"Never did I expect to taste such a barbaric dish as a sheep's head. But a decade later there it was on my plate, looking up at me with a sorrowful glaze in its eyes." - Lara Webber (Chicago Tribune)
I've never felt as touristy as when I hefted a cleaved sheep's head from a deep freeze in Krónan with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.
The head had been sawn in half lengthways, the brain removed.
There aren’t many things more traditionally Icelandic than eating the head of a sheep.
I think briefly about how panicked the sheep would have been before it was shot through the skull.
Then I bleep its head through on the self-service checkout.
I'm cooking the head with a wild-eyed Icelander who's been sleeping in my bed for a week.
It's sometime late afternoon. It's hard to tell without looking at a clock, as the dark is still rife in Reykjavík.
We're at that time when it’s tradition to eat gross stuff, though our Þorrablót is missing rams testicles, whale blubber, headcheese, rye bread, turnip, fermented shark and a wooden trough to scoff it all from.
I've never had Svið before you admit, as we stand at the hob, poking the two halves of the sheep's face with forks.
I don't disguise my shock. But I know it's ready when it's soft!
We dump the halved heads on our plates. Meat jostles off the jaw bones. It stinks. One serving is half a head. It seems an awful lot for one person.
I don't know where to begin, I say. Wikipedia tells me to start from the front, and work my way to the back.
I angle my knife and fork around the bones of the skull. I feel like I've never used cutlery before.
There should be rhubarb jelly to hand. It's said to be delicious with sheep cheek meat.
I eat the milky blue eyeball. It pops softly. Like I read it would. It isn't pleasant. It tastes like something that isn't supposed to be eaten. But it’s the best part for many Icelanders over forty.
The Icelander opposite me doesn't eat his eyeball. He's stalling more than I am.
The chunky tongue in my mouth feels every kind of wrong.
After a good twenty minutes, I give up trying to extract something, anything pleasant tasting from the sheep head.
I bring my heavy plate of wasted face to the sink, fill the bowl with warm water.
I pull off all the meat I didn't eat. It takes a while.
The water in the sink swiftly becomes oily, my hands almost too slippery to hold the head.
A multicoloured string of lights outside the house opposite vies for my attention.
But I’ve dug too deep into my disappointment for not enjoying the unique textures and flavours of a sheep's face.
It’s only when the bones come out the dishwasher, that I realise we cooked the faces of two different sheep, for when we place them together, the half-moon bolt holes are impossible to align.
From my upcoming (as yet untitled) collection, which explores the Icelandic winter throughout the ages.
“Dulce est pro sciente mori - It is sweet to die for science.” – The vaccination Inquirer and Health Review September 1881
In one of the photos of my family and me, I’m asleep, slumped like a doll on my mother’s lap.
My sister looks furious. Her hands threaded tightly together. She looks as though she would, if she were big enough, hurl a harpoon through the belly of the photographer.
Then, retrieve the harpoon and hurl it through the belly of the one who lured my father to gather his family together and sail on the Eisbar to Europe.
She died, my sister, alone in a German hospital. Nobody there would have understood her last words.
In Europe, zoos put us on display.
(This may be a legend, but a polar bear at one zoo became frantic with excitement when he saw my family arrive.)
Where we went, huts of turf were built, our whale skin tents erected.
The Sami had been here before us with reindeer. Before them, Zulu, Patagonians.
People came to witness us, with our wolf-like dogs and unusual features.
They said we were ‘clumsy in our sealskin clothes, a bit like bears.’
Though they were thrilled indeed to have in their midst raw meat-eating savages.
They handed us fruits through the bars. My father was amazed by the juice that squirted from an orange.
16,000 people came one day to see my father harpoon a seal, to witness our supposed inferiority, and satisfy their curiosity about the savages from the furthest north.
When father harpooned the seal, the crowd clapped. It sounded like the flap of eider ducks wings.
Intently, they watched him strip the skin and the blubber. They eyed us as we ate. My mother handed me pieces of seal from off her thumb.
It was the first time my sister smiled in Europe. She had blood on her tongue.
Men gabbled into their moustaches. Ladies shrieked behind handkerchiefs. Children leaned over the fence surrounding our enclosure for a closer look.
My sister said to my mother in Inuktitit – home.
The show lasted three hours.
At one point, my father took up his whip and acted terrible to chase away the crowd.
In a diary, father wrote of what they fed us, of our meals of coffee and rusks, codfish and potatoes and ship cookies and more coffee and ship bread and herring, beer and more ship bread.
He wrote things such as ‘we are greatly sad.’
The damp climate gave us chills, made our noses drip.
My father wrote how I slept and did not wake anymore.
Smallpox took us all in the end.
I was buried in European soil, section 17 of the Parisian cemetery Saint-Ouen on the northern outskirts of Paris.
My father’s brain was sent to a laboratory, and a plaster cast made from it.
When they examined us after death, they noted how our hair was ‘black without exception.’
Years later, my sister’s skull cap was found in Berlin.
When the man who brought us here was asked about the vaccination we should have been given on arrival, he said he had ‘forgotten.’
I wonder what happened to the nine dogs we brought with us and the eight pups. If they stayed in the zoo, like the polar bear, too far from home to ever go back.
From my collection People of the Sea Ice, published in 2021. A copy resides on a shelf in the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.
The thick scent of bear drives under the cabin door.
I put my head against the cold floorboards. I can hear him move.
The dog is barking. Father tells me to wrap up warm, be ready.
There's shit stuffed deep between the groves of my boots from this morning, when we collected snow shoe hares from their traps.
Mine was the only one still alive. Father showed me where to place my hands, where to apply pressure.
I fondled its pelt, pale as my shoulders on the first day of summer.
Father told me to hang it around my neck and hurry up.
He said the muck on my boots was bear shit.
He said the soft, dense smelling dirt had fallen from the backside of a big male, getting ready to retreat under the earth.
Getting ready to sleep and wait for spring, when hunters rest their guns.
The bear moves away. He's heavy, stocked with sacred fuel.
After the first gunshot, I move outdoors.
I can't see my Father on his eerie harvest, but this bear is a screamer.
I wonder if he was the runt of a cluster of cubs.
The forest night kisses Father's bullets, but it doesn't bless them. They land deep in tree trunks and are silenced.
I can smell his gun and know exactly when he makes the killing shot.
The silence is tight. Nothing moves.
The morning after and the bear wears a crown of frost.
There are bloody, frozen prints, tufts of fur missing from his enormous shoulders.
There'll be plenty of warm nests this winter.
I lean on his joints until they crack apart.
Cold air sets in my mouth as I move around the body of this giant berserker.
Father says we have to move quickly.
He reminds me that at certain points of decay, a bear's forearms resemble that of a human.
There's no real celebration in my heart, as Father pulls back the skin, revealing solid, cold flesh marbled with clean white fat.
I feel guilty for having feelings, for not keeping my hunter instincts close.
The cabin is warm with sleep, but there's the presence of everything dead.
I imagine ghostly armies of bears moving soundlessly through the trees. This evening we ate good meat, intense with flavour. We ate both eyeballs, the brain and tongue.
I wish I'd had chance to smell him properly before the end, while his breath still made clouds around his wet snout.
I wish I'd pushed my face into his thick fur, and breathed everything from his life into my lungs.
I'd have told him that real freedom is on the other side of this sorry place.
I taste my forbidden sadness, try to swallow it whole and fail.
From my book My Heart Is A Forest, a collection composed of my strongest poetry from 2009-2019.