Iceland was occupied by British forces on 10 May 1940 to prevent the island from falling
into Nazi hands. The Icelandic authorities were aware of these plans, but neutrality
was a key element in Icelandic foreign policy. When the occupation became a fact in
the early hours of that May morning, it was therefore formally opposed by the government
as a violation of Icelandic sovereignty, even though, in practice, the authorities
knew that it had become inevitable at that stage and that there was little they could
do about it.
The occupation constituted a watershed in Icelandic history. It was the first time
that Iceland was involved in a war: it had no army and no military tradition. While
Iceland was still a part of the Danish realm, the responsibility for its defence officially
lay with the Danish authorities, although it was Iceland’s location in the North Atlantic
ocean on the European periphery that had, for the most part, protected it from foreign
aggression. War was thus something most Icelanders considered an alien phenomenon: something
profoundly un-Icelandic that happened elsewhere. Suddenly, however, it was no longer just elsewhere: Iceland had been drawn into a
world war. Two hundred and thirty Icelanders lost their lives to the war—most of them
at sea, some abroad, a few even in concentration camps. Soldiers lost their lives
here as well. The British were, for the most part, replaced by American soldiers in
1941.
When the British army brought the Second World War to Iceland’s doorstep, Icelandic
society changed almost overnight. There was profound shock at being confronted with
an alien military force. Many found the sight of armed foreign soldiers walking around
the Reykjavik streets and crowding buses with their bayonets deeply disturbing and
feared that an Allied army presence would in fact make Iceland a target. But there
was also excitement: the army brought work, money, opportunities, and it opened the
floodgates of modernity, consumer goods, mass entertainment. Foreigners, who had always
been few and far between, now virtually outnumbered the locals in Reykjavik. This
aspect of the war was often referred to as an ævintýri, an exciting adventure that offered unprecedented possibilities for people who had
never known opportunity of any kind, only poverty and drudgery.
Considering the fact that the Allied occupation of Iceland marks a sea change in Icelandic
history, it has received remarkably little attention in Icelandic historiography.
In his chapter on Iceland in
Nordic Narratives of the Second World War, the historian Guðmundur Hálfdanarson suggests that the main reason for this lack
of attention is that it does not fit into the Icelandic national narrative, which
relies on a view of Icelandic history in which the centuries under Danish rule represent
an era of poverty and humiliation resulting from foreign oppression. This national
narrative places Icelandic identity firmly in the position of the small, put-upon,
peaceful, defenceless nation that constantly has to guard itself against foreign aggression.
As Hálfdanarson puts it:
Since the beginning of the so-called struggle for independence in the nineteenth century,
historians and political commentators have stressed the adverse effects of foreign
rule on both the economy and culture. Only through full sovereignty of the Icelandic
state and the preservation of their national culture, or so the story goes, could
Icelanders establish a prosperous society. (80)
Icelandic war and postwar prosperity are of course proof of the very opposite.
As a result, the war years in Iceland have only tended to be briefly discussed in
official histories and are barely commemorated in public ways at all. Where this does
happen, the war is presented as a foreign event of which Icelanders are entirely innocent,
while any discussion of Iceland during the Second World War focuses on the economic
boom, the modernization of Icelandic society, and the relations between soldiers and
Icelandic women (Neijmann and Guðmundsdóttir; Neijmann 2014). Work by scholars such
as Hálfdanarson shows that this is now beginning to change,
but only very gradually. Certainly the kind of critical revision that has been taking
place in other European countries in recent decades, where tidy, simplified narratives
of World War II constructed during the early postwar years are challenged, has not
yet happened in Iceland.
Often it is literature we need to turn to in order to find what historiography won’t
tell us: the complexity of individual experiences and emotions, memories silenced
by official versions of history, alternative or “unspeakable” stories. However, literature
can also be instrumental in the construction of public
memory and forgetting, by giving narrative shape to confusing, uncontainable experiences,
creating discursive order out of chaos, and providing convenient explanations and
justifications to protect a national sense of self against profoundly unsettling anxieties
in the face of a perceived overwhelming threat. This raises the question what Icelandic
literature can tell us about responses to the Second World War and whether it fills
in the gaps left by Icelandic historiography in this respect.
As was mentioned earlier, relations between Icelandic women and foreign soldiers,
known in Iceland as the ástand or “situation,” dominate historical accounts of the occupation. When we look at literary
works that
deal with Iceland during the Second World War, it quickly becomes clear that they
constitute an even more prominent theme in Icelandic literature, bordering on obsession.
In his discussion of two Icelandic occupation novels, Kristinn Kristjánsson remarked
in 1984 that it often seemed as if nothing else happened in Iceland during the war
years, and he concludes his analysis by suggesting that women provided a convenient
scapegoat for a national sense of resentment and guilt, as they were a far easier
target than the army. It is therefore neither surprising nor unwarranted that what
little scholarly attention Icelandic occupation literature has received has dealt
exclusively with the representation of women. As necessary and revealing as these studies of the so-called ástandskona [situation woman] have been, however, I think the time has now come to widen our
focus, to see what
more Icelandic fiction can tell us about Icelandic responses to World War II and the
occupation. In this article I discuss representations of the wartime occupation in
Icelandic fiction and examine how the presence of a large foreign army was adopted
into the Icelandic literary imagination. I focus my discussion on the figure of the soldier as the personification of the
occupation: the embodiment of war and military might, a focus of attraction and revulsion,
and, not least, an alien presence.
