Iceland's new found popularity

Tourism’s propensity to kill the thing it loves

Dear Global Jigsaw,

This week’s guest post is by Oxford University Professor and Old Norse-specialist, Carolyne Larrington. I have had the pleasure of knowing her since my undergraduate days in the late 1990s, when I was a tutee of her husband, in addition to being an occasional walker of her river-splashing and absolutely joyous, Daisy Dog.

Carolyne’s research, which might once have been considered a tad esoteric, has been most in-vogue of late, thanks to the Norseishness of the Game of Thrones. You can hear her discussing why The Game of Thrones matters, here.

One of Carolyne’s many books. Buy here.

In today’s post, she writes about her visits to Iceland over the course of four decades, and the complicated relationship the island nation has developed with tourism.

Please do share if you find it interesting. And my exhortations to become a paid subscriber remain constant :-). Please consider it if you are a regular reader of this newsletter.

xxxxxxx

I first went to Iceland as a student in 1980. I sailed over on the Faroese ferry Smyril from Bergen in Norway; I’d been working as usual in a Norwegian hotel over the summer. I got the cheapest fare available. I made landfall in Seyðisfjörður in the east of Iceland – as far from Reykjavík as it was possible to get.

Iceland was in the grip of rampant inflation and hideously expensive. I camped and youth hostelled, ate mostly rye bread and cheese, travelled on the regular bus that circumnavigated the main road round the island and spent my 21^st birthday with my Icelandic friends, dancing in my walking boots in Hollywood, then billed as the biggest disco in Europe. There were only a few travellers in those days, and we kept bumping into each other as we fetched up in those campsites and youth hostels that were still open at the end of the summer.

Reykjavík was a sleepy small town; there were few public phoneboxes, no beer, for beer would only become legal in 1984, and no TV on Thursdays or in July (when people would be out haymaking).

I have been to Iceland many times since that first exciting and exhausting trip, for research, work and pleasure. When I flew there two weeks ago, the plane was jam-packed: some travellers were simply changing planes at Keflavík on their way to North America, but others were anticipating an action-packed adventure holiday. The bus station was thronged with visitors of all ages, booking fourteen-hour bus trips to see a glacial lake, or to go mountain-biking, ziplining, ATV driving, or, slightly more sedately, horse-riding.

They could visit the locations that feature in Game of Thrones on a tour led by a genuine Wildling, snorkel in a chilly lake at the point where the European and America tectonic plates meet and hike through deserted volcanic landscapes to the edge of the Arctic Circle. Car hire comes with fierce warnings about which roads you are insured to drive over and every summer there are stories about tourists destroying centuries-old moss through their off-road driving antics, or, tragically, failing to heed warnings about the dangers of the stunning landscape, and drowning or falling to their deaths when in quest of an incomparable photo. 

Kirkjufell in Snæfellsnes, as featured in Game of Thrones Wight Hunt. Credit: Carolyne Larrington

‘There are too many tourists’, my Icelandic friends say. ‘They don’t know how to behave, they endanger themselves and others in the wilderness, they don’t shower naked before they go in the swimming pools, and they stop their hire-cars in the middle of the road to photograph rocks under which elves may or may not live’.

Yet tourism is now Iceland’s biggest export industry, surpassing the aluminium smelting, fuelled by geo-thermal and hydro-electric power, that was the prime industry before the current boom in terms of foreign currency earning, and those annoying travellers have, more than once, rescued the little country’s economy.

Between 2010 and 2018 tourism grew by 400%, with a third of the tourists coming from the US, attracted by the stopover deals offered by Icelandair. Numbers flatlined, along with the country’s budget airline WOW in 2019, but post-pandemic they are soaring once more. After the kreppa, the financial catastrophe of 2008, when two major banks collapsed, bursting the country’s extraordinary economic bubble, it was tourism that refloated the króna and refilled the foreign exchange reserves.

The last time I drove all round the island in 1992, it was hard to find accommodation and the food was monotonous; now there are luxury resorts, spas, high-end restaurants and flourishing local crafts. Much as my friends complain, the tourist dollar has refloated the economy after the pandemic, just as it did after the kreppa.

Iceland is a tiny nation with a population of 376,000, and it’s easy to see how the nearly 1.7 million visitors who came in 2022 seemed even more overwhelming after the quiet years of the pandemic. The tourism season has lengthened: the possibility of seeing the Northern Lights and luxuriating in the warm waters and silvery silicate mud of the Blue Lagoon in the snow attracts travellers in the colder and darker months.

At Jökulsárlón, the glacial lagoon with its famous floating icebergs, cheeky seals and boat-tours, traffic has to queue for lengthy periods to cross the single-span bridge.

Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon. Pic Credit: Carolyne Larrington

There are complaints about the lack of infrastructure: no public toilets and few cafés and the roads outside the capital are often not tarmacked and difficult for the inexperienced driver. Holidaying Icelanders are irritated to find that impromptu trips around their country flounder, when the Airbnbs and guesthouses in small towns are booked months in advance. But neither tourists nor Icelanders want to see the wilderness concreted over for carparks, or majestic views of volcanos obscured by multistorey hotels.

Traditional European holiday areas like the Mediterranean are becoming unbearably hot, or ablaze with wildfires, as the Guardian journalist Helena Smith, based in Greece, noted in July, ‘everyone I know in Athens now dreams of holidaying in northern climes’.

If Europe’s south begins to travel northwards en masse, seeking to escape summer weather that feels more like Dubai, the pressure on Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and the Faroes, the last wild places of Europe’s north, will truly be unsustainable. International holiday travel is once again the engine that drives the Icelandic economy, but tourism’s propensity to kill the thing it loves raises compelling and hard-to-answer questions about Iceland’s future.

The author in Iceland near Kirkjufell. Carolyne Larrington is Professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford and researches and translated Old Norse literature. Her latest book is The Norse Myths that Shape the Way We Think (2023).

*****

That’s all for this week. Please share your thoughts. I love to hear from you. Hasta pronto,

Pallavi