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Björk’s ‘Cornucopia’: A Utopian Reverie For A World In Peril
“Imagine a future and be in it,” Björk sings in “Tabula Rasa,” the final song before the encore of ‘Cornucopia,’ an elaborate audiovisual production commissioned by The Shed, Manhattan’s brand new, state-of-the-art performance space. The line appears earlier in the show, projected…
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This is Ós: Ós Pressan Challenges What Counts As ‘Icelandic literature’
Since the days of sagas and skalds, the abundance and international distinction of Icelandic literature has always seemed an anomaly, deeply disproportionate to the nation’s tiny population and geographic isolation. Although the question of why Icelandic literature has achieved its iconicity has…
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Town Guide: Giant Eggs, Bones, Cake, And The Future In Djúpivogur
Just off Route 1 in the East Fjords, the buildings of Djúpivogur fill the interstices between a network of crumbling cliff walls. With about 500 residents and its own liquor store, Djúpivogur is a relative metropolis in the remote east. A member…
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Brewing Community: Beljandi’s Recipe For A Hoppier Breiðdalsvík
If you want to know how a hip microbrewery like Beljandi ended up in Breiðdalsvík, a tiny town in Iceland’s remote East Fjords, ask Elís Pétur Elísson about the mounted reindeer head that overlooks his pub. The story—like, perhaps, many good stories—begins…
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Town Guide: Local Beer, Swimming & The Freedom To Explore In Breiðdalsvík
Unlike its nearest neighbours to the north, which nestle within the steep embrace of narrow fjords, the small fishing village of Breiðdalsvík sits along a wide cove that opens onto a low-lying valley. Despite its miniscule population of about 140 residents, the…
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Antediluvian Architecture And Vegetarian Sausage: A Day In Berufjörður
The more miles I log on Iceland’s country roads, absorbing each landscape as it melts into the next, the more I find myself grasping for a vocabulary, an idiom, a metaphor to convey how each mountain, cliff, and waterfall fits into the…
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Writing Across the Chasm: Pondering Distance And Travel In Iceview Magazine
Situated halfway up the western coast of Skagi peninsula, the humble fishing village of Skagaströnd seems an unlikely headquarters for an international literary journal. Centuries ago, this northern town served as a major outpost for trade between Iceland and mainland Europe, but…
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Partus Gives Birth Abroad: The Icelandic Publisher Goes International
Since its inception in 2015, Partus Press has kept a finger on the pulse of the Icelandic literary scene, providing a platform for the newest generation of authors to showcase their work on a national scale. Beginning with the elegant, hand-bound chapbooks…
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Saga Spots: Searching for Egill in Borgarnes
Every time I drive by the gas stations and supermarkets along Route 1 as it passes through Borgarnes, I’m reminded of the stark disjunction between the town’s substantial medieval inheritance and the prosaic reality of modern day life there. Although Borgarnes was…
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Miss Vanjie Of The North: A Borgarnes Monument To An Insignificant Saga Character
You would be forgiven for assuming, upon visiting Borgarnes, that the elegant modern monument atop a hill in the town’s old centre commemorates some crucial figure or moment from local history. Carved in stone, the sculpture takes the shape of a ram’s…
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Travel Tips From W.H. Auden: Letters From Iceland, Seventy Years Later
With fascism and nationalism beginning to take hold in a handful of western nations, two idealistic Oxonian poets realise their lifelong dream of traveling to Iceland, and publish an interdisciplinary travelogue comprised of poems, letters and archival anecdotes. No, this isn’t a…
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Saga Spots: Glaumbær
In Glaumbær, just north of the truck-stop town Varmahlíð in Northern Iceland, a modest memorial commemorates a paradigm-shifting moment in the history of transatlantic exploration. A bronze statue beside the settlement’s old church portrays a woman standing on a comically small longboat;…
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Saga Spots: Krosshólar
With not so much as a gas station along the road, the peninsula that juts out into Breiðafjörður between Snæfellsnes and the Westfjords is a seldom-visited region in Western Iceland. A dirt road branches out from Route 60 just north of Búðardalur,…
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New Old Reykjanes: Looking And Seeing On A Lazy Day Trip
“Sleepy” is an adjective so frequently and tiresomely appended to the noun “town” that together the phrase “sleepy town” seems to convey nothing at all, save an author’s uninspired attempt to recycle generic diction for a specific circumstance. Yet here in Hafnir,…
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Saga Spots: Gunnarshólmi – I’ll Ride Home and I Won’t Depart
“Lovely are the slopes—never have they seemed lovelier—the pale cornfields and mown meadows.” So proclaims Gunnar, gazing upon his hillside settlement at Hlíðarendi in the south of Iceland. As recounted in Njáls saga—perhaps the most beloved of the medieval Icelandic sagas—the hero…
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Saga Spots: Berserkjahraun—Where To Bury Your Daughter’s Suitors
Perhaps it’s a familiar problem: your brother acquires two ferocious fighters as a gift from a foreign potentate, then palms them off on you when they prove brash, obstinate, and unmanageable. Soon enough, one of them is hitting on your daughter and…
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Saga Spots: Island of Outlaws
The island of Drangey stands like a naval fortress in the waters of Skagajförður in northern Iceland. Once a maritime volcano, its sheer tuff walls rise about 180 metres from the sea in the middle of the long fjord. Atop the rocky…
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Adventures Close To Home: A Trip To Borgarnes
It’s an hour’s drive from the capital to Borgarnes, and, on this Good Friday morning, old-time Southern gospel seems a fitting soundtrack for the familiar bucolic stretch of Route One that normally constitutes a forgettable leg of long-haul treks northward. I’ve not…
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Saga Spots: Helgafell, The Holy Mountain
Just off the road linking Stykkishólmur to the rest of Snæfellsnes, Helgafell (“Holy Mountain”) rises 73 metres above the flat, bucolic landscape of Þórsnes headland. Although unassuming against the backdrop of Snæfellsnes’s rugged spine, it stands out as the tallest and most…
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Pull Up Your Socks! Tanja & Loji’s Nu-Sportswear
As last month’s DesignMarch put the freshest ideas in Icelandic design on display, artists Tanja Levý and Loji Höskuldsson presented a project inspired by a field that may seem at odds with the world of art and design. In their playful new…
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Kalifornía Dreaming: Icelandic Music Goes To LA
“Welcome to Iceland. Don’t like the weather? Wait fifteen minutes.” So goes the clichéd joke about Iceland’s capricious meteorological tendencies—windy and wet one moment, sunny and still the next, but never comfortable enough for shorts. As a spring storm snowed, sleeted, and…
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Ramsplaining: The Icelandic Word of 2016
Hey girl, let me tell you about the Icelandic word of 2016, hrútskýring. It’s a portmanteau of the words hrútur (“ram”) and útskýring (“explanation”) and I probably need to connect the dots for you and clarify that it’s an Icelandic gloss for…
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Grapevine’s Best Of 2016: An Antiquarian Book Lover’s Guide To Reykjavík
Reykjavík is a relatively small city, but even so, sometimes you need a bit of local advice to find what you’re looking for, whether it’s a good people-watching spot, somewhere to see some contemporary art, or the best place to catch an…