Little could have appeared as aggressively foreign, or Other, in Iceland during the
1940s as the figure of the soldier, a symbol of an invading and occupying military
force: his arms, his uniform, his behaviour based on military protocol—all of these
and more would have been profoundly and utterly alien to the small Icelandic community,
which was only just beginning to emerge out of five centuries of social and economic
isolation and stagnation. The predicament of turning into literary narrative the overwhelming
magnitude and unprecedented atrocities of a modern war, which, in Marina MacKay’s
words, “managed to turn into a battleground everything it touched” (1), proved challenging
enough for writers from belligerent countries with a tradition
of war literature behind them. How did Icelandic authors deal with this challenge
of giving literary shape, voice, and meaning to an occupying army force—and what do
their attempts tell us about the ways in which Icelanders made sense of it?
Remarkably, the author of the first novel about the occupation, Verndarenglarnir (1943) [The Guardian Angels] by Jóhannes úr Kötlum, features a returning Icelandic
soldier as one of the main
protagonists, in an attempt to convey the terrible reality of war to a readership
for whom war lacks all reality. The author clearly bases his protagonist on the experiences
of an Icelander who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War and whose memoirs had been
published, thus bringing the war experience home. In the novel, the farmer’s son Haraldur returns a wounded man, both physically and
mentally, suffering from survivor’s guilt, being the only one of his regiment and
his friends to survive after having been betrayed by the British authorities. Haraldur’s
behaviour displays all the characteristics of what we would nowadays call trauma,
obsessed by events too profoundly shocking to integrate into his memory and his sense
of self, including the fact that being a soldier has made him a killer. As a soldier, Haraldur’s character is clearly meant to show that war is not an attractive
adventure but a very brutal and bloody business that only leads to destruction and
is alien to the Icelandic self.
The novel also features British soldiers, including a detailed description of the
occupation of Iceland on the morning of the 10th of May 1940. Their portrayal in this
novel is characteristic of most portrayals of the occupying army in Icelandic fiction,
which may be summarized as follows. Disembarking from large foreign ships is a faceless,
nameless presence, which is described with the focus firmly on those aspects most
unfamiliar to Icelanders: its uniformity, its “automated” (disciplined and controlled)
behaviour, and the carrying of arms. For some, primarily
women and children, the sight is an attractive and exciting one in its exoticness
and its promise of change in a largely static, isolated, uneventful society. For the
large majority of authors, however, this view is condemned as childish, unpatriotic,
and dangerously naive. For them, the army is symbolic of an act of aggression against
Iceland and a sign of imperialist power violating the rights of small, peaceful nations.
In Verndarenglarnir, for instance, the soldiers are described as tin soldiers behaving like mindless
automatons, which immediately reduces them to toys and machinery (46–47). Other descriptions
focus on uniforms and military paraphernalia such as decorations,
helmets (often referred to as “steel pots”), weapons, and boots. Many novels and stories
include an account of the local streets
filling with endless rows of marching soldiers, the noise of their steel boots, and
of orders being shouted. The general reaction among the local population in these
descriptions is one of utter bafflement and incredulity at the entire spectacle.
Once the occupation is a fact and the army has installed itself in tents, public buildings,
and, later, barracks, it remains a presence hovering in the background in literary
texts that focus on the effects of the occupation on Icelandic characters exclusively.
Here, we find general references to soldiers at best, and, if any individuals are
featured at all, they are defined by their uniforms or positions and are referred
to by their military titles rather than names: “the major,” “the lieutenant,” “the
commander,” “the officer”—or sometimes, quite simply, “the soldier.” And just as titles
replace names, the military uniform seems to erase individual
looks, for there are very few descriptions of personal looks. Significantly, when
looks are described, they tend to focus on features that these fictional soldiers
all seem to share: they are almost invariably “dark” (dökkt/svart hár, dökkur yfirlitum), they often have moustaches, they have a curved nose and sharp, even steel-like
facial features. If we consider these general characterizations, it would seem that
the soldiers are, first and foremost, described in terms which emphasize their status
as “other” from the Icelandic self: uniformed, dark men associated with steel who
either give
or obey orders and lack all individuality. While this is in itself not an unlikely
portrayal of soldiers, I would suggest that, in an Icelandic context, more can be
read into this. In a society that is characterized by individuality, denying that
individuality may be regarded as an act of resistance, a refusal to recognize its
armed occupiers as fellow human beings and see them instead as representatives of
an alien, anonymous force.
Deflating the power of the occupying army and its representatives certainly is a common
strategy in occupation fiction. Several texts emphasize the fact that most of the
weapons brought by the British are in fact useless or even fake, as in Indriði G.
Þorsteinsson’s novel
Norðan við stríð (1971) [
North of War 1981], where a painted telephone pole is meant to convince the enemy that it is in
fact
an anti-aircraft gun (195), and where even the troop commander himself refers to
the invading army as “a group of ambassadors wearing boots” (1981,13). In Elías Mar’s
highly ironic short story, “Átökin um Skólavörðuholt” (1950) [The Fight over Skólavörðuholt],
the British are referred to as an “unarmed” nation and their barbed wire, fortresses
built with sandbags, and guns as make-belief
(22). In these texts, the soldiers are disarmed as a fake and the war as a game played
by imperial powers. “The more sandbags and barbed wire, the more real the war becomes,”
as the narrator in
North of War puts it (23). In Þorgeir Þorgeirsson’s tale “Toni frændi” (1974) [Uncle Toni],
American soldiers are exposed as the cowards that they are when the narrator’s uncle,
a giant of a man with a fat face, false teeth, and a heart of gold, suddenly appears
in the doorway of the family’s wartime home, which the soldiers had invaded believing
there to be only women and children inside:
Sá herstyrkur sem var um þær mundir að sigrast á Hitler og Mússólíni, ... , hann riðlaðist
og flúði undan Tona frænda mínum án þess að Toni segði aukatekið orð eða blakaði hendi
við neinum.
