When your sheep are starving, you will feed them old twine, your family Bible, the shirt off your back, anything, because without sheep there is nothing. Of course, most Icelanders are no longer intimate with sheep. For them, they hay thing has been updated, all modern and tip top. In Reykjavik, anything, anything, even an old couch or an old barbecue made out of paving bricks, is a window.
Hverfisgata
But, of course, that’s the beauty of it.
I’ve been thinking about walls. What are they for? For shelter, yes, and seemingly to keep sheep in, or out, but into or out of what? I mean, look at the pastures under the Snaefells Glacier.
There’s precious little for sheep in the neighbouring pastures below, and any shepherd is likely to break a leg stomping after sheep in this stuff, and why? There’s as little grass on one side as on the other.
Assuming that in the past Icelandic farmers were as sensible and economical with their energy as any others, might there be a reasonable, but lost explanation? Could the walls be to direct sheep, not to make pasture but so that they herded themselves, a kind of large sheep fold, like the one at the edge of the lava (below)?
Driftwood helps. Is drifting the principle here? To reap the benefits of summer labour in the winter, when labour is just too exposed on the open earth?
Or is it to direct the snow, to bare some slopes for sheep and to bury others with snowdrifts, to provide fresh water in the spring and early summer? It could be. I don’t know.
It wasn’t a fence to guide human walkers in the fog and the dark. Cairns were used for that.
Might it have been to separate the fields by the shore from the fields by the mountain…
… to keep sheep from drifting away from survival food, winter’s seaweed…
Sheep Pasture at Dritvik
…into perilous holes in the lava?
Is it, in other words, about thinking with the land? Is this the wealth that Gunnar Gunnarsson said was at the heart of poverty? Is this an extension of the principle “when you run out of hay anything is hay, anything at all” to land itself, on the lines of “when you run out of pasture anything is pasture,” even if it is only an extension of the poverty of one man over another? Could this be love of land?
In a country in which only a landowner could wed and have children, the impetus to own any kind of land, in any kind of poverty whatsoever, must have been intense. Is that what we’re looking at here? Love?
The stubbornness not to disappear of a people from whom the benefits of community were continually removed, often by foreign traders?
Is drift a way of holding on by bending the way a path goes? I don’t know. Is it still going on?
Is this the principle of drift? Are some fences made of the mind and duty?
Is this how 1,500,000 tourists are safely guided through the cold every year by a few hundred front line Icelanders?
I bet the sheep know.
A Farm in Iceland 