Iceland in Icons

Iceland in Icons by Eunsan Huh

With English you have a word like “volcano” and you don’t know why it’s called a volcano. But with Icelandic it’s easy to understand that “Eldfjall” are two words put together–“fire” and “mountain”, so it’s a “fire-mountain”, Eunsan says. “I started deconstructing words and adding to my vocabulary, and Icelandic breaks down really well into small words.”As she learned to breakdown the composite words in Icelandic she began to doodle, to draw representations of the words. The drawings become more numerous an finally she decided they needed to be compiled into a collective work – Icelandic in Icons. A book that matches our quirky words with imagery, creating the ultimate visual aid for learning Icelandic – that’s not boring.

About the author

Eunsan was born in Korea, but after moving around the world her family settled in New York, before she moved to New York where she has lived over the past 10 years. In a way it was her disconnect with her adopted country’s culture that first brought her to Iceland.“ In America thanksgiving is a big holiday, generally people go home. Big celebration. My family being form Canada, in 2011, all my roommates at the time were going home to meet their family. But I decided to travel somewhere new and lone,” Eunsan explains. “There I was alone in this beautiful place and I wanted more–there was so much to see.”

But she didn’t want to experience Iceland like most tourists–stopping for a short while, enjoying the sights. She wanted to get under the skin of its people, to learn about the culture and more importantly their language.