The sun was in the southeast, high in the sky over the tranquil glacier, Dr. Lassi wrote, concluding her report, an intense, bright blue, the crater silent for now, to the north lay ice-sheets extending across the plateau to the horizons, white deserts, thick and old, creeping down the cliffs and gullies, passes and valleys, down to the lowlands, and from under them rivers run southward out to the sand, wild and merciless, all the way out into the ocean that receives everything in its silence. Far out there Ingolfshöfði slumbers in a mist of fog on the sand, singular, a symbol of a new beginning. We set off back down into the everyday newslessness, Dr. Lassi wrote. Hálfdán had put the beetle gently into an empty matchbox and thought of a name.
POST SCRIPTUM
The horse falls down into the fissure after me and the trunk comes down with him and stops right above me as I lie there with my head propped up on some kind of ledge. After a long time, I reach out and manage to free myself with great difficulty and turn around; exhausted, I crawl inside the trunk. Once inside, I turn the light on. I sing the Austrian imperial hymn to Joseph Haydn’s tune because it’s the only hymn I know and I want to sing myself alive like Sigurður sang his hymns to live, but no one hears me, there’s no brother to reach out a helping hand. People can no longer provide their own salvation. Despair is inevitable. Nothing happens. The days pass and I keep singing this one hymn. I pass my time writing you this letter you will definitely never get, it keeps me occupied, in fact, it is my salvation.
Forty days and forty nights have passed. One continuous night. All the supplies in the trunk have long since been used up; the fuel and gas for the stove have run out. For two weeks, I have only drunk water. I do not know how deep into the fissure I fell, how deep in the glacier I am, maybe a kilometer, maybe more, maybe less. Fissures in the upper glacier do not narrow like they do further down the advancing glaciers, it says somewhere in the books in the trunk; they can reach all the way down to the base of the glacier, where death is the only exit route. It’s been a long time I thought I heard a helicopter, which gave me weak hope, I even thought I could hear a gunshot, probably it was nothing; now I only hear in my dreams. The silence is so great that she has become a suction. A stimulating noise in my head. I ate what I could off the horse and remarked every time I tasted the soup how delicious he was. It lasted a long time, but now it’s all long gone. I’ve writhed around in guilt, about the horses, my mother, my brother, myself. I’ve been thinking whether I could cut off my limbs to eat them, gradually devouring myself to nothing. Fade away that way. What was at first a narrow crack has now become a splendid ice cave, and as it has enlarged, the possibilities of climbing up and out have diminished, although they were zero to begin with. There’s enough water and the temperature is steady, but cold. At first, I was afraid of the thunderous noise, scared of the dangerous cracks high up in the glacial heaven above me, afraid of the glacier’s movement, afraid I would be crushed to death; now I can say the thundering calms me to sleep like a distant music as I lie under my pelt in the trunk, which I do most all the time, not knowing if what I hear is thunder overhead or something taking place inside the limits of my body. I have carved the cave with the cake slice to warm myself up after sleeping, shored up the trunk on a plinth, fashioned a toilet, a kitchenette and a single spice shelf where I keep the cumin, during such activity I always sing the same hymn, varying the lyrics, improvising all kinds of adaptations, I eked out my liquor quite some time, and used to sing the hymn over Brennivín. Joseph Haydn, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about Joseph Haydn here in the ice cave, I wish that I could take Snorri’s-Edda to Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna and listen to Symphony No. 45 and wander about the streets drunk before saying goodbye to home as I float down the Danube on a raft all the way to the Black Sea … Farewell … journeying home … Otherwise, I mostly crouch in the trunk wrapped in a pelt, having stretched the sail-canvas tent across to keep the wet out of my abode … I will write to you as long as I live, my strength is gone and I feel death nearer inside me. These three days I have coughed up blood. The glacier gives back what it takes, they say. I am putting these papers in a well-made chest, an old Swiss lunchbox from the army, I think it’s actually bulletproof, in the hope the glacier will give the letter up at some point. It won’t matter anymore. You probably won’t be alive. I’ve managed to disconnect my mind from reality as I’m ebbing out. Is life anything but this? I have kept myself from my cold fate in this glacial crevasse these 40 days and nights by thinking about how everything could have gone another way, if I had been the fortunate person who crawled, exhausted, into the Skaftafell Visitor Center, bitten by a wild sheep and amputated by an angle grinder, lying in a dry and warm bed in a hotel instead of falling through a snowy ceiling down into a fissure and awaiting my death for weeks on end under a cold blanket. Today, Ascension Day, 29th May, 2003, now when my appreciation of light and my provisions have been used up and it is complete darkness, I have decided to take my razor blade and let him dance across my neck so I can go visit my brother, and thus I take leave of all my friends in this letter. After I have closed this box, I will fold my hands and say goodbye to this world without place names.
