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Intelligence Squared
How does a nation’s language shape its identity? Hannah Kent on her year in Iceland
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- [00:00]
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This episode is sponsored by the Planet Visionaries Podcast Planet Visionaries is back with a new season hosted by Alex Honnold, who you might know from his incredible solo climb of the 3,000 foot El Capitan in Yosemite national park this season. You can hear him in conversation with people who are not just imagining a better future, but actually building it. Here at Intelligence Squared, we love conversations that explore real solutions and real progress. In this podcast, you'll hear from scientists, explorers, activists and storytellers from around the world who are reshaping the future in practical and inspiring ways. In an upcoming episode, Alex speaks to Chris Tompkins, a conservationist and former CEO of Patagonia who has dedicated her life to preserving millions of acres of land across South America. In 2017, this vision led to one of the largest private land donations ever when her foundation gifted an area that the size of Denmark to Chile to create a new national park. What makes this show so compelling is that it highlights the human side of climate work. It's not just policy or numbers, it's people taking meaningful action to create a better world. Listen in to be part of the movement to reimagine our planet's future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, watch Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening right now. This episode is sponsored by indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Sometimes the hardest part of hiring is just working out where to start. Indeed makes it clear, simple and quick to reach the right talent. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute I've been talking to you. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners to this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com intelligencesquared just go to indeed.com intelligencesquared right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast indeed.com intelligencesquared terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
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Danielle Sands
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode, writer Hannah Kent joins us to discuss her new memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, a reflection on the profound bond she formed with Iceland as a young traveler. A bond that would inspire her bestselling novel, Burial Rites, and helped define her voice as a writer. In conversation with Danielle Sands, she explores Iceland's language, culture and traditions, and how learning to speak a new language can deepen a writer's sense of self. Let's join our host, Danielle Sands now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Danielle Sands, senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway University of London. And our guest today is the Australian novelist Hannah Kent. Hannah first traveled to Iceland at the age of 17. She'd never seen snow before and didn't speak a word of Icelandic. Living in a remote part of Iceland during the dark winter, she fell in love with the country, its landscape and its people. The experience inspired her best selling novel, Burial Rites, a haunting work of historical fiction set in 19th century Iceland. She is joining us today to talk about a new memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, which is her love letter to Iceland and the time that she spent there. Welcome to Intelligence Square. Tanner.
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Hannah Kent
Thank you so much for having me.
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Danielle Sands
So I want to talk about the inspiration behind the book to start with. So obviously the book traces your relationship with Iceland across quite a long time period, more than 20 years, from when she first visited as a teenager right up until the present day. Why were you drawn to write it now?
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Hannah Kent
You know, it's a funny thing. When this book was published in Australia earlier this year, I was reminded by some of my other writer friends that I had at some point vowed that I would never, ever write a memoir, which is true. I never, I never, it was never something that I thought I would write. I, I think probably because I, you know, one of the reasons I write novels is because I'm fundamentally much more interested in other people's lives than my own and never really felt like my own life was interesting enough. But then there was sort of a series of circumstances which sort of pushed me to reflect a little further on that year that I had living in Iceland when I was 17 years old. I remember shortly after my son was born, which was at the very start of the national lockdown here In Australia in 2020, my mother dropped around this huge cardboard box which was filled with memorabilia, things that she had kept from my exchange that I was unaware of. Every email I had written home, you know, all my notebooks. And I remember going through it. And at this time, as I think a lot of parents of newborns are, I was wholly kind of disconnected from myself. I felt very at sea. I. You know, the world outside was also completely changing. I. I was really struggling to write as well. And I was troubled by this sense that I might not ever be able to write again. Language had gone from me, and, yeah, I was at a loss as to who I was now and what I ought to be doing. I also had a book due, and I was very anxious about that. And then in reading a lot of these diaries that my mother had dropped off, I found a kind of parallel state in them when, at 17, I deeply held this desire to write at the heart of me, and yet was troubled by a lack of direction. And then through going through a lot of these emails and recounting my experiences, I was able to see, perhaps with the benefit of so much, so many more years having passed, that this was really a year. And especially, you know, this was a year in which Icelandic culture shaped me. Not only pushing me towards the first novel that I would eventually write, but also shaped me in the sense of offering me a validation in my own writing. And I guess it was then that I thought, maybe this is something that I need to examine a little further. Maybe this is also something that I can return to in order to get myself out of the rut I then found myself in. And so it emerged very organically out of, I guess, this curiosity as to just how deeply I had been altered and set forward in my life by this year abroad, but also by this sense, too, that, yeah, maybe there were a few interesting stories there that I hadn't yet seen spoken of, and maybe this did bear a little. A little bit of extra consideration. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. I do remember at one point thinking, oh, God, you know, I don't. I don't. I'm a bit scared to tell my publisher that now I'm thinking of writing a memoir, but I'm so glad I did. It was such an extraordinary process, and I think in some ways has really made concrete in my mind just how special the country is, how much I feel I belong there, but also how much that sense of belonging is continually being troubled and interrogated. Yeah, it was not something that I suddenly thought, oh, yes, I'm going to do it. It certainly emerged over the basis of A couple of years and several events.
