Old Icelandic Quotes

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

The origins of the word 'anger' were tied closely to physical suffering. 'Anger' was first an 'affliction', as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in term came from the Latin angor, which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.

We have a little Icelandic Club in Oxford called the ‘Kólbitar’: 38 which means (literally) ‘coal-biters’, i.e. an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals.

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!" Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!" A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?" "This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window." I couldn't believe I was hearing this.

Hilmar owns many books, even by Icelandic standards. The other day, when he came home with a wheelbarrowful, his five-year-old daughter looked him in the eye and implored, “Please, Daddy, please, no more books!” Hilmar has a stock answer to those who criticize his excessive book buying. “It is never a waste of time to study how other people wasted time.

The Earth is inconceivably old. But Iceland is barely a child.

The haymaking officially began at the end of July, when the blowballs had formed on the dandelions.

Most of the time, he’s controlling, with the temperament of a troll. Come to think of it, he has the manners of one too. And I do not like that he tried to kill me. Twice.

So where did you go, Holly?” Rafiq never tires of this conversation, no matter how often we do it. “Everywhere,” says Lorelei, being brave and selfless. “Colombia, Australia, China, Iceland, Old New York. Didn’t you, Gran?” “I did, yes.” I wonder what life in Cartagena, in Perth, in Shanghai is like now. Ten years ago I could have streetviewed the cities, but the Net’s so torn and ragged now that even when we have reception it runs at prebroadband speed. My tab’s getting old, too, and I only have one more in storage. If any arrive via Ringaskiddy Concession, they never make it out of Cork City. I remember the pictures of seawater flooding Fremantle during the deluge of ’33. Or was it the deluge of ’37? Or am I confusing it with pictures of the sea sluicing into the New York subway, when five thousand people drowned underground? Or was that Athens? Or Mumbai? Footage of catastrophes flowed so thick and fast through the thirties that it was hard to keep track of which coastal region had been devastated this week, or which city had been decimated by Ebola or Ratflu. The news turned into a plotless never-ending disaster movie I could hardly bring myself to watch.

We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools!

On average, odd years have been the best for me. I’m at a point where everyone I meet looks like a version of someone I already know. Without fail, fall makes me nostalgic for things I’ve never experienced. The sky is molting. I don’t know if this is global warming or if the atmosphere is reconfiguring itself to accommodate all the new bright suffering. I am struck by an overwhelming need to go to Iceland. Despite all awful variables, we are still full of ideas as possible as unsexed fruit. I was terribly sorry to be the one to explain to the first graders the connection between the sunset and pollution. On Venus you and I are not even a year old. Then there were two skies. The one we fly through and the one we bury ourselves in. I appreciate my wide beveled spatula which fulfills the moment I realized I would grow up and own such things. I am glad I do not yet want sexy bathroom accessories. Such things. In the story we were together every time. On his wedding day, the stone in his chest not fully melted but enough. Sometimes I feel like there are birds flying out of me.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an 'affliction', as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, thene xploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a deperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.*

All illustrate the “theory of courage,” which Tolkien called “the great contribution of early Northern literature,” meaning both Icelandic and Old English literature. It is a “creed of unyielding will”: The heroes refuse to give up even when they know the monsters—evil—will win. For that is the big difference between Snorri’s Ragnarok and the Christian Doomsday. Odin and the human army of Valhalla do not win.

The oldest creatures we’ve found so far all came from the sea. Ming the clam, a so-called ocean quahog caught off the coast of Iceland in 2006, turned out to be at least five hundred and seven years old. Scientists estimated its year of birth to be 1499, a few years after Columbus made it to North America and during the time of the Ming dynasty in China. Who knows how long it could have lived if the scientists in their efforts to establish its age hadn’t also accidentally killed it.

