Last Words: Where Is Icelandic Culture In 2025?

This issue, we reached out to some friends of the Grapevine to ask a simple question: where is Icelandic culture in 2025? Here are some of the responses.

“The past few years I’ve been living in Oslo, Norway while working on Icelandic music and trying to keep an eye on my island through the binoculars of social media. Sadly, my attention these past months has been drawn towards some negative sides of this beautiful culture scene that we have.

In March STEF published a report on how Icelandic copyright income is split between genders, revealing that in 2024 only 15.07% of copyright income was paid to female songwriters. On top of this, we saw some of the biggest festivals announce their lineups, which were even more disappointing. Kótelettan announced 34 acts, but only two of them were women.

As a young female artist, this landscape feels somewhat hopeless to work in. With that being said, there is a lot of hope and exciting things happening in the Icelandic music scene. Even though the top lists are far from being even, the grassroots scene is rich with creative and inspiring female and non-binary artists who can be our role models while the mainstream is catching up.” — lúpina, Nína Solveig Andersen, musician

“What lies at the core of Icelandic culture is the awareness of how thick a layer of fridge-cold butter you spread on your dried fish. But we are not untouched by the outside world. As elsewhere, the culture has been sucked into the reels of social media — where everyone is creative and the world is compressed. We share the hope with the entire world of capturing people’s attention in front of our creations for longer than three seconds in an endless stream of images, music, and experiences. If that doesn’t work out, one can always find comfort in having a bite of well-buttered dried fish and chewing it thoroughly and slowly.” — Halldór Baldursson, illustrator

“A defining factor of Icelandic culture is sköpunargleðin – the simple joy of making things. It’s essential in a country and economy determined to squash all wholesome activity. In winter lægðin – a uniquely Icelandic term for a meteorological phenomenon nobody understands – dictates moods, dissolves all plans, and we either charter-flight south or burrow indoors like hermits. Summer distracts with the broken promise of better times; we clock out at 13°C and return a few months later when the sun has started setting at a reasonable hour. Meanwhile the tourist economy, in its knuckleheaded mission of monetising everything, aims to erase whatever local culture it can’t sell. Yet, like the stubborn lúpína landowners battle each summer, culture refuses to give in — defiant, mischievous and joyful at its core.” — Árni Hjörvar Árnason, musician