No one in Scandinavia has swagger like us

I just finished reading The Saga of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue for Icelandic Culture, and enjoyed it immensely. This is the first saga I’ve read to the end—last year I started reading Egil’s Saga, but I had to abandon it about half-way through on account of homework. One thing I learned from the Egil’s Saga experience was that making family trees is key to keeping track of what’s going on. Sagas will sometimes span multiple generations, and Icelanders are big on geneaology, so a large part of the sagas is devoted to describing the lineage of various characters.


What follows is a summary of Gunnlaug’s Saga.

Gunnlaug is a young fellow who sets off on a journey to see the world and prove himself a worthy man so he can marry Helga the Fair. Helga’s father tells Gunnlaug that if he returns within three years, having done proper manly things, then Helga will be his wife. “Nice,” thinks Gunnlaug to himself, and embarks on Gunnlaug’s Northern Europe Tour ’06. (That’s 1006.) Gunnlaug, like many Icelandic heroes, is a poet as well as a warrior, and he spends quite a lot of his time freestylin’. Wherever he goes, he wows heads of state with his sick rap skillz, and in return gets all manner of bling. At one court he shows up with a boil on his foot. It’s oozing, you know, as boils do, and everyone wants to know why he’s still walking. “It’s because I’m a bamf,” says Gunnlaug. One courtier remarks, in my #1 favorite sentence of the saga, “He swaggereth hugely, this Icelander!” Yeah he does.

At the Swedish court, Gunnlaug meets Raven, another young Icelandic poet, and the two of them have a rap battle in front of the Swedish king. Raven disses Gunnlaug (“It is a song full of big words and little beauty; a somewhat rugged song, as is Gunnlaug’s own mood.” Hiyo!) Gunnlaug replies that the length of Raven’s song compares unfavorably with his own. Raven swears vengeance against Gunnlaug for mocking him in front of foreign royalty, and goes back to Iceland in a huff.

Gunnlaug, meanwhile, visits his buddy King Ethelred in England, who, for the record, is my pick for bim of the saga. Ethelred is paranoid that Denmark is going to attack England ANY MINUTE NOW, so he makes Gunnlaug stay and protect them from the Danes. (With his rhymes? Like one guy’s going to make a difference if the Danes actually bring the full force of their Viking might against little old England. Ethelred, YOU ARE SO UNREASONABLE.) This makes Gunnlaug late to marry Helga, and the Danes never show up anyway.

Gunnlaug gets himself back to Iceland as quickly as possible, twists his ankle in a wrestling match right after he lands (What’s up with this guy and random foot injuries?), and then finds out that, while he was protecting England from the non-existent Danish threat, Raven married his woman. The three of them meet again at a wedding, and Gunnlaug and Helga instantly reconnect. Gunnlaug and Raven throw down some more rhymes, Gunnlaug makes some vague threats, and “Raven had nought of Helga’s fellowship” from then on. Ouch.

The next time they see each other, bleep gets real because Gunnlaug challenges Raven to a duel at the Althing. “This Thing,” we are informed, in my second-favorite sentence of the saga, “was the third most thronged Thing that has been held in Iceland.” [Historical Context: The Althing, as I mentioned before, is Iceland’s parliament, and in the old days, this is something like how it worked. Once a year, the leaders of the country would gather at Thingvellir, and all citizens (read: free men) could come attend the assembly and present ideas, complaints, etc. Disputes would be settled, the law would be revised, probably there was a lot of partying, and then folk would go back home.] This duel is so intense, that the Althing makes a law that year forbidding these duels from taking place anymore. Of course, they’re too late to stop Gunnlaug and Raven, who, after some preliminary rapping, start going at it with actual swords. The duel ends in a draw, because the men’s fathers are so upset to see them fighting that they break it up.

But if there’s one thing Gunnlaug and Raven agree on, it’s that one of them has to die, and they run off to Norway so they can hack each other to bits where it's still legal. And hack they do! Gunnlaug whacks off one of Raven’s legs, and you’d think that would be the end of it, but you’d be wrong, because Raven, I kid you not, goes all Black Knight on us. Gunnlaug tells Raven to give up, because he’s not about to fight a man who only has one leg. Raven steadies his stump against a tree, and says, “Tis but a scratch! I’m pretty sure I could keep going if maybe someone brought me some water.” Gunnlaug, because he’s a hero, brings Raven some water, and says, “Wait. You’re not gonna, you know, run me through with your sword when I give you this water, are you?” “Who, me?” says Raven. Gunnlaug gives him the water, and Raven, because he’s a tool, stabs Gunnlaug in the head. And you’d think THAT would be the end of it, but YOU’D BE WRONG AGAIN, because the guy with one leg and the guy who just took a sword through the skull start going at it all over again. Gunnlaug wins, to the extent that Raven dies first.