Það væri rangt að segja að hermenn Roosevelts hafi hlaupið, þeir duttu hver um annan
út úr húsinu og niður af tröppunum.
(76)
[The power of the same army that was at that very time getting the better of Hitler
and Mussolini ... here became disorganized and fled from my uncle Toni without him
having to say a single word or make a single gesture.
It would be wrong to say that Roosevelt’s soldiers had run—they toppled over
each other, out of the house and down the steps.]
In other words, while the British are powerless, the Americans are just cowards when
it comes right down to it.
This last instance, of course, smacks of more than just a little “Icelandic masculinity
restored” after the humiliation of having been occupied by a force of foreign men.
This impression
is reinforced by an earlier vignette in the same tale, where the American soldiers
are shown to behave with colonial arrogance as they laugh and enjoy watching Icelandic
youngsters pick up everything they throw away. Many critics who have written on gender
and war have pointed out that the defence of home and country constitutes an important
part in traditional definitions of hegemonic masculinity. Similarly, in situations of conflict, the enemy, or Other, becomes a negative figure
of the positive attributes of national masculine ideals. In the words of Joane Nagel:
“hegemonic masculinity is enlisted in the service of defending the nation, and ‘enemy’
men and women are sexually constructed as simultaneously oversexed and undersexed
Other men and promiscuous… women” (398).
This is exactly what we find so prominently reflected in Icelandic occupation fiction:
the military power and aggression embodied by the occupying army is immediately sexualized
by a male population that deeply felt its humiliation at having failed to protect
its country from foreign invaders, who are now polluting the national body through
their sexual relations with local women (Björnsdóttir 1989; Þorvaldsdóttir). This
is exacerbated by the fact that war in the form of military occupation constitutes
an invasion of the home. What is originally a place of private shelter becomes a place
of public conflict, reverberating with moral ambiguities and civil tensions. In an
address to the nation following the occupation, the Icelandic Prime Minister urged
Icelanders to continue their daily lives and avoid contact with the occupying soldiers
as much as possible, but otherwise to treat them with courtesy, as “guests.” This advice encapsulates precisely the contradictions inherent in the occupation
experience. In her discussion of French occupation narratives, Margaret Atack points
to the difficulties involved in writing about this experience, what she calls the
“strange situation of ‘not at peace, not at war,’” “both familiar and other,” where
“nothing has changed and everything has changed,” and where the “guests” have imposed
their presence with the force of military might (80).
The soldier as the embodiment of a sinister threat, a superior military might masking
behind a smiling courtesy, makes an appearance in many narratives of the occupation.
Most commonly, he appears in the guise of the older, married, sexually aggressive
officer hiding behind a smart appearance, politeness, and generosity, in order to
fool and seduce Icelandic girls half his age who end up deceived and pregnant. An
example is the British officer in Einar Kristjánsson Freyr’s short story “Gjafir elskhuganna”
(1955) [The Lovers’ Gifts], who in this way seduces the girl the main protagonist,
Ásbjörn, fancies but with
whom he has no chance. Early in the morning this officer, Benton, married with two
children at home, sneaks out of the girl’s house like a thief in the night, quickly
slipping into his role of military commander as an army unit marches past,
sveiflandi höndunum fram og aftur með lítið prik í hægri hendi. Lítið prik? Það er
ekki rétt. Þetta er sproti af sama bergi sprotinn og veldissproti konungsins, táknar
áhrif Bentons og völd í stjórn brezka heimsveldisins. (38)
[swinging his arms back and forth, with a small stick in his right hand. A small stick?
That’s not correct. This is a staff that originates from the same source as the king’s
royal sceptre, symbolizing Benton’s influence and the influence and power of the British
Empire.]
Thus the hypocrisy and moral corruption of imperial power is exposed. Ásbjörn’s feelings
of inferiority towards the soldiers is clear throughout the story, for instance as
he watches one cheerily jumping over the fence across the road, a high fence which
only the most agile of gymnasts could traverse in such a light manner, “laglegur maður
…, dökkhærður og fínlegur. Hann er léttur í spori
… Hann svífur áfram” [a handsome man
… dark-haired and delicate. He is light on his feet
… He almost floats] (28). Ásbjörn himself in comparison smells so badly of fermented
meat that his landlady
gives him a stern warning to clean up or leave. But then, as Asbjörn resentfully observes:
“þessir hermenn, já, þeir hafa ekkert annað að gera en að sofa hjá stúlkum, pressa
buxurnar sínar, bursta skóna sína og stökkva yfir hlið” [these soldiers, well they
have nothing else to do than sleep with girls, press their
trousers, shine their shoes, and jump over fences] (29).
Not all male characters are as easily intimidated as Ásbjörn or prepared simply to
make a resentful retreat, however. Jón
skósmiður (“the Cobbler”), the main protagonist in Theodór Friðriksson’s novella of the same
name (
Jón skósmiður 1946), gives as good as he gets when Ragnhildur, the woman he fancies, is taken in
by a
British officer. He responds with a wonderfully humorous and sexually suggestive display
of his very own staff of power:
Var það nú aðallega göngustafurinn hans, sem nokkrir gestir veittu eftirtekt. Handfangið
var í laginu eins og hamar. Það var þungt – úr skíru silfri með fangamarkinu hans.
Bretar gáfu stafnum auga. Það stælti hug skósmiðsins, og vildi hann sýna þeim, að
hann væri engin drusla…. Hann bar stafinn hátt, eins og blikandi sverð, um leið og hann tróð sér út út forstofunni.
