An Ordinary Icelandic Farmer
by Sverrir Sigurdsson
An ordinary Icelandic farmer is nothing but extraordinary. Farming is challenging anywhere in the world. But in Iceland, coaxing greenery from this land of volcanic rubble, faced with the constant threat of fresh eruption and glacial flooding, plus a maximum growing season of three months in a good year, requires a mentality as quixotic as tilting at windmills.
As a child, I was lucky enough to have adopted such a farmer as foster father, living and working at his farm for six summers since the age of nine. His name is Sæmundur Þorsteinsson, and he taught me farming practices in use since ancient times. I milked cows with my little fingers and cut grass with a specially made child-size scythe. When I visit the farm nowadays, the level of mechanization puts me in awe. In one lifetime, albeit a long one of ninety-seven years, Sæmundur had brought his farm out of the Dark Ages to the modern era. While many Icelandic farms had succumbed to the hardships, Sæmundur’s is still operating as a dairy farm in South Iceland.
A few decades before Sæmundur’s birth, people were leaving the region for an improved spiritual and temporal life as Mormons in North America. One of them, Sveinn Þórðarson (IR# II76901) from Fell, a farm adjacent to Sæmundur´s birthplace, left for Utah in 1878.
Today’s visitors to Iceland can drive from Keflavík airport to South Iceland in less than three hours. When Sæmundur was growing up, however, this part of the country was hard to reach. Glacial rivers meander over the land, and the only way to get across was fording on horseback. Bridges were deemed unfeasible. In this region of “fire and ice,” when a volcano erupted, it melted and splintered the glacier covering the crater causing an iceberg-laced flood that bulldozed everything in its way. The south coast also had no harbors, which made it inaccessible to coastal steamers.
Sæmundur and his twin sister, Ella, had their first encounter with the power of nature when they were less than two months old. The family lived in a traditional turf building at the farm Holt in the foothills of the Mýrdalsjökull Glacier. Three glacial rivers, Hafursá, Holtsá and Klifandi flow on the flatlands below the farm. Because of all the silt that glacial rivers carry, these rivers meander unpredictably across the flat landscape as they deposit their silt, build up their bed, and scrub the land clean of vegetation.
On October 12, 1918, an enormous explosion shattered the quiet autumn day. To the parents of the newborn, it must have felt like the end of the world. A dense black mushroom-shaped cloud rose towards the sky. Orange-red fire and black tephra belched from the cloud, while lightning thundered and danced around its edges. Earsplitting explosions emanated non-stop from deep within the bowels of the earth. Molten magma fractured the glacier and sent huge chunks of ice, mud and water careening down river canyons. Plumes of black ash shot into the dark sky. Katla had erupted after a hiatus of 58 years.
For the next three weeks, the confluence of the three raging rivers imprisoned the inhabitants of Holt. Day turned into night whenever the wind blew ash over the farm. After a few days of shoveling tephra from the roof of the farmstead, Sæmundur´s father, Þorsteinn, conceded defeat. He decided that the shorter roof span of the sheep pen was more likely to withstand the enormous weight of the ash. Sæmundur thus spent the early days of his young life in a manger (like another and better-known personage). Fortunately, the family was spared the devastating mud-floods, which cascaded much further east onto the desolate sands of Mýrdalssandur. There they deposited house-size icebergs and enough sand to create a new southern tip of Iceland.
The farm recovered after the eruption. For the next quarter century, life followed patterns established ages ago by long-dead ancestors. In spring, sheep gave birth to lambs and were shorn of their pelt before being driven into the mountains. In summer, grass was cut by scythe, dried hay was raked and tied into bundles that a train of horses carried across their backs to nearby barns. In the fall, the community collectively gathered the sheep from the mountains, celebrated the end of the harvest season, slaughtered livestock and processed their meat and offal. In winter, animals sheltered in barns. It was a subsistence economy. Sheep provided meat and wool. A cow or two provided dairy products after calving. A few hens provided eggs. At the farmstead, spinning wheels turned wool into yarn while deft fingers knit yarn into clothing. In darkened rooms, entertainers sang, recited poetry, and told and retold the Icelandic Sagas.
Sæmundur's path to school crossed the Klifandi river. In the darkness of blustery winter mornings, his mother loaded him and Ella onto the back of a horse. Like other school-age children from nearby farms, they rode their horses across wastelands, rivers, and streams, arriving at school cold and wet. A teacher of a rural school once told me: “It wasn’t enough to teach the children the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic. It was equally important to ensure that they didn’t get sick from sitting chilled and soaking wet in the drafty and poorly heated schoolhouse. And somebody had to attend to their horses.”
Throughout his life, Sæmundur's relationship with glacial rivers was one of ease. He once took me horseback riding to a country fair a few miles from his homestead. A shortcut meant fording the Klifandi river. Without hesitation he rode his horse from the steep river bank into the stream. I had no choice but to follow him. Our horses went swimming. Sæmundur's jittery Nasi reared up his front legs when he tried to find traction in the river, while my Rauður swam steadily across. When I recalled the incidence years later, Sæmundur grinned and ruefully confessed that he had grossly misjudged the river crossing that day. He also told me that he had broken his nose when he accidentally smashed it into the back of the rearing horse’s head.
