The disappointment of the adventurer is often the realization that he or she is, in fact, a tourist.
In the journal William Morris kept of his 1871 trip to Iceland, he records his frustration with an arduous journey to the spouting hot spring at Geysir. Having been lost on the moors and forded great rivers, upon his arrival he is shown to a barren patch of ground scattered with mutton bones where he is to pitch his tent.
His protestations to be afforded an alternative site are dismissed by his Icelandic guide, who assures him that this is the place where “all Englishmen camp.” “Blast all Englishmen!” he vents.
The contemporary traveler in Iceland may share Morris’ deflation, as social media is full of what to expect: endless waterfalls, glacial cast-offs floating off of a black sand beach and perhaps a slightly risqué visit to Reykjavík’s Phallological Museum.
The latter is the world’s only museum dedicated to the male member. But rather than being an outlier of curatorial inquiry, this museum is symptomatic of an Icelandic tradition of small, oddly specific museums.
Dallas writer and artist A. Kendra Greene’s new book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, concerns these repositories, such as the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft with its “necropants,” trousers supposedly made from flayed human skin, or Petra’s Stone Museum, a collection created by one woman of stones found through her geological curiosities.
Greene’s engaging travelogue of encounters with those who instigated these small institutions illuminates this recent phenomena (most of the museums were founded in the last 20 years) and speaks of a reaction against the centralizing of national cultural institutions in Reykjavík and of creating spaces of thought in remote locations.
But perhaps most notable is the relation these museums have to the Icelandic traditions of storytelling. The island’s literary heritage, founded in medieval sagas — tales that blend history and myth — is exceptionally vibrant. Iceland has more published authors per capita than anywhere else in the world, and its museums are often personal narratives told through objects.
The founding of many American museums arose from similar factors to these small Icelandic institutions — a singular vision, indulged to its fullest extent: the Frick Collection in New York City, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
Greene’s book is a provocation to reflect upon the essential nature of the museum, an inquiry that feels exceptionally pertinent as museums around the world try to define what they do in this moment of isolation.
Greene’s enthusiastic prose would guide any visitors to Iceland well, in person or simply through the written word, taking them to unexpected and less-seen places. But the book is something more; it is a museum of museums, and Greene is the adventurer who has collected them.
She picks up on the oddities of Iceland’s cultural scene, where “boundaries between private collection and public museum are so profoundly permeable, so permissive, so easily transgressed and so transparent as if almost not to exist.”
Let’s hope that, now more than ever, the current situation affords opportunities for small institutions with distinctive voices.
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See
And Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums
By A. Kendra Greene
(Penguin, 272 pages, $22)