Sea Change

As Iceland Review has been reporting recently, Iceland is raining babies these days and nearly every woman of reproductive age in Iceland (that's a mighty wide range as people start young here) has got a bun in the oven, a baby in a stroller, or is just being hounded by her in-laws to hurry up and get ólétt.

This "wall of children" used to cover the remains of a burned-down bar on the corner of Lækjargata and Ausurstræti in downtown Reykjavik. It left no doubt in the mind that Icelanders are mad about babies.

By the way, Iceland has a lot of terms for "pregnant", and it's funny how the literal translations can all be perceived as borderline offensive to a woman whose tummy is too big to see her feet:

óléttur:  "un-light"

ófrískur: "un-fit"

fullur: "full" (sort of like an eating-too-much fullness)

þungaður: sort of like "thick" or "heavy"

hlaðinn: "loaded"

efnisríkur: "content rich"

Well, with descriptions like that, who wouldn't want to be með barn undir belti (with child under the belt)?

The answer? The Icelanders of 1,000 years ago.

Yeah, they weren't so keen on having too many kids filling up the longhouse using up scarce resources. I was doing some topical research on Iceland's adoption of Christianity in 1000 A.D. for a side project (don't ask) when I stumbled upon this in Wikipedia (I know, I know, it's not a "real" scholarly source):

"Once the church was firmly in control in Iceland, horsemeat, infanticide, and pagan rituals practiced in private were banned.... [and about the infanticide] ...infanticide used to be widespread around the world, and the practice of exposing "surplus" children was an established part of old Icelandic culture. It was strongly believed that there was a limit to the number of people the island could support and that rearing too many children would bring disaster for all; see carrying capacity."

Since Iceland currently numbers around 320,000 inhabitants for an island the size of a small US state, I would say they haven't quite hit carrying capacity yet (but I'm not even going to get into carbon footprint, food/water stability or other global overpopulation issues here) thus, unless some catastrophe strikes or continued economic pressures cause the government to significantly roll back its generous social services, then we'll be seeing high birthrates coming out of Iceland for quite some time. (It is already the highest of Europe.)

Although I sometimes suspect that Icelanders haven't evolved much (gastronomically or personality-wise) since the days of the Vikings, I guess some things have changed quite a bit.