Tropical Iceland

For most countries, impressions come from an eclectic range of sources built up over decades or even centuries: thus, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia, China, trigger a host of associations and impressions. These have little directly to do with the country’s name, however, and it is generally resorts like the Gold Coast near Brisbane or Sunny Beach in Bulgaria that paint an instant mental picture from the name alone. Yet there are a few countries whose name remains simple and direct: the Midway Islands (between North America and Asia), Greenland - and Iceland. Iceland: what else could it be but cold, snowy, bleak and a bit mysterious. When the TV advert for the frozen food store of the same name started decades ago –‘Mum’s gone to Iceland’ - it was supposed to suggest something rather heroic, a bit like Amundsen setting off to find the South Pole.

Leaping to conclusions from a name alone, however, can be misleading and there have been suggestions, in fact, that both Iceland and Greenland were named in a deliberate attempt to mislead, so that settlers in Iceland weren’t troubled any further by marauding Vikings or pirates. ’ This is Iceland-you wouldn’t want to stop here. Sail on a bit further and you will come to Greenland - doesn’t that sound much nicer”. There is ice and snow capped mountains- and volcanoes, of course - but there are also green fields, hot springs and expanses of lakes and rivers, where you can see wild horses crossing as in a Western movie; and its capital Reykjavik is warmer in winter than Boston or Chicago.

The feeling of something rather mysterious and haunting, however, is definitely real. Over the last week I visited Iceland with my daughter, guests at an Icelandic/Japanese wedding of two friends of hers. Standing on a beach 150 miles or so north of Reykjavik, with the Snaesfellsjokull glacier towering behind, an endless grey sky overhead and the sea stretching away to Greenland it was easy to feel that you were at the edge of the world. Snaesfellsjokull, in fact, was the location of Jules Verne’s novel, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. There is a children’s adventure type film of the book from 1959,  superior to the 2008 remake. In the clip below  (after about 4mins 40 secs in,) the explorers  - who include singer Pat Boone! -  find the entrance to the centre of the earth on the Snaesfellsjokull mountains - it seems somehow fitting that the fantasy was set in Iceland

Link to clip from Journey to the Centre of the Earth

The feeling that Iceland is different from anywhere else has also been found in songs, which have tended to be in two camps. One strand has looked back to the Viking mythology of heroic blokes with long hair on the rampage. Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song - “We come from the land of the ice and snow, From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands, To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!”- was written after the band’s appearance in Reykjavik in 1970. American metal band Mastodon followed a similar theme of rock singer as Viking warrior with Iceland: “Hail people of Iceland, Journey of a land anew, Ram as our liaison, Vision inspire and move”. The other strand has presented Iceland in its mysterious guise, a land where the sun never goes down in summer and never comes up in winter and where some surveys suggest over half the population believe in elves and hidden people. Songs like Bjork’s Anchor Song:” I live by the ocean and during the night I dive into it, down to the bottom”; or Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Iceland: “When I'm left here on the shore, the ancient basalt moor will beckon me to sleep among its heather”.

The song here, however - Tropical Iceland by New York duo the Fiery Furnaces from 2003 - is rather more prosaic and possibly more realistic, with the imagery of a bleak church on a cold tundra and the lament that “I've seen enough stray ponies and puffins to get me through till the end of May”. I guess if you live in an isolated fishing town the grey and bleak sky and landscape could become claustrophobic and the shops and cafes of Reykjavik- even those with puffin on the menu - would seem as exotic as a bazaar in Marrakech. Yet for the visitor like me, there remains in the mind something rather haunting, and definitely different, about the place. The Vikings saw it as beyond the world’s edge- even a millennium later it is not hard to understand why.

Link to song