(65–66)
[It was mostly his walking stick that some guests noticed. Its handle was shaped like
a hammer. It was heavy – made from clear silver, containing his initials. The British
looked at the stick. This hardened the cobbler’s courage, and he wanted to show them
that he was no worm…. He carried the stick high, like a glittering sword, as he walked out of the hall.]
Jón’s symbolic message to the British is clear: he is showing off his prowess and
has no intention of coming out the lesser man. He then waits outside, and when Ragnhildur
and the officer appear Jón again tries to outdo his rival, this time in a show of
courtesy and dignity. Eventually, his posturing pays off. Jón however is one of only
a few protagonists whose manhood remains intact in Icelandic occupation fiction (Neijmann
2013).
In the short story “Her” (1968) [Army] by Steinar Sigurjónsson, the narrator, a young
boy, watches a soldier smiling while
cleaning his gun and asking him if he has a sister at home to whom the boy could take
him:
Hev jú sister?
Jes.
Is sí bjútifúl?
Jes. (37)
Another is going around town with his fly down and taking out his knife when people
laugh at him, while yet another cruelly cuts a cat to death. The boy calls the soldiers “strange” and “unpredictable” (37). Similarly, Harry
Blumenthal in Indriði G. Þorsteinsson’s
Norðan við stríð is a sexually obsessed soldier suffering from mental problems, while, in the same
novel, an Icelandic farmer finds himself forced to complain to the army about his
cow being sexually molested. Here, soldiers are clearly portrayed as the oversexed
enemy described by Joane Nagel, made especially dangerous by a tendency toward perverse
and violent behaviour. And yet the girls seem to find them irresistable in nearly
all works of fiction. A rare exception is Steinar Sigurjónsson’s story “Minníng”
(1968) [Memory], in which an unnamed woman recalls how, only fifteen years old, a
forty-something
soldier got her drunk against her will and forced himself on her while she was powerless
to resist.
The point of view of the child is of course a particularly suitable one to convey
a sense of inferiority, powerlessness, and fear, especially where these are not really
socially acceptable emotions for male adults. In the short story “Toni frændi,” mentioned
earlier, the narrator is also a young boy who remembers the threatening
behaviour of drinking soldiers who invade his home one night in search of entertainment.
The boy is so scared that he hides in the loft, while his mother clasps a hot poker,
ready to strike. Dagný Kristjánsdóttir (2010) has suggested that this story in fact
goes further than expressing mere humiliation
and fear and describes the shock, even trauma, suffered by the Icelandic population
in the face of military occupation and living with an armed foreign presence. In an
untitled short story, the author Álfrún Gunnlaugsdóttir picks up this same theme from
a certain distance in time: 1982. Here, the point of view is that of a little girl
accompanying her mother on her way to get water from a well when they meet a soldier.
He talks to them, but they do not understand him, what he wants, or whether he poses
a threat. The girl has no means of grasping the context of war; all she senses is
her mother’s fear. Consequently, while hypnotized by the gun the soldier carries,
unaware of its potential danger, it is her mother’s reaction that frightens her: forcefully
pulling her daughter along as she runs home as fast as she can. The girl’s complete
lack of understanding of what is going on, her inability to understand and express
her feelings and reactions—especially her fear—could easily be interpreted as symbolizing
the reaction of Icelanders to being occupied by a military power and living with armed
soldiers whose language, behaviour, and intentions they do not understand, both exuding
a hypnotic attraction and inducing an inexpressible terror.
Lack of a shared language can clearly aggravate an already tense situation, impeding
understanding and increasing the barrier between the native and the military population.
The foreignness of the army’s looks and behaviour was compounded by its inability
to make its reasons and intentions clear. The sheer overwhelming numbers of soldiers
meant that for many Icelanders, their home environment had become almost unrecognizable.
Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðsson vividly evokes this in the novel
Seiður og hélog (1977) [Magic and Will-o’-the-wisp] as the narrator closes his eyes and recalls
the landscape of the war years in Iceland:
Ég sé þúsundir breta og bandaríkjamanna, flugvélar og herskip, fallbyssur og vígi,
sandpokahleðslur, gaddavírsgirðingar, tjaldbúðir, braggahverfi, varðturna, loftskeytastengur,
olíugeyma, nýstárlegar vinnuvélar, skrýtna bíla… Þarna gengur skozk sveit í köflóttum pilsum og leikur á sekkjapípur… Þarna standa börn hjá gaddavírsgirðingu og horfa á hermenn ráðast á pokadruslur með
brugðnum byssustingum. Það ýlir í blístrum víðsvegar um borgina, ljós slokkna, menn
þyrpast niður í kjallara, í loftvarnarbyrgi, en gífurlegar skotdrunur kveða við í
fjarska. Æfing? Árás? Kona biður guð að hjálpa sér, en talar um hárgreiðslu innan
stundar, þegar skothríðin þagnar. (103)
[I see thousands of British and Americans, airplanes and military ships, cannons and
fortifications, piles of sandbags, barbed-wire fences, tents, whole districts full
of barracks, watch towers, radio masts, an oil container, strange new machines, weird
cars… There goes a Scottish regiment in chequered skirts playing the bagpipes… Over there, children are standing by a barbed-wire fence and watch soldiers attack
tattered bags with drawn bayonets. Across the city a howling, whistling sound, lights
go off, people crouch in basements, in air-raid shelters, as the severe thundering
of explosions resounds in the distance. An exercise? An attack? A woman asks God to
help her and talks about a hair-do in the next instance as the firing stops.]
