introduction

Poetry and Other Worlds

By Anton Helgi Jónsson

Translated by Meg Matich

The first poem that I learned as a child was said to have been contrived by an elf woman.  I heard it from my mother, who never tired of telling me stories of the hidden world of the elves:

          Ló, ló, mín Lappa,
          sára ber þú tappa,
          það veldur því, að konurnar
          kunna þér ekki að klappa.

According to the story, Lappa was an elven-cow that appeared suddenly in the world of human beings.  It was locked in a stall in a cowshed.  In the human world, she became difficult to milk, but one evening, a voice outside of the barn window recited a poem of sorts to the cow.  The creature, or creatures, that recited the verse then stroked the cow and called her by her name.  After that, she became very easy to milk.

Poetry has been written in Iceland since its settlement over 1,000 years ago.  Some say that Icelanders have, from the very beginning, had a proclivity for literary creation.  In the sagas of the Icelanders, we’re sometimes told of poets who sailed to other countries and recited poetry for the king in exchange for payment.  In these stories, it’s almost as if the same language was used in all countries across Northern Europe, and that everyone understood everyone else.  In the present, on festive occasions, it’s sometimes asserted that modern Icelanders nonchalantly and happily read the old sagas and have no difficulty whatsoever understanding them.

That’s an exaggeration.  Most modern Icelanders can only read the sagas of our ancestors in special editions with updated spelling and grammatical conventions, and “dróttkvæði” — ancient Iceland’s highly stylized verses — are even less understandable. This also seems to have been the reality in our national past. When we dive into the histories of our poets, it’s clear that foreign kings didn’t necessarily or consistently understand the Icelanders’ poetic creations and even paid them to refrain from reciting — just as often as to recite — their poems. 

Modern Icelanders want to believe that they understand the old poets.  It reminds me of a belief in elves.  Throughout the ages, folk belief has transmitted the notion that beings — very similar to human beings — reside in Iceland’s hillocks and hillsides.  Those are the hidden people, the elves.  In reality, nobody believes in the hidden world anymore, but nobody wants to deny their existence either.  There’s a certain temptation to believing in fictional worlds. 

Icelanders also believe that not only the kings, but also the people of foreign lands wanted to listen to them and could, in point of fact, understand them.  These days, poets and authors travel around the globe with their creations.  Authors that write crime novels full of twists and turns draw the most attention, and are, in that way, alike the authors of the old Icelandic sagas — but a certain number of poets have also seen their work travel the world.

Which raises the question: is there something idiosyncratic about Icelandic poetry?  What characterizes Icelandic poets?

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Some say we’ve seen very little change on this island in the North Atlantic since the settlement period, and that circumstances remained more or less static well into the twentieth century — at which point civic society leapt from the Middle Ages into modernity in a few very short years.  The same essentially occurred in industry and employment and, conceivably, in poetry and the methods of its composition, too. 

Wise men say that the feature most peculiar to Icelandic writing is the usage of “bragreglur” — a manner of rhyming and syllabics in old Icelandic poetry — that’s been in fashion almost from the settlement age.  The most remarkable thing is that those who put together these verses, according to those strict rules, rarely receive the title ‘poet,’ nowadays; this activity is looked upon as a sport rather than a form of art or literature today. 

Around the middle of the twentieth century, schools of modern poets came on the scene, transforming poetry as it had been practiced for hundreds of years.  Many of these poets’ contemporaries accused them of belittling old traditions, saying that the new school belonged to a world that was closed off to others, and that their poetry was impossible to understand.  They were mocked with the epithet Atom Poets.

But the amazing thing is that poets continued to multiply, regardless of resistance to new ways of writing, and now there have never been more poets in Iceland.  Instead of being mocked

with epithets, the newest schools of poetry christened themselves — more often than not, tongue in cheek.  Listaskáldin vondu (The Bad Art Poets), Lystræningjar (The Desire Robbers), Nykur (a

mythological, murderous water horse), Nýhil (Nihil), Meðgönguljóðaskáld (Pregnancy Poets) og Svikaskáld (Imposter Poets).  It’s possible to glean a great deal about their trajectories from their titles, but seldom have they laid out a formal manifesto other than that which one can read into their names, which is often a play on or twisting of words.

In the past, television stations announced on the daily news when a new book of poems was published.  That meant that young writers who had just published their first book could make their name overnight, which hardly happens anymore.  Entering into the poetry community has become much easier — its relatively straightforward to publish a book or individual poems — but it’s become much more difficult to make your name as a poet outside of one’s particular ‘poetry’ group.

Can ‘names’ be more than labels?  Do names have meaning?  Do they carry something more ancient within themselves, or do they gain meaning from those that carry them through time?  Do we take on both that meaning and its history, its implications, as we build up our own names as individuals?

