Icelandic culture: a literature the whole country can still read

Why farmers wrote prose while Europe wrote Latin

Iceland had no king, no court, no town and no university at the moment it produced the literature it is known for. It had scattered farms, two bishoprics, a few cathedral and monastic schools, and an assembly that met outdoors for two weeks each June. Christianity was adopted around the year 1000 and brought the Latin alphabet with it, and Icelanders learned to write on vellum, which is calfskin. What they wrote in was the language they already spoke, at a period when the written language of Europe was Latin and the writing elsewhere was done by clerics for patrons.

The oldest surviving layer is administrative rather than heroic. Ari Þorgilsson, treated ever since as the father of history writing in the vernacular, produced Íslendingabók, the Book of the Icelanders, in the 1120s. It is short and dry, sets the settlement period at roughly 870 to 930, and states that the country was fully settled inside sixty years. Landnámabók, the Book of Settlements, does the same work at far greater length, naming more than four hundred settlers who sailed with their families, servants and slaves, and running to 1,500 farm and place names alongside more than 3,500 individuals arranged by district. Before it had a literature, Iceland had a land registry written out as a book.

The sagas grew from that habit. The oldest is the fragmentary Ólafs saga helga of about 1180, probably written at the monastery of Þingeyrar, and it is hagiography, heavy with miracles. A more critical style came from Skálholt in the south, the bishopric built on the school of Ísleifr and for centuries the chief centre of learning in the country. By the thirteenth century the two strands had fused into the form that carried: prose about named people on named farms, mostly set between 930 and 1030, written down two or three hundred years after the events it describes.

Snorri Sturluson shows how close the writing sat to the fighting. He was a chieftain in the middle of the civil conflict now called the Age of the Sturlungs, became a vassal of Haakon IV of Norway in 1220, and in the same decade produced the Prose Edda of about 1225, the fullest surviving account of Norse mythology, and Heimskringla of about 1220, the lives of the early kings of Norway. Egils saga is attributed to him as well, and Sturlunga saga chronicles his own century's power struggles, written by the class conducting them.

The subject matter follows from the audience. Njáls saga is an account of a vendetta that cost dozens of lives, Laxdæla saga turns on a love triangle, and Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga describe the settlement of Greenland and the voyages to Vinland. Alongside the prose ran skaldic verse, strictly syllabic and built on kennings so complex that the poems read as riddles, with sword liquid standing in for blood and the horse of the land of Haki for a ship. The UNESCO nomination describes the sagas as showing a society in transition, from heathendom to Christianity and from orality to literacy, and the description holds because the people who made the transition were the people writing it up.

How the manuscripts came home from Copenhagen

Árni Magnússon was born in Iceland in 1663, went to Copenhagen as a student and stayed, becoming secretary of the Royal Archives and, from 1702, professor of Danish Antiquities. He travelled widely at home collecting books, and assembled what is by common consent the single most important collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts in existence: nearly 3,000 items, the earliest from the twelfth century, with around 14,000 charters and copies. A fire in Copenhagen in 1728 destroyed much of his printed library and many manuscripts. He died in 1730 having willed everything to the University of Copenhagen, at the time the only university in the entire Danish kingdom, Iceland included.

That last detail is why the bequest turned into a national grievance. Iceland began asking for the manuscripts back before it was even a republic. Denmark legislated in 1961, and on 26 May 1965 passed the law dividing the collection. It set a test: the items handed over had to be classifiable as Icelandic cultural artefacts, compiled or translated by Icelanders and tied to events there. Opposition inside Denmark stalled the transfer, the matter went to law, and the Danish Supreme Court settled it on 19 March 1971.

A treaty was signed on 1 April 1971. Twenty days later the first two manuscripts reached Reykjavík, the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda and Flateyjarbók, received with a public ceremony and crowds watching the ship come into the harbour. Roughly 1,666 items from the Arnamagnæan collection and a further 141 from the Royal Library were covered, along with all the Icelandic charters. A joint committee of scholars then worked through the collection item by item, completed the division in 1986, and delivered the last manuscripts in June 1997. The transfer took twenty-six years. About 1,400 manuscripts and fragments remain in Copenhagen, half of them of Icelandic provenance and including several of the oldest that survive.

Iceland built the receiving institution before the ruling came. The Althing established the Icelandic Manuscript Institute in 1962, and in 1969 it moved into Árnagarður, a building on the university campus designed for the purpose. The collection went onto the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2009, and the return is treated internationally as the precedent for a former colonial power handing cultural property back.

The pattern shows in objects as well as books. The Valþjófsstaðir door, carved in Iceland between about 1175 and 1200 and the only such carved medieval door still in existence, hung in its church until 1851, went to Copenhagen, and was returned in 1930 with a large number of other artefacts.

