciousness of Icelanders represents the land (which, indeed, Gunnar argues in the latter part of his speech), and even if the madonna above comes from his farm in East Iceland, the Madonna and Iceland — or even Gunnar’s farm — just aren’t exactly the same thing. In his text, though, they are. The title gives us a clue as to what he means by that: “Our Land”. Whose land? Apart from raw, physical and spiritual nature, like this …

here are some of the many possibilities:

The Our Land Game

In playing this game, it’s good to remember that Gunnar was a showman and a businessman speaking to his main audience: the Germans, who had swarmed (to take a word from the German) to his books for decades. Indeed, they had done so to a whole genre of Nordic romances from Sweden, Norway and Iceland, that was fed, ultimately, into the German war machine. In other words, Gunnar was speaking to two audiences at the same time: Icelanders (himself, most specifically) and Germans who had a longing to get out of Middle Europe and to create a new centre of balance around the Baltic (somewhat removed from them by the Treaty of Versailles). If I’m right, he intended his text to be a cipher, read differently by both groups. The madonna was intended for the Germans. The pure nature for the romantics. The way of looking both ways at once, for himself. Himself, Gunnar was a boy from the fjords of East Iceland, a farm kid, from a long line of farmers. He remained so to the end. In the context of 1940, with German and Russian invasion of Poland a fait accompli and Germany reassertive along the south shore of the Baltic, “Our Land” meant several further things, which I will speak to over the following few days in this Easter season of death and rebirth, grace and forgiveness. One of them was “land to live upon,” a concept which was one of the cornerstones of Germany’s violent foreign policy, by which Germany sought to fulfill what it (or at least Hitler) saw as its “destiny” — another word that Gunnar carefully sows at the beginning of his speech. His audience would have been all ears. In my next post I will discuss the bearing this concept had on Jews and their culture and the horrific story of the Holocaust, but let’s be kind to ourselves. These things are hard and need their time and space to unfold. Until then, look at the world of Gunnar’s nature, islands of air, always different, always the same, and frozen into one picture of pure spiritual vision. Applying this boyhood observation of paradise to the divisive and self-devouring complexities of German political life in the 1930s might have been unwise on Gunnar’s part, but the boyhood observation is a thing of beauty…

The question is: what does one, as a man, make out of that? And that cross we will carry tomorrow.

The Language of ice

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Gunnar Gunnarsson’s published a fascinating ghost story called Vikivaki in 1932. Iceland is still writing them. Take a look…

Ghosts, Öxarárfoss, Iceland

What’s a ghost? Why, something that’s neither dead nor alive and which brings a message from deep within your story.

As for people, they’re writing something else. Here’s what visitors to Iceland write upon the body of the land when they visit:

Troll People, Þingvellir

They just have to leave a record of themselves, it seems, using whatever is at hand.

For people who live within a landscape, language comes from the land, the water, the light and the air. Here’s a piece of just such a language from Iceland:

Language Beginning, Öxarárfoss, Iceland

Forget about cuneiform and Linear B and language starting with bird tracks in sand. There is another way. Forget about writing for purely human audience and deferring the environmental costs of turning from the earth until the future. That future is now.

Language Beginning as Art, Öxarárfoss, Iceland

Compare that to the lines in this stained glass window from the church in Reykholt, West Iceland:

Mary, The Christ Child, and Three Angels

Reykholt

Iceland is a country in which Christianity is uniquely bound to the soil. Unsurprisingly, Gunnar’s ghosts are a surprisingly devout bunch, called forth in a moment of nationalist zeal. This is one lesson I’m going to happily take home to Canada in 6 weeks. Sometimes the hidden people of a country can be the people themselves.

Next: I will explore these ideas further by discussing an Icelandic artist who paints with ice.

Gunnar’s Warning to the Germans

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Look at the riddle Gunnar Gunnarsson told the Germans in 1940, just a few weeks before the invasion of Denmark and Norway and the resulting invasion of Iceland by the British and then the Americans:

It is far better for a man to recognize true inner human nature without touching it than through the words and behaviours people dress it in. Such a view into truth is far more vital than casual thought would have it. And certainly it’s no great sacrifice to hold to good taste and respect in all things. And since the talk is about sacrifice, our land has at least fully earned that, and our joy at its beauty will never be complete until these issues are ordered in such a way that gives no more ground for reprimand.

