Arctic Assonances: Elements for a Script

Air and Geometric Flair

Iceland is an island, surrounded by water, whose first human inhabitants arrived by boat in the ninth century. Boats and maritime connections are of particular interest to me, and I am visiting to learn more about these in the Arctic. I travel, however, by plane, from the Alps to Reykjavík International Airport, then from Reykjavík Domestic Airport to Ísafjörður and the Westfjords of Iceland. Alice Saunier-Picard, in an “Arctic Chronicle” written in 1968, underlined the extent to which aviation had revolutionized transportation on the island:

“A mostly mountainous country, mainly frozen and barren, with a jagged coastline, communities scattered over small coastal towns and isolated farms, its economy long stifled by the Danes’ market monopoly, Iceland, until the beginning of the twentieth century was deprived of roads and railway lines. It was short of ships for inshore navigation, while inland mobility took place exclusively on small horses.”

The development of air transportation in the twentieth century, and in particular the appearance of the first commercial jet airliners in the 1950s, transformed human movement on a global scale. Connections within and out of Iceland also improved significantly.

“Air transport in Iceland has increased dramatically: it compensates for the island’s isolation regarding the European and American continents as well as inland distances through glaciers and lava fields.” (trans. Françoise Décugis)

Vintage advertising by Icelandair shows spectacular sceneries, such as the rocky profile at the old Parliament fields, dramatic waterfalls, or emphasizes routes to Europe and North America. This strategy appears to have worked, as in Reykjavík today, it’s hard not to notice tourists who stop to jump in a hot spring on their way to or back from Europe or the Americas.

The airport in Ísafjörður is nicely tucked in the pit of Skutulsfjörður, and throughout my stay there, I will come to appreciate the landing and take-off of the local Icelandair plane on the one runway that is Ísafjörður airport. The arrival and departure board in Reykjavík indicated several destinations: Akureyri, Bíldudalur, Hornafjörður... Groups of business people mingled with hiking folks in the lounge, on their way to some similarly convenient runways.

In the well-illustrated Saga flugvalla og flugleiðsögu á Íslandi by Arnþór Gunnarsson (2018), bird’s eye views of local airports throughout the island repeat a geometrical motif: one, sometimes two perfect grey lines (in which case it’s a cross), on green grass and blue sea. In the 1950s and 1960s, when these airports were built, this concrete design was mirrored by a generation of abstract painters, such as Hörður Ágústsson, Benedikt Gunnarsson, Valtýr Pétursson, and Þorvaldur Skúlason. The most striking, if equally mysterious analogy, might be with the textile variations of such geometrical abstractions, as practised by artists such as Ásgerður Búadóttir.

The use of the grid was seen by the art historian Rosalind Krauss from its development in cubism to the abstract currents of the 1950s and 1960s as announcing “modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse... ”, its capacity “in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech” (R. Krauss “Grids”, October 1979). Without wishing to oppose the clear trajectory of introspection that the use of the grid implies in the history of modern art, its parallel proliferation in air transportation, city planning, and for better or worse planetary transformation points, in a complementary design, more to a flourishing of narratives.

Water, Wilderness and Industries

There are still people, nowadays, who come to Iceland by boat. Every week, several ships of different sizes anchor in town or just up the fjord, and packages of tourists flock into the cafés, shops, and restaurants on their Nordic tour. There are magnificent sceneries to be seen. The modern cruise industry, which emerged in the 1960s as flexible packages to enjoy sea and sun in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbeans, has taken the exoticism of ‘the last frontier’ (another vintage poster catchphrase) to Iceland. One of the attractions for the cruise tourists alighting in Ísafjörður is the folk museum, located in a historical house on the tip of the inhabited arch of land that stretches from the coast into the fjord. The museum is full of wonders, historical objects and pictures harking back to the old ways—fishing nets and baskets, waxed coats and boat models, and rudder and navigation maps, to name just a few.

