Say you and your brood have been hunkered down for months, shivering in the 24-hour night at the bottom of a wind-blasted fjord. It’s a hard life, but you’re bred from fierce folk who colonized Scandinavia, terrorized mainland Europe, and landed on American beaches long before that Italian. Your man Sigurd slew the dragon Fafnir, say the skalds. You can take the cold.
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The Thorrablot was a Viking celebration. Over the centuries, as their country Christianized and industrialized, Icelanders stopped observing the old Norse holidays. “It was kind of corny,” says Lena Hallgrimsdottir, who moved from Iceland to Chicago in 1996. “This was our past and we weren’t ready to celebrate it. You would move to Reykjavik and you wanted to forget about this backward country you left behind.”
Hallgrimsdottir and her husband, Einar Steinsson, are secretary and president of the Icelandic Association of Chicago, an expatriate group that was founded in 1928 as a chess club and today has a membership of about 60 families from the city and suburbs. Most have been here for several generations and speak only English, but there’s also a younger faction of recent immigrants like Hallgr’msdott’r and Steinsson, mostly professionals, students, and au pairs. The group hosts a Christmas party, sponsors a “Christmas Around the World” tree at the Museum of Science and Industry, and honors Icelandic independence in the summer with a picnic. But its biggest throwdown is the Thorrablot, which was popularly revived by a Reykjavik restaurant in 1954 and is now celebrated from Copenhagen to New York City.
Hallgrimsdottir, whose great-grandfather put to sea on a shark-fishing boat, says not many people know how to make hakarl anymore, even in Iceland. She certainly can’t find it in Chicago. So every year she puts in an order to her family, which owns several restaurants back home. Her father vacuum-packs a boxful of shark, sheep, and dried fish and sends it over with the Thorrablot band. This year that’s a guitarist and keyboard player who call themselves Slatrio–or “the Haggis.”
