Before Snorri
Mark Petursson’s adventure in Iceland

Auther: Katrín Níelsdóttir, Winnipeg, MB

Mark first went to Iceland in the early 1970s with his family, but it was his return in 1974 that became the real adventure. He was 17, fresh out of high school, and not quite ready to head straight into university. He knew he wanted something more than an ordinary gap year.

“I didn’t want to just see stuff,” he said. “I wanted to live in Iceland. I wanted to learn the language.”

So while others might have chosen a more conventional European backpacking trip, Mark went in the other direction entirely. Through family connections, he got a job in Höfn, where he started out on a construction crew building a new fish factory. It was hardly glamorous, but glamour was never the point. He wanted to immerse himself in Icelandic life, and the fishing industry gave him exactly that.

Over the course of his months in Iceland, he worked construction, moved into the fish factory, helped with herring processing, and eventually signed on to a fishing boat for the cod season. Looking back, he jokes that he took part in nearly every step of the process.

“When I came back, I used to say I had done everything in the fish-making process that a man was allowed to do,” he said.

At the time, he thought the jobs he was not doing were somehow specialized work that women were uniquely suited for. Only later did he realize that what he had really witnessed was gender inequality in the industry. That, too, became part of what he learned in Iceland – not just language and culture, but the limits of his own youthful assumptions.

Still, many of his strongest memories are funny ones.

When he first arrived in Reykjavík with a friend, the two teenaged Canadians had to outfit themselves for working life in Iceland. They went shopping for sweaters, boots, and pants, only to find that one shopkeeper would not take his money.

“The inflation rate was so bad it was going to be devalued on the Sunday,” he recalled. “She said, ‘You take all this stuff, send me the money on Monday.”

From Reykjavík, they travelled east by bus – something that had not been possible on his earlier trip because the south coast road had not yet been open all the way through. In Höfn, he settled into life in a rooming house that has long since disappeared. Today, he says, only the concrete ring where the walls once stood remains.

He arrived with almost no Icelandic, but he was determined to learn. He bought books, listened carefully, and picked up language wherever he could. Even bingo became a classroom.

“I played bingo to learn how to count,” he said.

His real breakthrough came in the fish factory, thanks to a co-worker who took his enthusiasm seriously. During breaks, the man would write Icelandic words for him in fish blood on the worktable.

“He would sit there and write all the words in the fish blood, so I could have the word, hear him say it, and see how it looked when written.”

It is hard to imagine a more memorable language lesson.

For Mark, learning Icelandic was not academic. It was survival, curiosity, and desire all at once. He describes the early stages of language learning with the kind of clarity that anyone who has struggled through a second language will recognize.

“When you hear somebody say a sentence in a foreign language, it sounds like one big word,” he said. “When you would finally learn enough Icelandic that you could parse out individual words, now it would be, instead of one giant word, it would be three. Once you hit that point, the learning curve becomes vertical.”

That moment came for him in Grundarfjörður, where he moved after Christmas. Suddenly, conversations began to separate into recognizable pieces. He could follow enough to guess the rest, and once that happened, the language started to come quickly. He estimates he was learning 10 to 15 new words a day.

His Icelandic education, however, was not confined to the workplace.

There were dances, films, road trips, and weekend trips to Reykjavík. In the small towns, Friday night meant rúntur – driving around in circles, drinking from a bottle in the back seat, and hopping from one car to another when routes crossed.

“You’d have the Brennivín bottle, which you had already consumed half, and then filled the other half with Coke,” he said. “And you would just be drinking straight out of the bottle in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle.”

It was, he admits, not exactly a model youth program.

“I was at home because I was a teenage alcoholic in a country with rampant teen alcoholism,” he said with characteristic bluntness, before laughing. “You gotta fit in.”

There is a rough honesty to the way he tells these stories now. He does not romanticize everything. He remembers the hard drinking culture, the risks, and the recklessness. But he also remembers the excitement of being young, far from home, and entirely open to experience.

He had made a pact with himself before leaving Canada: as long as something did not seem likely to kill him, he would try it once. That approach led him into all kinds of situations – some hilarious, some dangerous, and some both.

Working on the fishing boat in Ólafsvík was among the most memorable parts of his time in Iceland. He loved it immediately. “I took to it literally like a fish to water,” he said.

The days were long: out at 6:30 in the morning, back at 7 or 8 at night, seven days a week. He was the lowest-ranking man on the boat, doing the hardest physical labour, and he loved the rhythm of it. He also discovered that he had perfect sea legs.

“My very first day out on the boat, I ate like a pig,” he said. “I never got seasick, not even a hint.” That put him in sharp contrast with one crew member who spent every fishing season trying not to vomit. “The only way he would not puke was to put nothing in his body,” Mark said. “He’d lose about 130 or 140 pounds every season and spend the rest of the year putting it back on.”

The boat provided both beauty and danger. There were dolphins in the waves, long days of heavy labour, and storms so immense that he remembered looking up from the troughs of the sea as if he were at the bottom of a canyon. On one occasion, while carrying coffee across the deck in rough weather, he briefly found himself airborne.

“All of a sudden, I’m a metre and a half, two metres off the deck,” he said. “I didn’t spill the coffee, I was quite proud of myself.” His captain was less impressed. After Mark delivered the cup and proudly described his acrobatics, the captain punched him in the head.

“He said, ‘Any time you’re in weather like this, you make sure you always have something touching the boat.’” It was a lesson delivered with alarming clarity. The captain later explained that if the boat had shifted while Mark was in the air, he could have gone straight into the sea. “He says, ‘I’ve seen it happen.”

Even the quieter moments had their own humour. Stuck dead in the water one day while waiting for the Coast Guard to tow them in during the Cod Wars era, Pétursson decided to pass the time by jigging for cod. After an hour of effort, he proudly hauled in his catch – only to discover that one of the crew had played a joke on him. “I caught two fish and two boots,” he said. “They were matching boots.”

Not all of the stories belong in polite company. One that perhaps says a great deal about Iceland in the 1970s involves a night out in Reykjavík, a line for pylsur, and an older woman who approached the teenage Canadian with a proposition he completely failed to understand.

“She said, ‘I have a very comfortable bed, if you’re interested,’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘No, no, it’s fine, I’m at the hotel.’” Only after she walked away did one of his friends explain what had just happened.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Mark?” his friend asked. “She wanted to take you home and have sex.” Mark, by his own admission, had been “very clueless.”

For all the comedy, though, the deeper story is one of connection. Before organized heritage programs existed, Mark built his own path into Icelandic language and culture through work, family networks, and immersion. His journey was not polished or curated. It was muddy, fishy, exhausting, exhilarating, and unforgettable.

It also changed him.

“I had such a good time. I learned so much,” he said. “It obviously shaped the rest of my life.”

Today, as Snorri participants travel to Iceland through a structured cultural program, they are part of a long tradition of Icelandic North Americans trying to understand where they come from. The framework may be different now, but the impulse is the same: to go beyond ancestry charts and stories, and actually live the connection.

Before Snorri, young people like Mark Petursson went looking for Iceland with little more than courage, curiosity, and the confidence that somehow it would all work out. And, in his case, with enough confidence to survive fish factories, fishing boats, fish-blood language lessons, and at least one missed romantic opportunity in a Reykjavík hot dog line.