Two poets’ travels in Iceland, through its ancient sagas as well as its contemporary landscape, cast a disorienting but compelling spell
I’m lucky enough to travel for work, to a jumble of far and not-so-far-flung places. When I’m back at home for any length of time, however, I start to get an itch. I think it’s called wanderlust. When it takes hold – and in the absence of anyone asking me to go somewhere new – like most people, I turn to a book to take me there. I got the itch a couple of years ago after an eye-opening trip to Vietnam and east Asia and, perhaps for balance, I settled on Iceland.
In the mid-1930s, Louis MacNeice and WH Auden also went there. The resulting collection of poems and prose was published as Letters from Iceland in 1937. Nearly 60 years later, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell followed in the earlier poets’ footsteps, making their own journey to the land at the top of the world. Their trip resulted in a series for BBC Radio 3 – Second Draft from Sagaland – and a book, Moon Country: Further Reports from Iceland.
It was almost as if a Turner Prize-winning artist had been at the site 10 minutes before tipping coloured powders into the holes to make a metaphorical point about an artist and his/her palette, or a reflective pun on the term ‘landscape painting’.
Odin sat at the top of the world and sent two ravens out each day. They came back at night and sat on his shoulders and whispered news into his ears. One was mind and one was memory.
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