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Danielle Sands
You talk about this sense of belonging. And I feel like that search for belonging is so strong in the text. You know, some of the most powerful moments are when you kind of break through the loneliness and the homesickness and suddenly feel sort of part of the family in Iceland or even part of the landscape. And it makes me think about the. The title of the book, Always Home, Always Homesick. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the thinking behind that.
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Hannah Kent
It was funny around this. I mean, I mentioned around this particular time when my mother dropped around all of this material. It also coincided with sort of a kind of sense of synchronicity with a lot of dreams I was having. I was very aware that, you know, with the lockdown and no international travel permitted, even though Iceland is a very long way away and it's very expensive to travel to, just not even having the option of returning home made me yearn for it. And I was dreaming about it more or less every night, dreaming that I was back there, dreaming that I was speaking the language. And on waking I would feel this particular kind of grief, which I recognized as homesickness. And then when I was looking through my journals again, especially in those first initial months, I left Adelaide and South Australia, very hot summer for, you know, an Icelandic winter where there was four hours of daylight. And I was so intensely homesick in these first few months. And it was so interesting for me to look at the change then, but then also to re examine my continued relationship with the country and the way in which, even though now, you know, I'm married and I have a family here and I feel very settled. I very much love this beautiful place I live, which is paramount country in the Adelaide Hills. There is always a small part of me which feels slightly incomplete. You know, it's this sense that there's another me on the other side of the world. And the more I unpacked this, the more I was interested too, in the way in which, when you acquire another language or you are elsewhere speaking that language, you can be a slightly different person. So, yes, there's kind of homesickness in this conventional sense that we miss the people who live in another country. But to me, it was interesting too, to explore this sense of what happens when we aren't able to access a language and express ourselves in that language. Can we be homesick for ourselves in another place? And also, obviously, it's an incredibly different landscape. And I feel slightly different when I'm there. It motivates a different kind of. Or inspires a different kind of creativity in myself. So, yeah, it's a bittersweet feeling. But it's been very interesting that since the memoir has come out, I have had many conversations with people, particularly immigrants, who exactly understand that feeling, who implicitly know that, yes, I'm satisfied. I'm with my people, I belong to this place, but I also belong elsewhere. And so, therefore, I'm still not at home. It's this kind of, you know, a restlessness that never settles.
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Danielle Sands
Yeah. And does that restlessness feel like a sort of creative force, or does writing feel like a way of speaking that restlessness or responding to it in some way?
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Hannah Kent
I think a lot of my writing, especially when I write about Iceland and certainly this memoir, too, so much of it that thought that, okay, yes, maybe it would be nice to write about that year was born out of a desire to place myself there through my writing. You know, when I write one of the. I mean, ever since I was tiny, I remember sort of marvelling at the magic of both reading and writing, to just transport yourself. And one of the reasons why I wanted to return there in my writing was to place myself back there, especially during a time when I was unable to travel. That continued for many years here. And certainly, I think so much of Burial Rites, my first novel, came about because I had this out of this, you know, desire to return to a country that by then meant so much to me, if not in person, then certainly in mind and in imagination. Yeah, it was absolutely not the real thing, but it was probably the closest approximation I could get.
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Danielle Sands
Hannah, you were talking a little bit about learning Icelandic, and you write in your book that it sort of unlocked something for you. It unlocked. It opened up the culture. I'm very aware, particularly in the uk, that language learning has kind of fallen a little bit out of fashion. Fewer people are learning languages. Fewer people are studying languages at university. Your book is a really strong, vivid defense of language learning. Do you think this is something we should talk about more? Do you think it's something we should advocate more explicitly?
