The Museum You Will Never See

It's rare that I read a book about "my" Iceland, a book that captures the mix of place and people, nature and culture, history and saga that make Iceland my intellectual homeland. It's even rarer when one of these books is written by a non-Icelander.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, by A. Kendra Greene, is one of these special books, and the best I have found in a long time. Her description of stones first drew me in, when an excerpt from the book was published on LitHub; I read:

"When I say stone, perhaps I should clarify that I do not mean some plain-Jane piece of rock. I mean eye-catching. I mean white whisker-width spines radiating out in clusters like so many cowlicks. I mean a green between celery and mustard, pocked with pinprick bubbles and skimming like a rind over a vein that's crystal clear at the edges but clotting in the middle to the color of cream stirred into weak tea. I mean crystals like a jumble of molars and I mean jasper in oxblood and ocher and clover and sky, sometimes a hunk of one color but more likely a blend of two or three or five, maybe like ice creams melting together, or perhaps like cards stacked in a deck."

Here is a writer describing the indescribable, a writer reaching for words--it's like, it's like, what is it like?--and failing and trying again and, by her persistence, forcing me to see these rocks so clearly that by the end of the paragraph I am holding them in my mind's hand and setting them on the shelf of my own Icelandic rock collection. By the end of the paragraph, I had purchased the book.

I've done this before, purchased a book on the strength of a paragraph, but this time I was not disappointed one bit. The rest of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is just as honest and careful and reaching and, yes, sometimes failing, and persistent in its desire to share this odd collection of museums (some imaginary) and collectors (some unimaginable) that Greene found by traveling around Iceland with her eyes--and her heart--wide open.

I've been visiting Iceland since 1986. Soon after 2008, I noticed a change: little museums were sprouting up everywhere. It seemed as if the Icelanders' response to the global monetary crisis was to rummage through their closets and attics and rediscover their culture--or that their response to the "tourist eruption," after the real eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in 2010, was to corral the crowds into a museum, both to harvest their cash and to keep them from straggling all over the farm or town and getting in the way of real life.

Several of the little museums Greene explores are older than the crash. The Penis Museum dates from 1997, I learned. I've never been. I thought it was tacky; it's not. As Greene explains it, it's rather remarkable. Like many things in Iceland, it started as a joke that got out of hand and ended up being a philosophical inquiry.

The Folk Museum at Skogar, founded in 1949, is one of my favorite places in Iceland. I described it this way in an earlier blog post: "In addition to a collection of old houses, fully furnished, there's a separate building of several rooms stuffed with what can only be described as, well, stuff. There are books and embroideries and a two-stringed fiddle. There are birds' eggs, skeletons, rocks, pinned insects, pressed flowers, and a stuffed two-headed sheep. There are busts of several local dignitaries and two paintings by one of Iceland's most famous artists, Kjarval, in the basement, along with some mid-20th-century living room furniture and a famous writer's studio. There's a fishing boat. There's an excellent description of how to make spoons from cows' horns." (See "An Icelandic Horse Hair Tale.") There's also a lovely array of children's bone toys:

