Tjörnin at midnight.
Photo by the author.
Part three of my columns on Iceland. Previously: Oxararfoss and Njord.
This candle has traveled further in its short life than I traveled in the first twenty-two years of mine. I bought it at my favorite metaphysical shoppe back home.1 It came with me from Missouri to Minneapolis, and from there, to Reykjavík, where it sat on the hard plastic desk bolted to the wall of my dorm room for the first week of my stay. Now we are sitting at a picnic table hidden in a copse of trees next to Tjörnin, a lake in downtown Reykjavík, my candle and I. I am looking at it in the half-light, running my fingers along its surface. It is ten inches tall, with a white wick. Anywhere else in the world, I would describe it as midnight blue, but “midnight” is such a variable color in Iceland.
This boot knife came from a dealer’s booth at the Heartland Pagan Festival near Kansas City, long enough ago that I do not remember the exact year it came into my life. Its handle and sheath might have been gold, once, but that color has faded, in parts to silver and in parts to rust. Its blade has never been sharp. The unsheathed knife now rests in my right hand; I press its dull blade into the blue wax of the candle, cutting deep, straight lines into its surface.
This cup came from a ceramics department sale held in 2006 at the university I attended then. Its bare clay is the color of wet sand, the glaze closer to brick. There is a runic message drawn around the stem of the cup in blue acrylic paint: ODRAIZ. I found the formula in an Edred Thorsson book years ago and copied it without bothering to take notes; I have no idea what it is actually supposed to mean. The cup sits before me on the picnic table, full of a pilsner named for Egill Skallagrimsson, the priciest beverage sold at the 1011 convenience store near the dormitory. I believe the sculptor intended for it to be used as a flower vase.
This hammer came from a hardware store in south St. Louis; it has no further story, and is clearly the least sentimental of the tools arrayed in front of me.
It is the middle of the shortest night of the year, and I am sitting in a public park with a lit candle, a dull knife, a cup, and a sledgehammer. Clearly, the time is right for magick2.
MIDSUMMER, I carve into the wax. If I were more clever, I would have thought to look up phrases in Icelandic for this purpose before I left for Tjörnin, but it was too late for that now. I had to settle for English words, in letters that predated either of the languages that currently make up my world, the language of my birth (the language of power, comfort, ignorance, colonialism) and the language of this land (the language of frustration, error, isolation, faith.) ICELAND, MIDSUMMER 2014 I carve, along with three other words, and I set the candle to burning, to release my spell into the night.
I lean back on my elbows and watch people – mostly young, mostly drunk – pass by on the sidewalk that rings the lake. If any of them noticed me, the large, bearded man in a cloak burning candles at midnight, none of them said anything. I feel invisible and safe in that invisibility. I go back to my ritual – eating bread I had consecrated earlier, along with another draught of Egil’s Gull – and see someone approaching, walking down the path into the woods. It is an old woman with white hair and a lavender tracksuit.
(Even as I write this memory, I remember it in darkness: a deeper night, denser trees, and no light except for my little candle. I remember the woman entering into the light cast by my candle. But that is absurd; the lack of true darkness was my impetus for doing my Midsummer ritual at midnight in the first place.)
The woman comes over to my table and says goða kvöldið, good evening. I respond: Gott kvöld. She sits down at the picnic table, not seeming to notice all of the ritual paraphernalia that I had laid out in front of me, except for the candle, which she warns me I need to be careful about. She had been afraid that I was vandalizing the picnic table; I am not sure where I could have done so, since carvings and words written in thick black Sharpie already covered the entire surface of the table.
We talk for an hour or more, about language (the declension of Icelandic numbers), travel (the years she spent abroad in France and the other Nordic countries), and tourists (they had completely ruined Gullfoss, she claimed.) After we had been talking for a while, she eyed the table, taking in the knife and the hammer and the cup. “Are you practicing Ásatrú?” she asks. I nod and explain that I had come here in part because of Ásatrú. “I think that it is very beautiful,” she says. English words came slowly to her; she had to consider every sentence before she spoke.3 But when she got the words put together, they came out in a pleasant, musical rhythm. “They have such respect for nature. It is very beautiful.”