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Hannah Kent
Gosh, that's such a good question, isn't it? I mean, I. By no means am I fluent in Icelandic. I'm very aware that when I speak, it's, you know, just griddled with grammatical error. And, I mean, that's become more so the case the longer, you know, the longer I stay away from the country. There's not very many people here in South Australia who I bump into who speak Icelandic, but I think it's Interesting, because when I grew up, I grew up in a very sort of monolingual household, which had been for several generations. I learned Indonesian at high school for, you know, a year. I didn't really understand it. To me, my understanding of learning a language was having essentially a vocabulary list and then just swapping out words for one other. And one of the great sort of surprises to me which, you know, sounds. You can sort of see how ignorant I was back then, was that, of course, language is so much more than that. Both on a sort of, you know, on a syntactical level, you know, there's so much more about acquiring a language and just in terms of the way in which you speak speak, the way in which words fall in a sentence, the language, the words that don't exist within your mother tongue but.in another language, all of these things were kind of revelatory for me. And I think that when that first initial stage of acquiring another language gave me a renewed awareness of the power of it and also then what it. The power then of reading and of writing and of storytelling, that there is so much which is held within language. It's not simply about being a dictionary. It's about learning a history through the words that are in use, through the proverbs that come into play, through the slang. I was very conscious when I started learning language of how much it taught me about Iceland's history. Whether that was in learning about words like kveldwacher, which is this beautiful word we don't have in English, but literally it translates to evening, wake. But the word itself is a reference to a time when Icelanders still lived in turf huts. And it would grow dark outside, and everyone would gather in the main bath, Stoffer, which is the main room where everyone sleeps all together. And it was still too early to go to sleep, so they would turn on the lamps and everyone would sort of do handicrafts or knitting and someone would recite straight stories. And within that explanation, too, is kind of, you know, a reverence for language, which made me understand, too. As you know, Iceland, too, is a literary country. And it helped me understand the ways in which literature and stories and the sagas of the Icelanders have been so crucial to maintaining a strong Icelandic identity through years of colonization from Denmark, for example. And so not only was it learning a language, it was. You don't only just access the ability to just Google Translate yourself. You're accessing a whole other understanding of culture. And you're right when you say that it really was through acquiring language that I felt that I was able to belong. And, yes, that was partly on one level, just simply about communicating, but I think on many others, it was about having a much deeper, soulful understanding and appreciation of the people and everything that had transpired before that had given rise to particular words or sayings or ways of communicating. Communicating. And I do. I. You know, I have such a love of language. Since learning Icelandic, I'm learning other Nordic languages at the moment. Thank God. They're so much easier than Icelandic. So partly it's because I already have a leg up, but it's. But I love the. That's an aspect of it that I really appreciate. I feel like I come to know the soul of a people through. Through language. And I also feel myself growing in acquiring language, not only through ability, conversational ability, but also in acquiring an understanding of other ways of being and being able to question prejudices or the ways in which I live my life and the habits in the route. Like, it's so multifaceted. And I don't think that we can kind of reduce the value of learning a language to simply being able to converse. It's so much more than that. It's about acquiring a much deeper understanding of things.
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Danielle Sands
Thanks. And it's so notable in the book that there's a sort of acceleration of everything when you're Icelandic, kind of breaks through. It feels like the whole sort of community, the whole culture, opens up to you in such a rich way.
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Hannah Kent
Yeah, it was so funny because, I mean, I went to Iceland in 2003 when there was, you know, I remember trying to find a book in Icelandic at the local bookshop. There was nothing, you know, it was skipped right from Italian to Spanish, I think. But it was. And I remember listening to, like, a Bjork song where she sort of spoke in Iceland, I think, oh, my gosh. What does this even sound like? So I had no idea. I went in completely blind. And although many people did speak English, I was supposed to receive Icelandic classes. But I was sent to Soda Kroka, which is this very small fishing village up in the north of the country. And there were no, like, Icelandic lessons available for English speakers. So I was kind of left on my own. And I ended up learning it in this very strange way which I talk about in the memoir, which is when I very much accidentally joined the local theater group. My host father at the time was sort of like, you know, you have to come with me. I'm gonna take you down to this place. I had no idea where we were going. And he ended up taking me to this industrial warehouse and led me up the top and then was like, okay, I'm going to. I'll see you in about two hours. Okay, I'll come pick you up. And I was left standing in a room of other people. And they start speaking Icelandic to me. I have no idea what they're saying. And then I'm like, I'm so sorry. I'm the exchange student. And like, okay, do you know where you are? And I was like, no, no, no. And they're like, oh, you've. This is. We're at the local zirte company and we're going to put on a play. And perhaps he thought that you could be in the play, but you don't speak Icelandic. I was like, no, no, no, I don't. Sorry. And they sort of went and talked amongst themselves, and then they came back to me and they said, okay, so I think there is something that you can do for us. Could you please mop up the blood? And I'm thinking, what.