The text it is from a speech called “Our Land.” It can be read many ways. Here’s one:

Turf Sheepfold, Reyðarfjörður

Here’s another, referencing each sentence of the passage quoted above to the argument Gunnar built up in the pages preceding it:

1. It is far better for a man to recognize true inner human nature without touching it than through the words and behaviours people dress it in.

Translation: Iceland has no history, except nature. Elsewhere (Germany included), nature is interpreted through the habits and clothing of people — in other words, through the changeability of time. In Iceland, however, nature is naked, and so are people: they are dressed in nothing, except each other. They do not exist in time — only in place. When one builds a bridge in Iceland (it is an example that Gunnar uses), one has to build it out of Iceland and not out of imported ideas, which sit within foreign customs and gardens rather than within nature itself, no matter how successful they were in other places. In Iceland, they won’t work. The land is not forgiving of any departure from its forms.

Workers’ Housing, Aluminum Smelter, Reyðarfjörður

Gunnar would not have liked this.

2. Such a view into truth is far more vital than such casual thought would have it.

Translation: Truth is untouched nature. It can be approached (and dismissed) casually, but it is not in itself dismissable. Nature is not the contemporary idea of “all things green”, nor the idea of “landscape art”, nor the notion of a goddess of nature called Natura. It is God: wordless, idea-less, unrepresentable and uncontainable. God is Iceland is Nature — or they would be, except God and Iceland and Nature have no names, and no words or ideas can be given to them, only drawn from them.

Streambed Near Njardhvik

3. And certainly it’s no great sacrifice to hold to good taste and respect in all things.

Translation: Just as with the sacrifice of Christ, good taste and respect (based on an underlying devotion to God) are not sacrifices but a practical good in their own right. Life flows in patterns. On earth (that is to say on “Our Land”), one lives within them. Land is this shore of life, which other people call a planet, and which yet others call countries. “Our Land” is a changeable idea. It really means, “Who we are.” That’s not a modern idea.

Ryolite Streambed Near Njardhvik

4. And since the talk is about sacrifice, our land has at least fully earned that, and our joy at its beauty will never be complete until these issues are ordered in such a way that gives no more ground for reprimand.

Translation: Iceland has earned the sacrifice of human desire to its eternal forms; all those wishing to speak of sacrifice must learn to do so in a way consistent with the forms of the shore, in the way water finds its path through the grasses yet still moves with great power. Societies can be repurposed. Land cannot. Any attempts to do so will destroy the society of humans on earth. The joy of Icelanders at the beauty of those forms will not be complete until human temporal constructions are ordered in a way no longer out of touch with the streambeds of nature. The bonds between humans and God — a bond called “Our Land” — must be respected, not with words or ideas or customs, but with bodies and with rock. Only the people of a place can build there. All else will fail.

Ptarmigan Waiting for Me to Go Away

It’s a remarkable thing to say, especially to a country in the throes of praise for the sacrifice of thousands of its young men in capturing Poland to provide, in the language of the times, land for nordic people, especially when Finland is falling and talk of Scandinavia’s strategic importance is in the air. Invasion plans have already been drawn up, by both the British and the Germans. It’s an especially remarkable thing from a man like Gunnar, who spent decades advocating for a pan-Scandinavian state and who earned his income writing Scandinavian books for a German audience enamoured with the idea of becoming Scandinavian rather than Mediterranean. It’s an especially pointed statement to a Germany that has just united with Italy, on the Mediterranean, especially when Italy, Norway and Iceland are the three poles of the world given in Gunnar’s speech. Did I say ‘speech’? I meant sermon.

Two Security Systems Hard at Work and Ready to Embrace You. Strandakirkja

Choose the one that works for you.

Next: Gunnarsson as a Lutheran.

Trolls and House Building: A Field Guide

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Well, not trolls exactly. And not exactly a house. It’s a bit of a riddle, but poets love riddles. Why, you could even say that on the northern shores of the world, poetry developed out of riddles, or that skaldic poetry did, at any rate. Here’s a famous Icelandic skald:

Egil Skallagrímsson, Skald

Ready to do battle with, what’s that, a rusty sword? More like a cleaver, I think. I have used things like that to pick cabbages. Poet farmers unite! (17th Century Manuscript from the Árni Magnússon Institute).

