Icelandic Survival Strategies Icelandic Survival Strategies
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Photo by Emma Francis/Unsplash
The Four Elements

Icelandic Survival Strategies

Life Among the Fjords in Þingeyri
Anna Berestecka
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time 7 minutes

Þingeyri (Thingeyri) is a small town on the fjords of northwest Iceland. Over the centuries, the harsh climate and isolation from the world have forced its residents into behaviour patterns that have guaranteed survival. What remains of them?

Lalla’s hands have touched so many textures. Now they stretch out over a piece of canvas, concentrating. It’s just like in an old book – about the art of bookbinding – lying on the table: vice, brushes, glue, needles, worn wooden tools. One book helps rescue another.

At another table, Alda hits a countertop with a heather-coloured hank. It’s not like the ones I’ve seen in shops. After a while, she starts to slip stitches. Where’s this colour from? It’s wool from the local sheep, boiled in a decoction of blueberries gathered in the valley. The growing season is so short that vegetables for soup don’t really grow here, but it’s easy to find plant dyes outside your house: rhubarb roots, silver Parmelia lichens. And so pots pile up on the table and on the stove, stuffed to the brim. It’s no surprise that one day Alda’s husband almost mistook a colourful decoction for his dinner.

In times when you can buy almost anything and send it anywhere

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Time and Ice Time and Ice
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In the “black forest”, among black pyramids left by the melting Skeiðarárjökull. The glacier will be gone by 2070. Photo by Andri Snær Magnason
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Andri Snær Magnason

I grew up in America as a child and when we moved home there were many things that struck me visually. There were elements in the landscape that had a deep impact, but I could not put it all into words. There were just these feelings stuck in my mind, and pictures, and things that I only understood much later.

In the north we had a farm by the ocean, just below the Arctic Circle. For many years, I was not sure what defined the nature there so strongly, because the most obvious thing was all the life. It is a place where you can listen to 14 species of birds singing or quacking at the same time. Walking around the beach or the meadows in late June, you have to tread gently: everywhere you will find nests with eggs, or small chicks. This is nature, but it is neither calm nor tranquil. It is as busy as a metropolis; the cliffs full of screaming birds, the meadows full of birds trying to divert you away from their eggs, or Arctic terns coming in swarms to attack you. All these elements resemble life in an obvious way, but a few years ago I found out that it was not life that defined this nature. It was death. The abundance and overwhelming presence of death. In a short walk you would find a dead bird, a dead chick, a half-eaten duck, a dead lamb wriggling with worms, dead fish, an old skeleton of a whale and a seal’s head. And looking closer, skeletons were everywhere, alongside parts of wings. The smell in the air was actually rotting seaweed.

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