Hallgrímur Helgason participated in the conference “Iceland and the Faroe Islands seen from within and without – cross-cultural perspectives, 17th-21st century” that was held in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, on the 14th and 15th of June, 2022. Among participants were historians and professors from Iceland, Faroe Islands, Denmark and France. Hallgrímur’s lecture was titled “Two Children in the House of Scandinavia”. It can be read here:

TWO CHILDREN IN THE HOUSE OF SCANDINAVIA

As we all know, the Nordic countries are just a one big family. Just look a the map, and look at the flags, they all look the same. They all sport the cross, with two exceptions. It’s like when a family goes to a restaurant and the dominant father starts by ordering a certain dish, “I’ll have this”, and the rest of the family nods to the waiter “yes, me too, I’ll have the same.” The two exceptions are of course Greenland and Lapland. Maybe because they didn’t get the email and came late to the restaurant. Nobody told them where it was exactly and they had to order from the desert menu…

One big family. OK. Maybe not a totally happy family and maybe a rather unusual family, or should we rather say an atypical family of nine. And this is quite normal, for after all, Scandinavia is the official home of atypical families: Here the average child has at least two fathers, one and a half mothers, and six sets of grandfathers and grandmothers. But even though this family might not be totally happy as a whole, the picture looks very different when they are asked one by one. Individually, they always claim to be the happiest people on earth. I mean, in the United Nations Happiness Report, the Nordic countries are always in the top ten. Finland is number one now, followed by Denmark, Iceland, then Sweden (no. 7) and Norway (no. 8). (I’m sorry, I couldn’t find the Faroe Islands on this list, I guess you are included in Denmark and this is why they are not number one, or?)

But you can say that we are competing in happiness. 

Let’s look at this family. Let’s look at the House of Scandinavia.

First we have of course big daddy Sweden, the rich and responsible man of the world, who runs his shops across the planet, and has it all fabricated by children labourers in Bangladesh, because he is so tired of all his unions and all his social democrats. It’s terrible of course, but we don’t talk about it, because Mr. Sweden is such a nice man. He plays the piano, speaks fluent french and he believes he can solve nearly all the world’s problems with a hexagon tool.

Then we have of course: Mother Denmark, the chain smoking queen of hearts. She is getting quite old now and doesn’t like to meet new people anymore, especially if they are strange and don’t speak Danish. (Which is kind of strange, since no one in this world can speak Danish except for her and her children maybe.) 

She had her divorce from Father Sweden many many years ago, and now there is nothing between them but Öresund, that used to be called Höresund, for they were always trying to listen what the other one was doing, but they never heard anything, so then it just became Öresund. But now they have built the bridge and they do sometimes meet, but then they always start arguing at once, like old separated couples always do. Mother Denmark says: “Look at me, I am happy today, I am number two in happiness. And that is because I divorced you. Look at you, you are only number seven! Because you can not be happy when you see how happy I am!” And then Father Sweden answers: “Jo, but you don’t have any landscapes, ha ha. No mountains, no lakes, only border with Germany, ouh ouh ouh.”

This old couple had some children together and also on their own. Their first born was a son, the big, tall and handsome man called Norway. And he is still their favourite child, because he’s done so well in his life. But in recent years, there is a hint of jealousy among the parents, because suddenly their son has more money than them, and he’s also outdoing them in almost every field. He’s now got more writers, artists, footballers and olympic gold medals than Father Sweden and Mother Denmark combined. And now suddenly Oslo has become the new cultural capital of the north with the new Munch Museum, the Astrup Fearnley Museum, the new National Museum (that opened last week) and the new Opera House that is designed so that they can now walk in their cross-country-skis up on its roof. I don’t know why they want to do that, but when you are filthy rich, you want to be able to do all kinds of crazy stuff, like going skiing on your Opera House. 

So the parents have a complicated relationship with their firstborn. This always happens when the children get more rich than their parents. At first there is jealousy, then they become proud, and the final stage is when they become dependent on their kids and move in with them. So be prepared, in 200 years time Scandinavia will consist of Norway and the United Norwegian Emirates. Because then Denmark and Sweden will be dead. They will be called Normark and Norden. 

And we will all speak with a Norwegian accent, like Stoltenberg at Nato meetings.

Then we have another child, a quite beautiful daughter named Finland. She is not the daughter of Denmark, for Father Sweden had her in his previous life, with another woman, a mysterious woman that nobody actually knows. Some say she was from Mongolia, others say Uzbekistan. And in fact, the father didn’t acknowledge the girl until she became a grown-up. But then he got such a guilty conscience that he gave her permission to use a “parental cross” in her flag. That is why, of all the Scandinavian children, Finland is the only one who has a clean cross, like the parents. We, the others, all have to have to do with a line around the cross. Still the relationship between father and daughter is stiff. If you have ever taken the ferry between Helsinki and Stockholm you can see it in action: Sweden sitting at all the tables in the middle, talking loudly as if they owned the boat (which they maybe do), and Finland in the corner, silent and shy. But lately they have tried to come together and recently father and daughter went on a trip together, to Nato.

