Book Space

Stories – as can be seen in rumors, adventures, legends, riddles, ponderings, jokes and even the making of paper airplanes – do not respect the pencil strokes of mapmakers. These everyday and even insignificant processes/elements/phenomena in the same unassuming yet decisive manner as an Icelandic forest fire: even though the fire doesn‘t draw much attention to itself, it still has a lot of influence on our everyday surroundings, on how we see and experience these.
Stories usually come from other people, much like our desires – our desire for a slimmer iPod, silicon boobs, green tea, a fuller life, or a stomach as flat as that of a friend of a friend. But where did these ideas come from; our wanting precisely this? Where did it all start? In the early days of the nation state, people chased the trail of all sorts of adventures and stories, intending to locate the original version of the story as well as its home. After several decades of travelling and mapping, they gave up. When chased backwards, the stories became neither better nor more interesting – and what‘s more: they didn‘t seem to come from a single place, or a single storyteller. The stories belonged to everyone, and they were to be found everywhere, literally speaking.
Everyday stories which are passed down from person to person are the creations of numerous people. They change constantly because some people can‘t remember what they were told, are disinterested in telling stories or simply bad at it. Others, however, add something to nearly everything they hear. They add events or thoughts, change stories, make them longer or shorter as they see fit. And then they communicate the story to another person. Thus, a story is passed from one person to the next, stretched and pulled every which way by numerous tongues, time frames, audiences, social conditions and a differing understanding of the subject by people of both sexes, all classes and ages.
We know how to employ our mouth as a factory to manufacture all sorts of stories, but what about the written word? Haven’t contemporary bestsellers-writers made famous those monks from the Middle Ages, and other men of God, who improved the Bible every time it was rewritten? Whether true or not, it’s not particularly difficult; you erase, scribble, add things and hide pages such as the Gospel of Thomas behind the nearest stone. Perhaps that was how monks whiled away the hours during the Middle Ages, but what about the options of the modern man, who has the opportunity to write about anything he wants? What does he get up to when he sends off his anonymous messages in bottles with planes between cities, across borders and to strangers?

Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir