Honouring World’s Oldest Parliament

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1052, 16 August 1930, Page 18

Honouring World’s Oldest Parliament

Iceland Stages a Great Celebration

iNE THOUSAND years ago there opened the oldest Parliament still in existence. No building housed it, no four manmade walls surrounded Ring place was a great

cleft in a fantastic lava field, and its members were hardy Norsemen, who feared neither the inclemencies of weather nor the wrath of their fellowmen. Iceland has just celebrated the millenium of that first meeting of its Althing ("al” meaning all and “thing”, being the old Norse verb to talk) at Thingvalla. Visitors from the outside world have been increasing in Iceland during the past decade or more. But they have not vet reached any sucn proportions as in most European countries. More over, the majority of them come on cruise ships that barely pause for a glimpse oi Rejkjavik, the Ice landic capital, and its immediate sur roundings, before steaming on to better-known and therefore morg popular regions This summer therefore. Iceland came into what she considers hoi' own in the matter of tourists, with at least a goodly proportion of her migrated children and other exiles of Scandinavian -.. from the United States and Canada by her celebration. Nearly all visitors make their first close acquaintance with Icelandic territory at the Westmann Islands, off the southern coast. These bare, sheer-faced mountain-tops floating on the sea, have a population equal to any other town of Iceland except the capital, and are prosperous from the successes. ' particularly during the past decade or two, of their large fishing fleet. They enjoy a consid erable income also from the oil. flesh and feathers of those thousands of millions of birds which whiten the islands' cliffs and are captured yearly by daring cliff-hangers. As a byproduct the captured birds furnish the islanders their chief winter fuel, the inedible and oil-drained parts being dried to the consistency of tinder. Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, a day’s steaming westward from the phantom-like islands of the south coast, is a disappointment to the mere

traveller. For it is progressive, modern, up to date to a degree; whereas Iceland’s location, sagas and very name lead one to picture something exotic, unusual, quite out of the run of ordinary goals of travel. On the contrary, it is in the midst of a strenuous real estate and building boom; thousands of its more recent houses and public buildings could not be distinguished from those in many a good Long Island suburb where wooden buildings are forbidden, and its streets are noisy and perilous with automobile traffic. Even the heaps of shiny codfish fresh from the sea are carried from the fishing boats to the curing factories along the shore in open trucks. Reykjavik is straining every ner % to make herself a modern city in every respect. Is it any surprise, then, that her prices make the visitor long to be back in his home town (asks Harry A. Franck in the New York “Times”) or that to the seeker after the picturesque and the unusual, the remnants of the quaint bygone and the lovable naivetS of isolated peoples finds his search difficult? Iceland is European, in spite of her isolation. The newcomer quickly senses a close kinship with the Old rather than the New. World. Yet, within these European limits of the formalities that are considered necessary in the dealings between man and man, Iceland, even Reykja vik, has also a simplicity in keeping with her importance in the world at large. The executive offices of the Government, known to most alien visitors as the “foreign office,” is an unimposing bungalow-like building, with a single “office boy” —aged 60, and, thanks to long travels and for- j eign labours, speaking his English as j fluently and colloquially as you or l—acting as a buffer between the outside world and not only the Prime Minister, but all his Cabinet and their assistants, down to the last Government stenographer. The Parliament House in which meets the Althing cf today, coddled descendant of that hardy yearly gathering in the natural lava-walled forum at Thingvalla, is much like the town hall of some very small New England , city; the “Cathedral,” or principal State-subsidised church, beside it, would pass unnoticed among village churches. In contrast, the new Catholic cathedral of Reykjavik, still smelling strongly of the cement and plaster of which it is built inside and out, j stands on an eminence which was, ] until recently, a meadow in the outskirts of the capital, and is the most conspicuous and imposing building in the city—though there are barely 100 Catholics in all Iceland. The island- I ers are with only unimportant exceptions Lutherans, and the State j

Church is as much a department - the Government as in the other 1 of Scandinavia. Denmark inherited the >«*-; along with Norway, aad kept ltuj the Norwegians shook off the wm*yoke. In 1918 Iceland virtually «- her independence, in the form treaty, or convention, signed Denmark. This leaves the two tries, long a single kingdom, at Siamese twins, bound together ? " same King, but otherwise haviM most no official connection King Christian the Tall can vew Acts of the Icelandic practice, since 191 S, he h on the dotted line anythffig Prime Minister has laid beforeWj; even the previous of a Danish Minister being no , necessary, nor, indeed, Icelandic point of view, j Furtherfore, Iceland W “ , f given formal notice, in a: - I with the terms of the revision agreement before «* f are Iceland, to be found 111 „®“ nte rpn* of the country. Scores o. t , ing farmers have steam D . ft? turf-covered dwellings.* =carce use of an ounce of fuel - , costly substance in are public institutions " “ 1C “ fnod and heated and have well-cooked , hot baths available .constantly unlimited quantity, m wbic , i is never struck unless it be pipe or a cigarette. -petite As to Thingvalla, former place of the Icelandic ,_ bra ti(*s focal point of the recent [Jay Y that fantastic lava riR, half w automobile from the cap jc TOcrugged surroundings, is - , ra veU« T derland even to the casual mg' as well as a marvel to the g On the way there the high ? {oJf . close to the largest tioning in Iceland —a yet pe ptc feet high, which erupt s „]7rly tb» hours and a quarter so reg t ??; the few inhabitants ron?“ * b v px?their clocks by it. Profiting w , experience. the * j erected about this a sto a protection against soaping- ()eeg » By far the most I ™ po^p bln g « tion of Iceland Is the <4 curing of codfish for t yediter the Catholic countries of® w ranean. Akureyi. S J P h towns & fjordur, and a score of otne tithe north—quite comfortable to-date towns, though ® or so ~ claiming more than 3,0 ploo habitauts —are little more pU t >1 fled codfish plants or ho"™* is sC ■ for Sweden. Reykjavik - sen*’ rounded by hundreds of # j of drying codfish on j when the sun shine*.