“Suffering sometimes comes like a silent night and so it happened here,” said an old, eccentric farmer in the only obituary essay written on a lamb, although it was not published as such. His name was Kjartan Júlíusson, an odd man out, living in the world of books, writing peculiar texts. The essay was on an innocent lamb that he had fostered at home and who followed him wherever he went, but was bitten to death, not by a wolf or by a lion, but by a neighboring dog.¹ The blood of the lamb runs constantly.

Another farmer, Ásgeir Jónsson, wrote a whole book about leader sheep, a distinct line within the Icelandic breed of sheep, endowed with unique skills and intelligence. The book contains empathetic narratives about individual leader sheep, their character and sense of direction and weather. They saved shepherds and whole herds by warning of fatal snowstorms, or leading the flock home after such storms broke out. The best stories concerned Ásgeir’s favorites, the brothers Svartur and Móri (Black and Brown). They are described like saga heroes. Móri broke his leg only four years old and had to be killed. “His life was short, yet noble,” Ásgeir wrote, and added: “With Móri, the pleasure and light of my eyes disappeared,” echoing a reply from Njal’s Saga. When Svartur died, 11 years old, Ásgeir again referred to Njal’s Saga by likening him to two of the saga’s greatest heroes: “There a brave and valiant hero fell. There Skarphéðinn fell, there Kári fell, in the shape of a sheep”².

Kjartan and Ásgeir wrote with naïve sincerity, revealing a strong sense of the rural, tangible, everyday reality surrounding them. Yet their texts reflect two great, mythical codes, the Bible and the Sagas, which multiplies the significance of their words. “The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,” as William Blake said.³

Such significance contrasts with much of what is said and written today, which is entirely devoid of meaning compared to the pregnant words of these farmers. The excess of meaningless communication lies on the edge of the black hole, that, in Baudrillard’s terms, indicates the implosion of modern urban society. The modern hyperreality, and banal, political rationalism, imply a painful loss of reality. A semantic bulimia and intellectual anorexia balance in a flow of empty information and opinions into the implosive void. The overflow of everything except significance is overwhelming. “Where have the days of your life lost their color,”⁴ a young poet lamented 80 years ago, an Icelandic country boy dying of tuberculosis in a foreign city. He saw no meaning in the boring, crowded, noisy city streets. The city is the locus of rationalism and technical order – perhaps Baudrillard’s implosion is ignited by everything rationalism is unable to accommodate.

The city tends to erode the countryside, or to reshape it in its own image. In Iceland, the sheep is among the most common symbols of farming and the countryside, an enemy that must be eliminated. The sheep carries the sins of the world on its shoulders: soil erosion, high taxes and mountains of unmarketable meat. “I’m bloody tired of living in a country that spends more money on sheep than education,” a female blogger exclaimed recently, according to an Icelandic writer.⁵ The sheep has been crucified for this serious guilt, although it provided nourishment and clothing over centuries; the crib in the sheep-pen is the cradle of our civilization and the good shepherd the strongest symbol of philanthropy. The blood of the lamb is still running.

Bleating resounds through all of Icelandic cultural history; the sheep is intertwined in the fate of the Icelanders at all times. “You, Grettir are my nation,” a national poet says in a poem, indicating that the saga hero Grettir the Strong personifies the entire nation.⁶ Grettir is an outlaw; he spends one winter in a hidden valley, where he entertains himself with a giant’s daughters. The sheep are fatter in this valley than other places and when Grettir has slaughtered the very big, fat lamb of a brown sheep, the ewe stands every night on top of his cabin and bleats so that he can’t sleep. Pleasure and anxiety balance in Grettir’s life – and backstage, the ram Hösmagi bleats when fate catches up with Grettir and his enemies kill him by means of sorcery.

Hidden valleys, inhabited by superhuman beings who owned big, fat sheep, were deep-rooted in folk belief. The seventeenth-century self-educated peasant poet and sorcerer Jón the Learned composed the Áradalur lay about outlaws who owned extremely fat sheep with devilish earmarks: “40 pounds fat in each of them / and wonderful making of sausages,” the poem says.⁷ The sheep was an important component of utopian folk-belief. The utopia was in the flesh of the sheep, as meaning and nourishment. Jón the Learned was a remarkable man, naïve and critical at the same time, open to the wonders of life, preoccupied with mental nourishment. In an autobiographical poem he brings up what the “ears of mind” and “eyes of spirit” are able to see; the poem is the expression of a creative mind.

