Underworld gods vent their anger

POOR old Iceland is in the dog-house.

The world recession hit the land of ice and fire hard; the banks went bust leaving customers, native and foreign, seething with rage. Then the volcano with the unpronounceable name began spewing out lethal ash and the squeaky-clean image of Nordic resilience in a land of environmental purity was in tatters. My dark side says it serves the Icelanders right for starting to slaughter whales again. At any rate, the gods of the underworld are angry. Of course I’m being mean and petty but nobody died.

It’s not the first time that Iceland has been punished. In 1783, Laki flung 90 billion tonnes of lava into the air, killing 9,000 people. Ash clouds and sulphurous fumes spread across Europe. The lack of sunlight affected crops as far away as Egypt. But the greatest of Laki’s aftershocks was political. Repeated harvest failures caused unrest in France leading to revolution six years later. Vulcan’s anger had shaped the destiny of humanity and not for the first time.