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Download "The fairies made me do it" pdf The fairies made me do it Ani Lamont ponders sanity in the face of Iceland.
Four months ago, before the affects of an Icelandic winter’s perpetual darkness had taken its toll on my sanity I don’t think I would have found myself clambering up onto a roundabout in the middle of a 6 lane free way, waving at the quizzical drivers telling them to pass by, muttering ‘utlinger, utlinger’ (‘outsider, outsider’) as some form of explanation. My brain and body would still be connected. But that’s exactly where I found myself. As it is, logic stands at the edge of the road watching as the body hurls itself out to the mercy of oncoming traffic. Finally logic condescends to cross the road and explain, once again what I am doing. This is the roundabout, made ‘famous’ by Reuters in the 80s. Second roundabout heading out of Reykjavik. Once long ago, Reuters ran a story about the trials and tribulations being faced by the Icelandic Roads Department in their attempt to build a simple roundabout. A series of disasters kept striking the project. The foreman died of a heart attack, the equipment stopped working, someone was nearly crushed to death. A spirit medium from the church of Odin was called in, who deciphered that the area was cursed, by the restless soul of a woman long deceased. A group was formed to channel and evict her from the premises. In modern Icelandic society there are two separate modes of thought running concurrent to one another. One runs narrow and straight following the path of European progression, past the clear yellow signposts ‘ENLIGHTENMENT’, ‘INDUSTRIALISATION THIS WAY’, ‘GLOBALISATION 200 kms’. The other meanders around the mountains and up and down the basalt cliffs of the Icelandic coast, driving people’s thoughts back to ancient superstitions and beliefs in the Hudulfolk, the ‘hidden people’ or nature spirits. Highway One, the only major roadway in Iceland, circumnavigates the island in one big loop. Perched atop my roundabout in the middle of this giant bitumen circle I look around to behold Reykjavik. The glacier Esja stands resolutely on the other side of Smoky Bay. She looks to my untrained eye like a shabby mountain that couldn’t be bothered to grow a proper peak. Like the sight of a mother in a daggy sundress and crumpled hat, her presence is warm and calming as she stands watch over the menacing grey and mauve waters of the North Atlantic. Abiding her wishes to not play rough, they take only small, playful swipes at the brightly coloured little boats bobbing about in the harbour.
The children of Reykjavik scuttle about their lives. Workers hop into bright yellow hydrogen powered buses to be chug chugged away leaving bright white plumes of water vapour behind them. Further over to the left of the bus station where the city centre rises in a great hump teenagers use a snow shovel as a makeshift toboggan to slide down the great white hill. Beyond them I can just make out the top of Hallgrimskirjke. The church with its unique design based on the natural shapes of glaciers looks like a great concrete jelly mould perched atop the city. I remember Reykjavik as I saw her on my first day, from the top of its steeple. A mass of primary coloured little houses with sloping corrugated roofs. A little play town sitting in a circle of geyser mist. I could not help but get the distinct impression that this town had indeed been made by fairies. As a little girl I spent hours in my Mother’s garden looking for the fairies that I knew hid in the blue Corn Flowers. I knew never to pick the smooth white Trumpet Flowers because that’s where fairies liked to sleep, and I knew that I mustn’t jump on grates in the footpath because I might fall through to where the goblins lived. Over the years though, that knowledge was all replaced. Standing above this little city, plucked straight from childhood fantasies, the mind started to loop back to this earlier way of understanding. There are problems involved with trying to assimilate into the seemingly nonsensical world of Icelandic thought though. Not brought up in it, I was ignorant to the customs and rules. One night, sitting in a relatively empty bar I made the grave mistake of trying to light my cigarette off a candle on the table. I placed the tip between my lips and started towards the flame. Imagine my surprise when not only did the friend sitting with me, but the bar tender as well grabbed for the candle before I could get there. The man now clutching the candle looked at me like I’d just tried to kill his first born child then scowled, clucked his tongue and walked back to the bar. I turned to my friend (cigarette still pursed between lips). “You can’t light a cigarette off a candle, you’ll kill a sailor.” It’s an old superstition he began to explain. Fishing boats used to carry water tight lanterns so they could see each other through the winter darkness. If a light went out it meant the North Atlantic had claimed another boat and more lives. So it came to be that the flame of a candle represented a spirit. To light a cigarette off a candle is not only disrespectful to the sailor that died, but steals some of his spirit away. As the North Atlantic still continues to charge a fee of dead bodies each year I suppose there has never been a reason to stop this tradition. Still, within the context of Reykjavik, a modern city with wireless connection in every café, it is often difficult to accept this prevailing mysticism, especially when your flatmate keeps blaming his lost keys on ‘the fairies’. Then a venture into the countryside reminds you once again how this all ‘makes sense’ in a backwards way. Travelling East along Highway One the land is completely flat – just one sprawling mass of cooled lava and volcanic rocks. After hours of driving along, without seeing anything with higher altitude than a clump of moss, there suddenly appears giant pillars of rock standing right out on the edge of the cliffs; their incongruous appearance a disruption to lava gazing meditations.
The geological explanation, as my guidebook so dutifully told me was that these were once volcanoes. Their surfaces now eroded away by strong winds, all that remains is the funnel of the volcano that brought lava to the surface. The folklore story behind them provided by an Icelandic friend was that they were once believed to be goblin’s cathedrals, built for practicing black magic. On exploring the surfaces of the structures, this explanation began to make more sense. There must have been a master architect from the goblin world who spent time carefully considering art deco aesthetics before choosing his design of geometric sunbursts surrounded by a symmetrical feathering pattern. He positioned the structures exactly so light would be captured at just such an angle to create an artificial halo that would reside over his church of the dark arts. My friend and I scrambled up and down, and round and round ‘the cathedral’ colonising it as our jungle gym for the afternoon. The inner child greedily sucked up remnants of energy from the volcano heart right through the soles of our sneakers. Payment would have to be made to the Goblins though. All I had to offer was logic, and so I left her chained down there on the Goblins’ alter. On the drive back to Reykjavik, Dutch chocolate was scoffed to keep the high running. The sugar rush giggles were unquenchable as we drove back around the roundabout I’d once surmounted. The body now a tingle and logic left somewhere behind in the barrens of Iceland. |
