Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  After resting, satisfied, I found myself brimming with a great store of ideas and noted them frantically in my notebook through the night while Edda slept. I lacked an introduction to my essay on Mávabyggðir and sat on the bed in the morning sun beneath the glorious mountain. Place names often describe the terrain or soil, I wrote in the notebook, place names can describe local conditions or landmarks themselves; really, one could say the place names are the landmark, symbolically; they are often formed by the lay of the land or its landmarks, the shape or relation of one place to another, they often give the hint of mineral strata or some other geological formations, or vegetation, they might describe color, can be metaphorical names, symbols, they are boundary markers, shore markers, the boundaries of pastures, they are taken from livestock, wildlife, from farming, from work methods or procedures, shipping routes and anchor points, trails, plentiful resources, travelogues, sundry incidents and events, battles, weather patterns, temporal markers, legends and oral histories, the names of people, doppelgangers, references to pagan religion, to Christian faith, the Church, political assemblies; place names are set upon landmarks and landmarks show people the way; place names are a testament to the people who settle a land or region, to their life, work, and thoughts; place names are precious cultural histories documenting ancient eras, our attitudes today, and a view to the future; place names are themselves people.

  I heated up some coffee and put a big layer-cake on the table to mark the occasion of this glorious day of the Lord. A breakfast for heroes! I shouted to wake up Snorri’s-Edda. She stirred and said in a low voice: How many books you have in your trunk … She fumbled about, as though trying to get her bearings with what had happened. What, are they all national studies? Yes, I said, I got them at the used-and-rare bookstore, Bragi, my friend helped me choose them, more or less chose them all for me. A lot was going on around the Skaftafell campsite. Are there many people at the campsite? I asked. She answered that there were, relative to the time of year. It’s good to sleep in a tent, I said but Edda was staring dejectedly at the tart, her expression somewhat ambiguous, though you need a good tent, emerging from a tent is like being born, which makes sleeping in a tent the closest thing to undoing our amnesia about the time we spent in our mother’s womb; it’s important that the tent is good, made of decent material, who wants their mother’s womb to be made of nylon and to crinkle relentlessly? What about this trunk of yours? asked Edda, isn’t it like being born from your father’s asshole when you clamber out into the new day? … the trunk is made of beech, it’s a durable wood but lightweight, I said, pouring a cup of coffee for her, cutting a large cake slice for that amazing body, then I asked her, suddenly sniffling: Is it fun, being a park ranger? …Yes, said Edda, it’s decent when things are going well, and it always goes well; you meet all kinds of fun people at the campsite, and get to observe the country’s economic development and the deterioration in taste, how the more a person moves away from nature, the more he desires it. At first, everyone came with cotton tents or tents made from sailcloth, natural materials that breathed well and kept the wet away; at one time, the tents didn’t even have a floor, and that’s how people slept best—they were A-shaped, so no pools of water formed on them, and they broke the wind well—but then they were no longer good enough and people began to bring all kinds of deformed tent shapes, an imitation of the mistakes of the city suburbs during the ’80s, domed bays here and outcroppings there, it was a difficult task, tenting such tents, people spent all day at it, not to mention packing them back away; it was a significant commitment, the whole weekend was spent attending to the tent. Next, one began to see pop-up campers, trailers attached to the back of a car out of which one unfolded a tent, in theory with a single gesture, although in reality that one gesture became a thousand; the advantage was that the tent didn’t take up space in the car but hung there behind it. A year later, the nation became slightly richer and pop-up campers became shelters, that is, much larger trailers, sometimes larger than the cars themselves; you hauled the shelter directly out from the trailer with a crank instead of flipping it open. The people in these shelter houses were so elegant that they looked down on the people in pop-up campers, who must be poor folk unable to keep up with the times; the shelter people couldn’t begin to imagine the era of national shame when families had stayed in ordinary tents on their travels, with all those incomprehensible poles and pillars; now you just gave it one crank et voilà—but many people got trapped in these shelter-houses when they lay down together and a lot of well-to-do people lost fingers; for a time, it was absolutely a status symbol to be missing a finger, it meant you probably had a shelter-house. But economic development outpaced status symbols, Snorri’s-Edda said, and the shelter-houses were still a kind of tent the men had to fold out from a trailer and the women were always afraid of them, worried about getting pinched by them or crumpled up into the structure or even shut inside and the men stopped bothering to listen to their nagging, and they very well did collapse in and the whole family was stuck in the trailer, a very scary experience, I’ve had to rescue many people from their trailers. A year later, no one had them, except caravaners, which left people free of the banality of tents and all that fussing, is it the case that now things are made from plastic and take people ever further into modernity? A year later, one could see more and more mobile homes, where the trailer is merged with the car; some people feel that’s a step down, that the mobile homes have a boorish quality, that it’s just more plastic rubbish designed for tropical weather, but we have seen it blow up everywhere, exploding all through the district, and now the situation is marked by a certain uncertainty: people do not know how to sleep when traveling. Who knows; perhaps everyone in future will have a trunk like yours.