A scaldic poem is a ceremonial poem, given as a gift by a poet (a skald) to his patron, written in praise (or at times rousing criticism — very scalding, very scolding criticism). Scaldic poetry was worked through in intricate design and was intended as a verbal form of the intertwined patterning on a shield — a kind of protective magic. (The contemporary equivalent might be depleted uranium.) At times, skaldic poems were even recited before battle. They were part of the battle. An important part, too, that preceded the bloodiness.

The Karlevi Stone, Vickleby, Sweden

Photo by Berig.

Note the vertical columns of the scaldic poem above. As Gunnar Gunnarsson pointed out in Unser Land (the speech he read from during his 1940 literary tour of Germany), they are not much different than this:

Basalt Columns, Vík í Mýrdal

A tightly-linked protective shield poem against the encroaching sea, written in the land itself. (Note: studies from Hawaii have shown that black basalt beaches like this form in hours, not centuries.)

Isn’t that cool? A poem that is the land? That is the riddle Gunnarsson was speaking from: his house is Iceland; Iceland is his house. If that sounds a little unusual, do recall: he’s a poet; he’s not really thinking in metaphor. Mostly, metaphor is for people who are not poets. It’s a useful way, for sure, of describing the work of poets, but it does do so without really accepting the poem as the reality of the world, which is the poet’s way. In the case of Gunnarsson’s house and island, that work is performed in skaldic poetry, which makes his house a shield as well — and not just a shield, but an ornament, too, like this, maybe:

Viking Broach, Sweden

Men might have wanted shields, to protect their bodies in battle, but, perhaps, just perhaps, women wanted something to hold their garments together at the shoulder, something that was as protective as a shield, something with an island in the centre and the four points of the compass around them, something that would set them at the middle of the world. In Sweden’s case, that would have been North for the Trail to the North (Nor’way), South for Denmark and the trails down the Rhine, East for Finland, and West for the Orkneys — and if you just kept going, going, going, going (whew) … aha! In the middle of the ocean… Iceland.

Once people arrived in the middle of the North Atlantic, the compass shifted. Iceland was now at the centre of the world. The other points of the compass were adjusted accordingly, to reference it. Since all directions led to water, however, Iceland became the entire earth, floating in the universe (which was a big, cold sea). The country is still roughly divided into these quadrants.

Iceland, the Compass Version

The shield and compass pattern extends beyond maps. For example, if you really wanted to get into the whole magical side of things, and weren’t squeamish about a little darkness in your life, you could play around with something like the following (You could even write it in your own blood):

Vegvisir

An Icelandic magical stave. Staves come in many shapes and were drawn for many different purposes.This one is a compass written in magical symbols, and was used to find one’s way in bad weather.

For such a stave to work (if it did), such navigation would not be done by the physical properties of the land, but by spiritual ones — and we’re not talking Christian-spiritual. In the high days of the Christian Church in Iceland, the possession of such staves could have had you condemned as a witch and beheaded at Þingvellir. That might have been awfully un-Christian, too, but, still, even today, this kind of magic is not advisable. When the Germans tried this kind of thing in the 1930s, for one thing, they invented the 1940s, which turned out to be a really bad idea.

Dresden, February 1944

Among the 20,000 people killed in the Allied bombing of Dresden and the millions of German refugees who streamed through it shortly afterwards on their way south and west from the Baltic, were untold numbers of readers of Gunnar Gunnarsson’s books about Iceland.

The pattern of land-as-compass-as-shield continues further, into practical applications of gentler spiritual principles. This time, they are placed in the interests of nationalism, where it’s not black magicians in the West Fjords or Ancient Viking ancestors or ultra-Nationalist Germans trained in the killing fields of The Chemins des Dames who are leading the way to a nation, but young women, quietly fitting their minds to the old patterns, to create a little beauty and order out of the blank, snow-white flaxen cloth woven out of the country’s fields. Think of these as self portraits…

Icelandic Needlepoint Pattern

Flowers, yes, but also a hand-held mirror lifted from a dressing table, as well as the old compass, the old shield, the old broach, and the old skaldic poetry, too. Not to mention Gunnarsson’s house. Yes, the house. Such a pretty thing. Such devotion.