Icelandic Language In this language, no industrial revolution; no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone; only sheep, fish, horses, water falling. The middle class can hardly speak it. In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble through dark and rain with a handful of rags. The door groans; the old smell comes up from under the earth to meet you. But this language believes in ghosts; chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses neigh inside an empty gully, nothing at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks. The woman with marble hands whispers this language to you in your sleep; faces come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes. In this language, you can't chit-chat holding a highball in your hand, can't even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course, all your grief and failure come clear at last. Old inflections move from case to case, gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening vowels, till they sound like the sea moving icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

They call me Mac. The name's unimportant. You can best identify me by the six chevrons, three up and three down, and by that row of hashmarks. Thirty years in the United States Marine Corps. I've sailed the Cape and the Horn aboard a battlewagon with a sea so choppy the bow was awash half the time under thirty-foot waves. I've stood Legation guard in Paris and London and Prague. I know every damned port of call and call house in the Mediterranean and the world that shines beneath the Southern Cross like the nomenclature of a rifle. I've sat behind a machine gun poked through the barbed wire that encircled the International Settlement when the world was supposed to have been at peace, and I've called Jap bluffs on the Yangtze Patrol a decade before Pearl Harbor. I know the beauty of the Northern Lights that cast their eerie glow on Iceland and I know the rivers and the jungles of Central America. There are few skylines that would fool me: Sugar Loaf, Diamond Head, the Tinokiri Hills or the palms of a Caribbean hellhole. Yes, I knew the slick brown hills of Korea just as the Marines knew them in 1871. Fighting in Korea is an old story for the Corps. Nothing sounds worse than an old salt blowing his bugle. Anyhow, that isn't my story.

Sometimes we woke in the night, huddled against the cold. Then, in the darkness, the world and everything in it became as skinless as water, no boundaries to show where one wave ended and the next began, our bodies like paired oars, each movement driving us further into the unknown. Time and sensation blurred. Tiny moments of golden brilliance, gossamer-thin and stretched to breaking, in a life otherwise steeped in grim shadow. I did not simply hold Pétur in my arms; I embraced him with blood and bone, clasped him with muscle and spirit, everything that I was and hoped to be. God might strike me down, but I felt saved and whole. Afterwards, we fell asleep intertwined. In those last moments of wakefulness, blinking up at the stars, as I sensed Pétur’s sweat cooling on my skin, I felt utterly human and fallen, and utterly content. And in those heat-soaked rags of time, I wished for every mountain in Iceland to shudder down rocks upon us, concealing us for ever from the gaze of the world. If we were ever found, our bodies would be dragged from the rubble together: tangled, knotted – inseparable. But such moments of savage contentment are as fleeting as the reflection of the swelling moon blinking upon the surface of the sea. Only ever minutes old, they dissolve with a passing cloud, or a gust of wind. In every human heart glows a tiny flame of hope that tomorrow will bring a love that might satisfy the smouldering yearning to be known. In some hearts, that fire is greedy and becomes a devouring inferno. It leaves only dead ash and dry dust behind. The wind whirls it into emptiness. But there is such heat while it burns … And the light is infinite.

He loves the way hot water spouts from the ground like geothermal gold. He loves the way people invite you over for coffee for no particular reason and talk for hours about nothing in particular. He loves the way Icelanders call their country, affectionately, the ice cube. He loves the fact that, without even trying, he already knows three members of Parliament. He loves the way on a brisk winter day the snow crunches under his feet like heavenly Styrofoam. He loves the choirs that line the main shopping street in December, their voices strong and radiant, turning back the night. He loves the fact that five-year-olds can safely walk to school alone in the predawn darkness. He loves the magical, otherworldly feeling of swimming laps in the middle of a snowstorm. He loves the way, when your car gets stuck in the snow, someone always, always stops to help. He loves the way Icelanders applaud when the plane lands at the international airport in Keflavík just because they’re happy to be home. He loves the way the Icelanders manage to be tremendously proud people yet not the least bit arrogant. And, yes, he loves- not tolerates but actively loves- the darkness. Most of all, Jared loves living in a culture that doesn’t put people in boxes- or at least allows them to move freely from one box to another.