After that, there’s a feud, more senseless revenge killings, and Helga marries a nice man but spends the rest of her life pining for Gunnlaug anyway. It’s all very tragic.

‘Bout That Time, Yes?

Things I Did This Week:

On Thursday I went to the National Museum with my Icelandic Culture class. We had a short tour, and then were allowed to wander around and look at stuff until the museum closed. As we’ve also been learning in the folk tales class, most of Icelandic history is pretty grim—the short story being, everyone lived in cramped and dirty turf houses, eating rotten food, and eking out a meager existence amid the glaciers and volcanoes until the Allies occupied them during WWII, bringing in their swanky American money and magically turning Iceland into one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And then they had a bank crisis. On account of all this, there’s not a whole lot of artifacts preserved in Iceland, because if it wasn’t made of dirt, it was made of wood, and either way it didn’t really hold up over the centuries. In spite of that, the museum has some pretty cool stuff. My favorite parts were the wood carvings that did survive from some of the early cathedrals. A lot of the wooden artifacts (there’s some paneling, also some pieces of altars, as well as chests and cabinets and the like) have very intricate and beautiful designs carved into them. There’s a lot of Celtic-style knot work, and on the panels from one of the cathedrals there are scenes carved, which served the same purpose as the frescoes and stained-glass windows you see in other European cathedrals—pretty much to teach illiterate folk stories from the Bible. I’m sorry there are no pictures, but we weren’t allowed to have our bags inside. I’d have taken a picture of the outside, but Icelandic architecture, in general, has all the grace and beauty of a state correctional facility. (For Marietta people, see: Walker. For Wooster people, see: Mateer Hall.) It’s not terribly exciting.

Guess what IS exciting? Free concert at an art gallery! (How hipster.) A group of us went to see Rökkurró at a tiny art gallery/record shop called Havarí on Saturday afternoon, and it was lovely! When I say tiny, I mean tiny, so it was a bit cramped. Being that close was very cool, though, and the music was beautiful. Another great thing that came of this experience was that I discovered an exciting new band while digging through a box of vinyl before the show. I came across the following album:

Let’s not kid around—I was attracted by the dragon. Reading the back, I discovered that Stórsveit Nix Noltes—that’s, “Nick Nolte’s Big Band” (What? I don’t even know.)—is sort of an Icelandic supergroup that does Eastern European-style music. Amazing, right? Who would have guessed. Anyway, I was QUITE excited, and I hope to acquire more of their music soon. Most of their songs are not played at quite the manic tempo of say, Fanfare Ciocarlia, but their sound is wonderful.

Classes are going well, overall. I enjoy the reading for British Literature (we’re covering Mr. Geoffrey Chaucer, my hero, this week, so I’m delighted about that), though the lectures are fairly uninspiring. Icelandic Culture, on the other hand, is quite interesting, and Folk Tales has picked up as well. Next week is when we actually get to the folk tales section of the class, so I’m looking forward to that. Vocabulary. Vocab is kind of rough. Let’s talk about some of the crazy things in the Icelandic language. Definite articles are expressed by changing the ending of the noun. There are about fifty bajillion different vowel sounds. (Ok, so maybe it’s more like 15. I still think that’s above average.) EVERYTHING changes depending on what gender you’re referring to, and of course that includes inanimate objects because Icelandic has three genders for its nouns, same as German. Even the words for numbers change depending on gender. 2 men are tveir, 2 women are tvær, and 2 houses are tvö. Telephone numbers are masculine, prices are feminine, and house numbers are neuter. Adjectives decline in all three genders, all four cases, singular or plural, AND depending on whether the noun is definite or indefinite. Is your brain exploding yet? Needless to say, it’s a lot to keep track of, and sometimes in class I feel very lost. I’ve been alternating between feeling excited for the challenge and feeling frustrated with having to start over from the beginning with a whole new language. My brain keeps wanting to substitute German words for everything I don’t know in Íslensk.

Réttir and the Golden Circle

I’m just going to skip right past Week 2—the short story is, I went to some classes and they were mostly pretty interesting and I’m really excited to read all my new books.

