My list of Icelandic women is a kind of letter to Santa Claus I’ve had since I first got a whiff of their music and felt like I was at home. They transformed my childhood room with their voices, they spoke to me when I was in high school and no one understood me, wearing heavy eyeliner, boots in the summer, and a Dimmu Borgir hoody with “God is Dead” written across it.

So, I sent emails, made contact with Alex Somers through a mutual friend and, after the first yesses, I got a plane ticket. I said that if I meet Sóley, Gyða and Kristín Anna, I can deal with just 3 hours of daylight.

The poet, Gerður Kristný, tells me that, in a few hundred years, the northern lights won’t be visible from Iceland anymore, but it’s ok because by then we’ll all be dead anyways. She lives in a house with large windows opening to the sea and a minimalist ensemble of houses where the president lives. “Icelandic nature tends to be very dramatic. It’s a bit scary to experience an earthquake, feeling your house moving and you can’t do anything, not knowing when it will stop or if there’s another earthquake coming in a few minutes. You don’t know what to do in that sort of situation. Or when there is a volcano eruption and we can’t tell exactly when the eruption will start or when it will finish. So, this is what we have to deal with. It’s a cause of a lot of insecurity. […] We live on an island far away from other countries and it has its minuses. But it’s also nice. We’re a close-knit community and we have to help each other out. We don’t know what nature will do to us next. It’s always plotting, coming back to show us who’s the boss and we just have to obey nature. And that’s what it’s like being an Icelander. You sleep fully clothed because you might have to run out in the middle of the night from an earthquake or whatever. Or a polar bear. They sometimes come floating on ice from the North Pole. That can be scary too, but it also means that you have the stuff for a good story—a polar bear knocking on your door. That’s something.”

Gerður is among the most successful Icelandic authors, writing poetry and children’s books. Her volume, Blóðhófnir (Bloodhoof), is inspired by an old Norse poem which tells the story of the giant Gerður who was kidnapped and forced to marry the god Freyr, written from the point of view of the servant who kidnapped her. Gerður Kristný has rewritten the story in the voice of the giant. On 25 October 2010, when Icelandic women took to the streets protesting the wage gap between women and men, as well as the violence that women are exposed to throughout the world, the poet Gerður read the story of the giant Gerður and her strife:

He wrapped

my hair

around his hand

and led me

away

…

Freyr’s paws

pawed me

reducing me

to terror

scored

a new scar

on my skin each night.