- [18:56]
Danielle Sands
What.
- [18:57]
Hannah Kent
What am I doing? But by this stage, it was just so. So excruciatingly, you know, the whole situation was so awkward. I thought, oh, yeah, I'll do whatever. And what they eventually communicated to me was that they. This play was about six characters who get sort of very brutally murdered on stage. It was a comedy which also seems very Icelandic. But they needed someone to set off nooses and gunshots and clean up the fake blood on stage. And so I became the props girl. But, of course, I needed to be able to. Even though I wasn't speaking Icelandic as an actor, I needed to be able to be able to follow a script and understand what I was hearing and match it to what was on the. What was on the page. And so I started learning Icelandic from this very strange way. In this very strange way. I think of it as learning it from the grave up. So I started acquiring Icelandic through words like, you know, blows like blood and draugr and ghost. And I think in so many ways, this initiation into the language ended up shaping my understanding of, you know, of Iceland isn't. In many ways, it was this very kind of haunting way to sort of start learning something rather than, you know, going through it in a much more conventional way of, hello, my name is Hannah. And I'm so pleased that that happened because I think it did allow me an earlier sort of entry point into understanding the community and the history and sort of more immediately accessing so much of what I ended up loving about Icelandic.
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Danielle Sands
You keep coming back to the particularity of Iceland. I think, you know, that you. Now you're telling us about the sort of rich history, the storied history of Iceland. The book is so much about the richness and the grandeur and the brutality of the landscape as well. When you know, at the start of the book, when you're talking about the process through which you arrived at Iceland, it's kind of luck. You say you wanted as an exchange student to go somewhere that felt kind of otherworldly, but in the end, it's a sort of chance that you're given. Iceland. But to what extent do you feel like it had to be Iceland? That in being Iceland, something was sort of opened up in you, something in your writing self was opened up by the kind of richness of the culture and the landscape and the people?
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Hannah Kent
Yeah, it's. It's absolutely true. I mean, like you say, I didn't select Iceland. I was asked to nominate some countries to be considered for. But because I didn't have any background in languages, I knew I wouldn't be considered for France and. And Spain and, you know, those sort of those countries. There were many other applicants who were going for those. And I was told that when that wasn't the case, I would. A country would be selected for me on the basis of personality, which I really don't know, you know, what that says about me. But I do remember being asked in the. In the application process, you know, how would you feel if you were sent somewhere where it was, you know, where it was dark for nearly. Nearly the whole day in wintertime? And I do think that that felt incredibly novel to me. And I'd never seen snow. You know, I was raised in South Australia. It's one of the driest climates in the world. And that seemed to me to be incredibly magical. And so, you know, I think that's probably why they sent me there, because of my sort of unbridled enthusiasm when I responded. But it's so funny because the more time passes, the more it's. Whether it's just the way in which humans try to make sense of the narratives of our lives. But it feels. It feels very fated, you know, it really does feel like it's a place I was supposed to be, especially when I consider the ways in which I had always wanted to write. And yet, by the time of my application, one of the reasons why I had applied to leave was because I felt I had been talked out of it. You know, I felt that everyone was Considering writing to be a hobby. It wasn't a vocation. It wasn't something that I should really. People weren't saying that I shouldn't write, but I think they were set. They weren't necessarily taking it as seriously as I felt that I wanted to, you know, and so much of my applying was really me buying 12 months to make up my mind about what to study at university. So here you have this desperately wanting to write teenager on the cusp of becoming who lands in a country of 250,000 people, which not only is deeply inspiring. And the beauty, very hostile beauty, but incredible beauty, very singular landscape and natural sort of wilderness. Deeply inspiring to many people, especially now that the tourism boom has occurred. I absolutely know I'm not the only person who finds that. But also lands in a place where. Where, you know, has had the highest literacy levels in Europe historically, where a place where the Icelandic sagas are deeply central to the identity. A place where one in 10 people writes a book. I mean, I started because I think I was so hyper aware of my own desire to write and anxious about it. I was very finely attuned to signs of validation within this culture, whether it was, you know, driving for three hours