According to Greene, there are some 15,000 objects at Skogar, displayed in no particular order. "This is a museum without sequence," she writes. "Even the guides say you can start anywhere. It all links, they say." And then she proceeds to prove that bold statement true. "And it's all here, the collection and the curator and the museum and the parking lot and the tour buses and maybe the garden, too, all because this someone in this someplace, a long time ago, was given a quest." Following Greene as she follows this someone on his quest is like taking a little quest of your own through Iceland's fabulous landscape and history.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is itself a museum, a collection of long articles and short essays, illustrations, lists. As a writer Greene is as observant about the Icelandic friends she makes and the historical people she researches as she is about the stones preserved in their collections. Alongside her long investigations of the penis museum, the stone museum, the bird museum, the folk museum, the witchcraft museum, the sea monster museum, and the herring museum, she includes several cabinets of curiosities, vignettes of collectors and their collections and the haphazard links between them. There's "The Museum of the Story I Heard," for instance, and "The Museum of Darkness," and "The Museum of Obligation," of which she writes: "I love this story of undaunted independence, of artistic freedom, of doubling down, of sticking it to the man. But there is a way of telling it that is all about obligation, a telling that is almost meek." And so she frames the story of this one-man museum again, and we realise the first picture she painted was merely the reflection of the place in a puddle.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, and Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums, by A. Kendra Greene, was published in 2020 by Penguin Books. My only complaint is that the text is printed in hard-to-read light blue ink. But I think you'll persevere.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See is one of several books about Iceland that I recommend on my Bookshop at https://bookshop.org/shop/nancymariebrown. For more on my own latest Iceland-related project, The Real Valkyrie: The Hidden History of Viking Warrior Women, see the related posts on this blog (click here) or my page at Macmillan.com.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and may earn a commission if you click through and purchase the books mentioned here.

Icelandic Toys

In the old days, when Icelanders lived in turf houses like this one, how did the children play?

The English traveler Alice Selby visited Iceland in 1931. During the week she spent on a farm in a narrow northern valley, she writes, "the weather grew steadily worse. At first it was bright but cold. Then it grew cloudy, and then the rain began. After that it grew still colder, the rain turned to snow and sleet, and the bitterest wind blew unceasingly. My first impression of the Icelandic countryside was one of complete gloom."

Then one day, out on a walk, she met a local man who shared with her a secret: "When we drew near the farm where he lived, he led me out of the way to a sheltered hollow and showed me a little village of toy houses made by children from the farm. The tiny mud houses were roofed with turf and fenced with sheep's horns. There were flowers, daisies and little pink arenaria planted in the gardens, and there was even a cemetery with crosses made from match sticks. I felt unaccountably cheered."

Selby doesn't mention the animals at the children's farm, but I came across this extensive farm-animal set one year when I visited the Skogar Folk Museum in southern Iceland. Before Legos there were bones. According to Jónas Jónasson frá Hrafnagili, in his book on Icelandic folkways, the knucklebones of sheep were sheep, the knucklebones of cows were cows, while the legbones of sheep were horses, though jawbones were sometimes horses too, like this well-laden packhorse:

In the airline magazine, on the way home from that trip, I read about a new toy set designed by Róshildur Jónsdóttir, "Something Fishy." According to the magazine, it's "a model-making kit including cleaned bones from fish heads and paint … The kit doesn't contain any instructions; it's up to the creative mind of each user what they want to create: spaceships, angels, or elves--anything is possible. A great alternative to virtual games and plastic toys." Here's an example:

Róshildur was inspired, the magazine says, by "the old days," when children's favorite toys were bones. You can read more about "Something Fishy" here: http://blog.icelanddesign.is/something-fishy-by-roshildur-jonsdottir-opens-at-spark-design-space/

Turf Houses and Hobbit Holes

Whenever I see an Icelandic turf house, especially from the back, I think of the opening of Tolkien's The Hobbit:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

When I first went to Iceland, I wondered why it seemed so familiar. Then I learned that Tolkien had read William Morris's journal of his travels to Iceland in 1873 and used them as the basis for much of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins's quest.

Morris's view of an Icelandic turf house, though, was that of a guest. "We are soon all housed in a little room about twelve feet by eight," he writes, "two beds in an alcove on one side of the room and three chests on the other, and a little table under the window: the walls are panelled and the floor boarded; the window looks through four little panes of glass, and a turf wall five feet thick (by measurement) on to a wild enough landscape of the black valley, with the green slopes we have come down, and beyond the snow-striped black cliffs and white dome of Geitland's Jokul."

Quaint and pretty, it seems--with a little imagination, it could be a hobbit hole.

But what was it really like to live in a turf house?