The narrator refers to this landscape in terms of the wondrous and strange, where
everything is constantly changing and nothing is what it seems any longer, calling
it “haunted” and “illusionary,” and referring to the inhabitants in terms of supernatural
beings (104, 295). Something similar happens in “Toni frændi,” where the military
barracks in the distance are “eins og framandi heimur innan við rammlega girðingu.
Yfirnáttúrulegustu farartæki
gerðu sífellda umferð” [like an alien world within a sturdy fence. The most supernatural
of vehicles would
continuously drive about] (70–71), prompting the grandfather to observe that: “Það
er, trúég, álfabyggð hérna uppmeð læknum” [I believe there are elves living over here
by the stream] (71). Theodór Friðriksson’s Jón the Cobbler meanwhile refers to the
spectacle of occupied
Iceland as a “gömul galdrahríð” [old magical storm] (40). In these texts, Iceland
becomes an otherworld, and the soldiers are directly likened
to alien, supernatural beings in the landscape. Interestingly, elves have long been
regarded as among the most Icelandic of supernatural beings, protectors of the land
and traditional culture (Hafstein). Now, they have been replaced by American soldiers
and their modern culture. This
clearly reveals a sense of identity crisis, a threatened loss of self.
The change of Iceland into an otherworld as a result of military occupation also underscores
the idea of this period as an ævintýri, which in Icelandic refers not only to an “adventure” but also to a “fairytale.”
And the image of the soldier as it appears in all of these occupation narratives
is remarkably like that of the fairytale monster. In the realm of fairytales and fantasy,
the monster is the sign of something aberrant and inhuman, something that transgresses
boundaries and violates the natural order and is therefore associated with horror
and violence. It is a threat to what is considered good and pure, overwhelmingly powerful,
generally evil, and defined by grotesque excess. As such, it inspires both terror
and disgust. It is the foe that must be defeated, the ultimate Other. In Icelandic occupation fiction, the emphasis on the lack of individuality and humanity,
the “dark” look, the association with arms and violence, and the unsatiable and perverse
sexual
appetite of the soldier all echo the characteristics of the classical monster.
If this suggestion seems rather melodramatic in the context of an occupation by what
were after all “allied” forces, it is worth considering the generally accepted interpretation
of one of the
modern western world’s principal monsters, the vampire Dracula, as a product of imperialism
and racism, a representation of late Victorian England’s deep-seated fears of an alien
invasion of the home and of reverse colonization, and the embodiment of a horror fantasy
“in which self-identities are invaded by and absorbed into the Other” (Gelder 1994,
12). As Geoffrey Wall explains: “Dracula‘s theft of blood defiles the patrimony, disrupts
the ordered exchange of women,
property and names, dissolves the serene continuity of the imperial Anglo-Saxon race”
(20). If we replace “Dracula” with “the soldier,” “theft” with “pollution,” and “the
imperial Anglo-Saxon race” with “the pure Icelandic nation,” we have, I would suggest,
an uncannily accurate description of the anxiety that so
obviously pervades Icelandic occupation fiction. Icelandic nationalist discourse of
the early twentieth century was driven by the idea of Icelandic purity—cultural and
biological: Unnur Birna Karlsdóttir has written on the influence of eugenics in nationalist
writing and thought, while Inga Dóra Björnsdóttir (1998) and Sigríður Matthíasdóttir
have analyzed the cultural meaning of purity and femininity
in Icelandic nationalist discourse. The entire rationale for Icelandic independence
was built on the idea that Icelanders, thanks to centuries of isolation, had been
able to preserve a unique culture, bloodline, and national character directly connected
to the settlement and fostered by the land. When a foreign army invaded the Fjallkona [mountain woman], the female incarnation of Iceland, at a time when traditional Icelandic
pastoral
society was already unravelling, Icelandic identity was seriously threatened, and
profound anxieties of cultural and biological contamination took over. In seducing
and liberating the nation’s women, the soldier, like Dracula, “carries a biological
phantasy, a masculine nightmare of femininity, of the female
body, out of control… violating the territories of the body, the home and the state” (Wall 20). A monster
is born.
In the short story “Tilbury” by Þórarinn Eldjárn, published in 1981, the soldier literally
becomes a monster.
What is particularly interesting in this highly original re-imagined folktale is the
type of monster that is chosen for this purpose, as it exposes this very “biological
phantasy.” The British major Tilbury, who is widely rumoured to have a sexual relationship
with
the beautiful archdeacon’s daughter Guðrún Innness, turns out to be a tilberi (pronounced almost the same as “tilbury”), or “carrier,” an Icelandic folkloric creature
created and nursed by women through the use of black
magic. The purpose of this creature is to steal milk from other farmers’ ewes and
cows and bring it to its creatress or “mother.” When it is inactive, it sucks blood
from the inside of its mother’s upper thigh.
On the surface, tales about these creatures contain a moral warning against greed
and theft. However, as a perverted product of woman’s creative and reproductive power,
the nature of the tilberi clearly reveals a deep-seated patriarchal fear of the female body and woman’s control
over it. By making Guðrún’s alleged soldier-lover a tilberi, the author thus brings into focus the “masculine nightmare” of the pollution of
the patrimony and a female body out of control underlying so
much Icelandic wartime fiction. At the same time, the revelation of the British soldier
as a tilberi completely subverts the idea of wartime social, economic, and cultural “contamination”
by a foreign invader, as he turns out to be an entirely homegrown creature. And while,
in creating a tilberi in order to amass wealth, Guðrún certainly is guilty of greed (and pays the price
for it, for the creature kills her in the end), it is not just the women who receive
the blame in this tale, for the men are all working for the British army for the exact
same reason: to make as much money from the wartime situation as possible.
