Icelandic Dinner & The Cod Wars

Yet another great feature of iPhones is that you can scope out wikipedia while at a bar after work, allowing you to seem intelligent and well-informed upon meeting an ambassador half an hour later.

I did an independent study on Vikings while in college, but was worried something major might have happened in Icelandic affairs since Leif Erickson, the point at which my focus tapered off. Good thing for that iPhone. With the exception of the ambassador and his wife, and a couple of enthusiasts who have actually visited Iceland, I think I was probably the closest thing to an expert at the reception.

“Actually,” I’d explain to some other twenty-something in a suit, “Iceland may not have a military, but they’re still active members of NATO. In fact they hosted the historic Reagan-Gorbachev meeting which helped peacefully negotiate an end to the Cold War.” Or something about geothermal activity, or the European Economic Area, etc.

I would then pivot around to Ambassador Hannesson to ask him if Iceland is at all worried about mounting Russian aggressions, given his nation’s ongoing participation in NATO, but he said the whole question was far too complicated for one evening and would take too long to explain.

I mentioned that the British view themselves as culturally distinct from Europe, despite the fact a skilled Frisbee player could conceivably smack a Gaul from across the Channel, and wondered if Iceland feels a similar sense of psychological detachment given its distance from the continent. 

His response was swift and firm: Iceland is VERY European, always has been, always will be. (Particularly now, in the midst of a Ragnarök banking crisis and salvific hopes of membership in the European Union.)

My query, combined with the fact I wear pinstripe suits and have a horse face, lead the ambassador to think I was British for large portions of the evening. He even singled me out as a representative of the UK during an informal toast. I made efforts to correct this mistake, but in the future I think I will let ambassadors assume I’m from whichever nation they care to, for fear wikipedia turns out to be fallible or I fall into some kind of trouble involving an open bar. If I should commit some horrendous diplomatic faux pas it might as well go on record as “that Lord John Marbory guy.”

Incidentally, dinner at the Ambassador of Iceland’s house technically means I left the United States for about three hours over the weekend, as embassies and the residences of diplomats are considered foreign soil. Which is to say I spent significant parts of my night trying to come up with fun things to do in the tiny Icelandic bubble which are otherwise illegal in the United States. 

The only activity I could come up with was “harpoon a whale,” which remains legal in Iceland. Ironically, not only does America enforce international anti-whaling laws, Oklahoma does as well.* So, back home, I’d be in all sorts of trouble if I harpooned a whale.

Not in Iceland, though. I went ahead and checked the pool out back for a pet orca, and also tried to find a bathtub which might have a baby humpback I could skewer or something, but I didn’t see any. I think in Iceland gay couples have the same adoption rights as straight couples, but that would probably do something weird to my tax code, plus I’m straight.

At this point I am happy to provide the reader with some interesting facts about Iceland, which I have pieced together from my independent study on the Vikings, an iPhone, and my conversations with Ambassador Hjállmar W. Hannesson.

Let’s examine the ambassador’s name, first. A lot of folks have names like “Anderson” or “Thompson,” which means, at one point, their ancestor had a dad named either Ander or Tom, and for some reason they decided to keep it as the family name, too. Icelanders never locked down their surnames, like us. We can infer that Ambassador Hjállmar W. Hannesson’s father is a guy named Han. And, if I ever meet a girl with the surname Hjálldotir, it’s a fair bet she’s the ambassador’s daughter. If I marry her, my son will be Kirk Andrewson, or Eleanor Drewdotir. At least in terms of their last names.

This is one of many cultural legacies retained by the descendants of Vikings. In fact “Icelandic” is almost linguistically identical to how the Vikings spoke, as opposed to Norwegian or Swedish, for instance.

So let’s skimmer to the Age of Vikings, in order to provide Iceland with some back story: Around 870 A.D. the King of Norway began consolidating power throughout his kingdom, which sufficiently irked enough warring chieftains that several packed up their long boats and headed to a recently discovered island northwest of Scandinavia.

Thus began the settlement of Iceland. Which is, from a masculine perspective, the absolute most glorious time in all of male history. Iceland (unlike, say, Virginia) did not already have people living on it when the Europeans showed up. The whole damn island was uninhabited.

