The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

3 Herra Björnsson 1929

I was born in the autumn of 1929, in a tin can of a house in Ísafjördur. And got saddled with the peculiar name Herbjörg María, which never suited me, nor itself for that matter. A blend of pagan and Christian strands that mixed like oil and water, and those sister elements still wrestle inside me.

Mum wanted to name me Verbjörg, after her mother, but Grandma wouldn’t hear of it. It was too close to verbúd, the Icelandic word for ‘fisherman’s hut,’ where she claimed people led wet, cold and miserable lives, and she cursed her own mother for naming her after such a shameful thing. Grandma Vera rowed seventeen fishing seasons between the little islands of Bjarneyjar and Oddbjarnarsker, winter, spring and autumn, ‘in the rat-pissing rain they’ve invented in that briny hell of theirs, and it was even worse on land.’

My father suggested Herbjörg instead, and apparently my mother didn’t hate him enough to disagree. Personally, I would have chosen the name of my maternal great-grandmother, the great Blómey Efemía Bergsveinsdóttir. She was the only woman to bear that name in the history of Iceland until the twentieth century, when, after lying in the island’s soil for fifty years, she finally acquired two namesakes. One was a textile artist who lived in a dilapidated shack, while the other Blómey, my little Blómey, who departed from us at a very young age but still lives on in the dearest realms of my soul and appears to me now and then in that strip of grass that separates dream from reality.

We should be baptised for death, just as we’re baptised for life, and allowed to choose the name that will appear on our gravestones for all eternity. I can see it now: Blómey Hansdóttir (1929–2009).

In those days no one had two first names. But just before I was born, my dear and gifted mother had a vision: the Virgin Mary appeared to her in a valley on the other side of the fjord and sat there on a rock, about four hundred feet tall. For this reason her name was added to mine, and of course, it must have brought some blessings with it. At any rate, I have endured all the way to this peak of my now-bedridden existence.

‘María’ softens the harshness of ‘Herbjörg,’ but I doubt that two more different women have ever shared the same life. One sacrificed her snatch to God, while the other devoted hers to a whole army of men.

I was not permitted to be called dóttir, even though it is the right and privilege of all Icelandic women to be known as ‘daughter.’ Instead, I became a ‘son.’ My father’s kin, sprinkled fore and aft with ministers and ambassadors, had made their careers abroad, where no one uses anything but surnames. And so the entire family was nailed to the head of one man, forced to carry the surname of Grandad Sveinn Björnsson (who later became Iceland’s ambassador to Denmark and eventually our first president). No other member of the family was able to make a name for himself, and that was why we failed to produce any more ministers or presidents. Grandfather had reached the summit, and the role of his children and grandchildren was to go slithering down the slope. It’s hard to preserve any ambition when one is constantly on the way down. But naturally, at some point, we’ll reach the bottom, and then the only way forward for the Björnsson tribe will be back up again.

At home I was always called Hera, but when, at the age of seven, I visited my father’s family in Copenhagen with my parents, their maid had trouble pronouncing ‘Hera’ and called me either Herre (the Danish word for ‘Mister’) or Den Lille Herre (‘The Little Gentleman’). My cousin Puti found this highly amusing and from then on never called me anything but Herra, the Icelandic word for ‘Mister.’ At first this teasing hurt me because I really did look a bit like a boy, but the nickname stuck, and I gradually became used to it. So that’s how a miss became a mister.

In small-town Reykjavík I received considerable attention when I arrived back in the 1950s after a long stay abroad, a radiant young lady with lipstick and worldly ways, and the sobriquet was almost akin to a stage name: ‘Other guests included Miss Herra Björnsson, granddaughter of Iceland’s president, who draws attention wherever she goes on account of her open and cosmopolitan demeanour. Herra has just returned home to Iceland after a long stay in New York and South America.’ So the unfortunate name produced some good fortune.