For the holidays, here's an Icelandic tradition of book-giving

Iceland is the world’s third most literate nation. According to published data, 99% of Icelanders over the age of 15 among the island nation’s 376,000 people can read. So it’s hardly surprising that their favourite holiday season gift is a book.

Jólabókaflóð (Jolabokaflod) – literally the Christmas book flood – is a popular tradition in which books are given as gifts on Christmas Eve. It’s reckoned that every Icelander receives at least one book for Christmas every year.

This enduring love of books is great news for Iceland’s 120 publishing houses who say that 80% of all book sales take place in the two months before Christmas. Iceland is said to produce more books per capita than any other nation in the world.

During the COVID-19 pandemic book sales in Iceland surged by almost a third and it wasn’t just Icelanders who got to read books by Icelandic authors during lockdowns. Forty titles were translated into English on the eve of the pandemic.

Icelanders are known for their love of a good story. The Icelandic sagas, long narratives about the lives of Icelandic monarchs and Norse gods, were written in the 13th and 14th centuries and reflect historical events from the 9th to the 10th centuries.

During the long subarctic winter nights, families would gather in their turf houses for what was known as kvöldvaka, an evening of reading aloud and telling stories. Tradition says children were taught to read during these sessions, foreshadowing today’s literacy rates.

The origins of Jólabókaflóð are a little more recent, dating from the wartime years of the 1940s. “Because of the bad economy and depression, there were quotas or very strict restrictions on many things you could import,” Heiðar Ingi Svansson, president of the Icelandic Publishers Association told Smithsonian Magazine.

“That limited very much the selection of commodity goods that you could choose as Christmas gifts. But paper was one of the few commodities not rationed during the war – so paper was imported to produce books that were written and then printed in Iceland.”

Today, books written by Icelanders are global best sellers. Crime writer Ragnar Jonasson, whose books have sold over three million copies worldwide, has been hailed as possibly the best crime writer in the world.

And he’s not alone. Iceland is a nation of authors as well as readers. One in three read a book every day, which is possibly why one in ten will publish a book in their lifetime, according to research by the BBC.

Icelanders have a saying, “ad ganga med bok I maganum", which translates as something close to the English language “everyone has a book inside them”. No wonder then that the capital Reykjavik has been designated a Unesco City of Literature.

A survey by the Icelandic Literature Centre found two-thirds of Icelanders prefer to read books written in their own language and three-quarters believe it’s important that books in Icelandic are financially supported to preserve their national culture.

It’s a measure of their dedication to reading that an Icelandic proverb translates as “It’s better to be without shoes than to be without a book.” That’s quite a statement in a nation where winter temperatures can plummet to -15°C in places.

To help maintain their appetite for new books, every household in Iceland receives the annual Bókatíðindi or book bulletin in mid-November. It’s a catalogue of all the books published in Iceland each year.

Explaining the continued popularity of books in Iceland, Alda Sigmundsdóttir, a writer and founder of Little Books Publishing in Reykjavík, told Smithsonian Magazine: “Some marketing geniuses learned very quickly that a book was the ultimate Christmas gift.

“Not so expensive, handy, easy to wrap and [satisfies] a thirst for new tales. And [it can] be used again and again,” she added.

And books still carry cachet even in a digital age. The World Economic Forum’s 2020 White Paper Understanding Value in Media found that consumers perceive paid-for media – like books – to be of a higher quality than free online digital media.