on a dirt rack on a dirt track and winding up at a tiny Icelandic farmhouse and the walls are heaving with bookshelves and that, you know, people memorize poems and there's a, you know, there's a. There's a weekly prime time television show dedicated to interviewing authors, none of which, you know, I grew up with in Australia. There was. There was never this sense that writing was a hobby or slightly embarrassing, these things which I had started to feel at home in Australia. There was only this sense of absolutely, this is a very worthy thing to do. You need to take yourself seriously and you should absolutely do it. And I ended up changing my university preferences when I was still in Iceland, thinking, okay, yes, I have been both indirectly and directly validated by the people I have met here. And I feel like, yes, I should give this a crack. And my decision was to go back and to study creative writing and to do it for as long as I could get away with it. And I still feel that way. I still feel like I'm getting away with it. But it was. It seems extraordinary, I mean, really, doesn't it, looking back, thinking, of course, you know, I had to land in a place where. Where people read so many books, where they have, again, just a word. Jola Bokel Floddy, which speaks, which means the Christmas book flood, which speaks to just the huge amounts of books which are published in the lead up to Christmas because everyone buys them as presents. You know, it's so. It's wonderful. I'm so deeply grateful that I ended up landing there. I'm sure I would have found my way to writing one way or another. But it was such a. It was such a strong, strong influence, and I was very conscious of its influence when I was there. It really does seem like some kind of extraordinarily meant to be, you know, thing which happened to me.
- [25:47]
Danielle Sands
Well, there's this fabulous moment in the book where you're sort of writing sneakily in the back of a classroom when you're supposed to be doing something else and you get spotted and you think you're going to get into terrible trouble. And actually the opposite happens.
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Hannah Kent
Yeah, I was. I had to take. So I'd finished high school in Australia, but I had to go to the local high school there in this town as a component of my exchange. And I mean, you know, I was trying to learn German, a language I didn't speak in Icelandic, also a language I didn't speak very often. And most of the time I was just kind of at sea. So I just. I started writing poetry and I was in Icelandic class, and I was doing exactly that. I wasn't doing the very dull exercises. I'd been set. I was writing pomps. I think I was looking out the window and writing about what I saw. You know, I was by this stage, very much already in love with. With the mountains and with the fjords and the sea. And I was so involved in what I was writing. I didn't notice that the teacher had come up to me and was sort of standing over me. And he very gruffly asked me what I was doing and why I wasn't doing the work. And he picked up my notebook and he saw that I was writing poetry. And I remember at the time, you know, he didn't smile or anything. He was just like, oh, poetry. You're writing poetry. And I was like, I'm sorry, I'll stop. And he kind of walked back to his desk and then, yeah, next class, he sort of beckoned me forward. He's a very intimidating man. And I thought, oh, he's gonna tell me off. And went up there. And instead he just, yeah, handed me a book, and it was called Cold Was that Beauty? Icelandic Nature Poems. And I opened it, and in the front cover he had inscribed, to Hannah, from one poet to another, Gary Logur. And then I looked up at him and I thanked him and he sort of pointed at me again, very seriously. No, sort of not patronizing at all. And he said, if you keep writing, you will be published one day. And I was like, oh, you know, I'd love to be published. He's like, no, if you keep doing it, you will be published. And I don't know, it was such a generous thing for him to do. And from that point he just let me write poetry in the class. I never had to hand up another assignment again. But that was, yeah, I think one of many examples that I many experiences I had in Iceland where I was very sort of directly encouraged in a way that felt adult and in a way that felt, yeah, deeply, deeply validating of, of this, you know, this heart yearning I had always had to to do to do this. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies just to see if you could save some cash? Well, Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. With Black Friday savings at the Home.
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- [29:23]
Hannah Kent
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Danielle Sands
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- [30:59]
Danielle Sands
The way you talk about writing, it's very much as a kind of bridge between the interior and the exterior. So you talk about novels as a way to explore inner experience, but it's clear when you talk about Iceland and the role of stories and community building that it's also something bigger. How do you think about the relationship between those two sort of facets of what writing can achieve?
