It’s just over a year since I first visited Skógar Museum in Iceland, and I’ve been thinking about one of my favourite artefacts (out of the fifteen thousand residing there) – a toy ‘horse’ made from a sheep’s jawbone by the museum’s founder, Þórður Tómasson. There’s probably not much to know about the ‘horse’; however, I’m one of those highly annoying people who feed on minute, possibly inconsequential details about things I get attached to.
In her fantastic (although sometimes challenging to get along with) book The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collections of Iceland, A. Kendra Greene writes lyrically about ‘Iceland’s biggest museum outside of Reykjavik,’ calling it ‘…a museum of old rituals, of daily chores, of things to do and things undone. This is a museum of kinship, of who we are by way of who’ve we’ve been.’
Something I appreciate about the museum, and which Greene highlighted, is that it’s ‘without sequence…you can start anywhere.’ I recall my first trip and can grin to myself, right now, as I curl over my laptop, at the memory of flitting around, bedazzled and delighted by all the curious things and stuff left behind by Icelanders of another time.
Greene writes about meeting the then 95-year-old Tómasson, but apparently, ‘the language yawned‘ between them, and there was little to say, which I found a bit sad. I was strangely affected to learn of the passing of a man I’d never met and whose museum I visited first the first time two years after his death (he died in 2022 at the age of 100). I would have loved to have met him, even just to shake his hand and say ‘I’m not often happy, but what you have built here has made me very, very happy, especially the jawbone horse.’
Northern Fever 