We do not go to parks in the middle of the night where I come from; the only people to find there are drug users and drug pushers, and I would have been taking my life in my hands to do this. (Or so I had been told all my life, anyway – whether experience would bear that out is another question.) Here, old women in tracksuits were perfectly happy to go jogging at one AM and stop for long talks with cloaked Americans when the opportunity presented itself. While I had several moments where I encountered the sublime in Iceland, this might have been the most genuinely otherworldly point of my visit.
The old woman leaves eventually, with no more explanation than she gave when she sat down, and I am still bemused by the encounter. I begin the process of closing up my ritual. It is, by now, three AM; I had, at one point, considered going to a nightclub after the ritual with some of my twenty-year-old classmates, but the bars had long since closed by now. I gather up my tools and stuff them into my pack, ready to go home.
The candle is the last to go. I run my thumb across the grooves of the three words I had carved earlier in the night. I will return.
Notes:
1. Pathways New Age Books and Music, in lovely South County, St. Louis. Tell ’em they owe me twenty bucks.↩
2. Yes, I use a k. Spell it however you want.↩
3. Though of course, her English was better than my Icelandic. In English, we had a long and engaging conversation about life, language, and religion; in Icelandic, I might have managed to ask her for directions to the post office.↩
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Nice post Eric, you sure know how to write! I also understand the rather heart-warming feeling to know that in Iceland, bein Ásatrú is neither odd nor queer. I hope your spell worked too. Regarding that, using candles and such, aren’t you afraid that fellow Heathens might call you fluffy?
They have before and I’m sure they will again. I don’t really mind. People value different things. Personally, I don’t understand why anyone feels they have to be “just one thing.” I am Wiccan, because my parents are Wiccan and that’s how they raised me; I am Heathen, which that was a discovery I made for myself; and I have also been, at times, a ceremonial magician and a Taoist. I don’t see why any of those things should preclude the others.
Thank you for the compliments!
It’s funny, I don’t understand the whole multi-path mindset. Takes all sorts, eh? 😀
Yeah – I should say that it really is a question of my not understanding, not of my disapproving. It’s just not the way I know how to think.
Seems that we are opposite sides of the same coin, here.
I have to admit that I don’t really understand the way some Heathens are completely closing themselves from the greater Pagan movement. I personally don’t mind, I think as long as it’s Pagan, there should be no grounds for conflicts.
In any cases, thanks again for your post, a big hail from Reykjavík.
That’s the thing, though, what makes a thing (big P) “Pagan”?
Heathenry has about as much in common with Druidry or Hellenismos as it does with Hinduism. Possibly less.
I am friends with Pagans, Heathens, Atheists and Christians. Doesn’t mean I am any of those things.
I liked this. There’s nothing like reading about someone living and practicing their faith everyday, except maybe hearing it first hand. Always good to have a reminder to center yourself more. Thank you.
Ever consider if the old woman was just an old woman? Considering the old stories she might represent something else.
Meanwhile you write well and you story is simple and true which says a lot itself. It is your own personal saga.
As to what others think. It does not matter because they will judge regardless whatever you do. Follow your gut feeling. Some might say follow your wyrd.
Meanwhile there will always be some of us that stay in touch with many different communities rather that isolate to just the one we live in.
I got that feeling too, as if she might be at least a locality spirit (the Latin escapes me right now), if not Someone Else. I do not speculate on who that might be.
“Genius Loci”. Most cultures have a similar concept, such as the Landvættir of Heathen lore.
I thought it might be “genius”, and “genus” has the wrong meaning for this, I thought–but had no time to check. Thank you!
Not a problem, the concept of the spirit of place is actually very much central to my world view. I call it “Landisc Belief”.
I have named my personal take on Heathenry “Frumcræft” and am working on codifying it in a coherent manner for others to understand.
One of the core tenets of Frumcræft is the concept that the
Ƿihta dwell within the land and are connected to specific locations. There is no omnipresence in Frumcræft, no ever-watchful being spying on us at all times.
Not all Ƿihta are the same and, thus, not all have the same
size home ranges. The British Isles are scattered with sacred sites from the various incoming cultures. We have springs, wells and trees, hills, woods and more with recorded connection to specific Ƿihta.