- [31:22]
Hannah Kent
I mean, I don't. It's hard because this is a deeply personal question and deeply subjective one. And I can only really speak to my own experience, which is that, I mean, yes, I can talk about writing, but I mean, so much of my understanding of the power of storytelling, both in terms of, you know, any kind of internal understanding or illumination and also in terms of building connection with others, comes. Comes from. From reading. And it comes. And, you know, I remember being very, very young. I was very early. I was a precocious reader. I started reading at 3. And I was a rabid reader. You know, I was that kid in the backseat trying to read in the dark, just waiting for every streetlight to pass so I could snatch another sentence. And, you know, I think one of the reasons why I was so quickly became enraptured with reading and was such a massive bookworm was because I was a very sensitive kid and didn't understand a great deal of the world around me and was troubled by what I didn't understand. And I felt the sort of very narrow parameters of my experience and that understanding, you know, broaden with everything that I read, which then went on to change the way in which I engaged with the world. And it shaped my political views as I became a teenager and things like that. So it was never something that I really sort of held up to the light and examined. It was just something I knew to be implicitly true, that often when I read something, I would both be able to interrogate who I was and gain a better understanding of myself, but then also, and perhaps be changed by that and that. That Change would then lead to. It would shape the way in which I communicated and lived my life and, you know, and how I interacted with the world, how I stood to interpret it. But it also continually challenged me and started teaching me that this is a constant kind of evolution, that it's not like you read enough books and you set that this is a way to continually renew your wonder in the world. Continually sort of renew an understanding of it, which is why we keep writing books. People still have things to say. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's incredibly magical. Words are how when I was very young, I remember writing it, it felt. It's how I felt like I could breathe. It's felt like how I could both give life to myself, but also it was the way in which there was an exchange with the world beyond my interior kind of life as well.
- [33:50]
Danielle Sands
In the second part of the book, you give us an account of the inspiration, writing and impact of your first novel, Burial Rites, which is a fictional account of the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Could you tell us a little bit about why you were draw that story and why it feels like a particularly Icelandic history?
- [34:10]
Hannah Kent
Yeah, it was funny. I heard the story of Agnes Magnus dotted in the first few months of my exchange at this time when I was still very lonely. I hadn't really picked up the language, I hadn't yet made friends or really sort of found my place in the town. And I was traveling south with my host family at the time, past this extraordinary kind of landscape. We came around the corner of a mountain and there being no trees, of course you can see for these very great distances. And as we came round the view kind of afforded this look at just seemingly thousands of hillocks in this valley mouth. And I remember again, not knowing anything really at that stage of Icelandic history, asking my host parents if, you know, were they Viking burial mounds. They kind of look man made. They're about sort of 8 to 10 sort of feet in height. And they were like, no, no, no, these were caused by an avalanche. And just as they sort of were telling me that, we were passing these three hills which sort of stood a little apart and they pointed to them and they said, it is interesting you mentioned this place because something interesting did happen here. Those three hills are the site of Iceland's last execution. And I was immediately interested, of course, just like anyone, as anyone would be. And I was like, oh, you know, what happened and what do they do? And they said, oh no, it happened a long time ago. It was. It was a woman, actually. Her name was Agnes Magnus Dotair, and she was beheaded by Broadax because of her role in, you know, in. In murder. She was said to have, you know, killed two other men and there was another man who was also executed for it before her. And I kept asking questions and they couldn't tell me a great deal more about it. I remember I did ask, you know, why. Why did she kill these men? And they said, oh, one of them was sort of her boss. He was a farmer and she was a servant. She worked for him. And I think, you know, some people think that maybe she was in love with him and he didn't want her and so she killed him. And I was kind of unsatisfied with that response because, you know, it just speaks to that trope of, you know, a mad woman who's been scorned and sort of pushed it a little further. And they're like, oh, you know, we don't really know. She's just, you know, she was just a bad person. And I think this. Gosh, I've asked myself so many times now, especially since Burial Rites has come out, what it was about that story and specifically about Agnes, Magda's dotier, that led me to become so deeply curious about her. Because I heard many stories, many amazing stories. Often when I was traveling through, you know, Icelandic nature, that stories are very much connected to place there. And I would hear them and they were all deeply interesting. But I would often find my thoughts straying to Agnes. I think I was frustrated by both the absence of information I could find about her. Even though, you know, she was the last person executed, she was often the person who seemed most mysterious in any sort of account of the murders and the execution. And I think, too, that there might have been. I don't know, I kind of call it an emotional resonance. I mean, I