Technically there were a few Irish hermits, but these guys were celibate and don’t really count, as they were rare and uninterested in building houses or catapults. A particular sect of Irish monks at the time had a habit of climbing into boats and floating aimlessly around the ocean, under the theory that divine providence would direct them somewhere to preach the Gospel. So the Vikings would occasionally find an Irish monk or two stranded on the island yelling at puffins, but otherwise no humans had ever been there before. (Incidentally, this raises the question of: where did all of the other aimlessly floating Irish monks wind up? Japan? Also, why aren’t universities throwing research grants at me left and right?)

The whole island was so virginal that cute seals would wander up to the Vikings out of curiosity, having never before seen a “person,” then promptly get brained with a club. From the Viking perspective, delicious piles of meat wrapped up in snuggly coats would scurry right up to you for slaughter. Neato! Nobody owned any real estate yet. What you claimed was what you owned. Everybody still worshiped Thor, so binge drinking and fistfights were considered socially acceptable, if not laudable.

So for a while life consisted of guys with helmets wandering around collecting driftwood to build houses and make fires with, then poking around mountains and valleys claiming picturesque plots of land and naming things after themselves. Occasionally you might chat it up with a crazed Irish hermit living in a tree. Then, at the end of the day, you’d settle down to a hot meal of beached whale with a side of baby seal brains, and afterwards relax in a warm geothermal spring. We can also infer that at least a couple of them invited their girlfriends, since there are still Icelanders today. (Or that they raided Ireland every couple of years for slave women. Really, that whole period of history is a drunken blur in terms of both ethics and narrative.)

Other stuff happened. They ran out of valleys to explore on the island, so they colonized Greenland and then Newfoundland in North America, but a miniature ice age and unreceptive locals drove them all back to Iceland. They subsequently got absorbed into the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway, but became a full Republic again in 1944. They’ve more or less stayed out of the way since that time.

In fact the only notable military activity of Iceland in the last hundred years is the so-called “Cod Wars” of the 1950’s and 1970’s. Iceland, in a bizarrely aggressive gesture, declared a series of territorial expansions pertaining to their North Atlantic fishing rights. The British defiantly continued fishing in the disputed waters, prompting one of the most passive-aggressive and boring conflicts in all of human history.

In response to “strategic fishing incursions” the Icelandic Coast Guard dispatched its fleet (six patrol vessels and a Catalina Flying Boat) to zip around the “war zone,” where they proceeded to cut fishing nets loose from British trawlers. The British, in response, dispatched a fleet of warships to valiantly protect their fishermen, and ultimately a cod-quota compromise was reached.

Iceland would of course be no match against the United Kingdom. Or anyone, for that matter. The whole country has a population of 320,000 people. That’s less than half the size of the county I grew up in. Or, to put it another way, there are roughly 1,000 Americans for every one Icelander.

Anyway, despite their diminutive size, they pulled the same stunt with the United Kingdom again. Twice. The British seemed to feel bad about potentially destroying the country with their vastly superior Navy, so English captains elected instead to occasionally ram into Icelandic tug boats in a series of weird, socially awkward naval maneuvers.

Eventually Iceland got so angry about cod fishing rights that they threatened to shut down strategic NATO bases on the island. At the same time, as near as I can tell, the British discerned that the fish-to-petroleum ratio of deploying an entire fleet of warships over cod disputes was financially psychopathic, so they basically conceded the issue and went home to prepare for the equally silly Falkland Conflict.

I do not know for certain, but I can only hope that every year thousands of Icelanders parade through Reykjavik swinging dead fish around, like a precision drill team, singing patriotic songs about “The Armistice” and eating traditional cod dinners. Lots of flag waiving and veterans tearfully recounting the horror of a British vessels nearly capsizing them in “The Battle of the Nudge.”

You go, Iceland. Skál!

*The reader may ask at this point: why would Oklahoma, an entirely land-locked state, feel compelled to outlaw whale hunting? I have given this a tremendous amount of thought over the last five years. Here are the possible explanations I’ve come up with:

1. A forward-thinking legislator has taken Global Warming into account and wants to make sure nobody eats any endangered species off the coast of Guthrie in the twenty-second century.

2. A whale from Sea World Orlando was en route to Sea World San Diego, and our statesmen convened an emergency session after noticing guys in John Deer hats perched on highway overpasses with harpoons.

3. The petroleum lobby systematically endeavors to gut-punch any form of competing fuel source, right down to whale oil.

4. (Most likely) Some smart-ass state senator tacked it on as an amendment to an entirely unrelated bill about school districting he didn’t like, in order to make the legislation sound moronic, but it managed to push through into law anyway.