Iceland Journal

Sketch by David Collier

Hamilton-based cartoonist David Collier is the creator of the acclaimed Collier’s series and Just the Facts, both published by Drawn & Quarterly. Collier is attending the NINE Comics Festival exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. What follows are his written and sketched impressions of that trip.

Day 1

Iceland is a little island in a big sea. You get to it from Canada by flying to Boston first. So this is how we — my wife Jen and son James — flew to Iceland. I’ll deal with the important part first: travelling with a six-year-old child.

Right away, countering my withering stare, Jen plunked down $20 in the airport gift shop for a miniature die-cast airplane set, complete with ground support vehicles, runway signage and pylons. And James spent some happy time with this spread out across the waiting-lounge floor during the otherwise interminable hours we spent there. People met this scene with equally annoyed and charmed glances, but the important thing for us was that it worked and I once again conceded the moment’s appropriate point to my wise wife.

Icelandair flies its plane to Reykjavik from Boston. Looking out Logan Airport’s big picture window — in front of which oversized rocking chairs hold teenagers on March Break — I was surprised by the size of this Icelandair craft.

It sure wasn’t a five-hundred seater. Or a three-hundred one. Ever taken a flight between two average-sized Canadian cities? Like say, an Air Canada Jazz flight between Regina and Saskatoon? Well, that will give you an idea of the little Icelandair plane. It cheered me, the sight of this slight jet.

Since I’d been invited to Iceland last summer — to take part in at the NINE Comics Festival exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum — and ever since I seriously started to consider where Icelanders are coming from, I’ve been consumed by the burning question: how the hell did Icelanders millennia ago ever get to Canada in nothing more than overgrown canoes?

I’m 42 years years old and during the course of my lifetime it has been proven that Norse/Iceland men and women landed and lived in Canada some five hundred years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. These were the good conquerors, or rather attempted conquerors, for they struggled against the natives of Canada and lost. And it’s not the fact that they lost, but rather how they lost, that I sympathize with.

These early raiders — a translation of “Viking” — fought the natives who lived in what later was to become Canada on the natives’ terms. The difference between the Norse and the Europeans who decimated the native population 500 years ago is the difference between the modern-day Canadian ideal and the situation in the United States: the Norse had no guns.

They were, in fact, worse off than the natives of what was later to become Canada. For when it came down to conflict, natives could easily replace their bone and stone-tipped arrows and spears, while the Norse were loathe to lose their precious metal weapons.

These original European settlers in North America lasted about a decade, archaeological evidence at L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland shows. And what a struggle every one of those years must’ve been, starting with and including the voyage across the ocean.

The Norse vessels, like canoes, had very shallow draughts, making them perfectly suited for travel on in-land waterways. But life on these little ships is hell on earth in rough North Atlantic seas, as recreated voyages have proven.

Who knows, I thought, as I listened to the roar of the jet engine on my flight to Iceland, if the world keeps on burning fuel at the rate these planes are going, perhaps in my lifetime I’ll experience the Norse method of travel.

For now, I limit my travel affinity with the Norse of yore to the modest Icelandair fleet and the fact that before boarding our flight, I had lost my tube of Polysporin eye ointment.

For the past 30 years, I've had a low-level eye infection that gives me a distressing red-rimmed appearance. The tube of stuff didn’t work all that great, but without it, my eyelids for the rest of our stay in Iceland will be of a scarlet red hue, instead of a mild pink.