Your friend,
Bernharður
EPILOGUE: THE FUTURE
As everyone knows, Öræfajökull erupted twenty-five years ago, destroying the settlements all around the glacier and laying waste to the largest national park in Europe. Things are still being rebuilt today, following the destruction, everything put back as before. We’ve never witnessed such a great volcanic eruption; geologists reckon it is comparable to the 1362 eruption. First, people became aware of three tremendous thuds and it was already too late, a gray-white swollen cloud could be seen proceeding with terrible speed down the glacier, within minutes all those who were based in Öræfi perished in a single instant, mostly foreign tourists; the rush immediately cast everyone into statues which have been preserved for all time at the regional museum of East Skaftafell district; they are exhibited there and attract many visitors; they’re the bedrock of the community. The deaths of tens of millions of people around the world can be attributed to the eruption. Dry fog crossed the ocean and first lay over Britain and then the whole continent of Europe, then south to Africa and Asia Minor. The haze sat for a long time over the landmasses. Riots broke out in the Arab world and recalled events from the beginning of this century, though they did not lead to anything except the deaths of many people and continued corruption and terrorism. War still surges on; it hasn’t been possible to make the twenty-first century the century of peace, as was intended at the beginning. Many people suffered the consequences, as in the past.
Öræfajökull became famous in the world in an instant, grounding all flights across Western countries for 18 months, despite the new technology of jet engines that were supposed to persist through ash clouds. The white, light, rhyolite ash of Öræfajökull proved different from what foreign scientists had previously known and considered. The effects of the eruption were prolonged, unceasing, some say even irreversible. Hoarfrost made war on hot countries while cold lands heated up, causing an ominous destruction of vegetation and the collapse of ecosystems; the northerners fled southward, but the southerners fled northward. Crops were destroyed almost everywhere for many years. Such horror and famine followed as the West has not seen for centuries. European markets crashed and there were fights over shipping routes in the northern part of the continent; many things remain uncertain. The collapse rebuilt the tourism industry in Europe and kept the Chinese in the West, as in the past, with treasury agreements and monopolies and inferior merchandise; they are still trying hard to buy Iceland, which has become pretty much all one big national park; there is an on-going quarrel in the Restored Icelandic Parliament at Þingvellir as to whether wasteland has any meaning or any value, there are quarrels about symbols, the meaning of symbols, about what lies beyond symbols and their meaning, there are quarrels about the financial value of wastelands, people listen to scholar
s but pay no heed to them, nobody understands anything and nothing changes, no more than before. The Chinese operate unscrupulous mining over large areas within the protected space which escaped the glacier, erecting a so-called luxury hospital and a luxury village there where rare metals are processed for the luxury sector. This is called progress and progression, our only alternative is to sink back to the darkness of the Middle Ages, they say at the Restored Parliament. Others maintain we should not upset the land-spirits with the yawning snouts of large-scale machinery, and the nation is split like a serpent’s tongue in this matter, as in everything else, being split is what defines a nation nowadays, as always.
Tourists have begun to visit Öræfi again, the Province, Hérað, as it is called now, and everything is headed straight down the same road as bfore. Destruction is the basis of the tourism industry here, as it is elsewhere. Large white pumice hills attract them; the ruins of towns, petrified people, memories of the disaster. The vegetation has manifested an admirable tenaciousness, the slopes fragrant with birch and willow, the birdlife more diverse than ever before; limpid streams trickle down the slopes, and sand and gravel turn to peat. After things warmed up, the deathly mist disappeared, the glaciers began to retreat faster than the most pessimistic forecasts and fires burned, the valleys written about in the chapters of The Book of Settlement opened up again, there is now fertile moorland and blissful weather; butter drips from every blade. The vegetation has reacted amazingly quickly to the glacial rock slopes, and scientists from all over the world compete to monitor the settlement of plants in the desert; the entire area is popular with the public. Vatnajökull has been given its former name again, Klofajökull, the Split Glacier, and new roads now lie around the valley between various parts of the land; scholars tell us how many contemporary things are redolent of the Settlement era.
Many things emerge from under the glacier which were lost in the course of time; it’s a popular sport for people to look for relics using metal detecting equipment—there’s practically a gold rush. West of Mávabyggðir, below Hermannaskarð, the equipment of a someone who half a century ago undertook a solo research trip onto the glacier came to light: various ancient metal items, crampons, tent pegs, a glasses frame, and what was thought to be a trowel but turned out to be a silver cake slice. No bodily remains were found. Then a box came to light filled with the letters which appear in this book only slightly modified and adapted. This is all on display in what was once called the Skaftafell Visitor Center but is now called something else—because everything gets called something else at some point, or else nothing at all, and only then can it be left in peace.
Auth.
THE PLACE OF TRANSLATION: SIX MISADVENTURES IN LOCATION
I.
“What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest?”
“Stand up.”
The first Icelandic joke I ever learned relies on classic Icelandic wit. Practical rather than hilarious, it’s faintly embarrassed about Iceland itself, and not immediately meaningful to non-Icelanders. You need to know forests are few and far between in Iceland to get the joke.