If you think I’m stretching this, consider that five centuries ago in the cloister below Gunnarsson’s house at Skriðuklaustur illiterate young women would have made embroidery of the flowers of the fields. It was a form of prayer, practiced between caring for the sick. Such devotion was the unique Icelandic contribution to prayerful attention and worship, in the way that the repetitive painting of icons of saints was an essential contribution to worship in Russia.

Christ Pantokrator

6th century encaustic icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai. The power comes from about fifty coats of paint and the deliberately non-representational nature of the image. God, after all, can’t be reproduced in an image, so trying would be arrogance. Accordingly, such images aren’t representations of God. They are God’s presence, revealed when people devote themselves to old patterns.

The repetition and patterning were key. For example, just down the valley from Gunnarsson’s house at Skriðuklaustur, the old girls’ school at Hallormsstaður trained girls in Icelandic embroidery, as one part of a project to create a culture in Iceland independent from Danish influence. If the home was the heart of the country, and women were at the heart of the home, and the country was its children, then Icelandifying young women would, it seems, pay future dividends. Politification (My, aren’t I inventing words today) of national identity could follow at its own pace.

Icelandic Nationalist Embroidery, 1930s, Hallormsstaður.

The doors of the rooms in the school dormitory bear the names of trees, instead of numbers, and are set within a somewhat overgrown botanical garden. Such gardens were decorative in mainland Europe. In Iceland, they are a more practical magic.

The embroidery above is much like a map of Iceland. When you get down to ground level, after all, and experience the map that is Iceland on a human scale rather than an international or global one of contours, nation states, trade patterns, colonies, weather isobars and even corporate banking, Iceland does look like this:

Iceland at Ground Level, Neskaupstaður

The embroidery of summer!

This beautiful meadow, may I remind you, is still our shield and still our skaldic poem. It’s also Gunnarsson’s house, his novels, and the workings of his subconscious and conscious minds. Skaldic poems are full of doubling like that. We’re back to this:

His house is Iceland.

Iceland is his house.

Very skaldic, indeed. Of course, in physical terms, when this skaldic play comes to Gunnarsson’s house, the whole thing does look awfully German.

Skriðuklaustur

The German architect, the Icelandic stone, the grass roof…why, it’s an island itself. An island in itself. An island. Itself. German….German? That’s the riddle within the riddle.

The poems are our key. The first form of doubling in a skaldic poem is a kenning. Kennings are natural word forms inherent in Germanic languages (Frisian, Icelandic, Norse, English, Danish, and so on). Speakers of these languages use words like that all the time. Some English examples are: butternut, windowsill, firefly, and doublespeak. In kennings, this tendency is made artful. Each kenning is a miniature poem in itself. Take the land, for instance, such as that forming Iceland. Take a look at the series of kenning’s below. The earth is cleverly hidden with them, or perhaps cleverly revealed. The delight in recognition is part of the magic of the poem. Can you find the earth there, in its sea? (The translation [mine] is loose, to try to catch some of the music, but it’s not wildly off track, or at least not enough to hide the earth any more than it already is.)

Skaldic Poem Made Out of Kennings

The earth is “The sun’s stronghold”. The others? Well, hey, it’s a riddle, right? Source.

So, that’s the first doubling: words are given multiple meanings by being joined together. In the example above, the earth is both rock and stone as well as “The sun’s stronghold” (as opposed, seemingly, to the darkness of death, underground, and the land of the salmon, or water). The other doubling comes about because the rhyme schemes of these poems were so intricate that the poem often had to be split in two columns, one representing each of its two speakers. Two speakers? Yes, that is another old Nordic style of poetry. Here’s what it looked like in its Finnish variant…

Finnish Folk Singers, Telling a Song Together

Each singer pulls the other towards himself to speak, then follows the other to listen, to pull again. It’s like rowing, or weaving.

Such poems looked like this, sometimes (the first line in each rhyming pair was given by one speaker; the second by the other… a pleasant game, for sure):

The Kalevala, Canto 27 (Opening)

Finnish is related to Pictish (and nothing else), the language of Scotland before the Vikings took the place for their own.

Here it is again, in English from the time of Gunnarsson’s youth. This time, the rhyming pairs are bound on single lines (to draw parallels with Homer, by the sounds of it):

The Kalevala, Canto 27 (Opening)

Finnish folk poetry, compiled and massaged into a narrative by Elias Lönnrot. Translated by Frances Peabody Magoun, Jr. Homer was extensively read in literary circles at the time.

