If Iceland were to have a national slogan, it would be 'þetta reddast', which roughly translates to the idea that everything will work out all right in the end.
We were somewhere in the remote Westfjords, a large peninsula in Iceland's north-west corner, when our campervan first stalled. It was late September, the end of the tourist season in a part of Iceland that sees about 6 percent the country's annual tourist numbers, and the roads were all but empty.
The van stalled twice more as my husband and I made the roughly 200km drive from Látrabjarg, a windswept bird cliff perched on the far western edge of Iceland, back to our base in Ísafjörður, the Westfjords' largest town (pop: 2,600). Once we finally got back to our apartment, we called the campervan rental company and told them the issue. Unfortunately, the town's mechanic wouldn't be available before we were due to make the drive back to Reykjavik.
"Well," said the campervan agent, "þetta reddast!"
A quick Google search informed me that þetta reddast (pronounced thet-ta red-ust) doesn't mean 'sorry, I'm not paid enough to care about your troubles', or 'try not to get stranded in the middle of nowhere'. It means 'it'll all work out in the end' – and if Iceland had an official slogan, this would be it. The phrase near-perfectly sums up the way Icelanders seem to approach life: with a laid-back, easy-going attitude and a great sense of humour.
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"It's just one of those ubiquitous phrases that is around you all the time, a life philosophy wafting through the air," said Alda Sigmundsdóttir, author of several books about Iceland's history and culture. "It's generally used in a fairly flippant, upbeat manner. It can also be used to offer comfort, especially if the person doing the comforting doesn't quite know what to say. It's sort of a catch-all phrase that way."
At first glance, it seems an odd philosophy for a place where, for centuries, many things absolutely did not work out all right. Since Iceland's settlement in the 9th Century, its history is littered with the tales of times when þetta reddast did not apply.
If Iceland had an official slogan, this would be it
In her book, The Little Book of the Icelanders in the Old Days, Sigmundsdóttir recounts some of these hardships: the long winters; extreme poverty; indentured servitude. There were volcanic eruptions, like the 1783 Laki eruption that killed 20 percent of the 50,000-strong population, as well as 80 percent of its sheep, which were a vital food source in a country with little agriculture. There were storms that swept in and sank the open rowboats used for fishing, wiping out much of the male populations of entire towns. Things were so bad that even up through the 18th Century, according to Sigmundsdóttir, 30 percent of babies died before they turned one.
The Iceland of old was an exceptionally hard place to live. And the Iceland of old wasn't that long ago. "It hasn't been that long since we were a society of farmers and fishermen, and the seasons and the harsh conditions we lived in had complete control over our lives," Auður Ösp, founder and owner of I Heart Reykjavik tour company, told me.
