What Price Comfort: Sigur Ros’ “Starálfur” by irene cooper
Yearning
The music of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros has an effect on people, an emotional reaction that is hard to describe. Languages other than English have useful words for complex emotional responses, such as the Welsh heareth, most closely interpreted as the feeling one experiences after proposing marriage and being refused (though not limited to that occasion); or saudade, the Portuguese word for missing something that exists (though not exactly).
The song “Starálfur” appears on the group’s second album, Ágætis byrjun. Unlike the songs from the album that would follow, ( ), which are sung in phonetic language the group calls Volenska, “Starálfur” is in straight-up Icelandic, and translates to “The Staring Elf.”
On his blog The Music in My Ears, Jamie Kyei Manteaw writes, “[V]ocalist Jónsi Birgisson sings about going to bed after a long day and suddenly seeing this supernatural creature looking right back at him. The elf takes the shape of Jónsi’s body. He’s stunned by the whole event. The song is sped up just a little bit, so Jónsi’s vocal has a boy-ish tone as a result. I think that all adds to the spectacle of it, though. Like I said, it’s in Icelandic, so it’s not like I know all of this.”
The album cover features a constellatory depiction of a fetus, umbilical cord attached, ostensibly yet in utero. It is unclear whether the fetus is human or elven. Fairytale connotations of elves a la Disney’s doughy Samaritans have little in common with Icelandic notions of elves, who are irrefutably real for 31% of the surveyed population (down from 54% in 2017), and not necessarily friendly. In Iceland, elves are referred to as the Hidden Folk, and are human-like, nocturnal, disposed to partying around the holidays, inhabitants of an Earth that is unpredictable, unknowable—a landscape in which diurnal human lives are subject to forces beyond their control—volcanic eruption, for example, and economic collapse. Icelandic elves remind their human earthmates: Don’t get too comfortable.
Music
Sigur Ros’ music is described as dreampop, as ethereal. Other-worldliness is underscored in “Starálfur” with the use of bowed guitar and a palindromic string sequence—that is, it would sound the same played forward or backwards. Ethereal can imply purity, is spirit-like, unworldly, light, airy, immaterial. Dreamy.
Founding member Jón Þór "Jónsi" Birgisson professed to be influenced by the Scottish-born Cocteau Twins. Cocteau Twins bandmember and songwriter Elizabeth Fraser initially composed and sang in a kind of gibberish composed of words culled from foreign language dictionaries. Fraser said in an interview in Far Out magazine that the technique liberated her songwriting: “The music and the singing and the words created the feeling, and I had a freedom doing this that I didn’t have singing English”—or in any parsable language. To detach from textual meaning, and from the responsibility of textual meaning, was the point.
Influenced by jazz, Christian Vander of the French progressive rock band Magma created a phonetic language—Kobaïan—to infuse the music with a celestial force, or zeuhl— “the sound which you can feel vibrating in your belly” (The Wire, 1995). Magma singer Klaus Blasquiz described Kobaïan to British music critic Ian MacDonald as "a language of the heart" whose words are "inseparable from the music."
Vander uses specific rhetoric about this lyric choice, which is sonic but also lends itself to meaning—over the years fans and Vander himself have provided translations. For many fans, the words carry and are intended to impart lexicographical meaning.
Volenska, on the other hand, is happy to remain a vibe, as is the language of “Starálfur,” though it is Icelandic, and therefore translatable. Translated, the lyrics are silly, maybe creepy. The listener hangs on the scaffold of the palindromic strings, and swings, suspended somewhere in a dream of childhood, with the line from “Nostos” by Louise Glück at the edge of their consciousness: “We look at the world once in childhood. / The rest is memory.”
“Starálfur” data: E flat major, 5B on the Camelot Wheel, tempo of 61 BPM, 6:47. In concert, the sonic experience won’t vary. They don’t riff.
Money
Sigur Ros tickets at Moda Center in the Rose Quarter of Portland, OR, in November 2025 “start at just $192,” according to a popular resale marketplace.