Though what transported me to a distant past even more than this remarkable cabinet of curiosity—or perhaps completed the visit—was the looped screening of the 1996 film Ísland þúsund ár by Erlendur Sveinnson. In this docu-fiction, we witness a day in the life of fishermen before the modern age. At dawn, seeing that the weather is fair—in the late winter fishing season, days could be spent awaiting favourable conditions—the seven men put on their fish skin apparel, push the small boat down the wooden rails into the sea, and proceed to row out in the fjords and beyond, in search for fishing waters guided by an antique quasi-magical knowledge. The narrator’s voiceover comments in a suitably reverent fashion on the events that take place, the hierarchy that commands the relations between the men, and the hourly organisation of the day that will ensure a safe return to land. The place where the film was shot is just up the road in Bolungarvík, where the traditional turf-roofed cabin, fish drying and drying huts, now houses a small maritime museum.

At the very end of the film – spoiler alert! – visitors arrive from snowy hills: they are merchants bringing demands from the city and lands afar that herald the beginning of a new age, and ultimately, the demise of the traditional fishing practices which still connected men in the nineteenth century to archaic periods, characterised by human’s immersion into their natural environment. In the maritime museum in Reykjavik, on the other hand, the story of maritime industrialisation is told through trawlers and banners, the voices of workers and the clashes of the cod war, trading charts of herring and stockfish distribution from the United States to Russia, Spain, and Nigeria.

In the Westfjords, I notice a series of perfect circles floating on the waters, as if mysterious inscriptions inherited from forgotten deities. In an old fish factory in Djúpavík, the exhibition Moving Hands, Weaving Futures curated by Emilie Dalum presents works by ten women artists exploring craftsmanship in the maritime world. In the semi-darkness of the dilapidated hall, the magic circles appear once more, in the animated film Wild Summon (2023) by Karni & Saul, in which we follow the cycle of life of a wild female salmon, swimming downstream to the sea and back to the same spot to die, giving birth amidst a thousand dangers, from natural predators to the overwhelming destructive presence of humans. Having reached the sea, the protagonist salmon encounters the fish farms, in which members of her species, encaged, circle aimlessly, crippled by disease, their ancient natural ways erased by blind human appetite.

Earth on (Melting) Ice

A stern-looking figure, of small dimension, seated holding a cross-shaped object in front of him, wearing a conical hat, was unearthed in Eyjafjörður in 1816. Is it Thor, or Christ in Glory? Ari the Learned, of noble mantle going back to Olaf the White and Queen Aud, Vikings who roamed the Irish and British Isles in the ninth Century AD, tells the story of the settlers in the Íslendingabók (Libellus Islandorum), the founding of the parliament and the nearby landing in Greenland and Vinland. He is also deemed to have composed much of the Landnámabók, the detailed account and genealogy of the first Icelandic settlers: armed farmers looking for fresh pastures and low tax in the Icy North, mixed with Celtic blood,progressively converted to the Christian scriptures.

To settle in is to establish a home. Homes, however, just like our minds, may reveal themselves to be full of uncertain corridors, non-linear past, infinite successions of unsuspected rooms as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). In 2005, in Ísafjörður as part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival, artist Elín Hansdóttir installed a 150-metre-long tunnel in Edinborg House entitled Long Place, twisting and binding in monochromatic white. To the obscurity of the house of leaves, the crystalline whiteness of the snow and the glaciers drew an equally disorientating and interrogating path into our dwelling place, as seen from the Westfjords.

The pendant to the lovely bronze sculpture in Reykjavik History Museum might be a blunt imposing basalt stone from a cemetery in Borgarfjörður, the outline of a grieving figure carved upon its surface, in the likely depiction of Mater Dolorosa, the Virgin Mary lamenting the death of her son, Jesus of Nazareth, who is shown nearby crucified in a wooden Romanesque sculpture elegant and elongated, the thin stripes of his beard and moustache surrounding a line of lipped sorrow.

The history of cultural circulations in which the Vikings partake has been investigated by the archaeologist Cat Jarman in River Kings, following a carnelian bead’s filiations from England to Constantinople and beyond. The complex and multi-folded textures of the Icelandic settlement and its resonance in the twenty-first century are the object of contemporary academic analysis, with scholars such as Kristín Loftsdóttir unpacking the contrasted layers of colonial history and nationalism on the island in relation to European identities and margins. Having grown up in France, I have heard of the intrepid Vikings, who settled in Normandy, learnt French, and went on to conquer England and later on, Ireland. Halldór Laxness muses in Under the Glacier on a certain French fascination for the Icelandic North:

“Bishop: don’t you find it odd that the greatest French writers should have written books about Iceland that made them immortal? Victor Hugo wrote Han d’Islande, Pierre Loti wrote Pécheurs d’Islande, and Jules Verne crowned it with that tremendous masterpiece about Snæfellsjökull, Voyage au centre de la terre. That’s where Arni Saknussemm appears, the only alchemist and philosopher we’ve ever had in Iceland...”