Icelandic children sometimes furtively nourished their souls by reading books while herding sheep, even though some of them were punished for their thirst for reading. A little girl, born in 1793, bribed the sheep to stay put in the pasture by feeding them salt and seaweed so she could read the books that she brought with her or hid between rocks in the pasture. She read annals, poetry and the word of God; she even memorized the entire Bible; she hid in a cave⁸. The sheep is thus intertwined with a literary culture, impregnated by creative potential and significance.

The Bible bleats too, nomadic in its origin. There are many sheep, from the ram Abraham found stuck in the bush to the sheep surrounding the birth of a child laid in a manger. Eventually, the Book of Revelation breaks up the semantic universe of the Bible, making it hard to pin down an institutionalized meaning.

The lamb is a symbol of Christ and consequently of innocence, culminating in the Book of Revelation. It first appears in chapter 5:

Image 1: William Blake (1757-1827)
The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne (1805)

Then I saw standing in the middle of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the middle of the elders, a Lamb that appeared to have been killed. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. Then he came and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne, and when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders threw themselves to the ground before the Lamb. Each of them had a harp and golden bowls full of incense (which are the prayers of the saints) (Rev. 5:6-8).

The lamb is a keynote, while a variety of scary creatures and incidents pass the scene, riders of death, an earthquake, angels blowing trumpets, locusts, a dragon, a beast with ten horns and seven heads, war in heaven, plagues, the mother of whores etc. After Armageddon, a new heaven and new earth rise. The sacred city Jerusalem descended from heaven, where God and the lamb had a throne, the lamb thus mediating between the country and the city:

Image 2: Jan and Hubert van Eyck: Adoration of the Lamb. Bottom central panel of the Ghent Altarpiece (1432)

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life – water as clear as crystal – pouring out from the throne of God and of the Lamb, flowing down the middle of the city’s main street. On each side of the river is the tree of life producing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month of the year. Its leaves are for the healing of the nations. And there will no longer be any curse, and the throne of God and the Lamb will be in the city (Rev. 22:1-3).

The Book of Revelation is centrifugal, unfixed in meaning and thus rather unreliable guidance for believers. The lamb, a rural phenomenon, has a throne in the city, and is associated with a scroll an the water of life, The Book of Revelation is visionary and was a great inspiration for one of the most visionary poets of all times, William Blake, who always exploded any fixed meaning and whose works were full of fruitful ambiguity.

Blake lived in the metropolis London all his life, but his visions transcended that city by far. In the first of his illuminated books from 1789, the pastoral Songs of Innocence, the lamb and the shepherd appear as images of joy and innocence:

Image 3: William Blake: The Lamb

These are tender and simple images of the lamb – innocence, beauty, delight and the warmth of the wool – but the poem also identifies the lamb with creation, or the Creator. The Songs of Innocence describe a pastoral idyll, where everything is good and sweet, not least the shepherd’s relation to the sheep:

Image 4: William Blake: the Shepherd

Yet Blake’s poetic universe wasn’t that simple. He followed the currents of society intensely in revolutionary times. Darker faces appear in Songs of Experience from 1794, where rationalism threatens innocence, an opposite force destroying the idyll. A dystopic picture of London is drawn in one of the poems but Blake’s deep ambiguity culminates in the poem “The Tyger”, where the tiger forms a counterpoint to the lamb:

Image 5: William Blake: The Tyger

The tiger, or rather the creation or design of the tiger, is carefully described with sharp, threatening images: fire in the eyes, sinews of the heart, hammer, chain, anvil, deadly terrors’ grasp, spears of the stars. These images of intelligent creation conclude with the question of the creator’s taking pleasure in the tiger’s ferocity, in stark constrast to the lamb:

The poem about the lamb is thus recalled. The opposition between the tiger and the lamb underlines the ambiguity of creation. The emphasis on design brilliantly contrasts idyllic nature on the one hand with rational, designing culture on the other. The opening stanza is repeated at the end, slightly altered:

This little change demands that the threatening symmetry of the tiger be challenged. Blake poses questions without answering them, but the underlying opposition between pastoral innocence and increasing rationalism in the wake of the Enlightenment is reflected in the rational design of the tiger. The lamb is a Biblical symbol of innocence, but Blake puts it into a deeply ambiguous context, addressing the order of the world.