  Ever since Bernharður Fingurbjörg, as a young boy, saw the discussion in National Geographic about Öræfi, Vatnajökull and its expanse, Dr. Lassi wrote in the report, he dreamed of going to Iceland. The magazine featured large images of Jökulfell, Skaftafell, Hafrafell, Svínafell, and Sandfell; interviews with ancient farmers; pictures of sealers and the skin-curing process; of bird-hunters, abseiling and taking eggs (they were poor farmers in remote areas getting hold of what food they could); there were discussions of handicraft and homemade work equipment; of horses on the sands; of the dying art of riding horses through the glacial waters. It was like the end of beauty, Bernharður says, though I didn’t think so back then, I discovered it inside me later, it is only now that I’ve put that feeling into words. And then the ring road was opened up and bridges crisscrossed the sand and Öræfi was run together with the world after 1100 years of solitude: the district was opened up and simultaneously destroyed. I have to go to Öræfi, I kept telling myself and later I managed to create a link to my studies. I have always subscribed to National Geographic; its spines were the yellow glow of my childhood. The Iceland issue summarized glacial exploration history, documenting the first trip the doctor Sveinn Pálsson took onto Öræfajökull; he was my boyhood hero simply because of this one short passage about him in the issue, a passage I read a thousand times—I was probably the only kid in the whole of Austria who was bothered about the 18th century Icelandic physician Sveinn Pálsson, the only one who had him as a hero or knew who he was, even. My father had a great affection for him, owned his books, quoted his diaries and his travel narrative, which we had in our home. I decided to start keeping a diary, too, and become a bit scientific in my own life. I began to write small travelogues on the way to school, all the names of the streets I passed, what time I arrived at an intersection, when I left and when I arrived at my destination, I recorded the weather, light, temperature, distance, all the detours home, I wrote down all the names of the streets in Innere Stadt, first it was all extremely imperfect, but gradually I trained myself, I wanted to become a doctor and explorer and naturalist like Sveinn Pálsson, the first to walk on Öræfajökull. The Iceland issue quoted old writings, included old black-and-white photos of research e
xpeditions from the early 20th century, discussed J. P. Koch’s surveying of Skeiðarársand and Öræfajökull in 1903 and his collaboration with Dr. Wegener, the situation of the tectonic plates in Iceland, how the country is at the fracture between the North American plate and the Eurasian plate, all those frightful volcanic eruptions which destroyed settlements and human beings through the ages—ever since then I wanted to go to Iceland and walk around the mountains in Öræfi, the Wasteland, get into all of it … I later saw that behind all of this lay, of course, the father of mountain-going, Benedict de Saussure, his alpine spirit hovered over the waters of my youth, Benedict de Saussure was a contemporary and model for Sveinn Pálsson, this poor Icelandic farmer’s son wanted to be like Benedict de Saussure, the true aristocrat among Geneva citizens who sacrificed his working potential and intelligence for mankind. I also found out that Sveinn Pálsson check-mated his mentor on one crucial point, though never received recognition for it: Sveinn Pálsson was the first to grasp the nature of advancing glaciers, a problem with which people had long wrestled. He presented his theory in his book Glacier Writings along with a study of glaciology; if it had been printed right away in 1795, it would have become the foundational article for the academic community; Sveinn Pálsson is the secret father of glacial studies. In Glacier Writings it states, according to National Geographic, that farmers in Öræfi had for centuries known the glaciers’ character; though it was said that Sveinn had been the first to set foot on Öræfajökull, the Öræfings had long gone out onto the glacier, though only if they had an errand, not for fun like nowadays; they knew the languor which seizes you as you head over the top of the crater, what’s now called Antarctic stare. Sveinn was first and foremost a doctor, he translated Core Questions in Health by Dr. Bernharður Faust, which came out around 1800 and was on my father’s bookshelves along with Travelogue and Glacier Writings. In Faust’s book, in a chapter about traveling that I used to prepare for my Iceland journey and glacier hiking, it says: What should you do if you get frostbite? Avoid going into a warm building, or near a hot flame. What instead? The frostbitten limb needs submerging in ice-cold water, or to be packed in ice and snow, until it has completely thawed, and life and feeling return to it. Wouldn’t the pain be intense? Yes, deeply painful, but you must do it anyway, because the limb, which otherwise might have been forfeit, will come to life again and heal completely if you follow this method.

