I bought How Iceland Changed the World by Egill Bjarnason months ago and I’ve been dipping in and out ever since without quite being able to bring myself to read it from start to finish. That I eventually achieved by literally scheduling a chapter a day in my calendar and now I’m certain it does indeed work better in small chunks.
Reviews generally describe this as hilarious, entertaining, fascinating, witty and so on. Frankly, I rarely agree when people say things like that but as I don’t read reviews before I read a book, I didn’t go in with my anti-hilarious prejudice. I did go in with my anti-book prejudice – as I’ve already said, I’d dipped in and out and failed to read it so I already had an idea of what I thought about it before I put my head down and charged my way through.
No, I didn’t find it hilarious, entertaining et al. In fact, it had its moments when it got a bit dry. It could be a little bit repetitive and for a book claiming to cover Iceland’s entire secret history, I can’t held noticing that five of the nine chapters covered just the last hundred years. A further one covered 1800ish-1900ish and that leaves three chapters to cover the first thousand years of Iceland’s existence.
The first three chapters are Icelanders discovering North America, Icelandic politics and the Danish years, and Laki. Yes, the untold sagas of Iceland’s role in the French Revolution. It may not be widespread knowledge but it’s certainly not “untold”. I told it right here on this blog – admittedly in a post that’s now been deleted and replaced with one that doesn’t mention that detail – how the huge Laki eruption caused widespread air pollution that resulted in crop failure across Europe, thus triggering the French Revolution. Well, no. Not in itself, but it was a contributing factor in the hunger of the people, who had no cake to eat. It does make the relationship between Iceland and Denmark reasonably clear but I don’t think it quite pushes hard enough the idea that Denmark made life very difficult for Iceland for a few hundred years. I also don’t think it quite pushes hard enough how Icelandic writing preserved the Norse religion. Tom Hiddleston wouldn’t have a career, or at least not the one he has now, if not for the medieval Icelandic writers because we wouldn’t know about Loki or Thor.
And what else happened between the eighth and nineteenth centuries? Well, the Danish centuries were quite quiet and quite dark and perhaps a more detailed account of those years would be a bit dry and academic but I still don’t particularly like how quickly the establishing years were skipped to get to the twentieth century.
The trouble is, once you hit the twentieth century, you get into modern warfare and politics. It’s all WWII, Cold War and Israel. I admit, Israel is part of a huge blind spot for me. You can’t know everything about everything; the world is just too big and complex for that, and it would take the rest of my life to really understand what’s going on and what’s been going on in the Middle East and even if I did understand, what answers could I provide? So I remain ignorant. I’m not sure how much the author understands either; a huge chunk of the Israel chapter is taken up with the family history of the Icelandic ambassador in the US. I think the point of that entire chapter is that the gentleman in question voted for Israel to join the UN.
I just can’t manage to take an interest in modern warfare. If I’m going to look at history, I want the early days. I want Vikings and Saxons and medieval cathedrals and axes and swords. I get that you can’t just skip over the war years because they and Iceland’s neutrality have shaped so much but it feels like four full chapters about various conflicts and I’d rather have had at least two of them set in Iceland’s Golden Age, back before the Danes came along.
The final chapter, Gender Equality, brings us crashing into the present day from 1972, via President Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the world’s first elected female head of state. She’s interesting and Iceland’s gender politics are interesting, being lightyears ahead of most of the rest of the world, but this chapter mostly sticks in the 70s and 80s and doesn’t really give us a picture of what Iceland is like in 2020/21. I suppose that’s not the book’s job: its subtitle is “the big history of a small island” for a reason and it would need a separate book to cover Iceland in the present day.
I quite like this book, as I said, for dipping into. Opening it to random bits of information is interesting but when you read it through in one go, it feels a bit less than the sum of its parts. It’s trying to tell about 1,200 years of history in nine events. I can’t criticise too much: I couldn’t have done a better job and yet when I read it, I feel like I would have done a very different job, although admittedly mine would have been three times the length.