Views of Iceland (Updated)

Fourteen years ago, during a week in Iceland, I visited the Listasafn Íslands (National Gallery of Iceland), which was then housing an exhibition entitled Inspired by Iceland. The exhibition covered various styles and periods, but one of the highlights for me was a group or fifteen or so dramatic landscape scenes executed by an unknown painter or painters, probably in the eighteenth century. Though somewhat crudely done, the paintings were fascinating, especially when one realized that they were essentially works of fantasy. Though they bear inscriptions connecting them to real places in Iceland, their topographic infidelity makes it likely that the artist had never visited the country. (Earlier post here.)

It's been difficult to find reproductions of the paintings — there are said to be twenty-four in all — or more information about them, but the Listasafn has now put them back before the public eye, with the collaboration of the Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum, in an exhibition entitled Iceland from Afar, which will run until October 2026. The reproduction above is from the Listasafn's Facebook page; the version on the museum's website is drabber and murkier, and I suspect that the former is more faithful to the original.

Notebook: Chloe Dalton

It's become a bit of a commonplace in contemporary natural history memoirs that the subject can't only be the natural world; there has to be some kind of personal dysfunction that can be healed or at least moderated at the same time. This is true even in the very good ones, like H is for Hawk, where Helen Macdonald describes her depression and grief as well as her goshawk, and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is about out-of-control alcoholism as much as it is about the wildlife of Orkney. By comparison, the author of Raising Hare seems fairly stable. Chloe Dalton has been a longtime foreign policy advisor to British politicians (mostly to Tories, apparently) and has spent much of her life abroad, but she doesn't tell us much about herself, her romantic life, or her choice of substances.

If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises, and to travel, which I often had to do at a few hours' notice. I avoided fixed plans that would remove the flexibility to take a bag and go, and what I missed of holidays and family occasions I believed I gained in novel, unrepeatable experiences and exposure to parts of the world I might otherwise never have seen: glimpses of Bamako, Baghdad, Kabul, Algiers, Damascus, Ulaanbaatar, Tallinn, Sarajevo and Siem Reap.

The precipitating factor in her book is the COVID pandemic, which grounds her, exiles her from her urban rounds, and confines her to a converted barn somewhere in the countryside that she has been slowly restoring. She finds a leveret — a baby hare — that has apparently been abandoned or orphaned, and decides to take it in, although no one seems to have much information about how to foster a leveret or even about whether it can be done at all. Though she feeds it with a pipette, she refuses to regard it as a pet and never names it. Surprisingly, the animal survives and soon makes itself at home. Eventually allowed to come and go at will, it wanders the nearby garden and fields, bears several litters of young (we — and Dalton — only then learn that it's a female), but still likes to come in and lie by the fireside. Apparently hares are notably clean and instinctively house-trained, and the greatest damage it does is to chew through some computer cables.

I see lots of rabbits in my perambulations, but my only experience of hares — except, perhaps, in a zoo — was during a bus ride one spring through the Berkshire Downs, where I witnessed from a distance the sparring and dancing of their mating season that gave rise to the expression "mad as a March hare." Anyone writing about hares is quick to point out that they aren't rabbits, and are very distinct in form and behavior. Oddly, the staff at the Library of Congress doesn't seem to have gotten the message. Here is the CIP (Cataloging in Publication) subject data from the copyright page of the Vintage Books edition:

Subjects: LCSH: European rabbit—Great Britain—Popular works. | European rabbit—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Behavior—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Infancy—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | Human-animal relationships—Popular works. | Dalton, Chloe.

I've been somewhat skeptical about attempts to cross the human-wildlife divide (see earlier post), but Dalton's book effectively makes the case that the divide isn't necessarily absolute, if one respects the fundamental nature of the animal in question. She doesn't domesticate the hare (it can't be done), and only partially "tames" it, but it accepts and values her presence and, perhaps of equal importance, re-centers her perspective on the relationship between human beings and the other inhabitants of the planet.

Notebook: The Use of Learning

Henry Fielding:

Booth, as the reader may be pleased to remember, was a pretty good master of the classics; for his father, though he designed his son for the army, did not think it necessary to breed him up a blockhead. He did not, perhaps, imagine that a competent share of Latin and Greek would make his son either a pedant or a coward. He considered likewise, probably, that the life of a soldier is in general a life of idleness; and might think that the spare hours of an officer in country quarters would be as well employed with a book as in sauntering about the streets, loitering in a coffee-house, sotting in a tavern, or in laying schemes to debauch and ruin a set of harmless ignorant country girls.

Amelia