The other children of the family are Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands and the Sami. The Sami child is a mystery. We don’t know too much about it. It doesn’t even live in the house, but the garden. Åland is a grandchild, daughter of Finland.

It’s a bit since Iceland moved out of the parental home and started a life on its own. I have to state here, that Iceland is not exactly he or a she, it’s not quite clear what it is, at the moment it’s them. Despite their moving out of the house, Iceland is still a very young and undecided person, we can call them transgender in transition. And with that undecidedness comes a bit of instability. Iceland is in fact still a teenager and has been causing all kinds of problems in its lifetime. 

For example: Shortly after moving out from their parents, Iceland started a war against the British Empire. Yes, you may not believe this, but this is a historical fact. This war was waged when I was about twelve. It was waged on the ocean and it was called the Cod War. This was a rather optimistic war on Iceland’s behalf because we didn’t have any military and we still don’t have. No army, no fleet, no weapons, no soldiers, nothing. We fought against the fleet of Great Britain with one small boat. But the most striking thing about this war is not those facts, but the fact that we actually won! We won the British Empire at war, the only war the British Empire has lost, until Brexit. And how did we win? We won it because we had innocence, optimism and stupidity. As you know, there is nothing that can beat this blend. We also used this mix again in a football match at the Euro in France back in 2016, when we won England in the last-16 round and knocked them out of the competition. Curiously enough, this was actually in the same week they voted themselves out of Europe with Brexit. So it was a double exit for England from Europe. And this is why we always feel a bit responsible for Brexit. We contributed to it. We made it worse.

We also feel bad about our economic crash of 2008. And also about that Eyjafjallajökull eruption of 2010. The one that shut down all of Europe. That one was clearly a mistake on our behalf. We had been trying to start a small eruption for tourists, but we just lost control of it, and it sort of got out of hand. This was because we needed cash after the crash, but all we got was ash. Ashcloud. That shut down all the airports in Europe.

But before the ash and the crash we had been behaving recklessly, we had been partying hard for many years (like teenagers do), inflating our banks with monkey money, fake numbers and dirty laundry from Russian oligarchs. We thought it was an economic miracle, with our three little banks becoming big and respected players on the world stage. We even thought we had bought Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen, and Illum’s Bolighus! We only did this to get our old mother angry, to piss her off. But it was all just imaginary money and the whole system came crashing down one night. All our banks exploded in the same night and we were a bankrupt nation. The teenager, who had just moved out from Mother Denmark’s house, was guilty of drunken driving and had hit the wall.

After that, nobody wanted to help us. We had no friends anymore. Everybody just looked at us and said: “This will teach you a lesson, young boy… or girl… or trans something, whatever you are.” No one was willing to help us. No one except you guys: The Faroese people were the only nation willing to help, offering to lend us money. “Hevir tú brúk fyri pengum? Skal ég lána þé penga?” 

This was the hardest lesson in all our history. Our little Faroese brother, who was still living with his mother, and was not even having a proper job, but had saved all his money (that he got from uncles and nieces, throughout the years, for birthday og Christmas presents), had saved it all in a piggy bank that he kept on a special shelf in his room. And he was willing to break that piggy bank and lend us the money inside it. Our three internationally acclaimed investment banks were going to be saved by a Faroese piggy bank! All we could do was to look at the tiny little thing in the arms of this young boy and swallow our pride and our arrogance. 

I have to use this opportunity, on behalf of the Icelandic people, to thank you dear Faroe friends, for teaching us a lesson, for making us become a little more responsible in our lives. “Þakka ykkur kærlega fyrir!” Or as you say it: “Stóra takk!”

Because mother Denmark was not pleased. She was still angry at us, for having bought those fancy shops in Copenhagen, and also because we had used a weak spot in her own history, when she was in a very toxic and abusive relationship with a man called Germany, and was being raped every night, we had used exactly that moment in time to forsake her, to move away from home. Actually we still feel guilty about that parting, for as soon as we found our freedom, we stared dating this American army officer, a very good looking, gum chewing, cigarette smoking guy. He was our first boyfriend, even though we didn’t know if we were a girl or a boy back then. And we just forsake the family, we turned our backs against the holy Nordic family, the whole House of Scandinavia. We thought they were so provincial, listening to Kim Larsen and using snus, walking around in ugly Ecco shoes and smoking wannabe weed in Christiania. 

