Most Unimaginably Strange: An Eclectic Companion to the Landscape of Iceland by Chris Caseldine is a weighty little hardcover of 333 pages, divided into eleven chapters about different aspects of Iceland’s varied landscape. Over one hundred illustrations supplement the book on glossy pages, some of them over two-page spreads to emphasize detail, but the abundance of photos does not mean that the book scrimped on text. By no means–the text is so small that I feel I have to talk about it before I get to the contents. Although it only took me six days to read this, it was a struggle. How so? When I took it on public transit, where the interior lighting on buses only gets bright when letting passengers board and disembark, I was left unable to read it. Subway lighting was only slightly better. The smaller the font, the more I need to have a light projected directly onto the text, so I could only read this book while sitting anchored at my kitchen table with a snake-neck lamp shining down at it. The main print and page numbers were tiny, but the photo captions, endnote numbers and exponents used in denoting area or volume were illegible or missed entirely, and if I saw them at all, I interpreted them as flaws in the paper. I referred to all endnotes after I finished each chapter, and it was a devil of a time to find the numbered note within the text as I matched the endnote to it. I wonder if this book was originally produced in coffee-table dimensions, yet later shrunk to its present size in order to be a financially viable project. The photos and text produced in a larger format would have made a more stunning book. The photos, however, were jaw-dropping and am thankful for the two-page spreads of volcanos, lava plains and glaciers.
I certainly learned a lot from this book. The chapters were divided first into areas by geographic name, and then later by landform type. Thus the first chapter is on Þingvellir, followed by chapters on Hekla, Laki and Geysir. Then the chapters deal with glaciers, ice sheets, jökulhlaup (glacial outburst floods), waterfalls, canyons, deserts and erosion. The first chapter however did not start until page 50 as the introduction occupied the first 42 pages.
In the chapter on Measuring Glaciers, in keeping with the eclectic as seen in the book’s title, we learned not only about glacial melting due to global warming, but also about the artist Katie Paterson, who made sound recordings from three glaciers (Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull) which were pressed into three records, then cast and frozen using the meltwater from each corresponding glacier. The discs of ice were then played simultaneously on three turntables until they melted completely:
Paterson also set up a live phone line to Vatnajökull via an underwater microphone submerged in Jökulsárlón lagoon, an outlet of Vatnajökull. The number 07757001122 could be called from any telephone in the world, and the listener would hear the sound of the glacier melting.
I quite liked Caseldine’s quotations from and assessments of early travel guides to Iceland. Before Iceland became such a popular tourist attraction it is today, in the nineteenth century it was considered a faraway place rarely seen by others. A travel account from 1935 recorded this observation while crossing a sandy outwash plain:
“I really cannot imagine a worse road than the one we were to be driven over. We were proceeding along a track; every moment we had to stop and make a fresh start. We had to get down and push the car, run after it, perspiring in our heavy black oilskins and rubber boots.”
The author made repeated references to the works by early women travellers and travel writers, such as Ida Pfeiffer, who wrotre Reise nach dem skandinavischen Norden und der Insel Island in 1846 and Ethel Tweedie, who wrote A Girl’s Ride in Iceland in 1889. Women travellers, especially solo women, rarely visited Iceland and weren’t as adventurous as Pfeiffer, who toured Iceland on horseback and even climbed Hekla.
To deal with soil erosion, Nootka lupins were introduced from Alaska in 1945. These purple flowers are seen all over Iceland and blanket hillsides. When I asked Icelanders how they felt about them, their responses were mixed, yet consistent: they help stabilize the ground and thus are preserving the landscape, yet they are an invasive and nonindigenous species. Caseldine wrote that their “introduction has initiated a very lively debate in Iceland spilling into broader issues of nationalism and perceived xenophobia.”. The author then in the final chapter listed all the species, both flora and fauna, that were introduced to Iceland since the first settlement over a millennium ago. There are movements aimed to depopulate the country of foreign flora, however less so for fauna. The Arctic fox is the only indigenous mammal on the island, so if one wanted to depopulate the country of all foreign fauna, the sheep and horses will have to go.