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Why are most people in Iceland named either Son or Dóttir (daughter)? a friend from Sweden once asked me.  Are they two families — the family Son and the family Dóttir?   This use of the patrynomic is the most prominent feature of the Icelandic naming system: children don’t take the last name of their parents in a traditional sense, but instead are assigned a last name according to their father’s first name — and occasionally their mother’s. 

In general, all men are in the Son-family.  Gyrðir Elíasson, Ísak Harðarson, Óskar Árni Óskarsson, Dagur Hjartarson, and Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson. But that begs the question: do they all belong to the same (skaldic) lineage? 

My feeling is that it’s either immediately or soon becomes apparent that each poet is his or her own world, is his or her own lineage. 

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Far into the twentieth century, one didn’t see women’s names appear among published poets.  Later, those absent women poets found their niche in being a dóttir, in belonging to a group or lineage of dóttir s.  Vilborg Dagbjartsdóttir, Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir, Linda Vilhjálmsdóttir, Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir, and Soffía Bjarnadóttir have all become important dóttir s. 

Some poets have received exotic titles.  Sigurður Pálsson was oft called S. Pálsson, as if to recall the meaningful influence that he brought with him from other countries and cultural centers.  Most commonly, poets are spoken of familiarly.  In Iceland, common practice is to speak of people using their first name, rather than their last, and it sometimes becomes difficult to puzzle out who people in other countries are speaking about when they bring up an Icelander.  Guðmundsson is a good poet, somebody said to me when I was attending a literary event abroad.  It took me a moment to realize that he was speaking about the Icelandic writer Einar Már Guðmundsson.  Away from home, our names take on new forms. 

Likewise, it’s fairly common for people to have two names and, when we’re speaking about poets, their second name becomes a sort of identifier; Kristín Svava, Einar Már, Ingunn Lára, Aðalsteinn Ásberg.  Some poets are rather in between worlds, and one doesn’t know, for instance, whether it’s “Lommi” or “Jón Örn Loðmfjörð” that we ought to speak of.  And abroad, is he  “Loðmfjörð the poet”?  What about Kári Tulinius?  Is he “Tulinius”?  Both are rather old family names, but these poets both represent innovative approaches to poetry.  And what if we were to consider the concreteness of Icelandic names, in their odd transparency?  In some ways, one might imagine that, if we were confined by the boundaries of our names, Fríða Ísberg (Iceberg) or Ingunn Snædal (Snow Valley) would be doomed to think and write about land and nature, their creative force stopped up by the literal.

Individuals react in very different ways to the names that their parents, society, and traditions have bequeathed them.  One poet, Gerður Kristný, wrote a book-length poem drawing upon a

thousand-year old Eddic poet that speaks of her namesake, Gerður Gymisdóttir; she places the story in a modern context, her radical verse giving her own name new meaning. 

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Over the past few years, there appears to have been a surge in interest in Iceland, and a significant number of individuals have immigrated to Iceland (non-native residents make up around 10% of the population).  In this group are many poets who don’t speak Icelandic as their mother tongue.  Some began to write in Icelandic and created Icelandic pen names for themselves, like Elías Knörr who is called Elias Portela in other places, knörr (‘knarr’ in English) being the type of ship that carried the first settlers to Iceland.  Poets are, of course, always engaged in a type of discourse with the world beyond themselves. But then why write in Icelandic, which is spoken by some 365,000 people worldwide?  If new creation can sustain language, even oxygenate it, then perhaps they believe that the future of the language rests on their shoulders, their powers of creation.  In turn, they carry on a sort of inheritance.  Or does it perhaps come down to something that’s unique about the Icelandic language, something that can’t be created in any other tongue?  Some new way of thinking, new possibility of meaning?

That applies to making your name, too.  Doesn’t it? 

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For the past few years, two books have been compiled by groups of women who chose not to have their names appear on the same page(s) as their poem(s).  They were called Ég erfði dimman skóg (I Inherited a Dark Forest) and Ég er ekki að rétta upp hönd (I Will Not Raise My Hand).  In one of the books, the names are listed in the appendix, but in the other, it’s impossible to tell who wrote which poem (other than by familiarity with their style). Such books, and their gestures, are remarkable when one considers how little time it’s been since women’s names began to appear in a literary context at all.  Some believe that it was in fact women who wrote the oldest and most remarkable poems in the Icelandic literary canon, and often point out that the Völuspá is said through the mouth of a female oracle.  It’s also clear that women have been primarily responsible for transmitting stories and poems from generation to generation. 

After all, the first poem that I heard in my childhood was of an elven cow, said to have been recited first by an elf woman.  Since then, I have always believed that literary creation is something carried over from the world of the hidden people.  I believe in the hidden world.  In the hidden world in every poet worth listening to, worth naming.