OK, ya, the people are all gone. It’s just ruins now.
But the houses aren’t empty. Here are some sheep who have moved in. Lords of the manor at last!
Victory comes to the patient.
Happy Times in Vestdalseyri
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Tag Archives: farming
The World Owes Iceland Peace
Think of Icelanders eking a living out of nearly bare soil in an inhospitable climate, and then think how much the world has profited by selling them useless things like fences. Think of how much land was eroded just to pay for this nonsense.
And then all those profits blown up in wars. Imagine what could have been.
What Does an Icelander Need a Ladder For?
Why, to keep the cows in. Of course.
A Typical Icelandic Sheep Pasture
The sheep are shy. They left where I am standing to make this shot and were at the top of the ridge on the right, and beyond, in ten minutes.
Stapavik
Imagine rounding them up in the winter. Pretty crazy!
The Politics of Farming and the Truth of Art
A century ago, most Icelanders were farmers. Now a few thousand remain. Their Iceland is as complex as any other. For instance, the image below shows not only rich hayfields, with some drainage issues not-yet-solved by dredging, but the results of government farm-improvement subsidies (for dredging) that are one of the ways that Iceland keeps farmers on the land. Note the older style of farming in the foreground, with the sheep at pasture on the heath.
Borgarfjörður Eystri
If you travel around Iceland, you will see fields like this all the time. Few look quite like this one, though. Notice how the mounds of soil dredged out to drain the land are left beside the canals from which they came. If this were a prosperous farm, they would have been levelled out across the entire field, enriching and deepening the soil. They aren’t. Rather than enriching the land, in this remote, barely-prosperous farm, the dredging remains a political calculation at best. The view is a sobering reminder that although millions of people visit Iceland for relaxation, in most of the areas one passes through people are working at their absolute limit, and within a narrow set of political parameters. This tetchy balance between freedom and control is as much Iceland today as when Gunnar was driven off his farm when his workforce went to work for the Americans instead of under his beneficent dictatorship, or when Halldor Laxness wrote his great novel of orneriness, stubbornness and endurance,
…or Independent People.
These things aren’t just in the imagination of novelists.
What Happens to a Farm Over Time is a Variable Thing
Some farms that no one lives on anymore are still being farmed for hay. Note the fine tractor road here in Reydisfjörður.
Others have gone wild, although they are still farms and can be claimed again. This one, in Neskaupstaðir, is accessible only by foot. A boat looks out of the question.
I bet there are eiðars, though!
One of Iceland’s Small Pleasures
I know, it’s a thing to chase after waterfalls, but consider the lowly Icelandic driftwood fence. It’s a charming tradition, speaking of past pain set aside.
Unaós
It doesn’t really do anything except to remember, but it’s a fine artwork nonetheless. It catches the mind and holds it, and that is… well, that’s memory. Cool.
The Self-Peeling Ewe of Rauðarnes
Baaaaa-aaaa.
Bah.ðarb
Iceland New and Old
The old ones, the new ones, lost farms, invasive (but strangely beautiful) lupines on old farmland on old dunes, old fence lines of social power, new power lines of social relativity, the sea at your side, the mountains at your back, isn’t it great to be in a place where nothing is forgotten and nothing need be spoken of because it can be relied upon in the midnight sun?
Selvogur
Let’s not break the spell.
Haunting Iceland
This image from North Iceland haunts me. This was once a prosperous farm, as the driftwood fence shows. In a country without wood, to have rights to pick up Siberian wood from the beach was enough to make a farm pay. Now they’re inexpensive replacements for more expensive metal posts, and not a cash item.
Speaking of economy, look at the tun, or house field in the centre of the image. It would have been manured with the manure from the winter sheep barn… just as far as a man could carry it with his strength. The point is, that was economy: this concentration of the energy of the land in such a way that it gave forth more richness in the year to come. This principle was applied after the Second World War, when the country embraced foreign modernity to maintain the old economy. In this case, the fuel tank, and a tractor that went with it, looked like a path to a bright future. Maybe it was for Reykjavik, but after 1,000 years no one lives here anymore. It’s still farmed, as a hayfield. The main field, the tun so to speak, is up against the ridge on the upper right of the image, bright green and fertilized with nitrogen fertilizer: an industrial product, that must be paid for with cash the land can barely spare. That’s where the edge of maintaining Iceland by bringing in foreign technology has lead now. Without it, there’d be no economy, yet if it had always been this way, there’d be no Iceland. This has always been Iceland’s bind. Gunnar Gunnarsons’s attempt to solve it by bringing modern German farming to the Fljótsdalur in 1939 lasted only a couple years, before he had to give it up. In fact, this might just be a universal human bind: one looks for permanency and must accept transience, yet the dream of permanency continues to exert its pull.
What it says is that we are haunted by the world as much as we haunt it.
A Farm in Iceland 