don't mean to suggest that a homesick, you know, Australian exchange student looks to a woman who's also isolated in her community and thinks, oh, yeah, you know, it. We're completely alike and this is relevant to me. But I mean, it's like when we read a book, right? It could be about something completely different. But if there. Sometimes there's a resonance there which seems to speak very deeply to our experience or to our emotional, you know, wherever we are in life, our emotional space. And, yeah, I think there was something of that. Certainly by the time I was set to leave Iceland, I started dreaming about her. And these dreams came, came and went. I never at this stage was thinking I'm going to write a book about this woman. I thought I was going to be a playwright or a poet, certainly never going to write about Iceland. And it wasn't until I went back to Australia and I started doing a Bachelor of Creative Arts, doing creative writing in quite intensive workshopping, sort of a group of about 10, that I started dreaming about her with such regularity that I started writing the dreams down because I was kind of spooked by them. And I found myself also doing other things, like in between lectures, going to the university library and using the library resources to try and find Icelandic articles about it and translating them, just to try and sort of answer this curiosity I had about her. But I remember the dreams became quite upsetting. They were often very violent and would leave me quite shaken. And eventually, I think by the time I finished my undergraduate degree, there was this sense that everything I was writing, even the poetry I was writing, was sort of in her voice. There was something there that I needed to exercise, I guess, in a way. And so the decision to write a book felt came about in this very organic way. It came about as sort of, I guess, my solution to try and address the enduring curiosity I had, but also what felt like a growing kind of, I don't know, the sense of being followed by something. And by that I don't necessarily mean to say that I'm being pursued by this supernatural presence of Agnes Magnus daughter. But certainly there was a psychic hold there that I felt I needed to sort of do something about. And so I sort of, you know, fell quite easily into writing what was in the first draft of Burial Rites and for my honours. And then I. And then I realized there's so much more here. I really need to. In order to understand her, which I was still lacking a very strong understanding, I needed to go back to Iceland. I needed funding. I needed to, you return to the primary sources and find her incessances. I needed to know what her life outside of a context of crime looked like if I was ever going to write her story. And that's really where, I guess the premise of the book came about. It started with the question of not was she guilty or was she innocent, but who was she?
- [39:54]
Danielle Sands
Did it feel like a corrective to accounts of her that were prominent? Did it feel like you had a sort of responsibility to humanize her, to tell a different kind of truth?
- [40:06]
Hannah Kent
You know, it's funny, I don't think. I mean, this can be such a problematic thing, right? Especially when you're a foreigner. I was very Conscious of the fact that I was an outsider still, you know, as much as I felt I belonged in Iceland, I'm still, you know, an Australian. This is not a culture I'd been raised in, not a history I've been intimately acquainted with. I was at pains to ensure that whatever I was doing, it wasn't finding a juicy story from the past and kind of, you know, exploiting it. I was always very aware that this was. These were people who lived and, you know, the past is also very present in Iceland. Whether that's through people's kind of heightened awareness of their own genealogy or just simply because, I don't know, it just feels very close, close to the surface. So I. It was never. I did interrogate my reasons for doing it. And it wasn't this sense of, no, I need to sort of, you know, clap back at all these historical sources, which are very clearly informed from my contemporary perspective by certain, you know, ideologies and prejudices and so forth. It was very much more internal quest. It was a sense that. Oh, no, I think there is something that is worth pursuing here because I'm still curious. Yes. As I was doing it for a PhD, I thought, yeah, well, an examiner is going to read it and probably my mum. But this is more a sense that. It wasn't a sense of contributing something, but it was a sense of, I need to see if there is anything else there. I need to see if I uncover anything of her. And it wasn't until the book was later published that I thought, okay, maybe this will play a role in, again, not correcting perspectives, because I think people shared my feelings about the crime and her role in it and who she was as a person. But it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't a sense of sort of, you know, subverting what was perceived to be a truth. It was about kind of opening up the possibility of many truths. It was about interrogating the idea of history as we read it. A singular truth. Really, as much as I was using those sources, I also wanted to kind of, you know, interrogate them. So, yeah, it was more to do with the idea that we don't actually really know. It wasn't like I wanted to provide an answer. I wanted to simply come up with more questions and provoke more questioning.
- [42:18]
Danielle Sands
Now, as we know, Burial Rites was an incredible success and you've been invited back to Iceland to speak about it on several occasions. And there's a wonderful moment in the book where you're talking about going to Agnes's execution site and Finding a plaque with a quotation from burial rites at the site of the event. I'm wondering how the success of burial rites and the events that have followed has impacted your relationship with Iceland. Does it make you feel like you belong even more firmly, or is it more complicated than that?
