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By Root 209 0

choice is Iceland, the homeland of my dear friends Ana and Olaf Olafsson and their children, Ollie, Arni, and Soley. Olaf is Iceland’s leading novelist and lives in Sag Harbor. He spends his weekdays in Manhattan, where he works for a large media conglomerate. On holidays and in summer, the family goes home to Iceland, some four and a half hours east of New York, whose three hundred thousand citizens share their island with five thousand elves and five hundred thousand sheep. The latter they consume at an annual rate of fifty-five pounds per capita, more than a pound a week. Americans eat a mere pound of lamb a year. But in Iceland eating lamb is an ecological necessity. Iceland’s multitudinous sheep are depleting the island’s fragile ground cover of grass, moss, sedge, and berries. This forage lends the lamb its fine flavor, but also keeps the island’s thin and irreplaceable topsoil from blowing out to sea. For Icelanders, eating lamb is a matter of survival. The free-range newborns left to roam each spring upon the mountain meadows are as delicately flavored, tender, and greaseless as the salt-meadow lambs of France. Smaller than either French or American lamb, Icelandic lamb lacks the heft and intensity Americans are used to, but this is a fair exchange for its delicate purity. Since Iceland derives most of its energy from the geothermal dome upon which the island sits, its atmosphere is uncorrupted by hydrocarbons. The shellfish, haddock, cod, and halibut from its clean waters are its major export. So far, the usually resourceful Icelanders have not marketed their surplus lamb as a delicacy, but now that their economy has been badly wounded by the banking crisis, perhaps they will turn to their lambs to restore their capital.

Icelanders, descendants of medieval Norsemen whose ancient language they still speak, are not as insular as one might think of an island people in the remote North Atlantic, just beneath the Arctic Circle. Culturally, they are self-sufficient, from long experience of fending for themselves on rugged ground and perilous seas, a far more difficult habitat than North American settlers faced. The first thing one notices upon arriving in Iceland is that neither space nor emotion is wasted. The architecture is unembellished. The towns are shipshape. There must be rich Icelanders and poor Icelanders, and more of the latter since the collapse of Iceland’s economy, but the distinction between them and their neighborhoods is invisible, at least to strangers. The Icelandic manner is confident, welcoming, but reserved: the humor of survivors living on the world’s fragile edge. This reticence may explain why Icelandic lamb is little known to the outside world.

Iceland’s rates of life expectancy and literacy are higher than those of the United States. With a population two-thirds the size of the New York City borough of Staten Island, Iceland has its own international and domestic airline, a resident opera company from which it exports tenors to La Scala and other companies, a famous rock star (Björk), a world-class novelist (Olaf Olafsson), a symphony orchestra, and until Halldór Laxness died ten years ago, a Nobel laureate in literature. Reykjavik, the capital, where about a third of Icelanders live, has nine theaters, and thirty or so restaurants, not including fast-food outlets. The Hotel Holt, with its first-class restaurant, is a member of Relais & Châteaux. Reykjavik has more bookstores than I could count, and several publishing companies putting out about a thousand new titles a year. Nearly all Icelanders belong to the national church, but perhaps a third of the population believe in elves or hesitate to admit that they don’t. Iceland has a coast guard to rescue fishermen in distress and protect its fishing grounds, but no army, navy, or air force. It has no enemies or spheres of influence. Until the banking crisis it was the fourth-most-productive economy per capita in the world, and the fourth-happiest.

When I visited Iceland some ten years ago with Olaf, I knew nothing about the local cuisine and