The Evolution of Icelandic Food Culture: From a Lack of Colour to a Whole Rainbow
For centuries, life in Iceland has been a constant struggle. Large tracts of the countryside have very little fertility and support very little arable farming. The winters are long and dark. When the short summer comes around, work takes on a feverish place, to make the necessary preparations for winter. Time was of such an essence, that Icelanders would even knit their socks and show inserts while they were walking out to their fields.…
When the Lóa Arrives, Spring is Here!
As the days get longer and the nights get shorter, usually, temperatures usually (but not always) come up too. We have had an unusually short winter in Iceland this year, shortly followed up by a record snowfall, swiftly to return to our non-existent winter again. And then there was snow again. Just another day in Iceland.…
Þorri, The Traditional Food Festival and Mens Day
Like many traditions in Iceland, þorri (translates to “frost” in Icelandic”) has pagan origins. It all starts with the Orkneyinga saga, which deals with a range of topics in what is now mostly Scandinavia but also more broadly Nordic countries in general. Therein, it is outlined that the Kvens (an ethnic minority of Finnish peasants living in Norway) offer a yearly sacrifice to þorri, likely related to Thor, the god of thunder, at mid-winter. This sacrifice was known as þorrablót.…
Top 5 Icelandic Foods
There is a lot of interesting food in Iceland, and we could never cover it all in one post. Instead, we picked 5 of the most people, and many of them are traditional, so traditional that people have been eating it since Icelad was first settled over 1000 years ago!…
