Q&A: Sarah Tolmie, author of “All the Horses of Iceland”
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us! I absolutely loved it All Iceland Horses both for its quiet magic and its huge, fast travel. And, of course for Eyvind, the pragmatic (if not redundant) Icelander who keeps a cool head through some truly amazing adventures. So:
What inspired you to write about Iceland, and more specifically about Icelandic horses?
I’ve always been interested in Iceland, as a medievalist (but not an Old Norse specialist). It’s so impressive that such a small subsistence culture can produce this amazing wealth of saga literature. Its rate of authors per inhabitant is still quite astonishing today. Books have always been important in Iceland. And I have been passionate about horses since my childhood. The two came together in my head after attending the Icelandic Writers Conference in 2018 and being able to ride an Icelandic horse through a lava field. It was quite exciting. The idea for the trip to Mongolia was born nearly two years later from a chance remark in a documentary about Icelandic horses and their genetic connection to steppe horses.
Which Icelandic saga is your favorite?
Probably Egil’s saga. I love a poetic protagonist, especially one who kills his first man at the age of nine. Although for this book the Eyrbyggja saga was important, as it concerned Eyvind’s home territory of Eyri in western Iceland and was full of ghosts.
Was Eyvind based on a particular character from the legend?
Not really. He has the wrong status – a mere trader, not a poet or a Viking. Its general laconic style, however, owes something to Skarp Hedin of the Njals saga.
Eyvind is a remarkable character in part because he insists he’s not remarkable at all. What prompted you to write to someone who is not a warrior, a wizard or a lawyer?
I thought of his epithet as I wrote, from time to time, like Eyvind the Improbable. I wanted to both be true to the form of the saga – to its ghost story/marvelous tale ending – and yet have a protagonist who was unusual. Clever, laconic and practical, as the characters of the sagas are – but, let’s face it, we’re all a little sick of the Vikings. I think Eyvind is really a magician, though, to the extent that anyone is: he performs as such successfully in this culture. It’s just that magic is a lot less flashy in Old Norse (or pre-classic Mongolia) than it is in our pop culture. It’s on a smooth credibility gradient that blends it with everything else.
The wary but ultimately beneficial meeting of cultures returns again and again, and is certainly a welcome respite from SFF’s penchant for violence. How was it to write trade and exchange as the central conflict?
Writing about violence bores me to death. Anything but that. Trade is actually where it all happens, a real cultural contact that is productive: linguistic and technological exchanges, cooperation, legal advances, intermarriages, interesting art in all its forms. People who talk about war as an impetus for one or the other are full of shit. They just don’t know the story. War is about killing.
Many religious traditions are represented in All the horses of Iceland, and you point out that strangers and strangers can often be closer to the sacred than people entangled in tradition. What do you think this says about belief across cultures?
See also
Well, it is evident in the sagas that those who practice seithr are essentially of lower status: women, disabled, elderly, insane, foreigners, sometimes slaves like the Hebrideans. This is often the case with magicians or shamans elsewhere. Magical ability was one of the reasons for keeping marginal people alive, being 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 short, it keeps magic or religion (to me both are the same) safely at the margins of the society, where they may be called intermittently but do not become overwhelming. The one god of the Judeo-Christian tradition always shifts this dynamic towards the theocratic model, unfortunately. I’m very interested in cultures that have priests; I don’t want them to be too big.
You have just written two novels on very remote islands. Do you feel attracted to the islands, or simply to the more specific cultures (Nordic, Celtic) of these islands?
I’m teaching a grad class right now on Mervyn Peake Gormenghast. It’s not on a literal island but it certainly is island. I am attracted to closed communities and their dynamics. Although these dynamics are not always good, they are very different from our contemporary, porous and competitive dynamics. My first novels with Aqueduct Press (The stone boatmen, two travelers) were also experiences in closed communities, often on the verge of branching out into cultural contact and not knowing what to do about it. It’s an inventive moment, which I continually revisit. Even my recent and more historical novel small animalsquite factually about the quiet life of Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, the 17andmicroscopist of the last century, in the small town of Delft, has this quality: he has a kind of magical realistic injection in which he meets the Goose Girl of the Grimms’ tales. And it turns out that this wild child can hear the microbes he discovers through his lenses. Thus, the very small and closed world of European natural philosophy is confronted with an alien force or perspective that it does not quite manage to tame.
You made the “Icelandic horse” a pretty good option for the afterlife. Is this the location or creature you would choose, if you could?
The whole reincarnation thing is very disturbing to me. But fascinating. It was a big problem in The stone boatmen – in the form of transmigration of souls into birds. There is something in this collocation, man/bird, which seems natural to me. For steppe people, human/horse seems an equally natural collocation, hence the wind horse as a multipart soul element. I can’t decide if I want to be reincarnated as an animal or not. It would be infinitely preferable to being another person (or even myself, as one imagines Christian eternity—dreadful). Yet in our world, animals are so dominated by humans that it might be too depressing. Really not sure. Probably just best to peacefully crumble into atoms. Or rather, dynamically to atoms: decomposition is a fairly active, if not conscious, process.
