Tag Archives: Snaefellsnes

What Every Icelandic Sheep Could Tell You

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.

The Ogre of Dritvik is Still Waiting

The sun goes up and down, we’ve had a sandwich or two, storms have come in and out, but the Ogre of Dritvik is still out there. She never stops waiting.

This energy that has been frozen in stone has more than human endurance, even though it is human observation that gives it bodily life. Here are the bits of her that time has worn away:

That is pure Ogre, that is. It squeaks under your feet, calling out its name: “Pebble.” You can pick it up in your hand. Suddenly you are holding stillness. The whole energy of the volcano that made this coast is in your hand. Will you throw it out to sea? Will you hold it? Will you set it down? In this moment of stillness you become the world. The question all of us who have touched her ask is: What then?

It’s a good thing we’re not alone in the rain as we try to figure it out, because that might, ultimately, be the answer.

Don’t be alone in the rain.

What are we waiting for?

Playing Chess with Water in Stykkishólmur

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In Breiðafjörður, the wide fjord of West Iceland, people know a lot about water.

They live with it.

One can presume water knows a lot about people, too.

In Stykkishólmur, halfway to the far west, where land ends, people know about harbour, where land and water and people mix and voyages begin.

On the hill above the harbour there is an old library.

From it, you can read people reading the water and read the water writing the world.

You can also play chess.

This is the Library of Water.

Water from Iceland’s glaciers is here to be read.

To reveal itself.

Shelved with the shelves of the world.

Among houses for water.

And houses for people.

Water reveals itself here.

People come to be written by it.

And to see their world with new eyes.

They come to see with the eyes of water.

And to play a little chess.

Your move.

The Secret to Iceland’s Football Success

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So, you want to play football. Or soccer. Call it what you like, but there are obstacles to overcome. Take the town of Hellisanður, for example. Just finding a football pitch is a challenge.

You’re liable to throw a hoof, too.

Well, no point in crying the blues. Stop thinking about the volcano. Easy, boys.

It’s time to roll up the wool sweater and start looking. Football waits for no lava lump.

Aha!

Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it. Tucked away out of the wind, with a view from the pulpit.

On some days, I tell ya, you don’t need an opposing team. You’re playing against 35 metre per second winds off of the North Atlantic and the monsters that throws up onto the shore.

But, wait, what’s this…

Elvish fans!

A crowd, actually.

Analyzing your every move.

Every error is mourned naturally, without holding back.

Every victory is cheered, wildly.It’s not a game. It’s a world.

It’s not just played with a ball. It’s multi-dimensional. It knits together the dimensions. It’s shared.

Just stop thinking about the volcano.

That’s all.

The Harbour Master of Dritvik

For almost four hundred years, hundreds of men camped at Dritvik, on the extreme west coast of Iceland, for the spring fishery, and set out in tiny wooden boats into the open North Atlantic. On a ferocious, rough coast, this troll sat in the sea and made a safe harbour. For hundreds of years he looked out to them at sea and when the men came home they came in on the beams of his gaze.

He is still watching, still making the harbour, still waiting, and whatever is out there on the Atlantic is still coming in — just not men, and fish. He’s not alone. Trolls rarely are. They are herdsmen, after all. Turn around slowly. You are being watched.