Two speakers. That’s the key here. But who are they? Ah, they are many things, many of which I have already hinted at here: Iceland and Germany, Gunnarsson and Denmark, Elves and the Church, earth and language, men and women, peace and war, individual and state, man and God. It looks like many things, but that’s just a linguistic convention. It’s really all part of the same conversation — if those words could be brought together into one tightly compressed thing, we would have Gunnarsson’s house. Let’s not forget that Gunnarsson was an Icelander. For a man like him, the word ‘thing’ has special significance, and looks like this:

þingvellir, the Thing Place

Iceland’s first thing, or speaking (In Icelandic, Alþingi. In Norman English parliament), took place here in the Mid-Atlantic Rift in 930. In 1000, the country chose Christianity here, for practical reasons to do with unity, self-determination and self defense.

Below the Icelandic flag above, there is a church, and a curious collection of houses…

þingvellir Church, 1850

The earliest church on this site dates from the early 11th century. The row of five houses to the right of the church represent the Icelandic state. Each time the constitution has been rebuilt from the ground up, a new house has been added to the row. The one house that is not represented here, is the one in Fljotsðalur to the North East. That’s right: Gunnarsson’s. Hey, no one said he was particularly modest. The volcano, Thor’s Shield, rises faintly in the background, from the earth’s core.

I was standing down by the church, looking up at the Alþingi site and wondering why it was placed here, of all places. Official documents point out that it was on a list of four possible sites, and was chosen because of the four it was the one situated conveniently on the country’s major trade routes (horse paths), and had sufficient pasture, water and wood (for fires) to sustain a large crowd. Makes sense. But why was it on the list in the first place? I wondered, then I got to daydreaming, as poets sometimes do, and thought about being a kid back then, attending the Thing with my family, and I looked up at the cliffs and they came into focus.

A troll!

Another troll!

Yet Another!

Trolls Everywhere!

And all of them are looking down over the people. You could say that the land is taking part in the discussion that is taking part in the Thing. You could say that now the past is watching the present, and looking down over the house that is Iceland, which is embedded in that past. Time and space are unique here. They are a language. Since that’s an unusual language, at least for the contemporary, novel-driven world, it’s useful to walk through its halls a bit, to see how they’re constructed and where they lead. I’ll do that in the next post. We’ll walk among elves and dwarves and trolls. They are not part of fairy tale. They are something completely different, and provide clues to the mind of Gunnar Gunnarsson in 1940. It’ll be fun. I hope you’ll come along.

The Novelist, Sod Roofs, and the Other People

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Today I’d like to walk some paths between sod houses, Iceland, and Gunnar Gunnarsson’s inner world. All paths link in a vast web, each link of which is a starting point. My starting point today is a passage from Gunnar Gunnarsson’s novel, The Sworn Brothers, written during the First World War and translated into an English that was archaic even in 1921, when it was published in New York. A better contemporary title might be The Blood Brothers, especially for the passage quoted below, which tells of the ceremony by which Ingolf and Leif, the heroes of the book, become brothers by oath.

The Oath

Note the turf arch. From the German Book Club Edition of 1933 (Hamburg).

Here’s the story illustrated by that image. First, the cutting of the turf …

Ingolf and Leif had now cut loose the piece of turf, and went together to lift it. They raised it carefully till it stood straight up and formed an arch. Then Atle Jarl stepped in and placed his spear in the middle of the arch to hold the turf up. He himself stood and supported the spear while Ingolf and Leif cut loose an oblong turf under the arch. Their blood was not to run on the greensward, but was to mingle on the bare earth.

… and then the drawing of blood …

Ingolf thrust his knife-point well in and cut a deep gash. Leif put his knife right through so that the point projected a couple of inches on the other side of his calf. He had difficulty in drawing it out again. The blood ran down in red streams. The spectators felt a strange shuddering thrill at seeing how it oozed out from under the naked soles of their feet.

… the mixing of it with the earth …

Leif watched the course of his blood attentively as it approached Ingolf’s on the brown scar of earth between them. As it seemed to him to go too slowly, he stooped down, directed the streams of blood with the point of his knife, and stirred the blood and earth round between him and Ingolf. A laugh then rang out in the air from hundreds of throats.

