Letter from Iceland #54
The Little Book of Icelandic—Neotechisms, plus The First Day of Summer
Góðan daginn, og gleðilegt sumar!*
Today is Sumardagurinn fyrsti, or The First Day of Summer, according to the Old Icelandic calendar.
Allow me to dip into my Little Book of Days in Iceland for some elaboration:
“The First Day of Summer is celebrated on the Thursday between April 19 and 25 each year, and is a complete misnomer, as this day is almost always freezing. So why pretend summer arrives in April? Once again we can blame the old Icelandic calendar, which back in the day divided the year into only two seasons, winter and summer. And after a long, dark winter, folks so longed for their summer that they turned the first day of that season into a holiday. Workers got the day off, people went to church, and some of the more affluent farmers held feasts for their farmhands. And people gave each other sumargjafir, “summer gifts,” a practice that predated even the giving of Christmas gifts. In fact, back then the First Day of Summer was even more significant to the Icelanders than Christmas or Easter.
There was always a good deal of anxiety about how the summer would turn out, since so much depended on it being good. The belief was that if winter and summer “froze together,” that is, if there was frost in the night before the First Day of Summer, then the summer would be good. People would leave bowls of water outdoors, believing that the layer of frost on top of the water in the morning would be equal in thickness to the cream that formed on the milk later in the season. If winter and summer did not freeze together, however, then the summer would be poor.
Today, thankfully, we are eons away from those harsh times, yet the First Day of Summer is still a public holiday - a testament to the importance of this day to the Icelandic people in the past. Despite the often-frigid temperatures there are parades and various fun activities happening all over the land. And sumargjafir are still a thing, though nowadays the recipients are most likely to be children, and the gifts will consist of a toy or object meant for outdoor fun, like a ball, a skateboard, or a pair of rollerblades.
*Gleðilegt sumar = Happy Summer, what the Icelanders say to each other on this day. ☀️
And now on to our weekly Little Book of Icelandic instalment … this time about the slew of words Icelandic language committees have had to come up with in the Age of Technology. 😅
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