SC - Icelandic Penis Museum

[Nanna Rognvaldardottir]

Adamantius wrote:
>With all due respect for all concerned, I have a question for the list:
>
>Have any of you wondered whether Nanna had any role in Margaret Meade's
>studies of Icelandic mating rituals?
>
>Or, to put it another way, ever wonder if, just perhaps, she's serving a
>dish of tongue in cheek?


Who, me?

Actually, every word I´ve said about Icelandic food and cooking is the
honest truth. But I´ll admit most Icelanders get a kick out of telling
people about the local delicacies, and offering them a taste. When Mick
Jagger visited Ísafjörður (fishing village in the Western Fjords) a few
weeks ago, the director of the folk museum was proud to display on TV a cube
of fermented shark that he had been tricked into tasting (and promptly spat
out).

And for me, many of these things are not local curiosities, to be savored
maybe once a year, but the daily food of my childhood. Really. The evening
meal almost always included something from the whey barrels - there was a
really huge one, and a smaller one, and then a third one that contained bits
my mother considered only fit for the dogs but my uncles and I (as the most
adventurous of us children) would sneak into sometimes for a tasty morsel.

The fact is that, even though I´m interested in all aspects of food history,
what intrigues me most is how people at the very edge of the habitable world
managed with what little they had. Which means utilizing every edible part
of an animal, and finding ways to preserve the food for the looooong winter.
(BTW, I´m currently reading a Faroese book on this subject; seems that some
very interesting recipes and methods have been developed in the Faroe
Islands too.) And some of the things one comes across in researching this
field are of such a nature that either you are ashamed of your ancestors and
keep silent about their habits, or you develop a sense of deadpan humor
about them. Which most of us do. But it is still the truth - we ate these
things (still do in many cases), and treated them in this manner.

I suppose you could say that the Penis Museum is very much an example of
Icelandic humor - it has the alternative name Reðurstofa Íslands (which I
guess you could translate The Icelandic Penile Institute), which is meant to
rhyme with Veðurstofa Íslands (The Icelandic Meteorological Institute). But
it is still a real museum, and the guy who runs it is quite serious about
it.

As for Icelandic mating rituals, there aren´t any. We tend to dispose of
such preliminaries.

Nanna



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