I was late for the party this year. Sorry, I've been trying to catch up. But here it goes, a week after the Academy Awards, “the Oscars” between us. I would love to make a review about it, about Parasite, about the inclusion of the awards, about Joaquin Phoenix's speech, about Eminem singing in the event, about the low rating in their history ... but this is not the space for this kind of things. Here we all come to talk about Iceland and, therefore, we have to talk about the composer Hildur Guðnadóttir.
But I don’t want to talk about the great talent of the cellist, because that has already been stated. I was scrolling around Facebook, temple of my inspiration, when I found a curious article from those which are sponsored by the Morgunblaðið news portal.
The posted article said "Is Hildur your aunt?" Followed by the heading "Thousands of people searched to see if Hildur is their aunt". It made me laugh and I had to share it with you.
There is a rumor that is half false, that Icelanders have an app to check if the person they are dating is a relative of theirs. No, the app is not to prevent incest, as it’s been suggested, but nothing prevents people from using it for that. Or for example, in the case of this article, to find out if your aunt won an Oscar. The Íslendingabók site is a database compiled by the biotech company deCODE genetics and Friðrik Skúlason, with the aim of maintaining the genealogical information of all Icelanders from the present to the immemorial time.
Multiple anecdotes tell me that Icelanders frequently seek their kinship, whether with celebrities, politicians or historical figures. For example, the time we watched the Vikings series, A. decided to check if he was related to any of the characters and it resulted in the beautiful discovery that he was a direct descendant of Rollo (Hrólfr). And I saw myself claiming Normandy as ours.
The article said that three thousand people sought the relationship they had with Hildur the morning after the awards show, this represents a 25% increase on site traffic. Now the kinship between Icelanders is more of a "cousin" said by Snoop Dogg. The site tells you to what "degree" Hildur or whoever is your relative, most of them being related from the seventh generation, that is to say from the great-great-grandfather.
And yes, I am already part of the famous site, but I am more like one of those Sims that you create to marry it with yours to have beautiful babies, but who has no relationship with anyone else in their family tree.
What did we learn today?
At least I know for sure that no one here is my cousin and that Hildur is not my aunt.