Blake’s poetic use of sheep reveals a semantic amplification, that is, semantic potential is utilized in an expansive and creative manner, in contrast to the implosion of our times, where a communicative overflow is deprived of meaning. The sheep bleats significantly, forming various strands which weave through our mental history in a variety of contradictory, ambivalent meanings, constantly acquiring new life. “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival,” said Mikhail Bakhtin.¹² Therefore, we can pit living sheep-colors against the dull brightness of our times. The western urban mass-culture tends to tunnel all perception, thought and expression into the same narrow channels and create reductive images of life. This can be challenged by the interplay between the symbols and significance of past and present, and the city and the province. The semantic magnitude of the sheep counters these narrowing tendencies.

During much of the twentieth century, Icelandic rural culture was idealized as a stronghold against impending urban decay and alienation, in connection with the construction of Icelandic national identity, which was based on this idealization. This ideology has now been revised and rejected, with the final victory of urban culture. The Oedipal killing of rural culture has been consummated through shallow attacks on farming, with the sheep in a key role: sheep colors are a mocking term in later times, just as uncool as a black and white TV. But although the blood of the lamb is still running, the sheep-colors are a hidden strand in Icelandic culture. The sheep is the symbol of the peasant society, inevitably woven into our lives. A contextual shift is now taking place: the rural/urban dualism is passé; we are about to realize the semantic wealth of the sheep in past and present.

The sheep acquires elevated symbolic meaning in the works of some twentieth-century writers. Gunnar Gunnarsson wrote his masterpiece Aðventa (The Good Shepherd) in 1937, a divine comedy of human dignity and endurance, in which a noble shepherd goes to the wilderness in midwinter in search of sheep and brings a little flock home through blizzards and perils. When the story was translated into English, the Icelandic shepherd Fjalla-Bensi came to circulate in world literature, where he acquired descendants: in Iceland it is generally believed that the book was Hemingway’s inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea.

If Halldór Laxness’ best-known novel, Independent People, 1933-5, had been published a few years later, it would now be regarded as a deconstruction of the idealization of the shepherd in Gunnar Gunnarsson’s The Good Shepherd. The sheep is the semantic ballast of the novel, a foundation of the imagined independence that the peasant Bjartur strives for. Independence was to own enough sheep. The sheep is a part of his identity and he is the personification of the “independent” Icelander. Independent People destroyed the illusion of independence and is a prelude to the crucifixion of the sheep that took place in Icelandic culture and society in and after the mid-twentieth century.¹³ Natural scientists blamed the sheep for having destroyed the great forests of Iceland; rationalist economists and politicians blamed it for the meat-mountain; and it became a symbol of uncool rusticity.

In the last few years, however, the sheep has been resurrected, reappearing in art and literature, ever more ambiguous and mysterious. Artist Kristín Jónsdóttir from Munkaþverá works with wool, in works such as “Fjársjóður / Treasure,” a pun on the word fé, which can mean both sheep and money:

Image 6: Kristín Jónsdóttir: Fjársjóður (Treasure, 1997).

This sheep pen of plexiglass is filled with wool as wealth. Kristín’s most moving work is the installation “Shelter” in a cathedral in Santiago de Campostela in 2002, in front of a statue of holy Mary holding in her arms the child she delivered in a sheep-barn and laid in a manger.¹⁴ Thus there is an allusion to the lamb in the background of the installation:

 Image 7: Kristín Jónsdóttir from Munkaþverá: Shelter (2002)

The work is based on historical documents. The artist wrote on plexiglass the names of thirteen Icelandic women from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Images 8-9: Kristín Jónsdóttir from Munkaþverá: Shelter (2002)

Each had delivered an illegitimate child in a manger or a barn, and all of them were accused of having exposed the babies. All of them were poor servants; usually the farmer had gotten them pregnant, but urged the women to conceal their pregnancy.

The artist asks the women for forgiveness by means of the wool. “Softest clothing, woolly, bright” is set against the cruel violence of the world.

Sculptor Ólöf Nordal is also inspired by Ásgeir Jónsson’s book about the leader-sheep. In one of her exhibitions, the leader-ram Sokki was carved in styrofoam, a chandelier made of sheep-horns hung from the ceiling and a computer-ram bleated on the wall.

