The best books on Iceland

Thank you for selecting these five books about Iceland, which formed the setting of your own memoir The Raven’s Nest. Could you talk me through your selection as a whole—what do you look for in a book?

On the whole, I am looking to have my curiosity indulged, my empathy engaged and my knowledge expanded or challenged, and to be transported—to different places, states of being, and possibilities. I enjoy language that feels beautiful on the tongue, but I’m also grabbed by ideas. Other cultures and cultural practices fascinate me, as do the ways in which place, history, and thought—ways to think—interweave. I am excited by texts which render the landscape, and things more ephemeral than landscape, as animate and having agency.

My selection does all of these things, through a variety of genres. It takes in a historical novel, an Icelander’s autofiction, a magical realist fable, a non-fiction treatise about mythology, metaphor, and climate change, and an academic text about the social life of dreams!

Maybe that brings us to your first book recommendation, Jón Kalman Stefánson’s Heaven and Hell, translated from the original Icelandic by Philip Roughton. Why do you recommend it?

I read this affecting, timeless novel about the lives of turn-of-the-20th-century Icelandic fishermen when I moved to the Westfjords at the beginning of winter. Fishing is the foundation of Iceland’s modern economy and most families have at least one fisherman—mine was no exception. Culturally, the fishing life is almost archetypal so it is a brilliant introduction to the bone marrow of Iceland, so to speak. My reading experience was bound up with the strong impression the land- and seascape, and this risky livelihood, were making on me. It took me into a parallel world—a Westfjords fishing village along a stretch of coast which, though fictional, was inspired by the shoreline where I lived. Past and present felt close.

“I am excited by texts which render the landscape as animate and having agency”

The narrative centres on the death of one of the main characters, Barður, who succumbs to cold at sea in an unforeseen storm. His fatal error—forgetting his waterproof gear—was caused by his engrossment in a copy of Paradise Lost. His friend and fellow crew member, a boy, vows to return the book to its owner and in doing so embarks on a perilous journey. But, en route, he is waylaid by the temptations of the town and its stories and inhabitants. This plot alone demonstrates one of many remarkable characteristics of ‘Icelandicness’: a fierce love of literature and literacy that was shared by the rural poor as well as the richer echelons of society.

Death and the constant risk of death looms within the text, as does the imperative to remember the deceased. Done well, as it is here, there is so much life in that. As I would come to discover in much Icelandic literature, and in my own life there, the landscape—and in this instance the sea especially—is a protagonist, not a backdrop; one from which we can learn everything we need to know. As the narrator says, “The sea on one side, steep and lofty mountains on the other. Therein lies our whole story.”

Your second Iceland book recommendation is Land of Love and Ruins, translated by Philip Roughton. Tell us about it.

This is one of my favourite books, full stop. Fluid and endlessly questioning, this prize-winning work of autofiction explores how a woman finds and makes her place in the world and in relationship—with the earth, with kin, with lovers, with ancestors, and with her words—when capitalism is creeping in to commodify every blade of grass. The original title, Jarðnæði, is revealing when you consider that jarðnæði is a ‘farm tenancy’, and broken down, jarð means ‘earth’ and næði means ‘ease/peace/rest’. It suggests a way of belonging and tending to the earth without owning it.

It appears to be an easy read. It is an easy read—short chapters, a breezy narrator—but this ease belies its complexity. Equally sensuous and intellectually curious, cumulatively Eir covers vast feminist philosophical territory while remaining grounded. It is written as a journal, marking solstices and equinoxes, feast days and celebrations, from a variety of cultures—from Icelandic ‘Cream Puff Day’ to ‘Day of the Dead’. Her stream of thought flits between apparently diverse subjects yet each sentence lays down a part of a mix that comes to feel like soil itself. Reading it, I was invited inside the mind and body of a fiercely intelligent woman who was at once incredibly laid back and concerned. I have pressed this book into so many hands.

The third book you’ve chosen is Sjón’s Skugga Baldur, translated into English as The Blue Fox by Victoria Cribb. It was named one of the best fantasy books of all time by Time. Why did this book make your Iceland reading list?

