Over the cold and barren sands: folk singing and folk memories in a northern Icelandic valley

ABSTRACT

This paper continues from the two previously published in Folk Life, that concern daily and seasonal life, women’s work and food production and preservation in the northern Icelandic valley of Vatnsdalur, in the later 1970s and after. It addresses the tunes and words of ‘folk-style singing’ in spontaneous contexts, in the home, farm work environment and at social events, noting that the practice later diminished, though it ceased only in about 2015, with the deaths of the leading singers. The relationship to the production of music in church is then considered. The paper then goes on to consider aspects of the general narrative folk tradition recounted at the period in question.

KEYWORDS:

• Tradional singing
• Folk verse-making
• Iceland
• Rural life
• Folk anecdotes
• Oral history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Feeding the ravens: clothing, food, women’s work and the recollection of change in northern Iceland, 1976–82’, Folk Life 60 (2022), 41–65, and ‘Recollections of an Icelandic valley: the farming and social cycle’, Folk Life 61 (2023), 135–158.

2. Thanks are due to Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir, of the The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies; and Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir of the University of Iceland, both of whom read the paper in draft and for comments and corrections. Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir, also identified printed versions of the vísur in the Ísmús Database of Icelandic Music & Cultural Heritage (https://www.ismus.is/). Jakob Jónsson, Sveinn Jónsson and Bára Grímsdóttir, grandchildren of the couple in question, gave comments from their own memories and background knowledge.

3. He seems always to have committed them to memory, and although some words may have been seen in printed form, for example in newspapers and magazines, in his earlier days, by the 1970s he had become almost blind through glaucoma.

4. Available at the websites https://ismus.is and https://bragi.arnastofnun.is.

5. Kvæðamannafélagið Iðunn: https://www.rimur.is. Lárus and Péturína’s family in Reykjavík were involved in this long-standing society, founded in 1929, and in other organizations of the same kind. At the time of writing, the Chair is their granddaughter, the professional folk singer Bára Grímsdóttir. There are similar organizations in other parts of the country, including Kvæðamannafélagið Gefjun in Akureyri. See too: Stemma: Landssamtök kvæðamanna: https://www.facebook.com/kvaedamannafelog/?locale=is_IS.

6. ‘Einn um nótt’, ‘alone at night’ is the author’s version, but it was apparently adapted locally to ‘einn um ferð’, alone on a journey’.

7. Recorded by the ethnomusicologist Helga Jóhannsdóttir (1935–2006).

8. The subject has been much studied within Iceland. Sometimes traditional instruments accompanied the singing, but this was not encountered in this area, perhaps because of the spontaneity of the gatherings at which the music was heard, sometimes outside. The absence of any musician among the people involved locally may also have been a factor.

9. The nineteenth-century Skáld-Rósa, ‘Poet Rósa’, (Rósa Guðmundsdóttir (1795–1855) from the nearby farm Vatnsendi) was remembered for her skill, as well as her scandalous lifestyle as a woman who left her husband and a wealthy farm for a lover, and poverty, but very few of her verses have survived.

10. His sister published a collection of his work: Í Forsæludal: Ljóð og vísur eftir Ólaf Sigfússon, ed. Sigríður Sigfúsdóttir, Akureyri: Bókaforlag Odds Björnssonar, 1990.

11. At least one other occasional poem, which was never heard sung or recited, was in print. There were also praise-poems on Lárus and his parents. Pride and strength in the face of the hardships of poverty and the battle of life, often cast in saga-heroic mould, were regular themes in poems extolling these and other farmers.

12. Unknown author. printed in Jóhann Sveinsson: Eg skal kveða við þig vel (Helgafell, Reykjavík, 1947).

13. The author, Skúli Gíslason, was a clergyman who grew up in Vatnsdalur. The verse appears in the collection of folklore by Jón Árnason, Islenzkar Sögur og æfintýri, 2 vols, Leipzig 1862; extended version Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri, ed. Árni Böðvarsson og Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 6 vols, Reykjavik 1954–61. Hereafter JÁ.

14. Composed by Valdimar K. Benónýsson from Ægissíða á Vatnsnesi (in the same county). The second line in both has been adapted by Lárus.https://bragi.arnastofnun.is/skag/visur.php?VID = 22102 and https://bragi.arnastofnun.is/hunafloi/visur.php?VID = 34580.

15. Composed by Ólína Andrésdóttir. https://bragi.arnastofnun.is/skag/visur.php?VID = 12823.

16. Published in the journal Skessuhorn, unnamed author. https://timarit.is/page/7158483?iabr=on.

17. See https://bragi.arnastofnun.is/skag/visur.php?VID = 15710

18. Composed by Sveinn Hannesson frá Elivogum.

19. Composed by Dr Hallgrímur Jónsson. https://bragi.arnastofnun.is/skag/visur.php?VID = 9402.

20. Composed by Benedikt Gröndal. Úr Göngu-Hrólfsrímum. https://timarit.is/page/2165602?iabr=on.

21. Composed by Sveinn Hannesson frá Elivogum. https://bragi.arnastofnun.isdiv/skag/visur.php?VID=32454.

22. Printed in Morgunblaðið, October 24, 2003. https://timarit.is/page/3482269?iabr=on.

23. Iceland: its Scenes and Sagas, London 1863, 132, 148–52; see also Plate 5. See too Power, ‘Feeding the ravens’, 43 and note 5.

24. Iceland: its scenes and sagas, p. 151.

25. Traditional handwritten paper manuscripts could still be found on farms. In the late 1990s Didda found one such, an incomplete text from the late nineteenth century of one of the later medieval sagas. She allowed it to be taken to the manuscript institute (then named Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi) in Reykjavík.

26. Tales of the supernatural, which formed a large part of the repertory, are not included in this paper, nor are the many stories Lárus told his visiting contemporaries about exploits on the heath, including those where his knowledge of the uplands was important to understanding them, whether they concerned guiding, seeking sheep and horses, or shooting birds for food and fox for the price on their heads.

27. Magnusdottir, J. ‘Gender, Legend and the Icelandic Countryside in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-Engaging the Archives as a Means of Giving Voice to the Women of the Past’, Folklore 179 (2018), 129–47. She refers (135) to there being only two women collectors in Iceland prior to 1980, one of them being the ethnomusicologist Helga Jóhannsdóttir, referred to previously. Júlíana refers here too to the male-gender bias of the most prolific story-collector of the period, Hallfreður Örn Eiriksson (1933–2005), who nevertheless collected from Péturína and other women, The author Elinborg Lárusdóttir (1891–1973) was in the mid-twentieth century one of the most prolific writers in Iceland, and her books were often found in rural parish libraries. Much of what she wrote of concerned the traditional rural way of life, in particular from a female perspective, but she also wrote extensively on spiritualism, the work of mediums and similar matters, seemingly seeing no contradiction with her role as a pastor’s wife. One of the key threads in her three-volume Förumenn concerns dreams around the recognition of a character’s aunt, who had drowned herself on her wedding day. In one key dream, the deceased women of the family were seen spinning like the Norns of the sagas, all except the mother who had forced her daughter to the unwanted match. (iii, 224–33). Something of the influence of Spiritualism and the way it fed into older traditions can be seen from the Theosophical Journal Gangleri (1926-), see http://www.lifspekifelagid.is/, which has a page in English. See too some of the older articles in Iceland’s oldest periodical, Andvari (1874-), https://www.thjodvinafelag.is/utgafa/andvari/. The influence is discussed in Simon Halink, ‘The Quest of Gangleri: Theosophy and Old Norse Mythology in Iceland’, in Northern Myths, Modern Identities, online, 2019, https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004398436/BP000014.xml

28. I was then aged twenty-two, with a B.A. Humanities degree, which had included some study of Irish folklore.

29. These do not seem to have been heard by foreign visitors, for there are no mention of them in the printed accounts from the nineteenth century, nor those from the 1920s and 1930s referred to in Power, ‘Feeding the ravens’.

30. ‘Feeding the ravens’, p. 60.

31. JÁ. The pagination of the original two volumes is given in square brackets after those of the six-volume edition. Vol. 6 is mainly indices, the last two in English, with references to Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, 5 vols, second edition, Copenhagen 1955. The stories in question are in i, 51–3 (51–3 in the later edition) ‘Priest associates with huldufólk’; iii, 228 (shepherd escapes from trollwomen), iii, 397–8 (priest raises dead man as draugur to kill county sheriff), and the stories of the priest Einar, iv, 239–40. Summaries of these and similar tales can be found online in the https://ismus.is database. An English summary can be found in https://sagnagrunnur.arnastofnun.is/en/.

There were also earlier published collections of folklore, including by Jón Árnason, and several other major folklore collections from Iceland. There are numerous pocket-sized books extracted from JÁ that circulated among the farms, as did paper manuscripts, chapbooks of cheap, printed versions of individual sagas (which were sometimes copied out by hand for wider circulation), and other small-scale booklets telling the stories of Icelanders considered admirable in some way, including farm labourers. See for example of printed works, Huldufólksogur : Úrval úr Þjóðsögum Jóns Arnasonar, [second edition], Reykjavik 1920, and Draugasögur, Þjóðsögur og ævintýri Jóns Árnasonar, Úrval, Reykjavik 1921.

32. Einar Eiríksson (1731–1810) was parson in Grímstunga 1759–85. He was defrocked and eventually died in poverty, in the home of an old woman. While the account in JÁ (iv, 239–40) has similarities, there are sufficient differences to indicate that Lárus’ version was not, or not primarily, derivative. These involve both the pithy if inappropriate sayings the priest seems to have been adept at, and his brutal conduct in the face of poorer people.

33. The farm was visited by three well-known British Icelandophiles, as discussed in the section above on folk music, and in the previous articles in this series. Sabine Baring-Gould visited ‘the little church and farm of Grimstúnga’ (sic) in 1861, who said that the church was a chapel-of-ease served from Undirfell, so perhaps Lárus’ recollection or that of his informant was slightly out, or this was a new arrangement when Baring-Gould visited. A ‘widowed housewife’ was their host, where Lárus’ account had two clergy widows. William Morris visited in 1871, and describes the journey to the farm through bitter August weather. On the heath, they encountered two men and a woman travelling from Grímstunga in the opposite direction, apparently on foot. He describes the ‘handsome stead of Grímstunga lying in its ample tún, and a new-built wooden church beside it’ though he must have mistaken the use applied to this new structure. He describes the hospitality they received there, where they stayed two nights, drinking coffee and brandy, thawing their clothes, eating, sleeping, buying ‘beautiful warm stockings’ from the ‘goodwife’, after which Morris took over the kitchen and cooked dinner (68–71). Surprisingly, he makes no mention of its place in saga literature, though he was aware of the Grettis saga tale of Glámr as associated with the heath above. W. G. Collingwood spoke of it in 1897 as ‘now a pretty and wealthy farm’, and sketched it, by which time the church was gone. His Preface to his book states the images ‘may be taken as fairly accurate, – all the more so because our work was often watched by the people of the place – old and young – who checked off every touch as it was laid; and there is nothing that puts a sketcher so much on his guard against playing tricks with the facts’ (v). Nevertheless, his representation of the farm re-orientates it from east- to south-facing, and does not include the churchyard, to fit it into the landscape, which he sketched faithfully.

34. The eruptions of Hekla in 1766–8, caused considerable loss of life, and especially in this northern county where it destroyed pastureland with ash, killed livestock and fish stocks; and the poor summers caused widespread hunger.

35. This form of address, a historic plural equivalent to French vous, was not widely used in rural areas and had almost entirely died out even in the city by the mid 1970s. A degree of compassion rather than respect remained for a clergyman, based in the local town, of the late 20^th century, who had a drink problem that at times led to his arrest and loss of driving licence, but not to his loss of ministry.

36. Power, ‘Feeding the ravens’, Power, ‘Recollections. The farming and social cycle’.

37. See Elinborg Lárusdóttir and Note 28 above.

38. The Mormons arrived in 1975, but their mission was short-lived. For some years, Reykjavík summers were enlivened by the presence of Dublin cohorts of the Catholic organization the Legion of Mary, who were bent on converting the Icelanders to Christianity. Local people practised their English conversation and some accepted a Miraculous Medal, until one year the small Icelandic Catholic Church succeeded in having their visas blocked.

39. This included even those that affected her own church affiliation, for she believed the Pope to be the Head of the Lutheran Church, Why else would he have come to Iceland?, she asked in reference to the visit of Pope John Paul II to Iceland on 03–04 June 1989. While some rural people of her generation had never been to Reykjavík, Didda visited the city often in later life, but left Iceland only once, when in her seventies she made a brief visit to Sweden.

40. A son, Helgi, named after his deceased sister, had died aged 18 of tuberculosis, and was sometimes mentioned, but more as a past grief than in the context of life after death, as the first-born child was.

41. This ended for alcoholic spirits in 1935, though beer remained prohibited until 1989. Inevitably, spirits were made illegally, and Lárus had tales of a nearby small farmer on the uplands who was known for his making of svarti dauðinn (black death), and the well-worn path to his door.

42. For comparable material see Anne O’Connor, The Blessed and the Damned: Sinful Women and Unbaptised Children in Irish Folklore, Peter Lang AG, Bern 2005. She has also referred to the practice in the inter- and post-war periods in London when poor women with stillborns would beg or bribe to have their child, sometimes wrapped only in newspaper, hidden in the coffin of a recently deceased adult designed for churchyard burial. (Personal communication, 1983.) In recent years, tests on the naturally mummified body of a seventeenth-century Bishop of Lund in Sweden found that he had had the remains of a pre-natal infant slipped under his robes near his feet. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/21/scan-mummified-body-swedish-bishop-reveals-baby

43. Svanasöngu á heiði by Steingrímur Thorsteinsson (1831–1913).