Iceland: How a scholar of the nation’s Presidency swiftly became its Presidential front-runner.

When I heard that the historian Guðni Jóhannesson was running for President of Iceland—not only running but entering the final weeks of the campaign as the clear favorite—I was intently curious to be present when and if he won. I had met Guðni a year or so earlier, when he delighted a busload of nervous novelists on a literary retreat in Iceland, during an all-day tour of local landmarks that took place on the coldest, windiest, foggiest day an Icelandic April could offer, with the bus neatly enveloped in milk. Guðni, serving as tour guide, mike in hand, kept his cool and his good humor throughout. “Here are the great parliamentary fields of the Thingvellir,” he said at one point, referring to Iceland’s famous early-medieval parliament, and gestured straight-faced toward a wall of white cloud. More impressive, he lightly detailed all the ways in which the myths of the monuments were and were not in accord with the facts of history, providing a detached view of what might be called Icelandic Exceptionalism, while still thinking it exceptional. I liked to tell people in New York that our tour guide was now running for President, though the truth is that he never would have been on the bus had his wife, the Canadian writer Eliza Reid, not been running the literary seminar—but, then, he was on the bus, he did have the mike, and he was giving a guided tour.

I should add that, having married into a Canadian-Icelandic family (about a fifth of Iceland’s population decamped for Manitoba around a century ago, keeping their culture and their national pride intact), I wasn’t entirely unhappy to hear Icelandic exceptionalism debunked, if gently. I had long ago come to accept Icelandic particularities—the cooing voices, the long-winded family histories, the constant coffee consumption—but I’d also had the prideful bits drummed in (world’s oldest democracy, most literate nation, most successful welfare state) for so long that I could stand them being a little upended. Iceland, to be sure, is a country for which many Americans and English and Canadians have an outsized affection, not unlike that which some of the wizards in Tolkien, himself an Icelandic fanatic, have for the Shire. While recognizably part of our own Western world, the country is so islanded, so unlike anyplace we know in landscape and language, that it is possible to feel protective of it in ways that Icelanders themselves sometimes find encumbering.

In thinking about Iceland, one is always whipsawed between two facts. On the one hand, there’s the tiny scale of the place. There are only three hundred thousand-plus people in the country, and a Presidential election, even though it gets a huge, Nordic-style turnout, will still top out at about two hundred and forty thousand voters, about one-third the number in a single congressional district in New York City. One might read that, as a proportion of the population, more Icelanders died in the Second World War than Americans did, which means two hundred and thirty, most of them in seafaring accidents. “Icelanders suffer from ecstatic numerical aphasia” is the way that Heiða Helgadóttir, a prominent alternative politician, put it one morning, over milky coffee, the country’s vin ordinaire. “We are convinced that we come from a country of at least two or three million, and nothing dissuades us.” On the other hand, Iceland is an honest-to-God country, not a principality, like Monaco, or a fragment fallen off a larger one, like Montenegro. It has a language and a history and a culture entirely its own, it fields competitive teams in international football tournaments, and it can claim about as many famous artists—Björk, Sigur Rós—as its far larger Nordic peers.

Politics is serious in Iceland, not least because of its self-image as the Oldest Democracy in the World, a view questioned by only a few academic skeptics—one of them being Guðni Jóhannesson. On the plane to Reykjavík, I finished his “History of Iceland,” the best one-volume study of the country to be written in English. He makes the point that the early parliament was less a democratic conference than a meeting of the tribes and chieftains to sort out their differences—like a meeting of the Five Families to divvy up the Bronx and Brooklyn. Guðni’s history shows that the medieval Iceland of saga was largely a Romantic invention, for the purposes of nineteenth-century nationalism, laid over what had been, until the twentieth century arrived, a scarcity economy of almost unbelievable hardship and hunger. How someone so prepared to look skeptically at his people’s myths would motivate those people to vote for him intrigued me. I was drawn to the Icelandic election, too, for more or less the same reason that Icelanders are drawn to the local swimming pools, where the temperature is kept around that of Icelandic seawater. It seemed refreshing to follow a Presidential campaign where erudition was revered, where the various sides were more or less sane, and where democracy was seen as a communal enterprise, not as a carnival for television. That, at least, was my hope when, arriving in Reykjavík, I raced off to find Guðni in the Höfðatorg, one of the city’s few modern glass-and-steel frame towers, where he was giving a speech.

Reykjavík is perhaps the hippest capital in Northern Europe, a sort of double-sized Williamsburg, with fjords instead of the L train. It is built mostly on a two- and three-story scale, and, as the capital of a timber-depleted island, is made mostly out of the two most unprepossessing of architectural materials: concrete and corrugated steel. But all the concrete has produced a great building, the Hallgrímskirkja church—a masterpiece of Northern Expressionist architecture that looks exactly like Tolkien’s drawing of the tower of Orthanc—while the corrugated steel is jaunty in its waves and ripples, and comically used to create many stylistic effects. One sees corrugated-steel Gothic, and corrugated-steel Queen Anne, and the metal is painted in bright colors that give Reykjavík some of the quality of a child’s playroom, as though it were a city of Lego.