The question may arise at this point whether the soldiers themselves get a voice at
all in Icelandic fiction of the occupation to tell their side of the story. There
are indeed a number of literary works that feature the soldier’s point of view. Halldór
Stefánsson’s short story even carries an English title: “‘England expects every man
will do his duty’” (1943). The story is told from the point of view of Tommy Atkins,
a young farmworker who
has just got engaged and managed to scrape together enough money to buy his own farm
when England calls on all its young and able men to defend their country. Although
inconvenient, Tommy responds when his country calls. Soon, however, grave doubts set
in. In what way is he defending his country by being stationed in some miserable place
overseas, which the Germans surely would never bother with anyway? Tommy thinks very
little of Iceland and finds its people rather contemptible for allowing themselves
to be occupied without resisting. He does not understand either why they are ordered
to walk around armed everywhere—“sú glæpsamlega hugsun tók að ásækja hann að herstjórnin
væri að leika skrípaleik á
þessu eyðiskeri, í stað þess að beina geiri sínum að hjarta fjandmannsins” [the criminal
thought even occurred to him that the army leadership was playing out
a farce on this rock in the ocean—instead of aiming its force at the heart of the
enemy] (336).
Clearly, the soldier’s perspective here serves not as a counterpoint to the dominant
view but as a projection, a narrative ploy to present a local position from a different,
and more striking, angle. This impression is reinforced when Tommy expresses his contempt
for the behaviour of Icelandic women towards the soldiers in terms similar to those
used by Icelandic male protagonists: the women appear to regard the occupation as
a stroke of luck and all the talk in the barracks is about how they provide the soldiers
with many hours of delight.
In the end, Tommy becomes drunk and loses all control of himself, going out into the
street waving a pistol. He has been enlisted to fight a war, but there appears to
be no fight: “Þetta var fábjánalegt stríð og herstjórnin bandvitlaus. Ef hann fengi
að ráða, skyldi
verða vaðið beint inn í land óvinanna og þeir skotnir eins og hundar, í stað þess
að vera að halda hernum á kvennafari norður á pól” [This was an idiotic war and the
military leaders completely crazy. If he were in charge
they would go straight into the enemies’ country and shoot them like dogs, instead
of having the army skirt-chasing here on the North Pole] (329). Finally he is shot
down, his death as pointless as the war itself. The message is
clear: even the soldiers themselves come to realize they are mere pawns in a crazy
game of war without purpose. The army has no business being in Iceland, and, in the
end, the ordinary soldiers are as much a victim in this game as the Icelanders are.
There is clearly sympathy here for the fate of the common soldier.
There is, however, no sympathy at all for Icelandic women. This contempt for women
across national borders is a prominent feature in many texts that include the soldier’s
point of view. In the novel
Dansað í björtu (1947) [Dancing by Daylight] by Sigurður B. Gröndal, entire chapters are devoted
to the situation of the soldiers
stationed in Iceland. The unnamed “major” consistently shows understanding for the
predicament in which Iceland finds itself.
He attempts to explain this to his men and repeatedly urges them to show dignity and
respect, reminding them that they are the King’s soldiers who have wives waiting for
them at home, but they care little:
- Já, heima, heima – en við erum ekki heima, og heldur ekki í hernaði. Við erum í
ævintýri, og við eigum að njóta þess á meðan er – við verðum sendir í eldinn fyrr
eða seinna. (25)
[Yes, at home, at home – but we aren’t at home, and neither are we engaged in warfare.
We find ourselves in an adventure, and must enjoy it while we can – we will be thrown
into the fire sooner or later.]
When the major points to the damage that they may be doing to Icelandic society with
their womanizing, one of his officers retorts: “Og í einlægni sagt, svona okkar á
milli – hvað varðar mig um stelpuskjátur hér norður
í ishafi!” [To be frank, and just between us, what do I care about wenches here in
the frozen
North!] (26). To them, Iceland is a paradise where they have a last chance to enjoy
themselves
before they enter the hell of the battlefield.
For the ordinary soldier, meanwhile, it is not quite so easy to get access to Icelandic
girls. In the same novel, one soldier has to resort to stealing army goods to bribe
Icelandic men so he can sleep with their sisters and daughters, something that the
narrator excuses along with the material opportunism of Icelandic men:
Eiginlega gat [Nonni] ekki reiðzt Bobb; þegar litið var á framferði hans með góðgirni
(en af henni átti Nonni mikið) var það auðskilið. Bobb vildi hafa sem mest út úr
lífinu undir þessum kringumstæðum – og nákvæmlega það sama vildu þeir feðgarnir!
(86)
[[Nonni] couldn’t really be angry at Bob; when his behaviour was regarded with goodwill
(and Nonni possessed much of that) it was easy to understand. Bob wanted to get as
much as possible out of life under the current circumstances, and so did he and his
father!]
Meanwhile, when Páll Jónsson and his friend in Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðsson’s
Seiður og hélog get drunk and want to beat up soldiers for stealing their girlfriends, the soldiers
laugh and tell them that girls are only for officers (91), while the agile soldier
in “Gjafir elskhuganna” has to resort to stealing underwear from an obliging washing
line to give to his
Icelandic girlfriend.