Icelandic comic Greipur Hjaltason jokes that when people ask him when the best time to come to Iceland is, he says that anytime is good if you want to eat a $6,000 hot dog in the rain.
Movies
“Starálfur” was used in the British TV movie, The Girl in the Café, a film in which a British bureaucrat asks a woman he meets in a café to join him for a G8 conference in Reykjavik. The act is spontaneous and out of character. At the conference, she, unburdened by travel or otherwise sick of being burdened by convention, reacts to what she sees as the hypocrisy/sludginess of the summit, much to the embarrassment of her date, until, after she is packed off to the airport, he hears the thing that makes him face his own collusion in the so-called first-world capacity to remedy suffering and its perpetual failure to do so. Before he hears the thing that shames him (and divests him of the shrugging armor of irony that had, up to that point, protected him from the suffering of others) he finds she has been in prison, and he is ashamed of his failure to have known or suspected such a thing before extending his impulsive invitation.
Nighy’s character’s charm resides in his crackle-finish and self-deprecation. He demurs, he deflects. Nighy is a fine actor, capable of exuding a vulnerability that reads genuine but that also somehow never puts his character in real jeopardy. He reveals, in the embryonic stage of the romance, that he dreams a recurring dream in which members of the Rolling Stones beg him to join the band; he acknowledges, proactively, how pathetic that might seem. He lives tightly bound by his compromises, until his diplomatic body threatens to rupture under the edge of her candor. Nighy is superb at discomfort. I was uncomfortable, immersed in the protocol of the setting.
At a formal dinner the young woman begins to snap her fingers and announce a fact everyone at the table knows, that “every three seconds, a child dies” of famine and other avoidable hardship. Her snap implicates the body via movement, and the sound, along with her language, enters the body in vibration. Intellect makes what it will of the arrangement, if the arrangement is recognizable, like, say, in English, to an English-speaker. Where the intellect decides “gibberish,” the body, thirsty landscape, moves in with its own criteria for meaning.
The bureaucrat and the young woman say goodbye at the airport, to the wistful strains of “Starálfur.” As the woman walks away, the bureaucrat asks her to tell him what she did to go to prison. She says, “I hurt a man. I hurt a man who hurt a child, who killed a child.” He presses, “Your child?” She responds, “Does it matter whose child?”
“Starálfur” features significantly, as well, in the scene in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in which Bill Murray and the crew of his oceanography vessel are squished into a submersible in pursuit of the illusive (and fictional) jaguar shark—the sea creature that had eaten the Bill Murray character’s creative partner a year before. Zissou, throughout the film, is a bit of a prick, and is grieving, and so, in Bill Murray fashion, remains likeable. When he crumples with emotion upon seeing the animal, he is comforted by all—his ex, his oceanographer nemesis, the journalist, his crew. He says, “I wonder if it/he remembers me,” a moment of vulnerability that is sympathetic without being defensible. It is a moment of bald narcissism, but he is suffering, and not really a villain, after all—his weaknesses outweighed by the boyish whimsy he somehow keeps alive in that middle-aged body that is subject to little to no trauma but is somehow a tragedy.
“On the other hand, nobody could leave ‘The Life Aquatic’ without the impression of having nearly drowned in some secret and melancholy game,” writes Anthony Lane in “Go Fish,” in The New Yorker, January 9, 2005. Sad-faced actors in a memory of the Italian Riviera playacting nostalgia to a soundtrack that climbs between heaven and the deep blue sea: unparsable (except maybe, to Wes Anderson) and oddly comforting.
Money
October 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the women’s strike in Iceland that shut down the country for one day to protest inequalities at home, in society, and in the workplace. Since then, Icelandic women have taken at least 40% of the seats at the political table per legal quota, initiated equal pay legislation, and, in 1980, elected their first female president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir.
“Get the fuck out,” said a young man on Instagram to the woman who informed him that women in the U.S. couldn’t have a credit card that wasn’t cosigned by a husband, father, or brother until 1974.
My mom got her first Visa card in 1974. It was not her first credit card—her wallet was tiled with department store cards—but the Visa was the first card with no dictate as to where it was used, or on what. What she gained was not purchasing power, per se, but choice. Exhilarating, but not always a comfort.