Why a modern reader can still follow it

Written Icelandic has not changed substantially since the eleventh century, when the first texts went onto vellum, and modern speakers can read sagas composed about eight hundred years ago. Editions update the spelling and add footnotes, and what sits underneath is intact, in roughly the relationship a current English edition bears to Shakespeare. With some effort many Icelanders can also read the original manuscripts.

The grammar explains most of it. Icelandic kept a four-case synthetic structure with three genders, strong and weak declensions in each, a wide assortment of irregular forms and between 150 and 200 strong verbs, while the other Germanic languages shed nearly all of that. Pronunciation did move, especially in the vowels, between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, which is why the line between Old and Modern Icelandic is drawn at 1540. Danish rule from 1536 to 1918 left the spoken language alone, because it stayed in daily use among the whole population.

Vocabulary is where the effort is deliberate. New words are coined from Icelandic roots rather than borrowed, and old words are recycled with new meanings, so the word for computer is tölva, a compound of the ancient terms for number and seer. Bishop Oddur Einarsson wrote in 1589 that the language had remained unchanged since the ancient literature was written, the purism movement grew through the eighteenth century, and it became settled policy in the early nineteenth. It is a popular preoccupation rather than an elite one, which is unusual as language policies go.

The modern alphabet is a reconstruction of a medieval one. The standard was laid down in the nineteenth century mainly by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask, working from the First Grammatical Treatise, an orthography written in the early twelfth century by an anonymous author known since as the First Grammarian. Icelandic keeps þ, ð and æ, and is the only living language still using the runic letter þ in Latin script.

Act No. 61 of 2011, in force from 15 June that year, states that Icelandic is the national language and that public authorities must ensure it can be used in every area of society. The same act makes Icelandic Sign Language the first language of anyone who relies on it, and of their children, and Icelandic Braille the first written language of anyone who needs it. Language Day has fallen on 16 November since 1995, the birthday of the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson.

Where the reading actually happened

The baðstofa was the one warm room of a turf farm, used for working, eating and sleeping, sometimes built above the cow byre to take the heat off the animals. Beds were shared. In the evening the head of the household read aloud by the light of a fish oil lamp while everyone else carried on with handiwork. The Danish painter Schiött put the scene on canvas in 1861, and reproductions hung in Icelandic homes for decades afterwards.

That room is the transmission mechanism, and it is why the literature never separated from the population. What was read there included rímur, alliterative rhyming epics chanted without accompaniment, descended from skaldic poetry and using the same elaborate kennings. They originated in the fourteenth century and stayed popular into the nineteenth, the best known composer being Sigurður Breiðfjörð, who lived from 1798 to 1846. The tradition was revived in 1929 with Kvæðamannafélagið Iðunn, and in rural districts people still compose and perform them.

Print reinforced the habit instead of replacing it. Bishop Jón Arason brought a small press and a Swedish printer to Iceland around 1530; he was executed at Hólar in 1550 as the last Catholic bishop in the Nordic countries. Almost everything printed was in Icelandic from the start, which made it the language of the church here. Guðbrandur Þorláksson had the first Icelandic Bible printed at Hólar in 1584, five hundred copies over two years, every church required to contribute to the cost and buy one, and copies were still in use well into the nineteenth century. The Passion Hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson, from the seventeenth century, were the other book present in nearly every household.

The census of 1703, the first anywhere to count an entire nation by name, found 50,358 people, of whom fewer than 800 had any occupation other than farming or farm labour. The largest non-farming groups were 245 clergymen and 142 housemaids. A country shaped like that had no reading public in the ordinary sense. It had households, and they read to each other.

The appetite outlived the turf farm. Iceland has the highest number of bookstores per head in the world and the highest publication of books and magazines per head, more than a thousand titles a year, and around a tenth of the population will publish a book. Most of the year's sales fall between late September and early November, the Jólabókaflóð or Christmas book flood, which opens when the publishers' association delivers Bókatíðindi, a catalogue of everything new, free to every home in the country. Reykjavík was named a UNESCO City of Literature in 2011, and Halldór Laxness took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 for work including Independent People of 1934 and 1935.

What the island gave people to eat

The traditional kitchen runs on fish, lamb and dairy with almost no herbs or spices, because the climate ruled out the alternatives until greenhouses arrived. Þorramatur is the midwinter selection eaten during the old Nordic month of þorri, which begins on the first Friday after 19 January: cured shark, singed sheep heads, pickled ram's testicles, blood pudding, liver sausage and dried fish. Every item is a preservation method, and eating them on a fixed date is deliberate reenactment rather than survival.

The everyday version is milder. Skyr, a cultured skim milk product, is eaten constantly. Lamb comes smoke-cured as hangikjöt or salt-preserved as saltkjöt, cod and haddock are smoked, pickled, boiled or dried, and dark rye bread is baked in the ground in geothermal areas. Iceland ranked third in the world for coffee consumption per head in 2016. The national spirit is brennivín, distilled from potatoes and flavoured with caraway or angelica, nicknamed svarti dauði, black death. Strong beer was illegal until 1989, which is why bjórlíki, weak legal pilsner mixed with vodka, became a national drink for a while.