Yes, we fell in love with America. But then he turned out to be an asshole and just left us, and we suddenly found out that we had no friends anymore. I mean, we could have tried to become friends with the United Kingdom, but we beat them both in war and football, so we always feel a bit superior to them, we felt kind of sorry for them, and you can never build a true friendship on this kind of feeling, so we had to turn back to our old family, the old dysfunctional family of Scandinavia. 

And what did we see there?

We saw that there were still two kids living with their old mother, in mom’s house, in Mother Denmark’s old palace, and one in the garden (the Sami). Those two in the house were the boy called Faroe Islands, the one with the piggy bank, and a girl named Greenland. She is actually not the daughter of Father Sweden for Mother Denmark adopted her after their divorce. For a long time this was a secret and Mother Denmark didn’t really treat her well, for Greenland is an abused child, economically, culturally, and sexually, as the latest news show us. For it has now been revealed that Mother Denmark allowed the girl to be raped by her scientists. She also allowed them to install contraceptive spiral into her uterus so that she was unable to have babies on her own. How cruel is that? Who does this kind of a thing? Mother Denmark is just a chain-smoking cruel old bitch.

You, my Faroe brother, may think she is not, but you should think twice. You think you are cool and clever by still living in her home, when those rapes are going on, when her border-closing racism is going on, all the indoor smoking, and all her attitude towards her children is still there. 

I don’t know if you saw the TV series called Historien om Danmark presented by Danish actor Lars Mikkelsen. The first season consisted of six episodes, 60 minutes long each, that is 360 minutes in total, and out of those 360 minutes dedicated to the long life of Mother Denmark, only 30 seconds were dedicated to her children, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Oh, man. That was a hard blow, to find out that she never really cared. We didn’t even deserve a one minute’s mention in her history. Only 30 seconds, all three of us together. Wow. It was so revealing. All this time, all those hard suffering centuries, she had just been pretending. There is no real love when countries have “children”. 

We have a saying in Iceland that when the Norwegians came at the turn of the 20th century to fish herring on a massive scale, that they, the Norwegians, did more for Iceland in 6 years than Denmark did in 600 years. (Well, actually it’s not a saying but a sentence from my last novel). And when I saw those 30 seconds on TV I knew why this was true.

No, let me tell you, dear Faroe Islands, you are living in a sick house. 

You could probably ask your older brother, Norway, for advice, or you could ask your transgender sister Iceland what to do, and I am pretty sure you will get the same answer: 

Just leave.

Just walk out of the house and start a home on your own, with your own government, your own president, your own pride and your own self esteem, your own culture, and your own freedom. I mean, we Icelanders may not know whether we are a girl or a boy or whatever, and we may have been causing the world some problems, but just look at us: What we have done and become since 1944. We won the Brits at war and football, we won a silver medal in men’s handball at the Olympics in Beijing back in 2008, we went from living in cold and damp turf huts, to using the hot springs to heat our houses for free. We went from having no music at all to giving the world Björk. We went from writing novels in Danish to receiving the Nobel Prize in literature and becoming guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011 (something that the Danes are still waiting for). We went from being totally isolated in the North Atlantic to having 2 million visitors each year. And we went from being only 100.000 Icelanders to becoming 380.000, after the Danes stopped having birth control over our bodies. The only thing that we still haven’t managed to do is to win Denmark in a football match. Maybe we should first start a war against them, and then, after winning that, we can win them in football.

In fact there was only one negative side effect of our independence from Mother Denmark, and that was the fact that we lost the ability to speak Danish. Because we didn’t have to anymore. My parent’s generation read the Danish newspapers and magazines, but my generation grew up on Elvis and the Beatles. We turned our ears to England and America. And now, every time I meet my Greenland sister and my Faroe brother, I get jealous, for they still speak perfect Danish, you guys still know your Danish. I know it’s a beautiful language, but … is it really worth your self esteem, your freedom, your happiness, your sex life?

For us in Iceland, the language is always a matter of stress, when we sit down at the big old dining table in the House of Scandinavia, and father Sweden is there for a short visit along with step-sister Finland. She is holding her Åland baby in her lap, and out the window we can spot the Sami sitting outside his garden hut, smoking his reindeer meat in a pipe. Mother Denmark is sitting at the other end, opposite her ex husband, with her hateful happy smile, and across from us is brother Norway, all fit and fresh from his gold winning trip to the winter Olympics, his eyes still glued at his smartphone, looking for flere gratuleringer. And then there are the three smallest siblings sitting together on the west side of the table: Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. And we in Iceland look at the two of them and we always get the feeling that we are just three different islands in the sea of this Scandinavian language, be it Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. And the sea is rough and we are forever afraid of it, because even though we know how to swim, we never learned to swim in Danish. 