I remember once in the Arctic, when we were attempting to cross the frozen North Atlantic in a small, open rigid inflatable boat (RIB), that I heard that voice very clearly. We had been caught out in a monster, sub-zero, gale-force 8 storm, 400 miles off the coast of Greenland - and we were struggling. We were reduced to a crawl as we battled up and down huge, freezing waves and crashing white water. It felt like only a matter of time before we would be capsized to our deaths in the black and icy sea during this longest of nights. Each time one of us handed over the control of the little boat to another crew member to do their shift at the wheel, we had an especially frightening few minutes as the new helmsman fought to become accustomed to the pitch and character of those freak waves. If ever we were going to be capsized, it was during these change-over times. We got lucky once. We were all thrown off our seats after the RIB had been tossed up and landed on the side of her tubes, only to topple back, by luck, the right way up. We then got lucky a second time in a similar incident. Instinct told me we wouldn’t get so lucky a third time. ‘No more mistakes. Helm this yourself,’ I felt the voice saying to me. As I prepared to hand over to Mick, my old buddy, something deep inside me kept repeating, ‘Just keep helming for a bit longer - see this team through the storm yourself.’ But we had a rota and I also knew we should stick to it. That was the rule. Yet the voice persisted. Eventually I shouted over the wind and spray to Mick that I was going to keep helming. ‘Trust me,’ I told him. Mick then helped me all through that night, pouring Red Bull down my throat as we got thrown left and right, fighting to cling on to the wheel and our seats. By dawn, the seas were easing and by the next evening we could see the distant coast of Iceland ahead. Finally. Afterwards, two of the crew said to me quietly that they had been so terrified to helm that they were praying someone else would do it. I had been exhausted, and logic had said to hand over, but instinct had told me I should keep steering. Deep down I knew that I had been beginning to master how to control the small boat in the chaos of the waves and ice - and that voice told me we might not get a third lucky escape. It was the right call - not an easy one, but a right one. Instinct doesn’t always tell us to choose the easier path, but it will guide you towards the right one.

About two hundred years after the monks arrived and started Old English on its way to a written, literary language, the Viking invasions began, and they kept up for a few hundred years. These Vikings spoke a different language from the Anglo-Saxons, but a related one—Old Norse, the language that eventually turned into modern Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.

Once I heard an old woman in Mali utter words that I've treasured like rare pearls: "Never trust a guide to the Sahara. He is like Satan, cursed forever, because the Sahara doesn't like arrogance. Those who claim to know it must expect the inevitable punishment, death from thirst. Modesty is the only language the Sahara understands." A few years ago I met an Icelandic tourist who told me something extraordinary: that fishermen in the region where he lives don't know how to swim, because the safety of a shipwrecked man depends not on knowing how to swim but on obedience, submission, total resignation to the sea. There is no difference between the sea and the Sahara.

It was where they kept their minds active by making up poetry on the spot, which they called að kveðast á - someone would make up the first line of a poem, someone else would make up the next line, and so on.

Today, Icelanders consistently rank among the happiest people on earth.

Just as I like to think that Iceland’s powerful literary tradition stems from the kvöldvaka, or that the Icelanders’ issues with commitment stem from living with a capricious climate.

She told them that when they felt overcome with grief, or completely alone in the world, they could take their box, go someplace where they were alone, and touch the objects one by one, remembering that they were loved.

In the sagas of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, the scholar-adventurer burned his candle to a nub as he pored over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. A map drawn in faded ink, a cryptic document in Latin fell into his fingers. From such glimmerings, a glorious excursion into terra incognita unfurled, as the scholar’s team wound through an Icelandic volcano down to the center of the earth or traversed a lost Venezuelan plateau teeming with dinosaurs. As

The First Day of Summer according to the Old Icelandic Calendar is observed on a Thursday from April 19-25 in any given year. The old calendar had only two seasons, winter and summer. The

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.