The bishop of Iceland is talking to his representative, who is sent to the locality of Snæfells Glacier to investigate rumours of inappropriate religious behaviour on the part of the local pastor, not least that the dead appear not to be buried anymore.

Fire Walk With Vision

When I first arrived in Iceland, smoke, of course, already rose from the island, with a volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula near Keflavík airport making the news and even closing the famous Blue Lagoon. Not that this news could shake the spirit of the inhabitants: those are the grounds beneath the land and houses, a bubbly, mobile mass of red-hot lava. At the pub in Ísafjörður on a late Friday afternoon, it is not football that adorns the large in-house screens—although the national team has been performing with honour in the recent past—but 24-hour aerial coverage and close-up of the smoking pit in the south. On occasion, evacuation is necessary, as in the spectacular photographic documentation of the 1973 eruption in Heimaey on the southern coast of Iceland, in which the nascent Eldfell volcano was seen spitting ashes and golden lava right over the local white houses. In many ways, one could say that Icelanders do not so much live Under the volcano (1947), to refer to Malcolm Lowry's Mexican-based narrative, as on the volcano.

On the one hand, this complexion makes Iceland sublime. I don’t see this so much in the modern pictorial tradition, where fine paintings of post-impressionist heritage depict relatively serene scenes, as in Gunnlaugur Blöndal’s atmospheric take on Kötlugos, the eruption of Mt Katla in 1918. The town dormant in the foreground and lower third of the canvas, an equally tranquil large white cloud billowing above the distant horizon. Instead, it can be seen in the works of contemporary artists, where the sense of nature’s powerful and overwhelming forces, as they come to exert themselves in the Arctic, is conveyed in immersive and arresting pieces. Such is the 2024 exhibit of Jónsi of Sigur Rós at the Nordic National Museum, entitled Flood, in which visitors entered a pitch-dark room to the growing sound of thunder, sparks of lightning, and the smell of salted seaweed, in a cataclysmic work that furthered the artist’s 2021 Obsidian piece, an evocation of that year’s eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano.

On the other hand, the visible volcanic condition brings us back to Jules Verne, a position in between the scientific and the magical, where volcanology is apt at any time to morph into a journey of unexpected revelations. Such journeys searching for unprecedented forms of illumination can be found in the ancient history of Icelandic literature. In the Saga of Nitida, a Fourteenth-century tale that belongs to the genre of the riddarasögur, the feminine ruler of France, Nitida, embarks on a voyage to the island known as Visio, which “lies out beyond cold Sweden, out by the North Pole, the edge of those lands of which people have had reports”, where Virgilio, the sorcerer, commands supernatural stones she longs to see. They reach the island called Visio, the lake and the islet at its heart:

“They saw a floating boat there, took it, and rowed to the islet, where there were many oaks with beautiful fruit and fine apples. When they came to the middle of the islet, they saw a stone vessel with four corners. The vessel was full of water, and there was a stone in each corner of the vessel. The maiden-king looked into the stone; then she saw all the regions of the world, including kings and princes, and what each did, and all peoples, of every land, and many diverse creatures and monsters. The queen grew pleased at this sight, and took the vessel and the stones, apples and healing herbs, because she understood from her wisdom how magical each was.” (Trans. Sheryl McDonald)

An all-encompassing vision is a gift many human societies desire to obtain. And it might well be that Iceland, through its telluric foundations, is a privileged location to try and find it. At the end of my stay, I flew directly to Naples, under the shadow of Vesuvius, to participate in a workshop exploring the city’s metabolism, in a curious parallel to the signs that had emerged from my northern encounters. In these spatial movements across the surface of the earth, above and below, the superposition of times does not reveal a teleological secret, only a myriad of poetic assonances that connect us to past entities, within and outside of historical recordings.

No. 03/2025, 15 May 2025

This article is a part of the Arctic Circle Journal Series which provides insight, understanding and new information. The material represents the opinions of the author but not those of Arctic Circle.