Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us! I absolutely loved All the Horses of Iceland both for its quiet magic and its huge, sweeping journey. And, of course for Eyvind, the matter-of-fact Icelander (if that’s not redundant) who maintains a very level head through some truly astonishing adventures. So:
What inspired you to write about Iceland, and specifically Icelandic horses?
I’ve always been interested in Iceland, as a medievalist (though not an Old Norse specialist). It is so impressive that such a tiny subsistence culture could produce this astonishing wealth of saga literature. Its rate of authors per capita today is still pretty astonishing. Books have always been important in Iceland. And I’ve been a horse person since I was a child. The two came together in my head after I attended the Icelandic Writers’ Conference in 2018 and got to ride an Icelandic horse across a lava field. It was pretty thrilling. The idea of the journey to Mongolia came about almost two years later from a chance remark in a documentary about Icelandic horses and their genetic connection to the horses of the steppes.
Which Icelandic saga is your favorite?
Probably Egil’s saga. I love a poet protagonist, especially one who kills his first man at the age of nine. Though for this book, Eyrbyggja saga was important, as being about Eyvind’s home territory of Eyri in western Iceland, and in being full of ghosts.
Was Eyvind based on any particular character from legend?
Not really. He’s the wrong status – a simple trader, not a poet or a Viking. His overall laconic style owes something to Skarp Hedin from Njals saga, though.
Eyvind is a remarkable character in part because he insists that he’s not remarkable at all. What drew you to writing someone who is not a warrior, sorcerer, or lawyer?
I thought of his epithet while I was writing, from time to time, as Eyvind the Unlikely. I wanted at once to be faithful to the saga form – at its ghost story/wonder tale end – and yet still have a protagonist who was unusual. Canny, laconic and practical, as the people in sagas are – but, let’s face it, we’re all a bit tired of Vikings. I think that Eyvind really is a magician, though, insofar as anybody is: he performs as one successfully in that culture. It’s just that magic is a lot less flashy in Old Norse (or pre-classical Mongolia) than in our pop culture. It’s on a smooth gradient of believability that blends it in with everything else.
The wary but ultimately beneficial meeting of cultures comes up again and again, and is certainly a welcome respite from SFF’s penchant for violence. What was it like writing trade and exchange as the central conflict?
Writing about violence bores me to death. Anything but that. Trade is actually where it all happens, real cultural contact that is productive: language and technology exchange, co-operation, legal advances, intermarriages, interesting art in all forms. People who talk about war as an impetus for any of these are full of shit. They just don’t know the history. War is about killing.
A lot of religious traditions are represented in All the Horses of Iceland, and you make a point about how foreigners and outsiders can often be closer to the sacred than people enmeshed in the tradition. What do you think this says about belief across cultures?
Well, it’s obvious in the sagas that those who practice seithr are basically low-status: women, the disabled, the elderly, the insane, foreigners, sometimes slaves like Hebrideans. This is often true of magicians or shamans elsewhere, as well. Magical ability was one reason to keep marginal people alive, part of the social network. It also prevented any given culture from becoming a theocracy, where religious or magical power coincided with social power – in brief, it keeps magic or religion (to me, the two are the same) safely at the edges of society, where it can be called on intermittently but doesn’t become overwhelming. The single god of Judeo-Christian tradition always shifts this dynamic toward the theocratic model, unfortunately. I’m highly interested in cultures that have priests; I just don’t want them to be too important.
You’ve now written two novels about some very remote islands. Do you feel drawn to islands, or just to the more specific cultures (Norse, Celtic) on those islands?
I am teaching a grad class just now on Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. It’s not on a literal island but it’s certainly insular. I am attracted to closed communities and their dynamics. While these dynamics are not always good, they are very different from our contemporary, porous, competitive ones. My first novels with Aqueduct Press (The Stone Boatmen, Two Travelers) were also experiments in closed communities, often on the cusp of branching out into cultural contact and unsure what to do about it. It’s an inventive moment, one I continuously revisit. Even my recent and more historical novel The Little Animals, quite factually about the quiet life of Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, the 17th-century microscopist, in small-town Delft, has this quality: it has a kind of magic realist injection in which he meets the Goose Girl from the Brothers Grimm tales. And it turns out that this feral child can hear the microbes he is discovering through his lenses. So the very small, closed world of European natural philosophy is brought up against an alien force or perspective that it can’t quite get to grips with.
You’ve made “Icelandic horse” seem like quite a good option for the afterlife. Is that the location or creature you’d choose, if you could?
The whole reincarnation business is very unsettling to me. But fascinating. It was a big deal in The Stone Boatmen – in the form of transmigration of souls into birds. There’s something about that collocation, human/bird, that seems natural to me. To steppes people, human/horse seems to be a similarly natural collocation, hence the wind horse as an element of the multipartite soul. I can’t decide whether I would want to be reincarnated as an animal or not. It would be infinitely preferable to being another person (or myself yet again, as Christian eternity is imagined — appalling). Yet in our world, animals are so dominated by people that it might just be too depressing. Really not sure. Probably just best to collapse peacefully to atoms. Or rather, dynamically to atoms: decomposition is a pretty active process, if not a conscious one.
