I still can not say what, but there is something lyrical about Icleand. Some days ago I stumbled upon a website by Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson Rax with some stunning photos depicting the struggles - and joy - of life in rural areas and the vanishing lifestyles in the North Atlantic (Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands).

Born in 1958, Ragnar Axelsson is probably Iceland’s most famous photographer. He has worked as a staff photographer for the Icelandic newspaper “Morning Paper” since 1976 and have had his work published in Life, National Geographics, Time and others. Ragnar is also a recipient of the “Oskar Barnack Award” (2001) that is awarded to photographers whose “powers of observation most vividly express man’s relationship to his environment”.

Ragnar really gets to know his subjects because he lives amongst them,  he interacts with them and experiences what they experience, namely a world where the daily struggle against the elements is a constant battle to survive. I saw some of his images from the book “Faces of the North”, and I won’t attempt to try to put into words what is best expressed in the images. So, here is some images:

more photos

Letters from Iceland is title on a travel book made up of a series of letters by W. H. Auden and MacNeice that they wrote during their trip to Iceland in 1936. I am not going to write about this book, but about what a friend of mine from Iceland wrote to me once when I wanted to visit her:

Few people take interest in Iceland, but in these few the interest is passionate. We live maybe surrounded by ice, but we are like geysers. The remoteness of our contry in combination with its political and Viking history, make it just to be an amazing place visited by people with strong and very hyper romantic preconceptions.

I am neither hyper nor romantic, but I still want to visit Iceland - partially because of Gudrid, but partially because of what I saw and heard in this movie:

Most people know that Vikings explored North America five hundred years before Columbus. They recognize the name Leif Eiriksson and his father Eirik the Red, who discovered Greenland in 985 and set up a settlement there. But fewer have heard of the voyages of Gudrid, so called The Far Traveler. Her name appears in “The Saga of the Greenlanders” and “The Saga of Eirik the Red“:

She was nineteen, newly wed for the second or third time and pregnant for the first. With her were her second husband, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and three Viking crews in clinker-built boats. They were sailing to Vinland, a fabulous land that Leif Eiriksson, son of Greenland’s founder Eirik the Red, had washed up on a few years back, when he was caught in a summer storm, sailing west across the icy North Atlantic from Norway. It was Gudrid’s second attempt to get to Vinland. She meant to settle in this New World. At summer’s end, the crews beached their ships on a grassy shore and built a longhouse out of turf; there Gudrid gave birth to her son Snorri. For three years they explored their Vinland, or “Wine Land.” They found salmon and halibut, tall trees and lush grasslands, wine grapes, and a grain like wheat. They saw islands full of eider ducks, bears, or foxes, mountains and marvelous beaches, fjords with fierce currents and wide tidal lagoons. And they met strangers whose language they could not understand, strangers who had never seen an axe or a bull, who were delighted by the taste of milk and traded packs full of furs for thin strips of red wool cloth; strangers who fought with stone-tipped arrows and whose numbers were overwhelming. After three years, the Vikings abandoned their settlement more

“The Far Traveler” written by Nancy Marie Brown tells the story of Gudrid, an Icelandic woman whose travels took her to Greenland, Rome and North America. With the help of scientists, archaeologists and 21st century technology, Nancy Marie Brown uncovers Gudrid’s travels who have been the subject of myth and legend until recently. I got this book from Goran, and was pleasantly surprised finding out much more about Viking culture and how their women were praised for being brave and tough, just like the men. From today on Gudrid is my favourite female hero in history.

Gudrid and her son Snorri at the National Park of her homestead in Laugabrekka, Snaefellsness

PS: A great lecture and a slideshow by Nancy Marie Brown