After my trip to the Westfjords last week, this one has been pretty heads-down. The weather was mostly dreary, with enough rain that 50 meters of the ring road in eastern Iceland was simply washed away. The timing of various coursework sort of stacked up on me, which means I have a few presentations and a few essays all due this coming week. But honestly, that’s not such a bad thing to overlap with inclement weather.
A fascinating thing about Iceland is that everything has a name. The photo above is from the Island of Grótta, which I visited yesterday off the tip of the Seltjarnarnes peninsula, but you’ll find similar horizon-labelling signs throughout the country. They indicate the names of not just prominent peaks or landmarks, but every valley, ridge, indentation, rock outcropping, and farm. Armed with this vocabulary, you could refer to the environment with incredible precision, and combined with all the nuanced words for wind (this website lists 14) then just imagine the richness in which you could describe air moving through the landscape.
And yet, names for Icelandic people are more limited. This week the Icelandic Personal Names Committee approved seven new names, and while I confess that I don’t know quite how it works there is apparently a defined list of names that parents must choose from. Combined with the patronymic naming structure used in Iceland, this leads to a lot of similar sounding names. The approval of a name is based partly on its ability to work with Icelandic grammar and alphabet rules, although there are additional criteria depending on if it’s a given name, middle name, or surname.
All of the official rulings of the Personal Names Committee are public, and the most interesting (of course) are the denials. This one for Óskir was rejected because it’s already the plural of the established proper name Ósk, while this one for the middle name Hó got stopped by the ambiguous judgement that it could “cause trouble for the name bearer.” The middle name Boom was ruled against as it is “not derived from an Icelandic root word,” which is required for middle names, but not given names. I feel like I could easily lose an afternoon digging through this database (and shoutout to Google Translate for making that possible).
Tomorrow, September 29, is my birthday. I’m just happy to put this one behind me, but time marches forward and somehow I’m 47 years old.
Noted & Done
- Saw The Last Paradise on Earth, a film from the Faroe Islands at Bíó Paradís as part of a screening of films that were nominated for a Nordic Council Film Prize.
- Watched a series of shorts from Switzerland and the feature film Sorry, Baby at the Reykjavík International Film Festival.
- Went to a Hekla show at Mengi, which was my second time seeing her perform this month as she was also part of the Extreme Chill Festival. What can I say, I’m a fan of the theremin.