… the proclamation of brotherhood …

Atle Jarl now proclaimed that Ingolf Arnarson and Leif Rodmarsson had entered into legal brotherhood, and named the witnesses. With that the solemn ceremony was at an end.

… and the re-laying of the turf …

The grass-turfs were carefully laid down again in order that they might grow firm and be incorporated with the earth’s life. Ingolf and Leif were now joined together by the strongest bonds that exist the blood-tie between brothers, the most sacred and inviolable of all blood and family ties. The earth by which they had been formed in different mothers’ wombs had now drunk their blood mingled, and had at the same time given them new birth, since they had passed together under the turf arch, a part of earth’s living frame. The earth knew now, and had recognized their covenant a covenant no power could break.

And now, from Iceland, a few observations. First, a turf arch …

Turf Doorway, Bustarfell

In Gunnar’s representation, the sacred, pre-Christian earth that lies beneath its cloak of sod, and which figures so powerfully in The Sworn Brothers, once lay at the heart of every Icelandic house. In fact, they were cut out of it.

Next, Gunnar’s house at Skriðuklaustur, with its sod roof (designed by Fritz Höger, a German architect who shared Gunnarsson’s romance with pan-Nordic culture) …

Skriðuklaustur

Note how the space of earth inside a traditional sod house (containing darkness) has been replaced by a space of air (containing light). The sacred grass covering remains, but as it is no longer connected to the living earth, it is only symbolic. In other words, this house is a poem. It is an act of human will. It is the space into which Ingolf and Leif shed their blood, as conceived of in Gunnar’s imagination.

Below the house, the old cloister below the house is being excavated. It’s worth a look, too …

The Red Earth of the Cloister Floor (Klaustrið að Skriðu)

For perspective on the theme, a little journey north to Husavik is recommended. Besides a beautiful Christ in the form of a polar bear in its graveyard, the harbour church also has this moving painting as an altar…

Christ, Bringing Lazarus from the Dead

Right out of the mid-Atlantic Rift in Þingvellir, yet. The painting is the work of Sveinn Thorarinsson, an artist from Kilakot farm in the spreading estuary of Kelduhverfi county (1930-1931).

This is a splendidly nationalistic work. So were Gunnar’s novels. So was Gunnar’s house. Poetically thinking, Gunnar, who had returned to Iceland to build his house, had returned from the dead (Exile in Denmark, the colonial power; exile from the land and farms of his childhood, and so on.). In keeping with his modern saga, “The Sworn Brothers,” to swear his oath, he needed a sod roof, to cover the earth upon which he swore it. Here’s another variation on the theme:

Elf House

Like a human house, it is covered with sod — just a bit more dramatically. (Out of respect for the privacy of the elves, I will not give you the locations of their houses.)

Not all elf houses are the same. Here’s one with a chimney…

… and here’s one without sod, and with its smoke hole plugged …

Elf Fortress, with its Roof Plugged by a Cross

It has been like this since the day the settlers arrived. As the story goes, a Christianized chieftaness sailed up the fjord, spotted this volcanic plug, and dealt with it right then and there. Luckily for the elves, there is a whole complex of plugs in the area, but, still: ouch.

A house part elf city, part peasant hut, and part elf dwelling … that’s what Gunnar was making, both out of stone, wood, glass and sod, but also out of words, between the pages of his books and in the minds of his readers (he hoped.) Considering it all poetically, and leaving aside for now questions regarding the appropriateness or timeliness of the gesture, he was bringing his books to life, through the construction of a man, or a space for a man, out of the stuff of Iceland, energized by his will.

Next: Why Elves?

Icelandic Houses: Part 2 (Rock)

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The Icelandic sod houses that largely vanished in the last half of the twentieth century reflected the interests of peoples’ lives and in turn moulded the way they thought. That’s another way of saying that they acted like poems.

Icelander, Looking Out of His Sod Poem

Long ago this was a seaside cliff. Now even the coastal plains are above sea level and covered with grass.

Another way to put that is to say that Icelandic houses were the subconscious mind of Icelanders. The house below shows the modern Icelandic method of keeping the imagination green and growing.

Bishopric at Holar

A combined Norwegian-Icelandic restoration project, complete with rooftop sprinkler.

