The organ in the Hallgrímskirkya in Reykjavik is a giant’s causeway of clustered steel pipes, five thousand two hundred and seventy-five of them. It has seventy-two stops, four manuals and a pedalboard, and an electronic operating system, and weighs twenty-five tonnes. It is the largest musical instrument in Iceland.
The manuals are set ostentatiously in the nave, God’s tiny organist facing the pipes and with her back to the altar. When my brother and I visit, she is there, playing an arrangement of Saint-Saens’ Dance Macabre, the dance of a Catholic devil thundering around this North Atlantic Lutheran space, the pagan Icelandic imps brought here by the first Viking settlers chased to the corners of the sulphurous land.
The organ was bought from a manufacturer from Bonn and inaugurated in 1992, and paid for in part through subscriptions, individual Icelanders buying single pipes. Some are still available for purchase from the gift shop.
The organ plays loud, as loud as you want. Throw open all the stops. This is an organ designed to fill an empty land, to drown out the silence of the non-human.
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Iceland was an empty land when the Vikings began to colonise it after 874AD (or near-empty: tradition and the sagas tell of the first Norse settlers being greeted by Celtic hermits, and there is some archaeological evidence to support this).
And not just empty: deeply empty. Unlike the billion-year geologies of Greenland or Orkney, Iceland is startlingly youthful, a mere eighteen million years, and in parts, near the mid-Atlantic rift which cuts through the country not far from Reykjavik, much younger than that. It is still a country upwelling from the sea. It has no fossil record, and whatever animals have died here (fox, whale, settlement sheep or settlement goat). have only left their bones on the surface to whiten and dissolve.
No fossil record then, but the record of its settlement is relatively complete. It is written in two books, the Landnámabók – the Book of Settlement – and the Íslendingabók – the Book of Iceland. And it is written in the sagas.
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The thirteenth century Egil’s Saga tells how Egil’s father, Skallagrim, settled in Iceland around the end of the ninth century, and how Skallagrim’s father, Kveldulf, came to be buried there. The story goes like this: Kveldulf had two sons, Skallagrim and Thorolf; Thorolf entered the service of the tyrannical Norwegian King Harald, who then killed him on spurious rumours of treachery put about by jealous courtiers. Kveldulf and Skallagrim, in the Viking tradition of blood-fued, duly struck back, but understood that there was no peaceful future for them in Norway. They sailed in two ships for Iceland. The ships were separated on the journey, however, and Kveldulf died (according to the saga, following his exertions as a berserker and shapeshifter in exacting revenge on the crew of a ship of Harald’s). Before he died he instructed that his body be placed in a coffin and the coffin heaved overboard. He also sent greetings to his son, telling him that if against all expectation he, Kveldulf, was in Iceland when Skallagrim arrived, Skallagrim should settle near where his father had. This rather confused instruction bore miraculous fruit when Kveldulf’s coffin was found washed up, and was reburied under a cairn on the new land. Skallagrim established his farm nearby, at what is now known as Borgarnes, north of Reykjavik.
Egil’s Saga says nothing about Celtic monks, but it does show us Skallagrim walking about the land like a new Adam (there is no mention of any Eve – ships complements are numbered by the menfolk only), naming the crazy place in any way that occurs to him. Here he saw a lot of ducks, so this is Duck Lake. On that stream he saw swans, so that is Swan Stream. That river goes down to a gulf? Gulf River. This river flows North? North River. And so on. Solid, practical people, Icelandic settlers.
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W.H. Auden, travelling in Iceland with Louis MacNeice in 1936, remarks on the sagas:
Great excitement here because Goering’s brother and a party are expected this evening. Rosenberg is coming too. The Nazi’s have a theory that Iceland is the cradle of the Germanic culture. Well, if they want a community like that of the sagas they are welcome to it. I love the sagas, but what a rotten society they describe, a society with only the gangster virtues.
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Just as Adam in the old story was not required to extirpate the Neanderthals or Homo Erectus from Eden before he began to stroll about in it, pointing at creatures and naming them, so the sagas do not need to describe the erasure of indigenous people in Iceland, because there were none. But the history of all settlement is nonetheless the history of erasure, beginning with the Neolithic march up the river valleys and around the coasts of Europe. The Vikings who settled Iceland, after all, came from somewhere. Some other erasure.
We do not need to have been perpetually lodged in a place to regard it as our own. Recently arrived will do. This is the land I grew up in and know deeply, perhaps my father knew it in the same way. That is enough.
Luckily for us, we are good at forgetting. It is nature of all settlement. Our houses might be bright and luminous spaces of minimal clarity and pristine cleanliness, but they have their attics, their Jungian cellars, their forgotten ritual corners; and somewhere out there beyond the Pale is a midden of landfill, bones and shells. Your personal Eden does not stand at the beginning of all things; is a snapshot taken in medias res. Similarly your beginning, your foundation dates and stories are not arbitrary; but nor are they beginnings.
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Later on in Egil's Saga a number of Irish slaves belonging to a man named Ketil Steam (named by Skallagrim?) escape, trap and burn a man and his people in their homestead, and are then hunted across the land. Wherever they are brought to Viking justice, they lend their name to the pristine world.
Lambi and his men pursued them and killed the slave named Kori at the place now known as Koranes... . They found found Skorri on Skorrey Island, where they killed him, then rowed out to the skerry where they killed Thormod, which has been called Thormodssker (Thormod's skerry) ever since. They caught other slaves at places that are also named after them now.
And so the empty land is gradually known and named.
