Laborlore - The Cultures of Icelandic Workers

Hildibrandur Bjarnason

Samuel Ludger Levesque conducted this interview, with photographs by James P. Leary.

sign by the roadside guides travelers to Bjarnarhöfn.

Samuel Ludger Levesque and Hildibrandur Bjarnason confer in Hildibrandur's museum devoted to local fishing and culture; in the background is his family's fishing boat, built in the 1860s and in use through most of the 20th century.

Samule interviews Hildibrandur regarding the tradition of shark fishing and making hákarl (rotten shark meat).

A piece of properly aged shark meat, with some hardfisk in the foreground.

The hut for hanging and drying shark meat.

Hanging shark meat during the aging process

About the project

Laborlore consists of the cultural traditions of workers: their job-related personal histories and identities, as well as their informally acquired job skills, sayings, stories, customs, and material expressions. The Icelandic workers on this site were photographed and interviewed in fall 2012 by students in Professor Jim Leary's Public Folklore course in the Department of Folkloristics and Ethnology at the University of Iceland: Aline End, Anna Björg Ingadóttir, Anna Kjær Voss, Arndís Hulda Auðunsdóttir, Guðrún Emilía Kolbeinsdóttir, Gunný Ísis Magnúsdóttir, Samuel Ludger Levesque, Sæbjörg Freyja Gísladóttir, and Trausti Dagsson.

The documentary materials created for the course – sound recordings, audio indexes, photographs, photograph indexes – now form the "Public Folklore: Worker's Culture" collection of the Oral History Archives at the University of Iceland.