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From Away.com
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Finding Your Inner Viking (cont.)
Icelandic Gang Warfare: Nose Pinching
While the midnight sun blazes in the summer, winter in Akureyri, Iceland's northern capitol, must be less idyllic. Just short of the Arctic Circle, winter nights are punctuated with a three-hour day around noon. Suicides throughout Iceland rise in the winter. But try to find an Icelander who blames the darkness.

"Each season has its charm," says Tomas Olrich, an Akureyri native and a member of the Althing. "Many Icelanders look forward to winter. That's what it means to be young," he says, leaning toward me, a tall, blue-eyed man with gold-rimmed specs. "You look forward!" Tomas, a scholar of French literature, also confesses to reading lots of books in the winter. Although videos are making inroads, Icelanders are reputed to read more books than anyone else on the planet.



"We had a murder in 1993. And, a couple years ago, some guy had the audacity to try smuggling a few hundred grams of cocaine into Iceland. So you see what we're dealing with."
They have always been wordy folk. Even when their young democracy wobbled out of control, leading to horrible poverty that lasted from the 12th century through the 19th, Icelanders held the touchstone of their language. Through the winter nights, they huddled in damp, turf-and-stone huts, reading the sagas aloud. In the worst of times, brought by Danish exploitation and vomiting ash that smothered the grass and starved the livestock, they ate their beautifully illustrated calfskin books, and went back to telling the sagas from memory.

This linguistic tenacity has paid a peculiar dividend: The Icelandic language has hardly changed in a thousand years, meaning that Icelanders can still read their ancient literature. These days, to protect the historic tongue from the epidemic of Global Culture Fade, a panel of Icelanders is charged with inventing new terms as needed. The telephone, for example, is a simi, or "thread." A fax is a simibref, or "phone letter."

(There have been incursions, I was informed by a wry scholar at the Reykjavik museum where the ancient manuscripts are stored. "You can hear kids saying English swearwords—'fuck' and 'shit' and stuff that you hear in bad films. They'll take a word like 'shit' and conjugate it [in Icelandic]. It's a great pity," said white-haired Dr. Sverrir Tomasson, peering over his glasses at me with the tiniest grin. "We're losing all the Icelandic swear words.")

When I ask Tomas if winter leaves northerners cut off from the rest of the country, he launches into a surprising answer: Iceland hopes to have every home Internet-ready by the year 2001. Not that they feel out of the loop, mind you—when I ask if Icelanders feel cut off from the world, he chuckles, shaking a finger at me: "We feel that we are living in the middle of the world. Some say we have a complex of superiority. We feel we have a role to play in the world. You can doubt it. We never would."

Icelanders, who go a bit berserk for competition, Tomas says, have thrown themselves into such diverse world arenas as ballroom dancing, body-building (they boast the world's strongest man), chess (numerous Grand Masters), beauty pageants (two Miss Universes), and music (two symphony orchestras, and an opera star). Not bad for half the population of Boston.

Iceland's summer light begins a metamorphosis at about seven in the evening, burning more gold-red as the sun drifts toward the horizon. Green fields glow. Close hills turn deeper yellow; far-off mountains go from pale blue to heavenly purple, their glacier caps blushing faintly pink. All this intensifies as the sunset progresses, until at midnight every eyeful of Iceland is overflowing with color.

At ten o'clock, we emerge from the hills onto the long, green plain that runs south to the ocean. Unwilling to close our eyes on the unfolding beauty, we drive steadily east. Tractors work hay, and boys leap around a basketball net at midnight. When we finally camp near the white roar of a waterfall, the light is just graying. It is 1 a.m. before we can bring ourselves to call it a day. At a campground, I crawl into my tiny tent, and Mike collapses tentless in his sleeping bag. I am just dozing off when the nose-pinchers arrive.

Mike hears them approaching, tipsy and hushed. Debating whether to fake sleep or confront them, he opens his eyes just as a teenage Viking stretches her stealthy fingers to squeeze his snoop. She flees, squealing, and the reinforcements ride in. I swallow giggles in my nylon bunker as they interrogate the prisoner.

"Why aren't you in a tent?"

"Do you like Iceland?"

"Would you like a drink?"

"They were standing around looking down at me in my sleeping bag. I felt like The Head," Mike moans after they charge off. "They wounded me in the ego!"

In Reykjavik, an ex-Pennsylvanian we found driving a bus had warned us about Iceland's crime wave: "We had a murder in 1993. And, a couple years ago, some guy had the audacity to try smuggling a few hundred grams of cocaine into Iceland. So you see what we're dealing with." Wait 'til he hears about Icelandic gang violence, I thought.

And when Mike complains of his treatment to his Icelandic friend Marin later that day, I think her big, blue eyes betray something less than shock and innocence. I think Marin looks like a veteran nose-pincher.

But she sends us north with nothing but a kind bit of legal advice: "Remember, it is not allowed to drive on sheeps and horses."


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