The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

19 The Icelandic Tradition of Silence 2009

In those days, silence was one of the pillars of Icelandic culture. People didn’t resolve their arguments through dialogue, and they were more skilled at interpreting silences than asking questions. They believed it was possible to erase a person’s entire existence through the sheer power of silence. But that was understandable, of course: we were crawling out of the millennium of muteness that had reigned over land and sea, when our strife required no words, so that they were best stored in a book in the communal living room. This is the reason why the Icelandic language didn’t change in a thousand years – we virtually never used it.

For centuries on end, very little was said in Iceland. Because people so rarely met. And when they did meet, they systematically avoided conversation. In our living quarters, people listened to readings, in churches to sermons, at big birthdays to whole speeches; and when the population started to grow, in the twentieth century, we developed the perfect way to preserve our silence: whist. Icelandic was much more a written language than a spoken one. It wasn’t until we started to learn other languages that we realised we could use language for other things than poetry, writing and reading.

I’ve heard it said that the great Icelandic silence came from a pact that was made with the Nordic countries: they would leave us in peace, provided we preserve the language for them, since they were rapidly losing it from sucking up to the French and German courts. And one shouldn’t touch the things one is keeping for others. They, however, didn’t hesitate to break the pact, since before we realised it, we’d been turned into their colony. Now they expect us to speak their watered-down variation of the golden treasure we stored, the Latin of the North, no less.

We Icelanders therefore walk around with gold in our mouths, a fact that has shaped us more than anything else. At least we don’t squander words unnecessarily. The problem with Icelandic, however, is that it’s far too big a language for such a small nation. I read on the web that it contains 600,000 words and over 5 million word formations. Our tongue is therefore considerably bigger than the nation.

I did get to know other languages pretty well, but few are as solemn, because they’re designed for daily use. German strikes me as the least pretentious language, and its people use it the way a carpenter uses a hammer, to build a house for thought, although it can hardly be considered attractive. Apart from Russian, Italian is the most beautiful language in the world and turns every man into an emperor. French is a tasty sauce that the French want to savour in their mouths for as long as possible, which is why they talk in circles and want to ruminate on their words, which often causes the sauce to dribble out of the corners of their mouths. Danish is a language the Danes are ashamed of. They want to be freed of it as soon as possible, which is why they spit out their words. Dutch is a guttural language that gulped down two others. Swedish thinks it’s the French of the north, and the Swedes do their utmost to relish it by smacking their lips. Norwegian is what you get when a whole nation does its best not to speak Danish. English is no longer a language but a universal phenomenon like oxygen and sunlight. Then Spanish is a peculiar perversion of Latin that came into being when a nation tried to adapt to a king’s speech impediment, and yet it is the language I learned the best.

Few of these nations, however, have mastered the art of silence. The Finns are Icelanders’ greatest competitors when it comes to silence, since they are the only nation in the world that can be silent in two languages, as Brecht said. We Icelanders, on the other hand, are the only country in the world that venerated its language so much that we decided to use it as little as possible. This is why Icelandic is a chaste old maiden in her sixties who has developed a late sex drive and desires nothing more than to allow herself to be ravished by words before she dies. And that is what she will do. After my latest incursions into the blog world, I am convinced that the coming generations can be trusted to extract the gold from the bullshit and jettison the former to preserve the latter.

The Icelandic tradition of silence is therefore intertwined with the tradition of the Icelandic Sagas. And in line with that, my father pretended that my mother and I didn’t exist for a whole seven years. He shut up for seven years because his father shut up for seven seconds. But a heart is best heard in silence. And after seven years of its knocking on his chest, my father finally went to the door and opened up what he had locked inside. And thought that by doing so he was performing a heroic deed: triumphing over the so-called patriarchy, as modern women say. And he was allowed to entertain that illusion, because even though Grandad and Grandma had never opposed their firstborn’s choice of a wife and welcomed the fact that he had finally manned himself up to marry the mother of his child, they too remained silent about that.