Instead, I’m going to write about the thrilling adventures we had on Saturday! With many pictures! Mostly of sheep! A large number of international students piled into four buses at 8:00 yesterday morning and drove out to the countryside to see the annual Réttir, or sheep round-up. Iceland is famous for its wool (and also for traditional dishes like boiled sheep’s heads and ram’s testicles) so sheep are kind of a big deal here. In the summer, the shepherds just let the sheep roam free wherever they please, but in the fall they herd all the sheep together into a big pen, then each of the farms goes through and sorts out which sheep are theirs, by reading the numbers on the ear tags.

Unsorted sheep.

There’s a large, circular pen in the middle, and then several pie-piece-shaped pens radiating out from it, one for each farm.

Sorted sheep!

In-the-process-of-being-sorted sheep.

When someone finds one of their sheep, they pull it over to their pen, then wade back into the sea of livestock to find the next one.

Check out THIS one. I think it looks a little evil.

It was a crazy scene, and what was even crazier was that they actually let us get down into the pen ourselves to touch the sheep. While I did not personally try my hand at wrangling a sheep, several people did, with success!

Edvardas, Derek, and Kara show us how it's done.

This was while one batch of sheep was dwindling down, and then suddenly everyone started clearing off to the sides. We complied, and soon saw why. Icelandic sheep are actually pretty small, as sheep go, but they do have impressive horns, and when hundreds of them are running towards you, it’s a little alarming.

!!!

At that point, we felt we’d had enough of sheep, and found an opening and escaped back over the wall.



After the Réttir, we went on a tour of the “Golden Circle,” which is a driving tour that stops at a few of the notable sites in the center of Iceland. Our first stop was the Haukadalur geothermal area, where we saw the Strokkur geyser—over 100 feet tall! There is also another geyser, called Geysir (which is where we get the word! Fun fact: Geyser is the only Icelandic word in the English language. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.), but that one isn’t currently active, so we didn’t get to see it.

I climbed up a little ridge and got some pictures from above!

The downside to the geothermal area is the smell of the sulfur in the water. Though the odor was particularly strong there, even the hot water that comes out of our faucets at the dorm smells vaguely like eggs—just something you have to get used to in Iceland.



Next up was Gullfoss (which means golden waterfall), a gigantic waterfall in a glacial river. When the sun is shining (which it was!) you can see a lovely rainbow. We actually had incredible luck in the weather yesterday—it was bright and sunny everywhere we went (or at least as bright and sunny as it gets in Iceland), and only ever started raining after we’d returned to the bus.



The last stop was Þingvellir (that letter at the beginning makes a soft ‘th’ sound), the site of the original Alþingi. The Alþingi is Iceland’s parliament, and sometimes called the oldest parliament in the world. As our history lecturer professor pointed out last Thursday, this is technically not true because the current version of the Alþingi is not the same as the old one, but it’s still pretty cool. It was founded in 930, and the parliament continued to meet at Þingvellir (Parliament Plains) until 1799. There isn’t anything left in the way of buildings; instead it’s a national park, and very beautiful.




I probably would have been more excited if I hadn't been so tired, and ready to go home and stop smelling like sheep and geysers.

After all the excitement of yesterday, today is much more mundane—just grocery shopping and homework. Fun fun!

Orientation and Week One!

I’m sorry it took me so long to get this post together—the last couple weeks have been very busy!

The first Monday I was here we had registration and orientation. One of the first things we all discovered is that the university is maddeningly bureaucratic—pretty much the whole first week was spent running all over the campus and all over the city signing forms and waiting for paperwork to get processed so we could actually start going to classes. See, classes for the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences (where all my classes are) started on the same Monday we had orientation. BUT even though I registered old-school style on Monday morning by writing down classes on a sheet of paper, the registration is not considered official until you get your intranet username and password. The intranet is also where you get your timetables to find out where and when each of your classes is held. So, I didn’t get my login information until Wednesday afternoon, and at that point I’d already missed three classes, which was very frustrating. Also, once I got my timetables, I found out that two of my classes met at the same time, so I had to drop one and add another. I will say that this was much easier than it is at Wooster. At the University here there doesn’t seem to be any limit on how many students are in a class—if more people sign up for it, they just move to a bigger classroom. Anyway, it all worked out for the best, because I have a VERY exciting schedule! My classes are:

Icelandic Vocabulary I (Crazy language! So many vowel sounds! I’m really excited for it, though!)
Icelandic Culture (Every week we have one lecture by our professor and one by a guest speaker on some aspect of Icelandic culture.)
Icelandic Folk Tales, Beliefs, Customs, and Identity: Ghosts, Sharkmeat, Mountain Women, and Alcohol (I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory. And awesome.)
British Literature II (Misleading title? It’s actually the first half of British literature, from Beowulf through pre-romanticism.)