When I was in Iceland earlier this month, I picked up a book by the writer Thórbergur Thórdarson that has just come out in English translation as The Stones Speak. Thórbergur was born in 1888 in a remote part of the country. He moved to Reykjavik in 1906, became a schoolteacher, and in 1924 published a novel, Bréf til Láru (or, Letter to Lára) that "became an overnight sensation," says translator Julian Meldon D'Arcy. (The book also got him fired from his teaching job.) Thórbergur is now considered "as important an author in the Icelandic canon as his friend, the contemporary novelist and Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness," D'Arcy says.

The Stones Speak tells of his childhood living in a turf house in Suðursveit, about 400 kilometers east of Reykjavik near the beautiful national park of Skaftafell. If you want to get an idea of what it was like to live in Iceland in the early 1900s, this is the book to read.

Here is how he describes his home:

"Its three houses stood next to each other in a row with their peaked front gables facing south and their sterns toward the mountain. It was a pleasure to see them from the home field below standing side by side like that, as if they were taking care of each other, and it was easy to see that they all got on well together. When it started to grow dark it was as if they slept all huddled up as one."

It's characteristic of Thórbergur's writing style to infuse the houses with feeling, as if they were alive--as if they, like the stones of the title, the paving stones outside his front door, could speak. What stories they could tell if only we would listen!

Yet for all the warmth with which he looks back on his childhood home, Thórbergur's eye is sharp. One of my favorite passages in The Stones Speak describes the kitchen, warmed by its fire of sheep dung:

"The first thing you saw when you came in through the kitchen passageway, after you'd just carried in the dung, was the dung screen. This was a high wall made from stacked sheep droppings at the front of the dung heap to prevent the heap from tumbling all over the floor. The screen reached right across the kitchen, from wall to wall, a short distance from the fireplace. I thought it was beautiful. It made quite an artistic impression on me seeing the droppings regularly stacked up like cards on top of each other and side by side in a high and broad wall. And when the fire blazed brightly in the fireplace, a living glow flickered on this screen in different shades and tones. It was a poem in living colours. What a pleasure it was to look at, it was as if something delightful was aroused deep inside me as I stood and gazed at it."

A pile of sheep shit--is a "poem in living colours"! Thórbergur's description made me laugh. He is writing as the older and wiser man looking back on his naive childish self and, of course, he means to make me laugh. But he also means to make me think. Here in Vermont we heat with wood, not sheep dung, and those who stack the wood also take pride in their work. I could probably even find one or two who would describe their woodstacks as poems.

Another key feature of Thórbergur's kitchen was its rather temperamental smoke vent: When the wind changed, someone had to climb up onto the kitchen roof to reposition the vent.

Writes Thórbergur:
"In good weather it was always nice to get up onto the front wall of the kitchen. From there the whole of existence was a little different from down on the paved forecourt. The home field became broader and so did the Lagoon. Breiðabólsstaður and Gerði and the sheepcotes and stables on the home field seemed lower. You could see further out over the sea and west to the Breiðamerkursandur gravel plain. Hrollaugseyjar isles were a little further from land, and the folk and the dog on the forecourt became smaller while you yourself became bigger. That's life for you. When you yourself become big, others become small."

The Stones Speak by Thórbergur Thórdarson was published in 2012 by Mál og Menning, an imprint of the publisher Forlagið. You can buy it from the publisher's website, here: http://www.forlagid.is/?p=601952

The first two turf-house photos accompanying this blog are of the farmhouse in the Skagafjordur Heritage Museum at Glaumbær--about as far from Thórbergur's Suðursveit as you can get and still be in Iceland--but one of the best-preserved turf houses in the country. Learn more about it at: http://www2.skagafjordur.is/default.asp?cat_id=1123

The last one is from the Skogar Folk Museum in south Iceland: http://www.skogasafn.is. I wrote about visiting both Skogar and Glaumbær in June in "An Icelandic Horse(hair) Tale": http://www.nancymariebrown.blogspot.com/2013/06/an-icelandic-horse-hair-tale.html

Join me again next Wednesday at nancymariebrown.blogspot.com for another adventure in Iceland or the medieval world.