Introduction to the guest article by Andri Snær Magnason with photos by Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir

The peak of Okjokull mountain, or Ok mountain, in the west of Iceland.  Photo by Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir

As a writer I have always tried to understand the importance of words and stories. I write in Icelandic, which clearly shows the connection between the land and the language.

After just over a thousand years of human habitation, the surface of Iceland is covered with an invisible layer of stories — places carry names derived from historical events, folklore and geology. Since we speak a language that is spoken only on this island, we can see when ideas arrive and how they spread until they become a new paradigm of thought.

One of the last places in Iceland to be named and explored was the plateau of Vatnajokull glacier. It was a tabula rasa, without names or stories because previous generations had no means of navigating the area. I had the privilege to be close to some of the pioneers who named many places on the glacier. My grandparents were founding partners of the Icelandic Glacial Research Society. Their honeymoon in 1956 was a three-week journey to map and measure this largest glacier in Europe. The peak in the center of it is called Brúðarbunga — “The belly of the bride.”

In my guest essay for Times Opinion — in collaboration with the photographer Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir — I explore what it means to be a writer now that nature is changing faster than the language we use to describe it. Changes that used to take thousands, even millions, of years can now be witnessed in decades or a single lifetime. When I was young, glaciers were a symbol of eternity, but since 1995 they have been collapsing so rapidly that the names we gave them don’t seem to apply to the reality of the landscape.

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