It is noteworthy that about the year 1200, the Nibelungenlied, with its poetic version of the Siegfried story, was written, probably in Austria. At approximately the same time or within seven decades, The Saga of the Volsungs was compiled in Iceland with far fewer chivalric elements than its German counterpart. Almost all the Old Norse narrative material that has survived—whether myth, legend, saga, history, or poetry—is found in Icelandic manuscripts, which form the largest existing vernacular literature of the medieval West. Among the wealth of written material is Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, a thirteenth century Icelandic treatise on the art of skaldic poetry and a handbook of mythological lore. The second section of Snorri’s three-part prose work contains a short and highly readable summary of the Sigurd cycle which, like the much longer prose rendering of the cycle in The Saga of the Volsungs, is based on traditional Eddic poems (Jesse Byock)

No one can say exactly when the process of combining the different historical, legendary, and mythic elements into a Volsung cycle began, but it was probably at an early date. By the ninth century the legends of the Gothic Jormunrek and those of the destruction of the Burgundians had already been linked in Scandinavia, where the ninth-century “Lay of Ragnar” by the poet Bragi the Old treats both subjects. Bragi’s poem describes a shield on which a picture of the maiming of Jormunrek was either painted or carved and refers to the brothers Hamdir and Sorli from the Gothic section of the saga as “kinsmen of Gjuki,” the Burgundian father of King Gunnar. The “Lay of Ragnar” has other connections with the Volsung legend. The thirteenth-century Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson identifies the central figure of the lay, whose gift inspired the poem in his honor, with Ragnar Hairy Breeches, a supposed ancestor of the Ynglings, Norway’s royal family. Ragnar’s son-in-law relationship to Sigurd through his marriage to Sigurd’s daughter Aslaug (mentioned earlier in connection with stave church carvings) is reflected in the sequence of texts in the vellum manuscript: The Saga of the Volsungs immediately precedes The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ragnar’s saga, in turn, is followed by Krákumál (Lay of the Raven), Ragnar’s death poem, in which Ragnar, thrown into the snakepit by the Anglo-Saxon King Ella, boasts that he will die laughing. The Volsung and Ragnar stories are further linked by internal textual references. It is likely that the The Saga of the Volsungs was purposely set first in the manuscript to serve as a prelude to the Ragnar material. The opening section of Ragnar’s saga may originally have been the ending of The Saga of the Volsungs. Just where the division between these two sagas occurs in the manuscript is unclear. Together these narratives chronicle the ancestry of the Ynglings—the legendary line (through Sigurd and Ragnar) and the divine one (through Odin). Such links to Odin, or Wotan, were common among northern dynasties; by tracing their ancestry through Sigurd, later Norwegian kings availed themselves of one of the greatest heroes in northern lore. In so doing, they probably helped to preserve the story for us.” (Jesse Byock)

However, as the two sides approached the althingi in Iceland in the year 1000, it appeared that war would break out. Finally it was agreed that a single arbiter should choose one religion for the entire land, and the lawspeaker Thorgeir, a pagan, was chosen. After spending a night under his cloak, he emerged and decreed that Iceland should be Christian. And so it was. At first some pagan practices were permitted if carried out in secret, but later even this permission was rescinded. However, for reasons that are no longer quite clear, the old stories about the gods were not lost on Iceland. Poems about them lived on in oral tradition, to be recorded more than two centuries after the conversion. Some mythological poems may actually have been composed by Christians in Iceland, and Snorri Sturluson made extensive use of the mythology in his writings.

It wasn’t merely damage done by the sun that was causing him to slip suddenly into Greek; it was the Scull dementia, damage from the broken seed. His father, Evanswood Scull, intermittently mad but a brilliant linguist, used to stomp into the nursery, thundering out passages in Latin, Greek, Icelandic, and Old Law French, a language which it was said that he was the only man in America to have a thorough mastery

September has two attested names in Old English: while Bede calls it Haligmonað, Ælfric refers to September as Hærfestmonað, ‘harvest month’.6 Though not elsewhere recorded in Anglo-Saxon sources, the name Hærfestmonað is paralleled in other Germanic languages: for instance, a list of Old Norse month-names recorded by the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson includes Haustmánuðr, cognate with the English ‘harvest month’.

Ocean acidification is one of the largest unique geological events that the Earth has undergone in the last fifty million years. And it introduces another concept to which we connect poorly: time itself. Although time is properly called linear, imagining that the ocean will change more in the next hundred years than it has in the last fifty million years is a challenge. The time since Iceland’s settlement is very short, not more than twelve times my Grandma’s life: eleven hundred years. The history of Iceland is, in a sense, a continuous story of twelve women like my Grandma. Twelve girls who were born and lived lives that each felt like a flash. Twelve women in their nineties stretching out their hands as if they’re doing water aerobics, touching flat palms together. Their eyes gleam because time passes so fast that their eyes don’t realise they’re nearly a hundred years old. Time runs so fast that Jesus was born around twenty-one grandmas ago. They’d all fit in a single city bus, even if you added all their husbands. The earliest written records of humans date back five thousand years, events that happened practically yesterday. Humanity first emerged the day before that, in comparison to the ocean’s fifty-millionyear history.

In fact next morning was not the right time to ask questions either. Everyone had fierce headaches, and the sun was already high before we were ready to set out on the road again. I loitered, waiting for Donnachad to pay our host for all the food and drink we had consumed, but he made no move to do so, and our host seemed just as good-natured as when we first arrived. Donnachad muttered only a few gracious phrases of thanks and then we rejoined his men, who were trudging blearily forward. I sidled across to the elderly servant and asked him why we had left without paying. 'You never pay a briugu for hospitality,' he answered, mildly shocked. 'That would be an insult. Might even take you to court for looking to pay him.' 'In Iceland, where I come from,' I said, 'a farmer is expected to be hospitable and give shelter and food to travellers who come to his door, particularly if he is wealthy and can afford it. But I didn't see any farming near the house. I'm surprised that he doesn't move away to somewhere a bit more remote.' 'That's precisely why he's built his house beside the road,' explained the old man, 'so that as many people as possible can visit him. And the more hospitality he dispenses, the higher will rise his face price. That's how he can increase his honour, which is much more important to him than the amount of wealth he has accumulated.' What the briugu would do when all his hoarded savings ran out, he did not explain. 'A briugu should possess only three things,' concluded the old man with one of those pithy sayings of which the Irish are fond, 'a never-dry cauldron, a dwelling on a public road and a welcome for every face.' p243

Take a look at the changes in Matthew 6:92 over the course of about 1,000 years (this does not take into account accents and shifting in sounds). Beginning of Matthew 6:9 Date Our Father who art in heaven and/or Our Father who is in heaven Late Modern English (1700s) Our father which art in heauen Early Modern English (1500–1700) (KJV 1611) Oure fader that art in heuenis Middle English (1100–1500) Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum Old English (c. a.d. 1000) One thousand years ago, English looked somewhat German. But to make things worse, English is actually classified as a Germanic language, along with languages like Swedish, German, Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Austrian, Icelandic, and so on.

My lord has read in reputable books that Icelanders emit such a foul stench that men have to position themselves upwind when speaking to them." Jón Hreggviðsson said nothing. The adjunct said: "My lord has read in reputable books that the abode of the damned and of devils is in Iceland, within the mountain named Hekkenfeld. Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson said that he couldn't deny it. Next: "My lord has read in reputable books, primo, that in Iceland there are more specters, monsters, and devils that there are men; secundo, that Icelanders bury shark meat in the dungheaps by their cowsheds and afterward eat it; tertio, that starving Icelanders remove their shoes and cut pieces of them into their mouths like pancakes; quarto, that Icelanders live in mounds of earth; quinto, that Icelanders don't know how to work; sexto, that Icelanders loan foreigners their daughters for purposes of procreation; septimo, that an Icelandic girl is considered to be an unspoiled virgin until she has had her seventh illegitimate child. Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson gaped slightly. "My lord has read in reputable books that Icelanders are primo, thievish; secundo, liars; tertio, arrogant; quarto, lice-ridden; quinto, drunkards; sexto, debauchers; septimo, cowards, unfit for war—" the adjunct said all of this without moving and the colonel continued to grind his teeth and stare at Jón Hreggviðsson. "Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson swallowed to try to wet his throat. The adjunct raised his voice and repeated: "Is this correct?" Jón Hreggviðsson straightened up and said: "My forefather Gunnar of Hlíðarendi was twelve ells high." The colonel said something to the adjunct and the adjunct said loudly: "My lord says that whoever commits perjury beneath the standard shall suffer the wheel and the rack." "Twelve ells," repeated Jón Hreggviðsson. "I won't take it back. And he lived to be three hundred years old. And he wore a gold band around his forehead. His halberd sang the sweetest song that has ever been heard in the North. And the girls are young and slender and come during the night to free men, and are called fair maidens and are said to have the bodies of elves—

