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Background

Hannah is from Selfoss, Iceland and works as a farmer for most of the year. This is her story:

Dailey Life

Life in Iceland typically revolves around two things: tourism and farming. Hannah is involved in both. For part of the year she works as a guide showing tourists around the newly publicized Caves of Hella. The caves show strong evidence that the Vikings were not the first people to come to Iceland, but instead the Irish. It was quite a controversial discovery as the Icelandic people love and revere the Vikings and contribute so much of their culture to that one people.

The toughness of the Vikings still lives in the people of Iceland today. From the lack of umbrellas, both because of the extreme winds and the high tolerance for uncomfortable weather, to the handmaid wool woven sweaters. Icelanders love the Viking spirit of their ancestry. Yet the Irish ancestry just recently made public, has felt a little harder for them to swallow.

Although the evidence in the Caves of Hella has been known for hundreds of years, as farmers have used them for their sheep during the harsh winters in Iceland, the information did not become public until 2010 for fear of the Icelanders reaction to their history moving away from solely Viking.

Hannah embraces this truth more readily than others though. Yet her true passion still lies in old fashioned Viking farming. Her land has been in her family for generations and particularly with the thousands of sheep during breeding season, becomes a lot of work. The sheep in Iceland have grown so accustomed to human intervention during birth, that the mothers will not help lick the lambs’ faces clean after birth, allowing them to breath. So baby lambs born outside of a human’s presence will die. So Hannah and her family have their work cut out for them as they expect to help birth nearly 700 lambs over the next few weeks.

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Her Perspective

Hannah is a realist and takes facts as facts when they come. She finds beauty in the simplicity of life and is straightforward enough to tell even the youngest of tourists the lambs she raises are “slaughtered for their meat.” She’s not a sugar coater and says things how they are, which is how she lives her life. She works for what she has and doesn’t expect anything to be easily handed to her. Life is about enjoying the work and the struggle.

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