- [42:52]
Hannah Kent
No, I mean, that was an incredible moment and an unexpected one. I had gone back to Iceland since the book had come out. I was there when it was translated into Icelandic, which felt like a deep honour in and of itself because obviously the market, as much as everyone reads, the market's still quite small. And that was a real pleasure. I was able to meet my translator, who's a writer himself. But there was a sense, a greater sense there of having to not defend myself, but to. People were very curious, like, why you're an Australian, like, why on earth would you write your first book about Agnes Bagna's dotted? And I think there was an immediate generosity on behalf of the Icelandic people. You know, it wasn't like, how dare she? It was a sense of, like, why, okay, well, good for you. And, you know. But I was also aware that I was very glad I had done my research and gotten, you know, what I could correct, as correct as it could be. But there was something else which kept on happening as I was, like, you know, invited to go on the news and went on that literary show, Kiljawn, and was sort of otherwise invited to do press. Everyone asked if I could speak Icelandic. And that made me really, again, realize that, you know, as rusty as it is, my Icelandic was evidence of a deeper engagement with the culture. And I think that really helped me then. But by the time I went back, you know. For what? For that moment you speak of in the memoir. That was a few years ago. That was only two years ago. And I had always been a little bit anxious that some people thought that I was sort of, you know, as much as I'd tried to be very aware of my ethical obligations as a writer writing about this story, as an Australian writing about this story, there's always a slight, slight anxiety there that people would sort of not appreciate it as, you know, people who are going to write to you and thank you for it are generally going to be enthusiastic anyway. I wasn't sure about the people who weren't writing then. There was this amazing moment where I was being dropped back down to Reykjavik by my beautiful host father, and he's like, I think you want to see this. I haven't seen it myself, but I know what they've been doing and we pull over and previously the execution site had been as I first saw it when we drove past it in 2003. It was like a sheep paddock or a horse paddock and there were three hills and there's a tiny stone plaque right at the time. And they'd transformed it. There was now a car park and, you know, they'd victimised a pathway and it was beautifully designed, there was artworks and along the pathway they had set these plaques in it. So you walk over them with quotations from some of the better known histories of the murders and of the execution in Icelandic and English. And then my host father stops and I look down and I can see they've quoted burial rites. And as we keep walking, there's all these words from the book. And it was this incredibly emotional moment for me because it was, it was the most concrete way possible, I guess, that I could see that what, what I had written was a contribution to people's contemporary understanding of the case. It's not again, it's a. It's a novel, it's not a history book. It's not, you know, overriding everything else that they put there. But it had a place to exist along. It offered a certain perspective. And that was quite extraordinary, especially it falling, you know, 20 years since my exchange, 10 years after the book came out, almost to the day. It was one of those very rare but incredible full circle moments that we don't often get to experience in life. But, yeah, incredibly special.
- [46:19]
Danielle Sands
Do you feel like you're done with writing about Iceland or do you think.
- [46:22]
Hannah Kent
It'S gonna keep coming back? I think it's gonna keep coming back. I think it will because, you know, that yearning that I spoke of earlier, this desire to sort of be there, or the sense of a split self that, you know, whenever I return to Iceland and I start speaking Icelandic and I'm with the people I love there, I do feel slightly altered. I do feel like my qualities are slightly different. And sometimes when I'm here in Australia, I miss that person. It's such a weird thing to talk about. So, yes, it's kind of as much as it is absolutely missing all the people who are very dear to me there and wanting to be a part of their lives and missing that stunning landscape which I just, just love with every fiber of my being and love also attempting to, you know, distill onto paper because it's so. It eludes easy articulation and I love the challenge of that. It is also, I think, you know, if my writer self is perhaps a slightly more cerebral self. It is also a desire to access the person that I feel and the perspectives I have when I am, when I am over there. And also I don't think my host family and the people I love there will be, you know, not let me, you know, they got, they're always saying, I've heard another story. You've got to come over here. I've got something you've got to tell. You got to write about Iceland again. So, yeah, I think, I think it will absolutely happen, but I'm not sure in what form. No doubt it'll be one of those moments where I feel like I don't really have a choice in the matter. It'll be tapping me on the shoulder again.
- [47:46]
Danielle Sands
Hannah, thank you. That was Hannah Kent, author of Always Home, Always Homesick, A Love Letter to Iceland, which is available now online and in stores. I'm Danielle Sanz. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. Become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future events, head to intelligencesquared.com attendance to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.