The truth about Icelandic hookups

Or, why we don't need an app to tell us if we're about to sleep with our cousins

Hello! 👋 I’m Alda and I write about Iceland and Icelandic affairs. I have written a bunch of books that delve into various aspects of Icelandic culture. I am also a passionate advocate for indie publishing and the empowerment it brings. These days I’m delving into the history of my ancestors and how modern Iceland is shaped by the events in our collective past. I’m so glad you’re here!

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In today’s post I want to dip into my Little Book of Tourists in Iceland, where I write about how to travel responsibly and in harmony with the locals, and best practices for staying safe in Iceland. As well as other pertinent topics.

Among those pertinent topics is the myths that non-Icelanders are often fed about Iceland—like the myth that we all believe in elves, or that there are no trees, or how there is an “incest app” we all consult to make sure we don’t get into bed with our cousins. 🫠

Did these people consult the incest app before hooking up? Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

Allow me to focus on that one for a moment.

Iceland has an app to prevent relatives from sleeping with each other, called the “incest app” — true or false?

Before I even address this question, imagine that you live in a country with a population of approximately 360,000 people [up to about 390,000 since this edition of the book was published]. Of those, around 228,000 live in the largest urban centre. Consider also that family ties in that country tend to be very close, and extended families meet up at weddings, christenings, confirmation parties, funerals, and a multitude of other events.

What I’m getting at? Basically that if you were so closely related to someone that sleeping with them would constitute incest, you wouldn’t need a damn app to tell you. You would have met up with them a million times already in your life.

That said, where there is smoke there is fire, and this stupid story about the incest app does have a basis in reality. You see, there is a company in Iceland called DeCode Genetics, that studies and researches Icelanders’ DNA. Back in its early days, DeCode created a website called Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders). This website, still going strong, is effectively a genealogy database that allows you to trace your lineage, see how you are related to someone, and pull up all sorts of info about your ancestors, including where they lived, what they did, who they married, who were their children, when they died, and more.

It truly is an excellent and fascinating resource, and there are likely few places in the world where such a thing would be possible. In Iceland, however, due to the small and relatively isolated population (at least up until the 20th century), it is fairly easy to map these things out. All Icelanders, it turns out, are related at least eight generations back, and most people less than that.

So naturally when smartphones started taking over the world, it made sense for the Íslendingabók website to be made into an app. So now we Icelanders can do the same thing that we have been doing for over a decade online—checking out our lineage, but on our phones. Meanwhile some foreign media outlets picked up on this and turned it into a whoo-whoo story about Icelanders being in a bar and looking at their app to see if they were about to sleep with their relative.

Which is just absurd.

Okay then.

Aside from the incest baloney, this app and website are pretty great.

How great? Well, I can log in and with a couple of clicks view my lineage back to the very settlement of this country.

In fact, I can see exactly how I am related to the first settler, Ingólfur Arnarson (of high seat pillar fame), who was born in 844. How cool is that?

If I click on his name, I see his date of birth, his professional title (In this case “First settler in Reykjavík”), and whatever tid-bits of additional information has been listed.

As you can see, the app reveals that Ingólfur and I go back 30 generations: