Iceland Weather Quotes

Maeve was an Icelandic truck driver at heart, no weather stopped her

Window weather. It’s not charming, or wimpish, but a state of mind in which a fairly serious hope, that winter is over, that life is returning, is lost. It’s the antithesis of Easter.

Pastor Jón: God has the virtue that one can locate Him anywhere at all, in anything at all. Embi: In a nail, for instance? Pastor Jón, verbatim: In school debates the question was sometimes put whether God was not incapable of creating a stone so heavy that He couldn't lift it. Often I think the Almighty is like a snow bunting abandoned in all weathers. Such a bird is about the weight of a postage stamp. Yet he does not blow away when he stands in the open in a tempest. Have you ever seen the skull of a snow bunting? He wields this fragile head against the gale, with his beak to the ground, wings folded close to his sides and his tail pointing upwards; and the wind can get no hold on him, and cleaves. Even in the fiercest squalls the bird does not budge. He is becalmed. Not a single feather stirs. Embi: How do you know the bird is the Almighty, and not the wind? Pastor Jón: Because the winter storm is the most powerful force in Iceland, and the snow bunting is the feeblest of all God's conceptions.

The Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland were all found by accident when ships were driven off course in bad weather; nobody just set out for a far horizon. It is also important to remember that many of these Viking voyagers were simply never seen again.

For all his faults, Leifs was a unique composer, driven by the ambition to create an Icelandic sound that might intrigue and inspire the world by bringing to life the country’s literature, landscape, and vernacular songs. His friend, the writer and diplomat Kristján Albertsson, who was unusually cognizant of the composer’s strengths and weaknesses, wrote that Leifs’s purpose had been to give Iceland “a voice among the musics of the world, to let the cool, strong gale of the Icelandic weather rush into the world’s music—and to remind ourselves who we are, what we are, can be or become if we choose to be ourselves, true to our origins and character—and not simply epigones in the world of art.” In his best works, Leifs achieved his goal. They are born of a deep personal conviction and epitomize the unique soundscape of his country: roaring ocean, erupting mountains, cracking icebergs, trembling earth.

For all his faults, Leifs was a unique composer, driven by the ambition to create an Icelandic sound that might intrigue and inspire the world by bringing to life the country’s literature, landscape, and vernacular songs. His friend, the writer and diplomat Kristján Albertsson, who was unusually cognizant of the composer’s strengths and weaknesses, wrote that Leifs’s purpose had been to give Iceland “a voice among the musics of the world, to let the cool, strong gale of the Icelandic weather rush into the world’s music—and to remind ourselves who we are, what we are, can be or become if we choose to be ourselves, true to our origins and character—and not simply epigones in the world of art.” In his best works, Leifs achieved his goal. They are born of a deep personal conviction and epitomize the unique soundscape of his country: roaring ocean, erupting mountains, cracking icebergs, trembling earth.

If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes.

In the year 0982, Gunnbjorn Ulfsson reported that he had journeyed to another land having fertile green fields, about 200 miles to the west of Iceland. Out of duress, Eric the Red now 32 years old, decided to uproot his family and move there. Eric and his family sailed the treacherous distance between the two landmasses safely and named the new location Greenland. He chose this name because it reflected the grassy, valleys he discovered during this warm period of the island’s history. Three years later when he could return to Iceland, he told astounding stories about where he and his family had settled. His stories must have sounded inviting since they encouraged many other settlers to join them there, especially considering that a famine had devastated Iceland. Not knowing any better, they had severely overworked the cold soil in Iceland, putting their very existence into jeopardy. Knowing that they could not survive another winter, 980 people on 25 boats left for the arduous journey to Greenland. It must have been a cold, rough crossing because only 14 boats succeeded in making it. However, Eric later learned that some of the boats had survived and had managed to return safely to Iceland. In time, there were about 5,000 settlers in Greenland. The official records indicate that two sizable Norse settlements had been founded in fjords on the southwestern coast of the island. Other smaller ones were located on the same coast as far north as present day Nuuk. Most of the settlements which were founded in about the year 1,000, remained inhabited until well into “The Little Ice Age,” which started in 1350 and lasted for approximately 500 years. In the beginning when the weather was considerably warmer, about 400 farms were started by the Viking farmers. However later, the extreme cold and glacial ice made farming nearly impossible in these frigid northern latitudes. Recently, archaeologists discovered a Viking village that was radiocarbon dated back to circa 1430.

the boreal forest is the largest terrestrial ecosystem, comprising almost a third of the planet’s total forest area (more than 6 million square miles—larger than all fifty U.S. states). Fully a third of Canada is covered by boreal forest, including half of Alberta. Continuing west, over the Rocky Mountains, through British Columbia, the Yukon, Alaska, and across the Bering Strait into Russia (where it is known as the taiga), the boreal forest stretches all the way to Scandinavia and then, undeterred by the Atlantic Ocean, makes landfall on Iceland before picking up again in Newfoundland and continuing westward to complete the circle, a green wreath crowning the globe.

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document’s word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word play thirteen times, language twelve times, nature six times, and math five times. But there is not a single mention of literacy or writing. Instead, two of the most frequently used words are learning (with forty-eight appearances) and development (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn’t start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because “their monolithic culture values reading.” They have something else in common: their commitment to play in the early years.

Imagine you are studying the migratory patterns of a certain species of bird. Although we see them soaring and wheeling like free spirits – ‘free as a bird’, we say – they are subtly tethered to the earth. They have freedom to go where they want, it is true, but within certain constraints that are dictated by the realities of their embodied being. To understand a bird’s migratory patterns would require knowing something about the landscapes over which it flies – the opportunities for food and shelter they afford, the weather patterns they give rise to, and so on. These facts would not ‘cause’ the migration, still less are they themselves the migration, nor could they ‘explain it away’: they would simply indicate the constraints on the migration, that helped account for the pattern it tended to take. Sometimes, for contingent, or no discernible, reasons, a bird or birds might vary the pattern considerably and end up in Iceland instead of Scotland. But generally there would be a familiar shape to it, understandable in terms of the whole context: the nature of the land, sea, weather, fauna and flora through and over which the migration route passes.