These houses varied in design, but were all built of some combination of stone, driftwood and birch wattles, but mostly out of earth and sod — a lot more sod than in the image above. That was some fancy house. For an indication of a broader range of variations, there’s a collection of photographs of a number of these houses here, showing regional and historic variations. Here’s a variation with a cat…

A Cat and Its House in Borgarfjörður Eystri

It’s been in the ownership of one human family since the heady days of the 1970s-era back-to-the-land movements.

Although such traditional houses were built largely of sod, it’s not really sod that defines them, but shelter. In Iceland, an island in the the middle of the North Atlantic, that means shelter from the sea. In complex ways, this architecture was fundamental to Gunnar Gunnarsson’s project at Skriðuklaustur, sheltered far inland in the northeast from both the sea and the deteriorating politics of Europe. To get closer to that thought, I’ll be talking about its components, one piece at a time. Today: rock.

The “Church Floor” of Kirkjubæjarklaustur

Basalt Crystals Shaved Off by Ice

In terms of rock, near the core of the idea of Iceland and its houses being one, lies this thought of Gunnarsson’s on Iceland itself:

“The pillars of its cliffs are like the beams of a tightly-linked chain rhyme.”

from Our Land (1940)

Gunnarsson had in mind something like this:

Basalt Crystals West of Vik

With a frozen troll out in the water. (I’ll be getting to those trolls in a couple days.)

The connection between sod and stone is strong — and an obvious connection to people who are used to living in the earth. After all, sod covers rock.

Dettifoss: The Beginnings of Sod …

… over the poetry of the earth. Once the sod is skin deep, the poem is still there.

The kind of people who would intuitively see the connection between the earth and their bodies and the poems that speak to them are ones to whom a house is not a typical above-ground structure with four walls, a door, windows, and a roof but something that rises from the land and sinks back down into it again, like waves.

Sod House, Bustarfell

People like that lived underground, in what were basically excavations into the poem that was the land. Such excavations drew underground space out into the light. Because of this simple, physical orientation to space, the poem was completed, and brought into the present, in the moment when a man, woman or child stepped out of the house. If you were one of those people, you carried time out with you. You were, in fact, the present of something very old and very dark.

Entering Present Time

Here, the following series of images might show what I mean. First, a chain-linked poem …

Quickly Cooled Basalt Cap on Top of Slow-Cooled Pillars

Complete with a Door

And some Icelanders at home in in their poem …

Multiple Flows of Chain Rhyme Stopped by the Cold of the World

And a bunch of Icelanders, too, at home here on the boundary of the ocean and stone. Gunnarsson’s novel The Black Cliffs makes a clear connection between birds like these, on cliffs like these, and the dark recesses of human motivation. He intended it as a kind of Heart of Darkness.

I know. I’m thinking like a poet here, but so was Gunnarsson. At Skriðuklaustur he was trying to build an enlightenment, to bring, so to speak, the unconscious past into a conscious present. In mainland Europe, the Enlightenment was built out of the scientific and technical developments of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Enlightenment Era Cupid, Schloss Tiefurt, Germany

Gunnarsson was trying for a new Enlightenment, one built out of local patterns of belief rather than out of the imported classical models that were the rage in a National Socialist Germany that started out with dreams of becoming a Baltic, or Nordic, country, and became a Mediterranean one instead. Ironically, Gunnarsson’s house at Skriðuklaustur was profoundly German. (More on that soon.)

Skriðuklaustur

One important way it was German was that it was above ground. In his piece, Our Land, written for a reading tour he gave in Germany during the first year of the Second World War, Gunnarsson seems to have been musing that if Icelanders were going to start building houses aboveground, in the light, they would need some guidance — and not guidance that came purely from continental ideas. He was trying to offer it. Typically, he also wanted it to remain hidden.

Next: Hidden houses and other people.

A Farm in Iceland

Writing With Gunnar Gunnarsson

Category Archives: Architecture

Colonial House Building 101, an Icelandic Novel

Gunnar Gunnarsson Secret Agent: Part II

Gunnar Gunnarsson, Double Agent: Part 1

The Language of ice

Gunnar’s Warning to the Germans

Trolls and House Building: A Field Guide

The Novelist, Sod Roofs, and the Other People

Icelandic Houses: Part 2 (Rock)