Which days the year still marks

National Day on 17 June marks the republic of 1944, Sumardagurinn fyrsti the first day of summer on the old calendar, and Sjómannadagurinn in June belongs to the fishing fleet. The anthem, Lofsöngur, was written by Matthías Jochumsson with music by Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson in 1874 for the thousandth anniversary of the settlement, and first published as a hymn in commemoration of Iceland's thousand years. The national song is anniversary literature about the landing rather than about a state, since there was no state to sing about.

How wool and silver were worked

The traditional crafts are weaving, silversmithing and wood carving, and each is a direct function of what the island could supply. Iceland had almost no usable native timber, so grass and turf houses developed on the plan of the Viking longhouse, and carving wood came from driftwood and imports, which is why so little of it survives and why the pieces that do are treated as national objects. Icelandic wool is low in lanolin and carries two kinds of fibre, one fine, soft and insulating, the other long and water repellent, which is what makes the knitted goods behave as they do. In silver the old technique of ornamenting with silver thread has been kept rather than revived.

Carving produced the two objects that stand for the craft. The Valþjófsstaðir door carries a roundel telling the medieval tale of the knight and the lion, with a runic inscription reading that the mighty king buried here slew the dragon. The Cana drinking horn was cut in 1598 by Brynjólfur Jónsson, a farmer at Skarð in the south who lived partly by his art and counts as the first Icelandic artist known by name across the country.

Formal dress is a nineteenth-century design rather than an inherited peasant costume. The skautbúningur was proposed by Sigurður Guðmundsson the Painter, who lived from 1833 to 1874 and wanted to improve the artistic taste of his countrymen. The oldest surviving example was made in 1860 by Sigurlaug Gunnarsdóttir of Ás in Hegranes, in black broadcloth with silver thread on the jacket edges. It displaced the older faldbúningur quickly and is still worn on formal occasions.

What painters did with the landscape

Secular painting in Iceland begins in the nineteenth century and begins with the land. Þórarinn Þorláksson trained in Copenhagen in the 1890s, came home and exhibited from 1900 until his death in 1924, painting almost nothing but Icelandic landscape, and Jóhannes Kjarval later developed particular ways of laying on paint in order to render volcanic rock. The timing carries an argument: landscape painting arrived with the movement for home rule, and the pictures were a claim about whose country this was. The institutions came in the same wave, with the National Museum founded in 1863 and the National Gallery in 1884.

What Icelanders play and where they swim

Glíma, a form of wrestling thought to date from medieval times, is the traditional sport and is still practised. Handball is usually called the national sport, and the team has ranked among the strongest in the world. Football has the wider following. The national side qualified for the European Championship in 2016, drew with the eventual winners Portugal, beat England 2-1 in the round of sixteen, and lost to the hosts France in the quarter-finals, then reached the World Cup in 2018. On both occasions it was the smallest nation by population ever to qualify.

Chess sits oddly high in the culture for a country this size. Reykjavík hosted the World Chess Championship in 1972 at the height of the Cold War, nine Icelandic grandmasters had emerged by 2008, and Bobby Fischer took Icelandic citizenship in 2005. Golf has more than 17,000 registered players out of a population of roughly 300,000, and the Arctic Open is played through the night at Akureyri around the summer solstice.

Swimming describes the country best. Geothermally heated outdoor pools are spread across the whole island and swimming courses are compulsory in the national curriculum, which follows from cheap hot water and an economy built on the sea.

Why Icelandic had to be taught to machines

About 350,000 people speak Icelandic as a first language, a negligible number in the market terms that decide which languages get speech recognition, machine translation and spell checking. A language missing from those tools loses ground where people actually use language, which is the threat purism was invented to answer, arriving through a different door.

The government decided in 2017 to fund a five-year language technology programme, on the basis of an expert plan delivered that June. Work began on 1 October 2019, carried out by a consortium of nine universities, institutions and companies under Almannarómur, a foundation set up in 2014, with a budget of around 14 million euros and a further 3.6 million from industry. Everything produced is published under open licences.

The components have the same character as the manuscript collection. Risamálheild is a large annotated corpus of Icelandic text, republished each year of the programme. IcePaHC is a syntactically parsed corpus of one million words running from the twelfth century to the twenty-first, which is only possible because the language is continuous enough for a single annotation scheme to cover nine hundred years of it.

The body doing much of the work is the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, which since 1 September 2006 has combined the manuscript institute with the language institute, the lexicography institute, the Sigurður Nordal Institute and the onomastics institute. The building that holds the vellum also holds the speech data. The cultural argument has not changed since the twelfth century: the language is the inheritance, the texts are the proof, and keeping both usable is public work rather than a scholarly hobby.