Further to this, we can find references to Ƿihta with wider
territories. There are sites named for the Ēse across north-western Europe, some more widely spread than others. For example, we can find places named after the pan-Germanic god, *Wōđanaz, in such diverse locations as Estonia, France, Norway and the British Isles.
The idea of a being that can transcend location and be
everywhere, at the same time, all of the time is an alien concept to Frumcræft and is rejected as hyperbole.
An interesting aspect to this concept is the potential of
overlapping territories. The British Isles is a land of overlaps. On the east we have stronger Germanic influence whereas to the west it is more Celtic,
but there is no clear cut line, and we can find the sacred sites of both cultures across the Isles, sometimes even in the same places. Indeed, some sites have even been “claimed” by Christianity and dedicated to saints, often of dubious provenance.
This overlapping is not without problem. Half-forgotten
social memories have created a series of characters that are fairly unique to the British landscape; from Jack O’ the Green to Herne the Hunter. Often, these can be shown to have a fixed basis in a particular locale and legend, only to
have other legends blended with them. Herne, for example, started as a ghost of a huntsman in Windsor forest, but has had other scraps of legend attached to him so that modern perception often sees him as one of the masters of “The” Wild Hunt, with antlers like the continental Cernunnos.
Another aspect of Landisc Belief involves funerary rites.
When a person dies, it is common practice to consign their remains to the land, either directly through burial or, increasingly often, through scattering the ashes of someone who has undergone cremation. It used to be that the community burial area was close enough to the settlement that the deceased ancestors would be able to watch over their living family members. In a sense, this means the people really belong to the land.
It must be mentioned, however, that family is not merely
those to whom you are related by blood but those with whom you share a strong familial bond. Whilst this may well include genetic family, it also extends to those who are fostered or adopted and those with whom long term friendship has become something stronger. These individuals can then become part of the spiritual family and
will take their place watching over the family from the grave.
Imo Reykjavík is probably the least “magical” place in Iceland. It’s basically a huge city (for Scandinavia) and fr having lived there for quite while I can say that I rarely get any good feeling there. The rest of the country however, is completely different, especially in the Westfjords and you can really get a feel of something just by being out there.
There were parts of Reykjavik where I definitely felt something – I got caught in the rain walking to Nautholsvik on my second day in the country, right next to the ocean, and I felt deliriously alive. I wish I’d had more opportunities to get out into the country. (Next time!)
imo teh best place that’s still close to Reykjavík is Hvalfjorður, or, even better, the mountain passe between the fjord and Þingvellir.
I love your writing so much, Eric. You really set a scene and draw the reader in. I’ve especially loved these articles about your trip to Iceland!
Thanks!
As I’ve been reading the diaries of Rei on DailyKos.com, regarding that wonder named Bárðarbunga (which I think I can pronounce correctly, even with the trilling), I’ve been reading of her frustrations in learning Icelandic, or feeling confident enough to speak it casually. I heard some reporters talking about a music festival in Reykjavík just as Bárðarbunga was starting to be seismically active. I loved the sound of the language, and would like to find a teacher hereabouts to see if I can learn it well enough to use it in travel.
I have now eaten skyr, and will eat more.
I would do unconscionable things to acquire decent skyr in the US. There’s stuff that calls itself skyr here, but it’s both expensive and not nearly as good as the Icelandic stuff.
Darn. Guess I’ll just have to figure how to get to Iceland so that I can taste it.
Do let us (or at least me) know if any appears that meets your standards (or Iceland’s).
You know, there is always the option of making your own…
IF you can get the right bacillus culture and IF it doesn’t mutate/die out & get the local strains, the way SF sourdough culture will, when it is used anywhere else.
I’m not a food scientist! I only read them now and then.
Even if you use a different bacillus strain, you should be able to get a rough approximation, surely?
What brands have you tried? I am only seeing Siggi’s around here, although another brand beginning with S also claims to be available in Silly Valley.
Thank you for writing this. I could visualize everything and could almost feel the cool air. Beautiful.
Takk fyrir!