Sælt veri fólkið!*
We’ve had a bit of a swimming pool theme lately, on which I thought I’d expand a bit in today’s post, since pools (and their cleanliness!) are such an important part of Icelandic culture.
As we have established, swimming pools are the unofficial community centres of the Icelanders. As we are blessed with an abundance of geothermal water and therefore in most cases do not have to bear the costs of heating the pools (because the hot water comes straight out of the ground) there is a pool in every neighbourhood in the capital area, and in practically every community around the country with more than ten houses.
Swimming lessons are a part of the national curriculum here. Children are taught to swim in phys ed, starting in grade 1. And some start even earlier than that: swimming lessons for infants are a big deal here, where babies are taught to hold their breath underwater and become comfortable with being in a pool. These baby swimming courses are so popular that there is usually a waiting list to join.
Given all this it is interesting to ponder that, before the beginning of the last century, very few Icelanders knew how to swim. This despite the fact that Iceland has been a fishing nation for hundreds of years. The prevailing notion back in the day was that it was useless to teach people to swim because the sea around the island was so cold that they would die anyway if they fell into the water.
There are stories of men (and the occasional women) coming home from fishing expeditions and their families coming down to the shore to greet them, only to see them fall into the water if they failed to land their boats properly and drowning in the surf right in front of their eyes.
My husband’s great-grandfather, Páll Erlingsson, was one of the pioneers of swimming culture in Iceland. An avid sea swimmer, he disagreed with the assumption that people would automatically drown if they fell into the sea. To that end he cited Grettis Saga, in which Grettir the Strong is said to have swum from the island of Drangey to the mainland. People scoffed and maintained it was fiction—until Páll’s son Erlingur, my husband’s grandfather, undertook to swim that same route, from Drangey and over to the western shore of Skagafjörður fjord. He was the first person to successfully do so after Grettir and that particular swim, now called Drangeyjarsund, has since become a popular challenge for swimmers.
His feat helped debunk the myth that it was impossible to swim in the sea around Iceland, and ushered in the era of swimming pool culture that we enjoy today.
Incidentally, Páll Erlingsson built the first proper swimming pool in Reykjavík, a stone’s throw from his home. It was located in the Laugardalur area of Reykjavík, across the street from where Laugardalslaug (the largest pool in Reykjavík) is today. That area was, and is, rich in geothermal heat—hence the location. That pool was affectionately known as gömlu laugarnar, or “the old swimming pool” to differentiate it from the “new” pool—Laugardalslaug.
*Greetings to the people, a common Icelandic address to a group 😊
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