Music
( ) is entirely in Volenska, and Sigur Ros’ fourth album is a mix of Volenska and Icelandic, which may only be significant, ultimately, for non-Icelandic speakers. There’s plenty of precedence for non-lexicographic speech-like vibration in English and non-English language music: scat, do wop. The end of “Hey Jude.” The chant is as old as any language, with iterations that include Vadic and Gregorian traditions, as well as Talmudic and Buddhist intonations, and chants from the Koran. Say or sing the words, feel the vibration. I cast a spell on you. Lambs eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you…
In Frannie Choi’s poem “Danez Says They Want to Lose Themselves in Bops They Can’t Sing Along To,” from her collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, the poet speaks of her immersion, via K-pop, “in / the scaffolds and percussives of an unparsed lyric,” whose
harbors are built, mostly, of sonics—
not gibberish, I mean, but language so sacred
it’s not my place to decipher it,
phonemes holy as stones on a string, mysterious
as the names we give to animals, or words
we know only in prayer—
“Starálfur” is not prayer, but people respond to whatever vibrations it sets on the air, less profound, perhaps, than mystifying, like childhood, a trance state, a message communicated via tin can and string, between consciousness and sleep, between heaven and earth.
Yearning
The Icelandic tourism industry has been accused of using AI images to inflate its so-called other-worldly geographical splendor. The tourism board mounted a campaign: We really look like this, no one’s trying to fool you. Volcanoes, waterfalls, eerie rock formations. The land stands up to the hype—beautiful, and overwhelming so. But what is the narrative? What is the story that tourists are looking for that so wildly depends on the images’ authenticity? Iceland is not some pure landscape. It has suffered greatly from deforestation and erosion from the loss of critical topsoil due to sheep grazing. Reforestation has taken root with the introduction of new species of flora. The story could be about post-apocalyptic hope. But is it?
The body is landscape, a landscape is a body. The opening title sequence for the 2015 television series Trapped, set in a fictional fishing town in northern Iceland, was created by Börkur Sigþórsson. The Iceland-born photographer and director says in Art of the Title that the sequence alternates between aerial images “shot perfectly vertical and bordering on being abstract, intercut with close-ups of corpses. The merging of landscapes and bodies…emphasize[s] the similarities between the human body and the earth and serve[s] as subtle reminder of where we will all end up.”
“I wanted it to be a hymn. It was intended to provoke a sense of abandonment and isolation, and be equal parts sinister and solemn.” Bleak images, devoid of comfort, unless comfort be taken in mortality.
Greipur Hjaltason—he of the $6,000 hot dog joke—has garnered a following on the socials. His young son, Magnus, is often seen in the background of the videos, toddler-tipping into a puddle. Some comments applaud his hands-off parenting style; others chastise him for neglect. The puddle-hopping, though, is clearly a metaphor in Iceland for youthful spirit. In the video for "Hoppípolla," a track from Sigur Ros’ album, Takk, viewers follow a merry gang of seniors as they skip through town, playing pranks and puddle-hopping. Iceland is a wonderland; it’s never too late to be young.
And the data speaks: Iceland ranked third in 2025 on the international happiness scale. Icelanders are social. Government has significant LGBTQIA+ representation. Standard of living is high. Problems persist, of course, in concrete and contemporary contexts, because Iceland, elves or no, is a real place, not a fantasy.
But oh, those photos. All that post-apocalyptic promise.
The palindrome of this essay, its scaffold, is YMMMMMY: yearning, money, music, movies, music, money, yearning.
It doesn’t mean anything, but I feel something. I want something. I hope it’s not “Oh, shit, I forgot to become a rock star.” Whatever it is, I suspect it’s not free.
Irene Cooper wrote the poetry collections spare change; even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety; & octets, a chapbook of original form. She is the author of the novels Found & Committal. Irene supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison, co-hosts Raging Writers/Spoken Words, & teaches in the middle of Oregon, where she lives with her people & Roxy.