Iceland is known for differing from Europe and North America in drawing the line between the natural and the supernatural. Second sight or dead people appearing to the living is not an everyday experience but not all that rare, as can be seen in many sagas, and Corinne Dempsey, studying the spread of fairytales, finds that many of them were transformed into local legends, i.e., fixed to a time and a place. When a rock has to be blasted, e.g., for building a new road, the planners are still likely to inquire among the local population whether it is believed to be “inhabited.” And modern Icelandic films and television series rarely fail to include some supernatural element.
The author, in her introduction (3-18), explains how she came to spend considerable time, in 2009, 2012, and 2015, in Akureyri, Iceland’s second biggest city, situated on the North Coast. Teaching at Nazareth College in upstate New York, Dempsey's previous books are concerned with Hindus and Christians in South India, and Hindu practices in the part of New York State where she lives. Solveig, an Icelandic friend she knew from studying at Syracuse University, invited her to come to Akureyri to study the spiritist activities flourishing there. She was tempted because it might give her an opportunity to compare Hindu yogic abilities (siddhis) with the Icelandic second sight abilities she refers to with the native term skyggnigáfa; for “spirit matters” she also uses the local term, andleg mál. She had to learn Icelandic, which is not an easy language, at least to the level of understanding it and making simple statements, even if the text occasionally shows that her grammar is not perfect. Often her friends translated for her, and with the sometimes very awkward quotations it is not clear whether they reflect the limited English of the speakers or an inadequate translation. She generally takes pains to explain foreign-language terms but takes Japanese reiki for granted. She obviously became very friendly with at least half a dozen local people, mostly female, with whom she met regularly. Scheduled meetings took place in a Sáló, an abbreviation of the Icelandic term for Society for Psychic Research.
As the first chapter, “Roots and Layers” (19-47) describes, spiritualism, which flourished all over Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, did not reach Iceland until 1905, but there found mostly open doors. One of its proponents was the respected poet Einar Kvaran. There was a native tradition of communicating with the supernatural, helped, no doubt, by vast tracts of uninhabited country (as with Aborigines in Australia), where one was not unlikely to run into a former inhabitant. It was not something divorced from Christianity; meetings often started with prayers, and pictures in the Sálós were often a mixture of Christian images and portraits of mediums. The purpose was most often healing, or communicating with the dead through a passive medium (miðill), through whom a dead person spoke and acted. Yet there were few professional healers or mediums; most participants had commercial or administrative jobs.
Chapter 2 (48-74) describes the reactions of non-believers, especially medical doctors. As in other countries, some intellectuals/writers rejected spiritualism as mumbo-jumbo, while others admitted that it opened abilities that had been neglected by traditional education. Dempsey paints a picture of two spiritists who became national celebrities, the miðill Indriði Indriðason in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the shy healer Guðrún Sigurðardóttir in the 1970s. The author thinks that since the 1990s, there has been more tolerance and a relaxed tone between the two camps.
Chapter 3, “Skyggnigáfa” (76-104), discusses the various ways individuals experience this openness to the spirit world, often from childhood, and it is certainly quite common that children play with imaginary mates or animals. Some individuals see the spirits with open eyes, others only mentally; some see colors, shapes, and scenes, while others only hear voices or feel a physical presence, or they foresee somebody coming or are told to give a message to a certain person. Some people seem to have it in their genes, or maybe they are just more easily aware of it because their parents experienced such things. Others are troubled by it, try to escape it by taking to drink or drugs, or sometimes find peace through others praying with them.
In chapter 4 (105-134) the focus is on trance work, with participants forming a circle, with a special chair for the trance miðill, and a spirit organizer in charge, deciding what spirit can enter the entranced body. Among the dead who addressed Dempsey directly was the famous Indriði. One spirit in particular often laughed and made jokes and was rebuked for it; these sessions were meant to produce some good, mental of physical. It could also be the good of the spirits, e.g., by teaching them self-acceptance and forgiveness instead of grieving about things that went wrong during their lives on earth.
Healers and healing are the topics of chapter 5 (135-162); it records the different ways a healing process is experienced, as touch, as light, as a force arising from the ground, and in Iceland, where there is so much volcanic activity and hot springs bubbling up, this sounds plausible. Sometimes the healer’s power is ascribed to universal energy (alheimsorka) or the energy emanating from a particular mountain. Some doctors thought the healers should go through psychoanalysis--but that would hardly account for not uncommon stories of absent (or distant) healing.
“Leaps of Geography and Faith” (chapter 6, 163-183) views bridges between Iceland and North America, the destination of much emigration, especially to Saskatchewan and Alberta in Canada, where the Icelanders kept their identity and often returned to Iceland. Many Icelanders identified with the local Native peoples as the region‘s true natives and communicated with them, even after they returned to Iceland, but this was not confined to them; a friend of the author's in Wisconsin also reports such a link. Towards the end Dempsey‘s tone becomes more personal: although initially skeptical, she has had experiences that she cannot explain rationally.
So, she ends in an inconclusive way, but after vividly describing what she and her friends saw, heard, and felt. Her interviews and many of her conversations were recorded, and there is a fair bit of repetition. Also the circumstances are described at length, “over apple cream and ice dream in their kitchen” (102), “glasses of red wine poured for each of us” (152), who laughed, music in the background. The style is very relaxed, sometimes careless. The book is richly annotated, with a vast array of critical literature, almost all of it in English. Endless titles are endlessly repeated; eighty-three pages of text are followed by twenty-five pages of notes (in smaller type); then we get a one-page glossary of Icelandic terms; a nine-page bibliography of works cited; and a six-page index. When she quotes Icelandic works in the text, she often refers to the authors by their patronymics instead of their first names (which are what counts in Icelandic). Very useful is a directory of characters (xvii-xx), two-thirds living, one-third dead. Still, I am surprised that Oxford University Press did not ask her to make the text a little less rambling.
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[Review length: 1203 words • Review posted on May 8, 2018]