  From National Geographic I got a love of maps: the magazine often came with maps that I hung on my wall while my peers hung posters of singers and band photos from magazines like Bravo and Popcorn. I was teased for my interest in maps, always being asked if I needed to find my way home to my mother, which often upset me. The map of Öræfi held the place of honor: it was drawn by the Danish captain J. P. Koch in 1903. One gloomy day in my room, I saw my name on the map; I was startled, uncontrollably happy, afraid. Fingurbjörg, it was within Mávabyggðir, inside Vatnajökull, in Öræfi; J. P. Koch had been there and there I too would go, I want to go to Fingurbjörg in Mávabyggðir, I later said to my professor in the Nordic Studies Department at the University of Vienna. I read up on local knowledge, I groped around in the books in the library of the Nordic Studies Department, in one source or other I stumbled on the fact that, despite the name, no gulls live in Mávabyggðir, and I had trouble believing it, there must formerly have been some avian settlers who gave rise to the place name, in the 18th century Travelogue of Eggert and Bjarni, which the library had in Danish, German, French, and English, I found out that there had still been gulls living at Mávabyggðir back then, and I also read about wild sheep, how there were two strains still alive in Iceland, in Núpsstaðarskógar and far out on the glacier at Mávabyggðir. I felt a burning need to study the history and the meanings of the place name Mávabyggðir, I would defend my doctoral thesis on this, resolve all the uncertainty, go to Iceland and climb Fingurbjörg and investigate Mávabyggðir deep inside the glacier, taking samples of rocks and soil, looking into the relationship of folklore and place names, and also conduct, if it warranted space in the thesis, a comparative grammatical study of mountain place names in Öræfi and Týrol, using the teachings of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as a guiding light. My professor at the Nordic Studies Department jumped head height with joy when I brought him the topic, Bernharður said on his sickbed in Freysnes, wrote Dr. Lassi.

  So far I had been considered eccentric for having Iceland on the brain: a certain shame has afflicted Nordic Studies since the Nazi era; the field has been cursed since that time. Now, though, interest has re-arisen around the world, mainly in medieval Icelandic literature and Nordic mythology, although these topics are not absolutely the foundation of the State like they were the last time they were in fashion. I was always fond of Burnt-Njal’s Saga in my classes in the Nordic Studies Department; my father had the Halldór Laxness edition of the story in Icelandic, featuring large, beautiful pictures that enchanted me; he had given me it in German, Die Saga vom Weisen Njal (1978), when he became aware of my interest through National Geographic. I became obsessed with Suðurland, I pored over the map, I dreamt dreams about Flosi, the ruler of Svínafell, I dreamt dreams about Flosi’s dream when the giant Járngrímur appeared to him and said that poisonous serpents would rise up, how he enumerated all those who were doomed, except in my dream he named the names of the classmates who teased me, I told them that they would all die and I believe that has for the most part come to pass. I felt connected to Flosi from Svínafell, how he was sucked into a scenario that he did not understand and how he responded by putting on traveling pants, a sort of medieval leggings, and headed off on foot from Svínafell across the lava and sand and glacial lakes for several hundreds of miles—my professor in Nordic Studies was astonished at this and danced with joy and fury and went pirouetting down the columned hall, up until now Flosi has been a villain! ha ha ha! said the professor, Flosi who went on the journey to torch the dwelling at Bergþórshvol, burning up Njal and his wife and family and many other people, Flosi’s an arsonist and villain! the professor retorted and laughed loudly and rolled around the room, but I maintained Flosi was human, perhaps all too human, he goes along with or rather gets caught up in the plot and acts against his better judgment, he is forced to bow before customs and habits that actually displease him, he is out of keeping with his time, under the yoke of civilization, I said to my professor who now had stopped dancing and giggling and was stood bent over the pages on the big lectern, the time still hasn’t come for a Nietzschean interpretation of ancient Icelandic literature, he said, nor Freudian neither … Flosi is by nature a chieftain, a bellwether, I said, that makes him an empath …Well, said the professor, have it your way. So I went and wrote a master’s thesis about the place names in Burnt-Njal’s Saga.

  I wanted to wend my way onto the glacier, standing down on the plain near the Visitor Center in Skaftafell and looking at the mountains and glaciers towering over the country, this beautiful monster that could destroy everything at any moment, I went out on the sand, watching from there; I pored over the map in my trunk, stored the place names in my memory, went out and matched the map to the territory; the glaciers had retreated drastically in the hundred years since Captain Koch measured Öræfi in 1903. I had read that the way up to Mávabyggðir is to follow the so-called moraine streaks in the glacier that originate at Mávabyggðir and reach down to the plains, known as the Mávabyggðarönd, although they are really a belt of rocks which the advancing glacier ferries from the mountains down to the lowlands; you can establish the direction of glacial movement using these streaks. There was no hope left and I knew I had to study my maps well to orient myself better for the trip.

  Hafrafell is a hideous mountain, I said to Snorri’s-Edda when I re-entered the trunk and pored over the map, Bernharður said, and the author of this report can agree with that, Dr. Lassi wrote, having subsequently gone on a journey to hunt the wild sheep with the farmers in Öræfi, as discussed in greater detail later in t
his report. Hafrafell separates Skaftafellsjökull and Svínafellsjökull, but until almost the middle of the previous century the glaciers proceeded together in front of Hafrafell and sealed off the mountain, creating a very good highland pasture, which is still the reality, but the glaciers have now retreated to such an extent that Hafrafell protrudes into the country, surrounded by moraine; sky-high, sheer, rough-edged, like a rusty knife thrust out of the glacier. In Hafrafell there is a treasure trove of place names for you to investigate, said Snorri’s-Edda, because animals have gone about there since the settlement. I go on the livestock round-up there every autumn and am beginning to know it a bit; it’s impossible if no one knows place names, for then shepherding is pointless and hopeless.