All of the classes meet for double sessions twice a week, which means that the way my schedule worked out, I only have class on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to use those long weekends to do some traveling!

Orientation was interesting, mostly just to see how many other foreign students there are. I think they said there are over 500 of us? I might be wrong about that, but regardless, there are quite a lot. The vast majority are Europeans; I think there are only about ten of us from the U.S. As international students, we can join the Erasmus Student Network, which is a club for international students that throws parties pretty regularly, and also organizes trips for us to go on—most of them sound like a pretty sweet deal!

Later that day there was a meet-up for the international students at a bar downtown, where we got discounted beer, which naturally made many people quite excited, because the government taxes alcohol like no other, so prices are NUTS. It was really nice getting to meet more of the foreign students, and some people had participated in a photo scavenger hunt earlier that day, and we got to see a slide show of all their wacky pictures.

The rest of the first week was mostly uneventful (like I said—lots of trekking all over Reykjavík to fill out forms), and then I finally got my internet set up on Thursday, and suddenly my journaling became much more irregular…I DID, however, get to attend my very first class, which was Folk Tales! It’s starting out a little slow, but is otherwise very interesting, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the semester!

Arriving in Iceland

The fellow at customs gave me a stern look when I told him I would be here for four months and all I had was a passport and my acceptance letter. His grumbling about needing to get a visa was quite disconcerting, considering all the nonsense I’d already been through regarding the necessity vs. irrelevance of a visa. Once I arrived on campus, however, I quickly learned that NOBODY has a visa here, and at least one kid doesn’t even have a residence permit. Clearly, the Icelandic Directorate of Immigration is really pretty lax.

The first thing I did after arriving in Keflavík was head for the ATM (which turned out to be unnecessary—everything takes debit cards, even the vending machines!), where I had a mild panic attack after withdrawing 10,000 krónur. Briefly, my basic math skills left me and I had the sinking suspicion that I had just emptied my bank account at one go. I eventually recovered and realized that 10,000 krónur is only a bit over $100. I really need to practice dividing by 70. Speaking of cash, here is what Icelandic money looks like!


The paper money is very pretty; it mostly features severe-looking Icelandic national figures. The coins all have fish on them (way to be stereotypical, Iceland!), but the other side has the four national guardian land spirits (the story behind them is a fine example of Iceland's crazy/wonderful folklore--more on that later!).


I took the bus to Reykjavík; it made a stop at Blue Lagoon, so I got to see that from a little distance. The landscape out here is gloriously desolate, incredibly rocky, and the dominant life form appears to be lichen.


Unfortunately, the only pictures I was able to take were through the bus window, so they’re not exactly top quality. I’m sure later I will get a chance to explore properly, and then there will be proper pictures!

Once the bus got to Reykjavík, I shunned spending money on a connecting bus, since I could see my dorm from the main terminal, and hauled my suitcases over to Gamli Garður.

Here it is!


And here's my room! It’s a hotel during the summer; hence, the giant sign on top—luckily this makes it easy to spot from far away. The building is in a great location—we are right on campus, and both the Hallgrímskirkja and the Sagamuseum are visible from my window. A very nice park with the city pond, walk/bike paths, and an abundance of waterfowl lies just across the road.


There’s goose crap pretty much everywhere around the pond, but the geese are rather cute and make entertaining noises, so that’s okay.


Once I got there, I met up with a few other American students, and a group of girls from China. We all went to the student housing office to pick up our keys, and after moving in, a small group of us walked downtown to grab lunch at a deli. This was my first properly Icelandic meal, not counting the coffee and bagel I had for breakfast at Keflavík that morning. I’m still working on learning food words, so I’m not actually sure what the meat was on my sandwich (probably ham? It was kind of hard to tell.), but it definitely also had tomato, lettuce, and BRIE (?!), and it was quite delicious!

I don’t want to infodump my whole past week in one post, so I’ll follow up shortly with one about orientation and all that business. Bless! (What a lovely way to say goodbye!)