What a strange and weird travel book about Auden and MacNeice’s three month’s of travel around Iceland, mainly by bus and pony, in 1936; part letters home, part poetry, a little fact and quotes from earlier writers about Iceland, and a diary section written by a cod spinster.
As Auden says in his first “Letter to Lord Byron”:
Every exciting letter has enclosures,
And so shall this - a bunch of photographs,
Some out of focus, some with wrong exposures,
Press cuttings, gossip, maps, statistics, graphs;
I don’t intend to do the thing by halves,
I’m going to be very up to date indeed.
It is a collage that you’re going to read.

It might have been considered a bit of a rum do in its time, it now reads as humorously eccentric. It is fascinating too for its view of a historic Iceland that has disappeared in the 80 odd years since it was written (although Auden bemoans the move to towns from the countryside), for mentions of German tourists in search of the Aryan homeland and fleeting references to the Spanish Civil War, which started whilst Auden and MacNeice were in Iceland. The book ends with a humorous versified joint Last Will & Testament, which surprised me with its name dropping - John Betjeman may be expected, but Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess (both later revealed as Russian spies) were a surprise.

Overall, an enjoyable but not special book, with MacNeice’s letters from Hetty to Nancy are the most interesting reads, and Auden’s Letters to Lord Byron also working well. ( )

This wouldn't be much use as a travel guide for Iceland now, but it's interesting seeing how things have changed in 80 or so years. Still, the actual writing is crisp and witty even if not particularly profound.

Some pretty amusing pastiche, but the Icelanders don't come off terribly well in the account of Auden and MacNeice's trip! ( )

(1989 – after October (name is Liz inside the front cover)

I selected this with great excitement, as I remembered a jolly read about the two young poets touring Iceland in the 1930s. Unfortunately, there is less straight narrative than there is clever poetry and a rather odd section written as if by a jolly school marm type on a trip abroad. It does mention some of the older books I’ve read by intrepid women explorers of the country, but it was of rather more limited appeal than those. My first disappointment, though! ( )

Why read Auden's Letters from Iceland?

"Having put up the tents we ate a large meal... smoked mutton. Smoked...you put your teeth in a hunk and then haul away the hunk in both fists."

"The people themselves are not nearly so foreign...You can't imagine any of them behaving like the people in the sagas, saying 'That was an ill word' and shooting the other man dead. Disappointing, still one needn't travel if one wants to see odd behaviour. You are wonderfully situated, of course, in Cambridge."

"All we could think of was getting somewhere else. But we didn't. We went on and on and the landscape remained the same. It was like walking the wrong way on a moving staircase."

"Finally the remoteness of Iceland, coupled with its literary and political history, make it a country which, if visited at all, is visited by people with strong, and usually romantic, preconceptions. Few...people take an interest in Iceland, but in these few the interest is passionate."

W.H. Auden Rocks! ( )