Eggert Hansson in the novel
Félagi kona (1947) [Partner, Wife] by Kristmann Guðmundsson finds Iceland to be the very opposite
of a paradise. He
befriends a Canadian and an American officer because they constitute more cultured
and interesting company than he is able to find in Reykjavik. Here, too, however,
the soldiers’ predicament is presented as an excuse for their behaviour:
Í höfuðborg Íslands söfnuðust tugir þúsunda af útlendum æskumönnum. Þeir vissu, að
bráðlega yrði þeim skipað út í dauðann, og flýttu sér því að teygja af bikar lífsins,
eins ört og frekast varð við komið. Og Reykjavík var björt og hlý. Í danssölunum biðu
þeirra fegurstu konur heimsins,—kaldar og harðlyndar að vísu, en ungar, lífsþyrstar
og töfrandi! (76)
[In Iceland’s capital tens of thousands of foreign young men were gathered. They knew
that soon they would be ordered to their deaths and rushed to swallow from the cup
of life, as fast and best they could. And Reykjavik was bright and warm. In the dance
halls the most beautiful women in the world awaited them—cold and hard-hearted, admittedly,
but young, thirsting for life, and enchanting.]
Eggert and the two officers are united in their contempt for Icelandic women, whom
they regard as completely heartless and opportunistic.
The strange situation in which the army finds itself in Iceland is also described
sympathetically in
Norðan við stríð, where the soldiers try to turn their barracks into homes by creating little gardens,
concerned for their loved ones back home and eagerly awaiting post. The commanders
realize that:
Það er ekkert helvítis grín að sitja með nærri fjögur þúsund manns á lófastórum bletti
langt úti í ballarhafi, og ekki nokkra nazistablók að hafa fyrr en í Noregi. Auk þess
öll hús full af eiginkonum og dætrum. (Þorsteinsson 205)
[Itʼs no damn joke to be stuck with nearly four thousand men in a spot no larger than
the palm of your hand far out in the Ocean of Nowhere, while the nearest Nazi bloke
is in Norway and every house is filled with wives and daughters.] (56)
Any sexual relations between soldiers and Icelandic women in these works are blamed
almost squarely on the uncontrollable lust of women. When Jón Falkon, who has acted
as interpreter and worked closely with the troop commander, finally invites the commander
home, his wife practically throws herself at him, while another wife is described,
disturbingly, as inviting and enjoying her rape by a soldier. In a short story by the same author, called “Kona skósmiðsins” (1951) [The Cobbler’s
Wife], all the young boys grow very fond of the soldiers, especially one they call
Nikki,
and they become incensed when he is “seduced” by the cobbler’s wife. When Nikki receives
word shortly afterwards that his wife
and children in London have died in a bombing, he shoots himself—dead not because
of the war but because of the lust of an Icelandic woman.
These texts thus seem to indicate that even occupiers and occupied unite against a
common greater enemy: woman. In patriarchy, a suspicion of and contempt for women
creates a bond between men that exceeds all politics and nationalisms it seems. Clearly, the anxieties embedded in these occupation texts are also importantly inspired
by the threat that women’s freedom to negotiate their own lives, bodies, and natures
poses to the patriarchal order, as well as to the body of the state and the home.
Here, the monster is the liberated woman no longer under the control of men.
This raises the question how female authors represent the figure of the soldier. My
research suggests that, in fact, the large majority of women authors stayed well clear
of this explosive subject that could so easily be used against them. If any soldiers
appear at all in their works, they are usually well in the background, while a few
women authors are in fact quite as fierce in their condemnation of the occupation
and of women who consort with soldiers as any male author. When looking very closely, however, it is possible to find an occasional courageous
attempt to try and redress the balance and to present a woman’s perspective, although
these attempts largely fell on deaf ears. One example is the short story “Madaman”
(1955) [Madam] by the author Svana Dún (nom de plume of Svanhildur Þorsteinsdóttir).
The story is
told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman who runs a café in Reykjavik, called
“Madam” by her neighbours because of her appreciation for the finer things in life.
Attractive
and lively, she has nevertheless chosen to remain single, wanting more from life than
the drudgery of domestic chores, and this has isolated her in the small, uniform Reykjavik
community where every day is the same.
One day, however, an army of soldiers marches through the street, bringing change,
opportunity, and colour to the dreariness of life in Reykjavik. The men react the
same as they do in most occupation fiction, but in this instance their perspective
is challenged. Contrary to what people claim, the soldiers are completely harmless.
They are in fact extremely generous, courteous, and well-mannered. Now, everyone who
wants to work has work, and there is enough of everything: nicer clothes, better food,
and more varied entertainment: “Aldrei hafði verið eins gaman að eiga heima í Reykjavík
og þessa síðustu daga” [It had never been as much fun to live in Reykjavik as these
past days] (100). For the main protagonist, who has an enterprising nature and appreciates
the finer
things, life is suddenly taking a turn for the better. In other texts written by men,
the fact that, suddenly, women could earn their own money and even start their own
business is portrayed as another humiliation to the position of men as providers and
harshly condemned as unpatriotic opportunism. Here, however, it is shown in a completely
different light: as the start of a new and better life. While the men stand to lose,
the women only stand to gain.
Madam’s business thrives, but her gain is not only material. One day, a middle-aged
officer steps into her shop, strong-looking, courteous, and attractive: exactly the
type of soldier in fact who, in other texts, would be married at home but out to corrupt
innocent Icelandic young girls. This officer, however, called Mr. Bult, has only honourable
intentions. He provides good company, and for the first time in her life Madam is
given flowers. He invites her out for dinner and dances, and here, again, we see the
supposed corruption brought by the soldiers portrayed in a different light: it is
in fact the Icelanders who don’t know how to handle the new wealth and opportunities
that come with the army, which they, knowing neither moderation nor good manners,
squander in abandon and excess. As Madam and her officer walk through Reykjavik in
the moonlight, “gátu [þau] eins verið íslenzki sjómaðurinn og stúlkan hans, sem könnuðu
land framtíðarinnar.
Jörðin, sem þau gengu á, var jörðin þeirra” [they could just easily have been a fisherman
and his girl, exploring the land of the
future. The earth on which they walked, it was theirs] (106). Borders, and the wars
fought over them, become irrelevant. It is a British officer
who gives Madam new life. From the female perspective, the army brings civilization
and courtesy and creates a situation that liberates and empowers women.
The idea that the army was in fact a civilizing force re-occurs in a more recent novel
set partly during the time of the occupation, this time written by a man. In Grafarþögn (2001) [Silence of the Grave, 2005] by the crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason, it is an American soldier who acts
as the
saviour of an Icelandic woman and her children suffering horrible physical and mental
abuse at the hands of her Icelandic husband. The pattern has become reversed: it is
now the Icelandic man who is the monster. Icelandic patriarchy and the national narrative—with
its idealization of a rural past riddled with poverty and systemized cruelty towards
those least able to defend themselves—are here exposed as engendering as much violence
as any foreign aggressor. It is significant, I think, that this critical reversal
occurs in a crime novel, a relatively new genre in Icelandic literature (Dagsdóttir
2006). It is also quite fitting that this story of abuse and the role of the soldier
are
revealed to the reader as a result of the accidental discovery of a skeleton—in the
ground rather than the cupboard admittedly, but it underscores the process of digging
up the occupation stories that were buried because they did not fit into the national
narrative, as well as revealing the violent crime that the patriarchal system and
the ástand-discourse perpetrated on Icelandic women.
Grafarþögn was published in 2001. Since then, not many authors have followed in Arnaldur Indriðason’s
footsteps to challenge established representations of the occupation, although Arnaldur
Indriðason himself has revisited this period in the crime novel Skuggasund (2013) [The Man from Manitoba, forthcoming]. A younger writer, Sindri Freysson, has written two novels that deal
with the occupation:
Flóttinn (2004) [On the Run] and Dóttir mæðra minna (2009) [My Mothers’ Daughter]. Both these novels admittedly present a different
point of view: in Flóttinn that of a German spy on the run from the British army in Iceland and in Dóttir mæðra minna that of a young girl who is arrested by the British and imprisoned in London. Remarkably,
however, neither challenges in any way the underlying nationalist narrative, which
portrays the British army as a brutal imperialist foreign invasion force vis-à-vis
the peaceful and innocent Icelandic nation. The one novelist who has since critically
challenged Iceland’s role in the Second World War, Hallgrímur Helgason in Kona við 1000° (2011) [The Woman at 1000 Degrees, forthcoming], has done so with such stunning force that it has, until now at least,
not engendered
the kind of debate one might have expected. In this work, Icelandic twentieth-century history is retold from the point of view
of an old, irreverent, dying woman who lived abroad for much of her life and thus
views this history from an international perspective. She experiences the brutality
of war first-hand, initially as the daughter of an Icelandic Nazi sympathizer in Denmark,
then as an abandoned teenage refugee in Germany and Poland, eventually fleeing with
her father to Argentina as outcasts during the years directly after the war. When
she returns to Iceland, she finds an Americanized nation grown fat on war profiteering,
full of itself, yet indulging in victimhood without having any real idea nor indeed
interest in the devastating effects of the war.
Looking at Icelandic occupation fiction as a whole, it becomes clear that a particular
narrative developed very quickly, which has dominated the literary representation
of the war years in Iceland since. Rather than filling in the gaps left by historiography,
this literary narrative obsessively focuses on the same issues: the changes brought
by the occupation and soldiers’ relations with Icelandic women, both of which are
portrayed negatively. The representation of the soldier suggests profound anxieties
underlying these texts. With the collapse of the traditional Icelandic pastoral society,
a foreign army force marching in, and the floodgates opened to modernity and international
consumer culture, the soldier becomes emblematic of a perceived overwhelming threat
to everything Icelandic, as well as to gender identities. Although officially a “friendly”
occupation force, these literary occupation narratives reveal that it is in fact
regarded as an enemy—but an enemy who cannot be fought, making the threat all the
more acute. The ocean that had protected Iceland for so long has been crossed, and
borders have been transgressed that should have been secure, leaving the Fjallkona completely defenceless against contamination. The soldier as enemy exposes Iceland’s
concerns: anxieties about loss of manhood and loss of traditional culture and values,
about the rise of women’s freedom, about pollution and degeneration. In short, it
reveals a deep-seated fear of a loss of identity. The Icelandic literary imagination
responds with a defence narrative that turns the fairytale of wealth and possibility
into a horror story about a transgressing monster that invades and colonizes the home
and pollutes the foundations of Icelandic culture and identity. In this horror story,
women, liberated through contamination by the monster, become monsters themselves.
In their attempt to re-establish the boundaries of Icelandic identity, Icelandic authors
remain faithful to the national narrative with but very few exceptions, casting Icelanders
in the role of innocent victims of foreign aggression despite the fact that the occupation
brought Iceland unprecedented prosperity and thereby laid the foundation for the modern
nation it is today.
With the American army base gone since 2006, critical revision of war narratives elsewhere
in full swing, and the generation that lived the occupation reaching old age, it does
seem that interest in alternative aspects of the war experience in Iceland is now
starting to rise. At least a few Icelandic authors have shown themselves prepared
to revisit the occupation from a different perspective, where a fear of the foreign
as Other is turned on its head and the monster becomes the monster within—a platform
for critical examinations of how to give meaning to an Icelandic sense of self as
part of a global community.