Iceland
sits on the rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic
plates, whose movements result in volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
Credit: Arctic-Images/Getty Images.
We were somewhere in the remote Westfjords, a large peninsula in
Iceland’s north-west corner, when our campervan first stalled. It was
late September, the end of the tourist season in a part of Iceland that
sees about 6 percent the country’s annual tourist numbers, and the roads
were all but empty.
The van stalled twice more as my husband and I made the roughly
200km drive from Látrabjarg, a windswept bird cliff perched on the far
western edge of Iceland, back to our base in Ísafjörður, the Westfjords’
largest town (pop: 2,600). Once we finally got back to our apartment,
we called the campervan rental company and told them the issue.
Unfortunately, the town’s mechanic wouldn’t be available before we were
due to make the drive back to Reykjavik.
“Well,” said the campervan agent, “þetta reddast!”
A quick Google search informed me that þetta reddast (pronounced thet-ta red-ust)
doesn’t mean ‘sorry, I’m not paid enough to care about your troubles’,
or ‘try not to get stranded in the middle of nowhere’. It means ‘it’ll
all work out in the end’ – and if Iceland had an official slogan, this
would be it. The phrase near-perfectly sums up the way Icelanders seem
to approach life: with a laid-back, easy-going attitude and a great
sense of humour.
Writer
Katie Hammel encountered Iceland’s unofficial motto after her campervan
stalled in the remote Westfjords. Credit: Andrew Norelli/Getty Images.
“It’s just one of those ubiquitous phrases that is around you
all the time, a life philosophy wafting through the air,” said Alda Sigmundsdóttir,
author of several books about Iceland's history and culture. “It’s
generally used in a fairly flippant, upbeat manner. It can also be used
to offer comfort, especially if the person doing the comforting doesn’t
quite know what to say. It’s sort of a catch-all phrase that way.”
At first glance, it seems an odd philosophy for a place where,
for centuries, many things absolutely did not work out all right. Since
Iceland’s settlement in the 9th Century, its history is littered with
the tales of times when þetta reddast did not apply.
If Iceland had an official slogan, this would be it
In her book, The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days,
Sigmundsdóttir recounts some of these hardships: the long winters;
extreme poverty; indentured servitude. There were volcanic eruptions,
like the 1783 Laki eruption that killed 20 percent of the 50,000-strong
population, as well as 80 percent of its sheep, which were a vital food
source in a country with little agriculture. There were storms that
swept in and sank the open rowboats used for fishing, wiping out much of
the male populations of entire towns. Things were so bad that even up
through the 18th Century, according to Sigmundsdóttir, 30 percent of
babies died before they turned one.
The Iceland of old was an exceptionally hard place to live. And
the Iceland of old wasn’t that long ago. “It hasn’t been that long since
we were a society of farmers and fishermen, and the seasons and the
harsh conditions we lived in had complete control over our lives,” Auður
Ösp, founder and owner of I Heart Reykjavik tour company, told me.
While Iceland today is an ultra-modern place where wi-fi is
abundant, credit cards are accepted everywhere, and the majority of the
country is powered by geothermal energy, it was only about 90 years ago
that 50 percent of the population lived in turf houses (traditional
homes with walls and roofs made of earth and grass) – so these hardships
aren’t such a distant memory. Just 45 years ago, the Eldfell volcano
exploded on the small island of Heimaey, spewing millions of tons of
ash, engulfing 400 buildings and forcing the evacuation of all 5,000
people who lived there. And just 23 years ago, a massive avalanche
decimated the town of Flateyri in the Westfjords, burying more than a
dozen homes and killing 20 of the town’s 300 residents.
The
phrase ‘þetta reddast’ near-perfectly sums up Icelanders’ laid-back,
easy-going attitude and a great sense of humour. Credit: Robert
Postma/Design Pics/Getty Images.
Even on a day without disasters, Iceland is beholden to the
forces of nature. The island moves and breathes in a way few others do;
fumaroles exhale steam; hot springs gurgle; geysers belch and bubble;
waterfalls thunder. The country sits on the rift between the North
American and Eurasian tectonic plates, and those plates are slowly
moving apart, widening Iceland by about 3cm per year and causing an
average of 500 small earthquakes every week.
Iceland is beholden to the forces of nature
The country’s weather is just as volatile and formidable.
Windstorms can reach hurricane force, strong storms can sweep in even in
summer, and, on the darkest winter days, the sun shines for just four
hours.
“Those who live off the land are in constant battle with the
elements,” Ösp said. “For example, when it suddenly starts to snow in
August, like it happened in the north a few years ago, you need to drop
everything and go out and rescue your animals. Or, when there’s a
volcanic eruption that disrupts flights all over the world and leaves a bunch of people stranded in Iceland, you need to think on your feet and figure out what to do.”
Maybe it makes sense, then, that in a place where people were –
and still are – so often at the mercy of the weather, the land and the
island’s unique geological forces, they’ve learned to give up control,
leave things to fate and hope for the best. For these stoic and
even-tempered Icelanders, þetta reddast is less a starry-eyed refusal to
deal with problems and more an admission that sometimes you must make
the best of the hand you’ve been dealt.
The phrase begins to be a little more understandable when you
find out that the first Icelanders weren’t marauding Vikings who bravely
sailed across the ocean in search of new lands to raid and tribes to
wage war upon. Rather, they were mostly Norwegian farmers and peasants
fleeing slavery and death at the hands of King Harald Finehair in the
9th Century. They so feared his wrath that they risked the 1,500km
journey across the rough North Atlantic seas in small open-hulled boats.
It’s hard to imagine those early settlers making the journey – one
undertaken with no maps or navigational tools – without a little bit of
blind hope.
“We couldn’t live in this environment without a certain level of
conviction that things will work out somehow, hard as they seem in the
moment,” Ösp said. “Þedda redast represents a certain optimism that
Icelanders have and this carefree attitude that borders on recklessness.
Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but we don’t let that
stop us from trying.”
With the conditions we live under, we’re often forced to make the impossible possible
“It’s not that we’re impulsive or stupid,” Ösp continued. “We
just believe in our abilities to fix things. With the conditions we live
under, we’re often forced to make the impossible possible.”
And in many cases, Icelanders have
made the impossible possible. They turned their stunning 2008 economic
collapse and the disruptive 2010 eruptions of an unpronounceable volcano
into PR opportunities that made Iceland one of the hottest destinations
in the world, attracted millions of visitors and turned tourism into
one of the main drivers of a now-robust economy. And in 2016, Iceland
stunned the sporting world when it beat the odds to become the smallest
country to ever qualify for the UEFA European Championship.
Iceland beat England to make it to the quarter-finals against France.
And though there was little chance they’d win, roughly 8 percent of the
Icelandic population travelled to Paris to cheer on the team (they
ultimately lost 5-2).
Auður Ösp: “Those who live off the land are in constant battle with the elements.” Credit: Posnov/Getty Images.
A 2017 University of Iceland survey showed
that nearly half of Icelanders say ‘þetta reddast’ is the philosophy
they live by. Perhaps, as Sigmundsdóttir and Ösp suggest, this idea that
everything will work out has been infused into Icelandic culture
through the centuries. After all, for those who survived – and even
thrived – against all odds, everything kind of did work out all right in
the end.
“This is just my home-grown theory,” Sigmundsdóttir said, “but I
think the Icelanders had to face so many hardships that they learned to
meet adversity with a combination of laissez-faire and
capitulation. It’s something that became ingrained in the Icelandic
people through centuries of living with a climate and landscape that
always had the upper hand, against which you had to surrender, again and
again, because you couldn’t fight them. It’s difficult in Iceland not
to feel your insignificance against the elements.”
“I think this mentality shows that we have a belief in ourselves
as a nation and as individuals,” Ösp added. “Who would have believed,
for example, that a team from a nation of 350,000 people could make it to the 2018 World Cup in Russia? We did – that’s who.”
Nearly half of Icelanders say ‘betta reddast’ is the philosophy they live by. Credit: Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo/Getty Images.
It seems the Icelandic belief that things will turn out all
right also comes with a little effort and ingenuity on the part of the
believer.
For my husband and I, that meant trusting that everything would
work out on our drive back to Reykjavik. If the ‘þetta reddast’ attitude
could help Icelanders thrive on a barely inhabitable rock on the edge
of the North Atlantic, surely the same optimism could see us through a
few hundred kilometres of remote mountain passes in the unreliable van.
So, just like those early settlers who set sail from Norway, we
set out with little assurances but a lot of hope. Of course, we had one
major advantage: we had mobile phones.
This article was originally published on June 4,
2018, by BBC Travel, and is republished here with permission.
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