two signs on a wall, one in Icelandic, the other in English, naming the men responsible for the music and words of the icelandic national anthem in 1874

Iceland and Scotland: Some Musical Connections

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Summer is a time for travelling – as the old Vikings knew well.  Travelling not so far from home, Soundyngs went to Edinburgh, and wandering those streets, came upon a sign beside the front door of 15 London Street, New Town Edinburgh, celebrating the composition of the Icelandic National Anthem by Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson and the poet-priest, Matthias Jochumsson, in 1874.

Initially sung as a hymn to celebrate the 1000-year anniversary of the first settlement of Iceland, this song, O Guđ vors lands (O God of our land) became the Icelandic national in 1944 when Iceland became independent from Denmark. The lyric seems to have preceded the composition; I haven’t been able to find evidence that the poet and composer actually worked in person on this composition in 1874, although the plaque suggests at least the possibility of their meeting up in Edinburgh.

Sveinbjörnsson lived in Edinburgh in the 1870s. A recent doctoral project (Haring, p.18) has found that his time in Edinburgh was mostly taken up teaching the piano. After 45 years spent in Edinburgh – broken up with some short visits home – the Icelandic government voted to give Sveinbjörnsson a pension. Unfortunately, he died in Copenhagen before he could return to Iceland, although his coffin made it home for a civic funeral in Reykjavik cathedral in March 1927 (Haring, p.19).

Edinburgh was not in that period the most obvious alternative to Reykjavik, given this composer had previously trained in Leipzig and Copenhagen. Both Edinburgh and Reykjavik, however, would have shared a singing culture of hymns and domestic music-making accompanied by the piano (see the description of late 19th century Iceland drawn by Ingolfsson, 2004, and Haring, 2022). Likewise in both places, folksong style and religious hymns commonly expressed period ideas about national identity.  The musical needs and skillsets converged. Soundyngs wondered, what other Icelandic-Scottish fusions are out there?

Older voyages

The Orkneyinga Saga, written c1200, covers the deeds of the Earls of Orkney and includes episodes showing how these linked our northern isles with Iceland. Its survival owes much to a rewriting in Iceland associated with the settlement of Oddi (indeed, poets from this place also crop up at various times in the stories, as if advertising Oddi as a centre of creative production for the northlands). As the Saga itself demonstrates, poetry recitation was a shared cultural form across the Norse world, which in this period included the northern isles and Hebrides of Scotland.  The Saga tells, for example, of King Harald Hardrada demanding a Yule story from a visiting Islandic poet.  On hearing the performance, the King decided to establish trading links with Iceland – ostensibly for more songs and stories, although fish may have featured in the likely returns calculation.

Artistic collaborations back in the medieval centuries were arduous and left no aural trace.  We have words, but no music, although some music may be assumed. However, saga traditions may also have fed into ancient Scottish tastes for long, narrative songs, and Icelandic creatives certainly made a significant contribution to our medieval literature.

Modern musicians are more fortunate in their ability to record sound as well as sense.

Contemporary collaborations

Classical music is a genre that – like saga telling of yore – benefits from live in-person performance.  A key modern composer working in this repertoire to mention is Icelandic composer Halfliđi Hallgrimsson, who was principal cellist of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (1977-1983). Hallgrimsson’s early composition, Poemi (1984), for violin and string orchestra, was premiered by the SCO.  Other solo/orchestra collaborations followed with this group: Herma, written for cello and orchestra (1994-5); Still Life (1996), with accompanying visual images by Craig Aitchison; Ombra (1999), for viola and orchestra; a cello concerto jointly commissioned by the SCO and the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra (2003); Sonnambulo (2008), for double bass; and cycling back, a violin concerto which premiered in St Andrews in 2011 (see: Hallgrimsson, webpage, and Mackay, 1994). Collaborations with the New Music Group of Scotland produced other new works inspired by northern themes.

Hallgrimsson’s works can be heard around the world where orchestral music is a global resource.  Similarly global, in the world of contemporary pop music, producers may put people together who seem like they might make interesting projects working across national boundaries. Sometimes these collaborations make cultural sense. Some thinking of this sort must have lain behind Celtic Connections’ programming of Kathleen MacInnes and the Icelendic group Amiina in 2019. MacInnes is a South Uist folk singer.  Amiina is an Icelandic band – the string section from a larger band called Sigur Rós.  In 2019 at Celtic Connections, MacInnes and Amiina performed together in a programme containing, inter alia, a song called “The Waves Bear the Saints”, words written by Edinburgh novelist Alexander McCall Smith with composer and pianist James Ross, about ancient voyages made across the rough seas between the British isles and Iceland. The shared ground for the concert, musically, was apparently lullabies, although MacInnes also argued in the run-up to the event that the placenames in the Western Isles and Iceland also share common topographical themes (The Herald, 2018). The concert recording may be in the BBC archives but wasn’t released commercially.  However, this particular song, performed by MacInnes with Scottish session musicians, can be found on Ross and McCall Smith’s album These are the Hands which explores the relationship between Scotland and the sea (2019).

This final example of Scottish-Icelandic collaboration illustrates a model of music making where creatives don’t necessarily need to be in the same place at all.  In contrast with the live one-off festival collaboration in Celtic Connections above, and Hallgrimsson’s embedded work with the SCO, the multi-instrumental Glasgow/Edinburgh based group called the Second Hand Marching Band (SHMB) worked over several years mostly remotely with Icelandic musician Benedikt H Hermannson (also known as Benni Hemm Hemm). The result was a collaborative album “Faults” (2016).

SHHB is a big group; travelling en masse is expensive, although not usually as dangerous today as a 10th century sea voyage.  Reviews suggest that the Icelandic musician was able to do most of his work in a Reykjavik studio while the Glaswegian group played in various studios around Scotland, and, using studio production magic, the tracks were mixed together with little need for in-person meeting (See The National, 2016). The songs on this album don’t have a theme which is particularly located in either country. Technology allows cross-border collaborations between people who just like each other’s sounds. The final track – eponymously called “Faults” – uses the plate tectonic movements of the Atlantic as a metaphor for accidents and slippages impacting human relations. It’s fun if deeply eccentric; possibly something that could be said of a lot of Icelandic pop music, and quite a bit of the indie and folk/fusion repertoire written in contemporary Scotland.

I conclude, cultural and geographical proximity has inevitably brought musicians from Scotland and Iceland together. Some compositional projects may have fused musical traditions in profound ways.  Others may be more ephemeral, like wave interaction rather than seismic shifts.

Further Reading and Listening

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