LUMMUR (ICELANDIC PANCAKES) Rice pudding leftovers, (approximately 2 cups), 1 cup of flour, 2 eggs, ½ teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of baking soda, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, 1½ cups of milk, frying butter. Mix everything together in a bowl, adding the milk last. Melt butter in a pan. A four-year-old can make lummur with very little assistance when he/she is, for example, recovering from being drenched in a puddle. Place your assistant on a safe stool by the stove, tie an apron around him and allow him to place the floating dough on the hot pan with a small ladle. If you hold the handle of the pan for the child and make sure he/she doesn’t burn him/herself, the child can easily flip the pancakes with a spatula and then fish them out when they have been browned and place them on a plate. Allow the child to sugar the lummur. Lummur can also be eaten with syrup or jam. It is a good idea to make lummur and hot chocolate while the child’s boots are drying by the oven.

And that old story about the ghost that looks like a rock comes to her now: The farther from shore you take it, the heavier it becomes, until one day it gets too heavy to bear. Faye imagines her father taking a small piece of earth with him, a memento: this farm, this family, his memory of it. This was the drowning stone from his stories. He took it to sea and took it to Iceland and took it all the way to America. And as long as he held on to it, he just kept sinking.

...despite the fact that it's technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an easier time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers.

...despite the fact that it's technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an eaiser time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers.

Many people leave my assembly optimistic that crowdsourcing can help reboot Iceland. Some talk of laying the groundwork for a new form of politics. “What you’re seeing here is superdemocracy,” says a university lecturer. “The discussions are so powerful and creative and innovative, but it will take time to trickle up and reshape government.” Even participants of a less academic bent seem delighted with the ideas that have bubbled to the surface. “To be honest, I expected a boring day, but it was actually quite invigorating,” the marketing manager tells me. “When you put a range of people around the table together, you generate new ideas and new approaches to old ideas.

But words can of course equally well carry a blessing with them. A good word at parting is a gift of strength to the traveller. When the king said “Good luck go with you, my friend,” the man set out carrying a piece of the king's power in him. “Luck on your way to your journey's end, and then I will take my luck again,” is a saying still current among the Danish peasantry. A good word given on coming to a new place meant a real addition to one's luck. When Olaf the Peacock moved into his new homestead, old Hoskuld, his father, stood outside uttering words of good luck; he bade Olaf welcome with luck, and added significantly: “This my mind tells me surely, that his name shall live long.” Orðheill, word-luck, is the Icelandic term for a wish thus charged with power, either for good or evil, according as the speaker put his goodwill into his words and made them a blessing, or inspired them with his hate, so that they acted as a curse. There was man's life in words, just as well as in plans, in counsel. Thoughts and words are simply detached portions of the human soul and thus in full earnest to be regarded as living things.

Mér sé goð holl ef ek satt segi, gröm ef ek lyg." (May the gods be favorable if I tell the truth, offended if I lie).

Surnames have the longest history in China, where they began around five thousand years ago. They are about seven hundred years old in England, where they became hereditary in the fifteenth century (and likely earlier). They became hereditary in Scotland a century after that. Surnames are older in Ireland, beginning around nine hundred years ago. In the Netherlands they’ve only been in use for the last two hundred years. In Turkey they were adopted in the early twentieth century. Iceland is the only European country to retain the older-style patronymic that many other countries abandoned, in which children are surnamed with the father’s forename appended to the word for “son” or “daughter,” so the surname changes every generation.

Not that seventeen-year-old kids know what love is. Few people do, however old they are.

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an 'affliction', as meant by the Old Icelandic angr; and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor , which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.