A. Kendra Greene - The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Icelands Most Unusual Museums

Acclaim for The Museum of Whales You Will Never See

Unseen treasures are hidden in the corners of Icelandand inside this book. Glittering with whimsy and speckled with small drawings, The Museum of Whales provides a much-needed detour to a place most of us wont ever get to see.

NEWSWEEK

A delightful one-of-a-kind journey.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)

Beguiling and witty... Theres an air of Italo Calvinos fantastical Invisible Cities wafting its way throughout.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

So attentive and meticulous and compassionate a voice, a touch, that every light and feathery (avian, human) thing here gathered... seems pristine in all its qualities.

DAVID SEARCY

Like a dream... As the sentences unspool their disarming lyricism... Greene allows delight to converse with revulsion, incantation with nightmare, tradition with oddity.

MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK

This is a book that opens a pathway into the depth and variegated distances of the human heart, enriching the experience we call: to be alive.

KURT CASWELL

A delightful, lyrical tribute to those who gather, record, and preserve.

MALACHY TALLACK

Greenes wit and deep curiosity cast sparks across every page.

PHILIP GRAHAM

A beautiful, buoyant read... Funny and powerfully poetic.

CHRISTINE COULSON

Read this book. You will be happier, and richer in spirit, for it.

BEN FOUNTAIN

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE MUSEUM OF WHALES YOU WILL NEVER SEE

A. Kendra Greene is a writer and artist who has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago History Museum, the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, and the Dallas Museum of Art, where she was a writer in residence. She has an MFA in nonfiction and a graduate certificate in book arts from the University of Iowa and has received a Fulbright grant, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and a Harvard Library Innovation Lab Fellowship. She lives in Dallas, where she is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas, a guest artist at Nasher Sculpture Center, and an associate editor at Southwest Review.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright 2020 by A. Kendra Greene

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

The essays Anatomy of a Museum, The Stone Collector, and Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors were originally published individually as chapbooks, in different form, by Anomalous Press, Boston & San Francisco, in 2015, 2016, and 2017 respectively.

Illustrations by A. Kendra Greene

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Greene, A. Kendra, author.

Title: The museum of whales you will never see : and other excursions into the landscape and dreamscape of Iceland / A. Kendra Greene.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048016 (print) | LCCN 2019048017 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135463 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525506676 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Greene, A. KendraTravel--Iceland. | MuseumsIceland. | IcelandDescription and travel.

Classification: LCC AM62.5 .G74 2020 (print) | LCC AM62.5 (ebook) | DDC 069.094912dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048016

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048017

Cover design by Colin Webber

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For the sorcerer who took me to see petrified trolls,

who sent me running from the museum to catch a car departing

even before I understood that I might hope to see whales

Tears fall in all the rivers: again some driver

pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts

upon a fatal journey, again some writer

runs howling to his art.

W. H. AUDEN, JOURNEY TO ICELAND

When they boarded the boats, the Icelanders had the heaviest trunks. Because they packed their trunks with books. Not clothes, not shoes. Books. You dont feel starving or in pain if you have a book.

VALGEIR ORVALDSSON

Why have a museum if you dont have a story?

VALDS EINARSDTTIR

Points of Reference

MASS AND WEIGHT

4 kilograms = 8.8 pounds = 16 merkur = the approximate weight of a human baby

20 tons = 40,000 pounds = the approximate weight of a red comb sea monster

DISTANCE

500 kilometers = 310 miles = approximate stretch of southern coast without a bay

ell = length of an arm from elbow to the tip of the middle finger 18 inches

40 ells 20 yards 18 meters length of a narwhal according to the 1585 Ortelius map 3x modern records of adult narwhal lengths

CURRENCY

800 kronur (ISK) $6.50 (USD) 6 euros (EUR) 5.5 British pounds (GBP) approximate cost of museum admission

3 cows = the cost of the first Icelandic language Bible, in 1584

TEMPERATURE

81 degrees Fahrenheit = 27 degrees Celsius = approximate peak recorded temperature in Iceland

SEASONS

By the old Icelandic reckoning, there are two seasons: summer and winter.

Summer begins the first Thursday after April 18. Winter begins on a Saturday in October, twenty-six weeks after the start of summer. Where Ive taken the liberty of spring and fall, they correspond to the time of year otherwise so named in climates of the Northern Hemisphere.

A Brief Introduction to Srslensk Stafsetning, or Specifically Icelandic Orthography

As a student of Icelandic, you will become sensitive to the particular sounds and rules of letters like , au, , ei, , , , , dj, f, g, hv, j, ll, p, and r; sensitive to the y sound that j makes, as in Reykjavk; and attentive to the trill of the r. As a tourist to Icelandic you might muddle through acute accents, but at the very least, youll want a passing familiarity with eth and thorn.

The letter thorn ( in upper case, in lower case) is a survivor. It was popular in many historical languages, Old English included, but Icelandic is the only living language that still uses it. In shape it may resemble a pedestrian p, but it sounds like the th in Thor, god of thunder and strength. Look for it in the bird name rshani, or the last name orsteinsson, or the first names rur and orvaldur, and you cant miss it in the full name orbjrn rarson. It is the soft, voiceless, almost whispered th of thick and thin and thistle.