Recollections of an Icelandic valley: the farming and social cycle

ABSTRACT

This paper is the second on life in a northern Icelandic valley in the later 1970s, early 1980s, and subsequently. While the first concerned women’s work, food and clothing, this paper focuses on the farming cycle, the men’s work on farms and on the central uplands; and on the social life and seasonal customs that reflected the farming year. Further papers will concern folk beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Iceland
• annual farming cycle
• livestock
• modernity
• social life
• gender roles

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Sveinn Jónsson, Jakob Jónsson and Bára Grímsdóttir, grandchildren of the Grímstunga couple; and to Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir of the The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir of the University of Iceland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Following Icelandic custom, all Icelanders will be referred to by their given names, with patronymics supplied in the first instance.

2. See ‘Feeding the ravens: clothing, food, women’s work and the recollection of change in a northern Icelandic valley, 1976–82’, Folklife 60 (2022), 41–65.

3. I was at the time of my arrival in my early twenties, and while holding a B.A. Degree, had not entered the world of academic footnotes and analysis, so the parallels noted at the time were from personal reading. Later, while writing in 2020–22, further parallel research and factual checking became possible, especially after the covid pandemic subsided.

4. The most recent foreigner prior to myself was a Greenlander some five years previously, who stayed at the northern end of the valley, and was learning farming techniques for use on his return home. Shortly after the Second World War, a German woman had worked for about a year at Grímstunga. In later years, two women of foreign origins married farmers.

5. Indeed, while staying at the farm Torfufell in Eyjarfjörður a work-party went out to mend the track beyond the farms in the depths of the valley.

6. Some women over forty gained the right to vote in 1915, and equality with men was achieved in 1920. Iceland gained Home Rule from Denmark in 1918.

7. This brother became a noted person in his own right. In spite of their difficulties, Lárus often spoke of him. He, unusually, became a Catholic. For a time after the British occupation of 1940 he harboured a German spy out of pity, though the man gave himself up to avoid harm to his protector.

8. See his biography, Gylfi Ásmundsson, Lárus í Grímstungu: æviminningar Lárusar Björnssonar bónda í Grímstungu í Vatnsdal, Akureyri, 1981. A filmed interview was made in 1980 when he was ninety-one and was first shown on television: that year: Maður er nefndur Lárus í Grímstungu, interview by Grímur Gíslason. There is also an obituary: Guðlaugur Guðmundsson, Kveðjuorð: Lárus Björnsson í Grímstungu: Vatnsdalurinn var fallegur 6. júní in Morgunblaðið 12/08/1987. https://www.mbl.is/greinasafn/grein/6166/. His father’s autobiography was also published, Björn Þorsteinsson ed., Sjálfsævisaga Björns Eysteinssonar, Reykjavík 1957, rep. 1980. The publishing of male farmers’ biographies was not unusual, but the practice was rarely extended to the wives, as Péturína observed. However, there were a few short written accounts from the nineteenth century, published in small print-runs, either in Iceland or among the Icelandic diaspora in North America, some of which were written by or about women’s lives.

9. This was an international first for a woman, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir (1930-), to be directly elected to this role. One of her opponents also suffered, having never expected her to get elected, and later speaking on the radio in a very formal sense used of the President the masculine pronouns in a grammatically correct but semantically pointed manner.

10. Alternative views are expressed, for example by the near-contemporary journalist, clergyman and folklorist Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson. See ‘Þjóðsögur og sagnir’, in Íslensk þjóðmenning. Munnmenntir og bókmenning, ed. Frosti F. Jóhannsson (Reykjavík, 1989), vol. 6, 228–290; or for the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries Magnús Grímsson, Kvällsvaka: En isländsk kulturtradition belyst genom studier i bondebefolkningens vardagsliv och miljö under senare hälften av 1800-talet och början av 1900-talet, Studia ethnologica upsaliensia, (Uppsala, 1977), which contains a summary in English. I am grateful to Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir for these references.

11. More commonly fjallkóngur. Two other uses of Lárus’ form are attested in Ritmálssafn Orðabókar Háskólans, (University of Iceland Dictionary Archive). Thanks to Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir for this reference.

12. These, and other aspects of Icelandic folk life, are considered in Kirsten Hastrup, A Place apart: An Anthropological Study of the Icelandic World (London, 1998).

13. This meant that meeting in the city would identify those too far out to attend weddings or funerals but of whom the knowledge of relationships acted as a bar on romance. An instance of this was at the height of the singer Björk’s fame, when it was casually mentioned that she was a cousin, and, while only slightly known, the speaker immediately explained how she was third cousin in two lines, though one was only half-blood.

14. Íslendingabók, Landnámabók, ed. Jakob Bendiktsson, Íslenzk Fornrit I (Reykjavík, 1968).

15. This clashed with the contemporaneous Troubles in Northern Ireland, on which I was sometimes questioned.

16. A more visual ‘upgrading’ was noted in 2010s, when every farm had its electric lighting provided by the State, except Bakki, where the couple had resisted the infringement of their dark skies, and had only the essential lights on house and outhouse corners, the markers for serious blizzards.

