Modern Icelandic

Modern Icelandic is often spoken of as a linguistic time capsule — a cryogenically frozen version of the language the first settlers of Iceland spoke 1,200 years ago, when they landed on this island populated by only birds and arctic foxes.

That is the modern Icelandic saga of Heida Ásgeirsdottír, who, at the age of 20 gave up on a potential career on the catwalk – she had been press-ganged into it by scouts and photographers, and by a fairy-godmother aunt who worked at the Elite model agency – to return home for lambing season; to become, as a recently published book of her life has it: “A shepherd at the edge of the world.”

Made with a finely honed sense of the ridiculous as well as unexpected emotion, this modern Icelandic saga is completely serious about its wall-to-wall wackiness, which of course is the only way to go.

"When Laxness won the Nobel prize in 1955 he put modern Icelandic literature on the map," Solvi tells me.

The ancient and modern Icelandic foxes share one DNA variation, called I2, which arctic foxes from other parts of the world don't have.