Once, during the communal collection of sheep from the mountains, a sheep lost its footing in the river. Sæmundur went after it. I watched with dropped jaws as he vaulted in and out of the fast flowing, thigh-deep Hafursá river to save the drowning sheep. This scene is forever etched in my mind. He reminded me of the Saga heroes performing superhuman feats.
I first met Sæmundur in June 1948. Like many of my city peers, my parents had sent me to the countryside for the summer to breathe in the country air, to learn about farming, and make a man out of me. A few years earlier, Sæmundur and his wife, Solveig Kristjánsdóttir, or Solla as she was always called, had bought the farm, Hryggir, a couple of miles east of Holt. Sæmundur was tall, fit, and as handsome as a movie star. He and Solla had originally met as students at the Eystri Sólheimar primary school, where the two-year older girl might well have taught the younger boy to read and write as was the norm in multigrade one-room schools.
At the time, Hryggir, like most other farms in the area, was only a notch above Holt in terms of farming methods and modern comfort. There were five milking cows, eighty sheep, four horses, a dog, a cat and a gaggle of chickens. Although horse-drawn machinery dominated the hay-making process, scythes and rakes were still used on uneven meadows. Personal comfort was not much different from that of Holt. In the cold and drafty farmhouse, the only heating was from a coal-fired stove in the kitchen. Oil lamps provided light. Drinking water was the collected runoff from the roof, and the bathroom was an outdoor privy. Solla, Sæmundur, and their two young children slept in the living room, while an elderly couple they had adopted occupied the only bedroom. I slept in the garret room. A few farms in the area had modernized their life with tractors, electricity and telephones, but Hryggir had none of these conveniences.
Over the next six summers my relationship with Sæmundur morphed from a father-son affiliation to that of mutually respected friends and peers. Early on he realized that my carpentry skills were superior to his. So, he let me loose on projects that required such skills. Sæmundur's attitude towards me was typical of his dealings with others. He was a good reader of people's strengths and weaknesses, worked well with others, and was highly regarded by the community. Cooperation with neighboring farmers was key to his life´s success. He admired and learned from other people’s skills and complemented the shortcomings of his peers with his own talents. He was a genial, outgoing man who wasn’t shy about speaking his mind, although he always prefaced his statement with a self-effacing, “I’m just a stupid man.” When others mouthed their opinions, he would be all ears, and one could see him weigh his every word with care.
During my summers at Hryggir, Sæmundur relentlessly worked at improving the farm. To electrify the homestead, he rented a bulldozer in 1952 to divert a nearby stream and harness its power for a home-made hydroelectric station. This was retired a dozen years later when the area was linked to the national grid. With the help of a community-owned crane, he dug drainage trenches and turned unproductive bogs into rich grasslands. He experimented with different kinds of fertilizers, feedstock, harvesting and conservation methods to increase the farm yield.
Steadily, the farm began to prosper. A few years after I spent my last summer there, Sæmundur bought a small diesel tractor to replace much of the horse-operated farm machinery. Most of his innovations were common to neighboring farms, but his dairy operation stood out. His was the first cowshed in the region to use mechanical milking to replace the exhausting work of manually milking the growing dairy-herd. In 1982, the family also built a modern farmhouse replete with electrical heating, running water and modern electronic conveniences.
When I visited the farm in 2012, one year before Sæmundur celebrated his 95th birthday, I was struck by the impressive farm machinery that allowed him and his son, Ásmundur, to run a farm with some thirty heads of dairy. When I asked him how the two of them managed the work he replied: “Ásmundur does most of the work nowadays. But during the lambing season I take care of the births. It is not heavy work, but you have to be up at all hours.” "How many ewes are we talking about?” I asked. “About 150,” the 94-year-old replied and grinned.
Life in the region has undergone a metamorphosis in the past century. Many farms in the neighborhood have closed their doors for good and their inhabitants moved away to enjoy an easier life in the capital. Others have discovered that housing and feeding tourists is more financially rewarding than housing and feeding cattle and sheep. Regardless of modern technology, dairy farming is still a demanding operation that requires constant attention. Now that Sæmundur has passed away, the future of his legacy is anything but clear as his bachelor son, Ásmundur, struggles to carry on.
On a beautiful summer day a couple of years ago, Ásmundur and I stood at his farm admiring the pristine Mýrdalsjökull Glacier in the distance. “Katla’s next eruption is long overdue,” I remarked. Katla is the volcano living under the glacier. “She has been known to erupt twice every century and now she has been dormant since your dad was born in 1918. What do you think will happen to your farm when she erupts?” Ásmundur looked pensive for a moment. Then he answered quietly: “Perhaps the brunt of the flood will flow east as it did last time. But it can also come this way, and in that case, it will wipe out the farm with me in it.”
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