17. One of my language students in Reykjavík was widowed after a month when her fisherman husband lost his life in the Second World War, and others suffered similarly. The Cod War of 1975-6 was part of the subject of my first meeting with Lárus, in the home of his grandson and his wife in Akureyri. Diplomatic relations with the U.K. were severed for a time, which in practice had little effect on several hundred British and Irish citizens, for whom the French Embassy took responsibility.

18. His autobiography describes the visits (p. 217), but does not state how he communicated, as his very basic schooling would have contained little or no Danish. He is not named among the guides (who have Danish names, so may have been interpreters) in the 1914 survey of the area. See N.E. Nørland, Islands Kortlægning: en historisk Fremstilling (Munksgaard, København [Copenhagen], 1944). Blönduós, sheet 43, completed in 1914. The 1938 survey, Grímstunga, is sheet 44. The upper reaches of Vatnsdalur were charted in 1937 and Réttarhóll is marked on sheet 54, Góðdalir, as an abandoned farm. See p. 77 on the triangulation and detailed measurement, including mountains heights; and especially pp. 67–8, and Blad (sheet) 44 for place-names.

19. By the time I arrived, he no longer hunted. Mink, which had escaped from special farms, were by then prevalent and also had a bounty on them.

20. Much of this material, together with anecdotes about local people who had worked with him or were neighbours, are the subject of his autobiography. This was recorded in his old age to his editor, who then transcribed and arranged the material by subject. His father’s autobiography was written before the hereditary glaucoma had taken over, with additional notes made later.

21. These were the smaller bales made mechanically and small enough to carry and sometimes slip the binding off.

22. The use of this, and the accompanying machinery, exploded within a couple of years of wet summers in the early 2000s, changing the farming countryside in summer. Though some people said that it changed the taste of the milk, others proclaimed how the cattle enjoyed both the sileage and the run-off liquid.

23. Sheep were brought in on this occasion from stock in the West-fjords, which were of the same breed but were not regarded as equally robust by the local farmers. I returned to assist with the lambing in the 1990s, which was undertaken inside the shed rather than in the fields.

24. Bringing in the sheep required too a refining of my vocabulary, for ‘to go south’ might mean to go to the sheepshed beside the house, or to Reykjavík, depending on the context. This use throughout Iceland was the subject of some laughter, for the folk of the far south of the island used it the same way, though a journey to Reykjavík would have meant going north-west.

25. Later, a string of lights was put up on one of the wooden chalets, which was being used as a pre-school, to delight any small children who might be driven past.

26. Now a farm with no notable ruins, this was the site of Iceland’s first monastery, probably founded in 1133, and a place of considerable scholarship and writing, including an early use of the vernacular.

27. The reverence for the office of President did not last: later a former politician held the role for 21 years, and was considered fair game.

28. It stems from later 19th century revivalism. Icelandic students celebrated it in Copenhagen by 1873, or earlier, and the events were held in Reykjavík by 1950. See https://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Eorrabl%C3%B3t (accessed 02 January 2023) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Eorrabl%C3%B3t (accessed 02 January 2023).

29. The Passíusálmar are hymns for Lent composed by the Icelandic clergyman Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–74), who spent many years in poor health. Copies were often presented as Confirmation gifts or were bought to accompany a person’s burial. In Lárus’ youth one might have been read or sung at the close of the evening’s work.

30. Beer was legalized in 1989.

31. This was in a society where, apart from the occasional, and usually drink-fuelled, murder, there was minimal crime, theft being almost entirely unknown. At one farm, on leaving, there was a debate about whether to lock the door or not: the compromise was to lock it to show that the people were away for a length of time, but to leave the key in the lock so as not to cause offence.

32. On two occasions, it appeared likely that I would need to deliver a calf, a matter on which I was much warier, knowing the damage that could be done.

33. Ljósmæðrafélag Íslands, Ljósmæður á Íslandi [Midwives in Iceland], 2 vols. (Reykjavík, 1984), I, I, 19.

34. It is envisaged that a later paper will describe these and other folk practice and tradition.

35. One of my own journeys took me to the ruins of Réttarhóll, the upland ruins where Lárus was born. He advised me to follow the river, and to trust his elderly horse Stökkull (the leaper), who would feel quicksand in the upper reaches of the river. I found the place without grave difficulty, though twice the horse refused to ford the river when I wished it. On the way back in the late summer evening, it began to grow dark, the horse refused my attempts to take a short-cut, and I later realized that this would have brought us up over a small cliff.

36. She, on one occasion, recognized 200 km. south in Reykjavík a male swan she had been feeding on the homefield, who had become so tame that he would eventually take food in her kitchen. On this occasion, to the surprise of passers-by at the lake, she called and he came up to her.

37. A similar matter, on which I was consulted as a foreigner, occurred on a later visit when the then President married a British Jewish woman. Didda, then in late middle-age, had previously only encountered Judaism in her Confirmation classes.

38. Apparently caused by particulates or aerosols, in the northern areas more of an inconvenience than a major problem, it diminished in later years.