Sjón is a poet and novelist and his diverse body of work always encapsulates what he calls the ‘marvelous’ nature of Iceland and its history, in sparse and often humorous prose. The Nordic Council Literary Prize-winning The Blue Fox is a slim, dark and powerful work of magical realism which reads almost like a fable. It follows the obsessive quest of 19th-century pastor Baldur Skuggason through treacherous winter terrain to hunt down a wily and elusive blue fox for its fur. Intersecting with the hunt is an estate owner and naturalist Fríðrík Fríðjónsson, and his charge Abba, a girl with Down’s Syndrome who was rescued from a shipwreck years prior. The fates of all four characters are deeply and surprisingly intertwined. As the hunt progresses, Baldur’s inner life and cruelty is revealed through brushes with the fox’s mind and Fríðrík’s backstory, and ultimately a horrific truth is laid bare.

I will always remember how haunted I was by this novel. Perhaps ‘haunted’ is not even the right word—the experience was so physical. Sjón is a master of deft and intricate plot strokes, playing with time as if it is a skein of yarn. And Sjón the poet shines in descriptions of the winter landscape, and the careful listening involved with the hunt: “The sun warms the man’s white body, and the snow, melting with a diffident creaking, passes for birdsong.”

Your fourth Iceland book recommendation is Andri Snaer Magnason’s On Time and Water, translated by Lytton Smith. Why is it worth reading?

It is a poetic and insightful environmental treatise on Iceland’s future, and all of our futures in the context of two of the most significant threats to life: climate change and ocean acidification. It deals with the limits of language and current Western metaphorical frameworks in making sense of these huge issues. As Magnason points out, their real implications are clearly beyond most of our comprehensions, otherwise we would be behaving very differently. This book is also about what happens when geological time and human life spans collide. Magnason is a stylist and he connects us to the future and the past “in an intimate and urgent way” through reaching for various mythologies—Norse and Hindu among them, history, and particularly his own eccentric family history, for help.

Particularly fascinating are his grandparents, who honeymooned as participants in one of the first Icelandic glaciological surveys. Now, when Magnason walks on that same glacier with his children, they have to imagine their grandparents’ footsteps far above their heads, and most are predicted to disappear completely in the near future. A simple proposition elicits a shift in perspective. By invoking our time as “the handshake of generations”—the period inhabited by those who have loved us, ourselves, and those who we will love in the future—he brings the impacts of this unknown future close to our hearts.

Finally, you’ve recommended Adrienne Heijnen’s book The Social Life of Dreams: A Thousand Years of Negotiated Meanings in Iceland. It can be a little tricky to get hold of, but there are a few copies on Amazon and some available second-hand on AbeBooks. Tell us more.

An ethnographic text is a niche wildcard I admit, but this long-term ethnographic study by a Dutch anthropologist is a fascinating endorsement of the importance—contemporary and historic—of dreams and dream sharing in Icelandic culture, and their ability to influence the future. It stood out to me because it embraces a kind of ‘messiness’ of life that some ethnographic studies attempt to tidy up, holding space for coexisting approaches to dream interpretation.

Though this is an academic work, the book is accessible in tone and full of intimate lived examples. Heijnen sets out the background to the study of dreaming, and walks through historical and literary sources of Icelandic dreaming and dream sharing before discussing examples of contemporary dream practices to demonstrate that ‘not only is history constructed in the present, but the past is generative of life.’ She notes that this is also true of Icelanders’ ‘bookish’ approach towards their society, identity and history. That is to say, historic accounts of dream sharing are taken seriously by Icelanders and inform and legitimise contemporary practices.

Heijden’s central point is that dreams are not only experiences to be taken note of, and shared, but are used to reveal future events and inform social action. They do not belong to the individual as such, but are part of a fabric that implicates Icelandic society as a whole, and which remains interwoven with the past. Overall I find this book to be a fascinating glimpse into what might be considered a collective Icelandic psyche, which navigates time vertically as well as horizontally.