Arboreal scarcity is a recurring Icelandic theme. Recently, I’ve been reading my three- and five-year-old daughters How the Ladies Stopped the Wind, by Bruce McMillan. In it, tenacious Icelandic women persist in growing trees to shelter their homes, despite obstacles including hungrily-grazing sheep, bemused cows, and an over-abundance of chicken manure. But, as one of the characters in Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s Öræfi remarks, “reforestation is supposed to rescue us from the humiliation of wind gusting around our homes and cottages.”
Both joke and story fear something’s wrong with the Icelandic environment. In 1874, on the 1,000th anniversary of the settlement of Iceland, Friðjón Friðriksson wrote to President Ulysses Grant. He and several co-signatories, all born-and-bred Icelanders now living in the U.S., requested that Iceland’s 70,000-strong population be allowed to repopulate on mass to Alaska. “Neither trees nor grain can now be made to grow” in Iceland, Friðjón complained, “it has become more and more barren.” Friðjón’s failed petition wasn’t a stab in the dark: in 1868, then U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward had received from the mining engineer Benjamin Pierce “A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland.” That document led to an 1869 New York Times article headlined “Iceland.; Rumored Plan for the Annexation of the Island to the United States.”
The question of whether Iceland can extend hospitality to those who live amid its glaciers and volcanoes has been a concern since its settlement. A largely apocryphal story holds that Iceland was named to deter future migrants (especially unwanted Norwegian overlords), with the icier Greenland, so named in order to tempt settlers. A different root for Iceland’s name is explained in Landnáma (The Book of Settlements, Iceland’s foundational literary text). According to that book, Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson, a Norwegian Viking, landed in the West Fjords in 865 CE; hiking up nearby mountains, he gazed out on the glacial pack ice at either Vatnsfjörður or Ísafjarðardjúp and named the country Ísland, Iceland. A more recent theory traces the naming to a group of Irish monks who pre-dated the Norwegian arrivants; one, stunned by the island’s beauty, gave the place the name Jesusland, in the form Ísuland, from the Old Gaelic word for Jesus.
In all three versions of Iceland’s naming story, we see the humans who confront its geology, topography, and geography attempting to find the language that could contain its wonder, tumult, and extremes. “Land of fire and ice” runs the tourist slogan: a place you could as easily get burned to a crisp in a geothermal zone as frozen to a statue amid endless glacial ice. The Icelandic word for stories is also its word for history; Icelanders have long known that place is narrative. That a recent tourist board promotion invited visitors to rename Iceland (entries included Endless Night Land and Best Country to Grow a Beard Land) suggests some hesitation about the existing state of affairs alongside a confidence in the power of place names.
II.
Translating Öræfi has meant traversing the path between word and world, exploring the ways language is a land-gauge. The fiction of translation is physical: a translation is a creation in which one geography gets moved to another, Iceland to the United States, or wherever and whenever you are now holding this copy of Öræfi—The Wasteland, a title that remembers the bridge a translation needs. Translation is not, as some would have it, a betrayal, but it is a displacement.
Finding the region Öræfi is easier than translating it. In Reykjavík some years back I bought a map of the area: it is mostly white, empty. By reputation, Öræfi is a wilderness, inhospitable, a wasteland. Like most Icelandic place names, though, Öræfi gains its name through narrative—through story and history—more than etymology. Eyjafjallajökull, the ice cap that erupted in 2010, disrupting European air travel, is composed of the Icelandic words for island, mountain and glacier. Its name only makes sense as a micro-story: the glacial mountain from which you can see the islands—the Vestmannaeyjar, just off the south coast of the country. So too with Öræfi: it is a name that replaced a former name, a reminder of the power of volcanoes and glaciers to wipe clean the human slate.
Ófeigur’s Sigurðsson’s Öræfi similarly sustains itself on the way words and events can get covered over. The whole of the narrative proves a fiction, an invention, one which overlays Austria and Iceland, Vienna and Reykjavík. Our narrator, Bernharður, finds himself at a guesthouse on Freyjugata in Reykavík; there he meets the Icelander Gestur, whose name means guest, and so recalls the maiden name of his mother, Geist—which also implies ghost, for everywhere this novel is haunted by past events. Little wonder that Bernharður lives on a street in Vienna called Freyvangur. Even as his mother’s own troubled history visiting Iceland plays out, backdrop to his own adventures, the words that shape his world shuttle him between places, between past and present.
Öræfi is at heart a thriller about a man contending with extreme elements, an adventure story featuring a lon
e figure out on a glacier. It is also a history of Southern Iceland, an eclectic annal to volcanic eruptions, to glacial melt, to Icelandic suicides. It is briefly an homage to the intersection of death metal and Belgian symbolism. At every moment, it is a love song to toponymy, the study of place names. It is a work of environmental consciousness, debating reforestation and cultural preservation.
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