In 1993 a film crew from Icelandic television spent a season at Lækur. The result was Maður og æður – “Man and Eider” – a documentary broadcast on RÚV that year, and the only moving pictures we have of the colony as it was then.
It is in Icelandic and there are no subtitles, so for most of our readers the words will pass by. Watch it anyway. The land is the same land we walk every May. The birds are the same birds, a few generations on. And the hands are the hands that taught us.
Zoffi – Zófonías Þorvaldsson, the man our eiderdown is named after – is here as we remember him, out in the colony. Our grandmother, Guðbjört Sigmundsdóttir, appears near the end, sewing an eiderdown duvet by hand, which is where every duvet we sell today really begins. And somewhere among the people helping are two fifteen-year-old boys, Ingi and me, who did not yet know that thirty years later we would be the ones keeping the watch. The photo at the top is from those summers: Mundi on the left, a friend who spent many of his childhood summers with us at Lækur, with the two of us and Zoffi and the day’s sacks of down.
Nothing essential has changed. We still walk the colony nest by nest, still take only what the birds leave behind, still dry the down in the same barn and still sew the duvets to order, one at a time. That continuity is the whole point of Zoffi Eiderdown, and this film is the proof of it.
Maður og æður, RÚV 1993. Written and directed by Jón Hermannsson. Camera: Jón Hermannsson, Jóhannes Jónsson, Páll Steingrímsson, Sigurður Grímsson and Snorri Þórisson. Music: Hermann Jónsson and Már Gunnlaugsson. Our thanks to everyone who made it, and to whoever kept the tape.
Follow us on Instagram – @zoffi_eiderdown – for the small moments from Lækur between diary entries: the first eiders in spring, the fjord in every weather, and the work in between.