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MATTHEW HART

The Globe and Mail

November 14, 2008 at 11:56 PM EST

REYKJAVIK - There was a man called Mord; he was called the Fiddle. He was the son of Sighvat the Red, and he lived at Voll in the Rang River Plains. He was a powerful chieftain and a great lawyer - so great a lawman that no case was thought to be legally judged unless he took part.

So begins one of the greatest Icelandic sagas, Njal's Saga. Generally, in Iceland's tales, the reader expects blood and is not disappointed. Men trudge about the country clouting each other's brains out in the bracing air.

But so important is this passage about Mord that American archeologist and Old Norse scholar Jesse Byock quotes it in the opening to his bestselling Viking Age Iceland - because, for all their chopping off of limbs and stealing of women, the sagas describe a people vitally concerned with how to conduct themselves, with what is proper and ethical in relations between people who had to regulate themselves in a society without rulers.

Today, Iceland is in ethical disarray, stripped by financial catastrophe of its image of itself. In real terms, the gross domestic product has crashed by 65 per cent. The island faces a sudden spasm of depopulation as Icelanders prepare to flee in search of work. Anger, shame and dread have spread like pathogens. They depress the mood of this northern capital as much as the empty construction sites and the gallows of idle cranes.

A woman holds a cardboard as she takes part in a demonstration in central Reykjavik, Iceland, on November 8, 2008 calling on the government to resign and for banks to be more open about the country's financial crisis. Between 3,000 to 4,000 protestors turned out on the fourth consecutive Saturday of demonstrations, with numbers growing each week.    AFP PHOTO / HALLDOR KOLBEINS (Photo credit should read HALLDOR KOLBEINS/AFP/Getty Images)

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A woman holds a cardboard as she takes part in a demonstration in central Reykjavik, Iceland, on Nov. 8, 2008 calling on the government to resign and for banks to be more open about the country's financial crisis. Between 3,000 to 4,000 protesters turned out on the fourth consecutive Saturday of demonstrations, with numbers growing each week. (Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images)

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In less than a generation, Iceland had transformed itself from Europe's poorest country into one of its richest. It took a scant eight years of frenzied expansion for the country's banks to help buy companies worth nine times Iceland's GDP. When the banks collapsed in October and Iceland's currency, the krona, began to fizz away, the country found itself transformed in a few weeks of headlines from rampaging Viking tiger to global deadbeat - a country whose bankers had annihilated not only the security of their countrymen but the savings of tens of thousands of other depositors, particularly in Britain.

Iceland now confronts appalling choices. There will be no rescue package until it settles with foreign depositors. And if it does reach some accommodation, and seeks the further safety of full membership in the European Union, EU rules would strip it of control of its fishery - a horrifying prospect for Icelanders. The fishery is freighted with emotion as the resource that single-handedly pulled Iceland out of the medieval age and for which it fought three bitter "cod wars" with the British.

However Iceland plays its cards, its hand is a bad one. Perhaps its best hope lies in its sense of itself as a people united by a history of survival and a cherished culture.

By the book

Reykjavik after the fall: A thin rain slicks the sidewalk with wet ice. Swans wrangle over bread beside the city hall. In a tiny square, a bronze patriot stands on a plinth and gazes through the weather at the dark grey parliament, the Althing. Then the Borg Hotel and the narrow thoroughfare of Austurstraeti. The only shop with any life on a late fall afternoon is Eymundsson the bookseller. Packed. An Icelander can always read.

Some of the books they are buying got their start right here in a coffee shop and bar called Hresso that has sent a steady trickle of writers out into the world pumped with coffee and ideas. One of them, Bragi Olafsson, comes in from the rain and peers at me through round tortoiseshell glasses that give him an owlish look. We commandeer a red banquette and sit in the rain-streaked window wondering what is to become of Iceland.

"What people are mostly saying is that there will be a very dramatic change in our way of thinking. We have been very greedy - a very rude society. You know - people in Range Rovers talking on their phones and honking horns. But almost overnight this has changed."

Mr. Olafsson is a poet and prize-winning novelist. The Pets, his first novel translated into English, sold 5,000 copies in Icelandic - a bestseller in a country of scarcely more than 300,000. He is one of a small group of leading writers salaried by the state. Nurturing writers is state policy in Iceland, where the written language has remained almost unchanged for 1,000 years.

"The only answer now is to join the EU and throw away the krona," Mr. Olafsson says with evident despair. "There are even talks of joining Norway. I don't want to be against it because I don't understand it, but culturally and aesthetically I don't want to be Norwegian. I hate their language."

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Bloggfærslur 15. nóvember 2008

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