This language situation always feels so strange, for we can clearly see that the members of this family are not understanding each other. Mother Denmark and Father Sweden can only pretend to understand each other (and this was the reason for their divorce). For Iceland, this is kind of strange, because for us it is quite clear that this IS the same language. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is all the same language. The only thing being different is the attitude. Those are just three different attitudes of speaking the same language. I mean, Norway. It’s the son. He comes into the kitchen with that longing in his eyes, and says:

“Skal vi ikke spise middag snart? Jeg er så sulten.”

And his father is there, Father Sweden:

“Joho, är du hungrig nu? Jag är inte säker på när din mamma … men jag kanske kan … jag har det här hexagon…jag kan försöka…”

But then Mother Denmark suddenly appears:

“Asso, det kommer snart, bare sæt dig ved bordet!”

So we have a language of longing, Norwegian, a language of understanding, Swedish, and a language of power, Danish.

This is how it looks for us, Icelanders, for we still speak the original language, we still remember the time when Icelandic was the universal language of the north, the latin of the north. We still speak that, but you just … yeah, what the hell did you do with our language? For us it looks like you turned it upside down, for us you sound like your speaking backwards. Take for example the Old Norse/Icelandic word EKKI, which means NOT. You have turned it around. In your mouth it’s IKKE, pronounced I K K E, when it should be EKKI, pronounced E K K I. So for us, Danish and Swedish sound like Icelandic gone sour, and Faroese… well, that just sounds like Icelandic in the fog. Foggy Icelandic. (We can hear those s-s-s sounds, but we can not make them out them, we can not see them because of the fog.)

Icelandic is the Old Norse language as it was spoken in the year 1000, then it was shipped to Iceland and kept there, in the fridge, for a thousand years, for nobody came to visit us, and we didn’t change the language ourselves, because we hardly used it. I mean, in the past Icelandic people were famous for saying only two words per year, and those were “oh, summer!” and “ih, winter…”. We only used our language for reading and writing.

For, back in Viking times, we were the only nation that could read and write. We were like Lisa of the Simpson family. Therefore it was our task, I mean, we had to write the histories of Norway, Denmark, Sweden. If it wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t know anything about Ólafur helgi or Ragnar loðbrók. So for us sitting at the dining table today and understanding next to nothing, is just rather ridiculous. We always feel a bit like the latin poet Virgil, if he was being sat down at an Italian family restaurant. “This language rings a bell, I can hear its resemblance to Latin, but … are these people drunk?”

Not being able to understand the conversation at the dinner table leaves us silent, and we sit there and start thinking, looking around the table. And we look at our Faroese brother and we ask ourselves: How can we convince him? I mean, because we really want to see you grow as a nation, and when we look at the numbers, your population was 29.000 in 1944. And now it’s 55.000. You have grown by 89% since WW2. We have gone from 100.000 to 380.000. We have grown by 280%. We are nearly four times bigger than we were on day one. (This I didn’t know until last night, and it came as a shock.) So for us, small nations, Denmark is a contraceptive. I just have to tell you Faroe Islands: Take this condom off!

Don’t get me wrong, dear Danes. I love Denmark. My first memories are from Skovshoved. Asger Jorn and Kim Leine are the best. Danish people love my books. I even think the language is vidunderlig, I’m just talking about power structure. No country should have another one under its spell, and especially not when they are so forgetful of them as the Danes are.

We have heard here at this conference that in the 19th century you, the Faroese people, suffered from the Danish monopoly. You got next to nothing for your products, because there was no competition, there was only one merchant in town. And now people tell me that you can’t leave Denmark because of all the money she gives you each year. For me it looks like you are still suffering from monopoly. In the past you couldn’t get money from elsewhere than Denmark, and they were giving you too little: Today you can’t get money from elsewhere than Denmark because they are giving you so much. Both is equally bad. Before, you couldn’t be independent because you were so poor, and now you can’t be independent because you are so rich. How about taking the money out of this question. How about saying that money never has anything to do with independence. But that money will come when you become independent. This is what happened to us. We even got so rich that we got bankrupt.

Therefore I say to you, my Faroe brother: You have everything you need to become a regular country. Of course it’s nice to live with your mother, you get free meals and some money for the cinema, and even a big and beautiful roundabout underneath the ocean. But you are not a real man, real nation. And I know you can do it because of the thing you did to us back in 2009, when you lent us a helping hand. You showed the world that you had size. You can rise to the occasion.

It’s so much better to be your own self all of the time, than 30 seconds in the life of another person, country, mother, Denmark.