God and Man in Iceland, Part I
By Tal Howard
We welcome this guest post on Christianity in Iceland from Tal Howard, Professor of History and the Humanities and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparasio University. Stay tuned for part two in a few days!
Recently I’ve had the opportunity to lead a study trip of former students to Iceland as part of an ongoing effort to reflect on the legacy of Protestantism in light of the quincentenary of the Reformation in 2017. Like other Scandinavian countries, Iceland has possessed an established Lutheran church since the sixteenth century, even if growing levels of secularity characterize the island republic today. But though I set out to discover Protestantism in Iceland, what first smacked me in the soul was Iceland itself: a geologic peculiarity, a cultural storehouse, a clump of aching beauty plunked down in the heart of the Atlantic.
Iceland’s beguiling landscapes are well known: a plethora of active volcanoes, glaciers, waterfalls, lava beds, vast tundra, thermal baths, geysers, fjords, and more. An infant in geologic terms at just 70 million years old, Iceland invites beholding, not inhabiting. Civilization boasts a toehold, and little more, around Reykjavik, where two-thirds of the country’s scant population of ca. 330,000 dwell. The remainder of the island, though pocked with smaller towns, basks in rugged, uninhabitable splendor. This is not Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw”--the Norwegian-imported horses and sheep roam unmolested by natural predators--but rather nature expansive, enrapturing, imponderable. Our study team felt this most piercingly when we traveled on Snaefellsnes peninsula on Iceland’s western coast. Walking along the lava-crust cliffs at the peninsula’s end, one can look up and see the glistening glacial ice cap of mount Snaefellsjökul, immortalized in Jules Verne’s adventure tale, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and then turn to take in the vast Atlantic. I’m not sure if beauty can save the world, as Dostoyevsky claimed, but if so, deliverance might well start here. Indeed, I’d like to think we had an intimation of what C. S. Lewis memorably described in Surprised by Joy as “Pure Northernness,” a longing that “engulfed [him]: a vision of huge, clear spaces standing above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity.”
While in search of Protestantism, we anticipated finding Odin, Thor, Loki, and other Norse gods. We were not disappointed. On the same trip on Snaefellsnes peninsula, for instance, we stopped at Helgafell, a sacred hill venerated by Thor worshipers centuries ago. In Reykjavik, one can’t miss streets with names such as Odinsgata, Thorsgata, Baldursgata, Tysgata, Freyjugata, and Lokastigur. A short walk from a restaurant named after Odin is a health food store called Yggdrasil, the great World Tree in Norse mythology.
With Lutheran confessional documents, we packed Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, a key source of knowledge about the Norse gods, written around the year 1220. What especially struck me was its brooding melancholy, even fatalism, epitomized by the events of the world’s end, Ragnarok, which most of the gods do not survive. Thor is slain by the sea serpent, Jormundgand. The bound wolf Fenrir, Loki’s child, escapes to wreck havoc, and ultimately devours Odin. Then,
The sun grows black,
the earth sinks into the sea.
The bright stars
vanish from the heavens.
Steam surges up
and the fire rages.
But today the old gods live on--and not only on street signs and in our weekday names. A relatively recently, fascinating development in Iceland has been revival of interest in pre-Christian beliefs. In 1972 the Ásatrúarfélagið or Ásatrú Association (Ásatrú, "faith of the Æsir," i.e. the Norse gods) formed to rekindle knowledge and veneration of the old gods. Largely the brain child of the farmer and poet Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, Ásatrúarfélagið gained legal recognition in 1973 as a registered religion according to provisions in Iceland’s Constitution. For most of its early history, the group consisted of hardly a hundred members. But today under the “high priest” Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, its membership has climbed to around 2500, making it the largest non-Christian religious group in Iceland. Ásatrúarfélagið does not have a fixed theology; members can understand the pagan gods however they please. Presumably for most involvement has an antiquarian motive, but a pagan temple is under construction for cultic use, and thethe group has revived a central ritual: the communal blót or outdoor sacred feast, a rite officially abolished in 1000 with the Christianization of Iceland. Ásatrú priests (or goðar) also conduct name-giving ceremonies, coming-of-age rituals, and weddings and funerals. As a registered religion, the group receives a portion of the state’s “church tax” to fund their activities, and they even have their own burial plot. Fortunately, unlike some neo-pagan movements in other European countries, Iceland’s has no neo-Nazi undertones.
While lingering on the old gods tempted, we pressed on in search of our quarry: Protestant Christianity in Iceland. Today, despite record levels of atheism, most of Iceland’s population still belong to the Lutheran Church. Its individual churches, usually small white structures with a red roof, dot the rugged landscape, tiny, forlorn outposts of the divine. Lutheranism in Iceland is necessarily understood in light of the island’s earlier Christianization, about which we learned from Sverrir Jakobsson, a historian of medieval and early modern history at the University of Iceland, and from Reykjavik’s impressive National Museum.
Uninhabited for eons, Iceland witnessed the coming of Irish hermits, possibly as early as the 700s, to seek out a solitary life of prayer. Only the scantiest evidence remains of these pious squatters, who brought with them the ascetic impulses that once drew restive Christians to the deserts of Egypt to seek the face of God. Since the Norse gods arrived with subsequent emigration from Norway, Iceland is the only country in the world that, due to the hermits, can pay honest, if mischievous lip service to having been founded as a “Christian nation.”
Part 2 is here.
Thomas Albert Howard is Professor of History and the Humanities and Holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is author of Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (Oxford 2016) and editor (with Mark A. Noll) of Protestantism after 500 Years (Oxford, 2016).