Image 11: From Ólöf Nordal’s installation Burp, 2001.

In another exhibition, entitled Toys, she combined sheep-horns and Barbie dolls – the toys of past and present, with ambiguous and even sexual allusions.¹⁵

Image 12: Ólöf Nordal: Gull / Gold (2002).

Ólöf Nordal has erected a bronze statue of Tungukots-Móri, one of the greatest of the leader-wethers from Ásgeir Jónsson’s aforementioned book.

Image 13: Ólöf Nordal: Tungukots-Móri (2001).

Yet her works are deeply ironical and challenging; she even distorts the symbolism of the lamb’s innocence in the work “Icelandic Specimens,” with a picture of a stuffed lambs in an Icelandic landscape, as the lambs are malformed, with two heads.¹⁶

Image 14: Ólöf Nordal: Iceland Specimen Collection - Janus (2005)

Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir, philosopher and writer, jumps between the big cities of the world with the sheep in her heart, and beautifully weaves together philosophical  and poetic reflections in her autobiographical book Opnun kryppunnar (The Opening of the Hump), where the sheep forms a distinctive strand in the narrative: Lambing season and sheep-midwifery come to her mind in Paris and Budapest – while she reflects on Icelandic documents in new contexts. In New York, she and her brother Uggi converted an alcove in their apartment into a space for installations. Painter Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir made an installation on the occasion of the lambing season back home in Iceland and painted the sheep Botna on the wall. Botna was a sheep the artist had owned back home in rural Iceland. In the painting, Botna is a strange and stylized creature, with breasts, and in her shadow is a small picture of a woman giving birth to a lamb:

Image 15-17: Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir: Installation at Dandruff Shroud and Space in Brooklyn
"Celebration of the Lambing Season" (2006)

In cooperation with Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir, Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir also made the video-work “An open letter to Botna.” The artist lies in a bathtub and reads the letter, referring ironically to Gunnar Gunnarsson’s novel The Good Shepherd, asking whether the shepherd-hero Fjalla-Bensi saves the sheep for philanthropic reasons or merely to eat them in the next slaughtering season. She describes the non-color around her and delivers a biblical message to Botna, who must leave her country because of the dominant utilitarianism destroying it:

Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

There is an ambiguity in these lines from Gen.12:1-3, the words of the Lord to Abram: they are an incitement to departure or exodus from a land threatened by destruction, but it is an open question whether the promise of becoming a great nation with God’s blessings is really a good thing.

Þórdís’ works belong to a strange, even morbid artistic world inhabited by many species of animals. Her works question our worldviews and civilization, even in a tone of despair.

The sheep is a profound semantic universe, deep and beautiful, ambiguous and ugly, ranging from the innocent lamb to mean and aggressive rams, reflecting aspects of human society and culture – an imaginative wealth. We can regard the sheep as a symbol for the province, but not an idealized one: rather, a revolt against modern, reductive rationalism. Let us get out of town, slow down, look around, watch the sheep grazing, pregnant with meaning – which doesn’t acquire a full (though not final) meaning until in dialogue, back and forth between the urban and rural, the metropolis and the province. It is also a question of the meaning of creation. The city is man-made, designed – and without a dialogue with something external to it, it implodes, in Baudrillard’s sense. It is finite, closed, but outside it lies the rural, the countryside, the province, and ultimately nature. The old dualism must be dissolved; there can only be a significant struggle with the ambiguities of life if both parties enter as active participants.

Alfred Kazin said that William Blake “was entirely preoccupied with his designs, his poems, and the burden of the finiteness of man before the whole creation”.¹⁷ Human creation is so infinitely small compared to the big one, with which we need to enter a meaningful dialogue in order to understand ourselves. We have to depart from the narrow frames of the metropolis and get in touch with creation. God is long dead, but nature still alive, somewhere out there in the countryside. We can still regard nature as creation, something larger than ourselves and outside of us, a dialogical counterpart underlining our finiteness. When that humble recognition has been reached, we can grow as thinking human beings, not as know-how freaks, “thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is,” as Hannah Arendt puts it.¹⁸

We can follow the sheep, but no final destination has been reached, not yet. The dangers of implosion and destruction are still looming, as the Canadian band Arcade Fire sings in “The Well and the Lighthouse.” The lion and the lamb are definitely not sleeping together yet, and they never will:¹⁹