There's Nothing Phallic About Norse Culture

There’s a crow flying around me as I write this, stopping on the roof, possibly to observe me. I wish I carried a pocketful of peanuts the way one corvid expert recommends, so that I might make a crow friend. They remember people, crows do, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this crow recognizes me from my apartment, one floor down but on the other side of the building. You can’t see the rooftop from there, but you can see an emergency ladder, whose handlebars curve gracefully over the top of the roof like twin models of the famous arch in St. Louis, and birds like to perch at the very top of the arch and peer around them. Often, that bird is a crow. If it’s the same crow, then she’s seen me many times before, on my green velvet couch with my once-plush cat who is old now and looks like the Velveteen Rabbit with patches of velvet rubbed off or worn down. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, Malka-the-cat is well-loved: she sits on a warming pad, which is balanced on her very own pillow with pink velvet corners, which itself sits upon the green velvet couch. Plush upon plush upon plush.

If the crow has recognized me from the apartment, perhaps she is calling out her identification to the other crows, perhaps that’s why her caw drops — a normal caw and then something more like a gargle, deeper and throatier. Perhaps she’s noting that I don’t have my cat with me. Perhaps has nothing to do with me. Perhaps it has everything to do with me, perhaps she’s wondering why I’ve been coming up to the roof so much, what I’m doing here when everyone else is still bundled up in their apartments.

It’s cold out on the roof, mid-March is really too early to be out here. It’s a lovely rooftop, with a grill and planters and low furniture made from the kind of wood that turns silver the longer it’s left outside, it just gets handsomer with the rain pouring down and DC’s mid-summer dripping swelter and the odd pile of snow teetering on the narrow armrests.

There’s nothing in the planter boxes but something hardy, spiky, maybe a small yucca, something to spike the back of your neck and make you shiver if you relax too far back in your seat, plus some dead-looking rosemary. It’s incredible, what rosemary will come back from. A twig, it looks like, bare as a bottom, also silvery in this light. Shine shine shine, silver silver silver, matching the vast grey skies above us, me and the crows.

I love DC because nothing can top Freedom — literally, you can’t build higher than the statue of Freedom on top of the U.S. Capitol. And because of this, going up to the little fifth floor rooftop in a major metropolitan city gets me a chim-chiminey view of rooftops and balconies and the Library of Congress and Freedom herself and secrets, lots of secrets, sometimes I see other people, sneaking out on their rooftops for a smoke or a drink or a kiss or just to be alone with their thoughts. There are repair people too, traipsing across the top of the life of the city, and sometimes we see each other, across the rooftops, and nod, and I think maybe we share this, being a little wild like the crows, looking around, identifying, calling out across the clouds. They inspect whatever they’re inspecting and disappear. They never had features, only outlines agains the clouds. I could never identify them, if we were to meet in the sunshine of earth’s sidewalk.

I’m up here because of the week’s events. It’s been a long, teary, exhausting week. I drove back from Atlanta with my friend Jonathan and dove right back into an ocean of work and personal drama and now, though I’ve built a whole little plush universe for myself, I can’t stand to sit in it, the couch, the soft rocking chair, the golden velvet barstools. Instead I’m up on the roof, with the wind and the crow and the repair people in the distance, and a lecture from an Icelandic man by the name of Thordur O. Thordarson called, “The Icelandic Phallological Museum: Interpreting the Science and Culture of the Penis.” 

I’ve just become a member of the Natural History Society of Maryland, primarily because I want to be able to see salamanders. They’ve got a tour of the early spring vernal pools, and I’ve read that that’s where amphibians really move-and-shake, hopping from one pool to the next, meeting mates, flirting, laying eggs. I’m desperate to see the slippery suckers in love. There’s love all around us, and so little of it is seen.

But there’s a waiting list for that tour, to which I add my name, and then I start looking around at the other offerings. The first event I can join is this zoom lecture from the Icelandic penis expert. 

The tagline: “Please join us for what is sure to be a most ‘uplifting’ presentation.”

I didn’t have anything else to do, so I pour myself a drink — gin and a blood orange San Pelligrino that I found lurking at the back of the fridge, so now I have a pink-orange sparkling drink, neon in the night. I sign into zoom via my phone, and head into the pitch dark cold of the rooftop. The birds are asleep. The penis expert begins his lecture.

The museum’s founder was, I learn, an eccentric gentleman, who first set out to collect a penis from each of Iceland’s 50 mammal species. His wife, however, was less interested in penises, or at least in penises trapped in formaldehyde, and particularly she was uninterested in penises in formaldehyde that were kept in her bedroom. At a certain point, the wife had had enough: “You have to get all these penises out of the bedroom!” she cried. And thus the formal museum was born.

The idea took off. Penises of animals were donated from scientists the world over. I missed the screenshot of Thor with world’s largest baculum, or penis bone, which belongs to the mighty walrus. Instead I got this shot of him talking about retractor muscles, which contracts to pull the penis back into the sheath and relaxes to allow the penis to become erect.

If popular culture was your guide, you might think that stiff competition might equal bigger balls in the animal world. Not so, apparently. Predator males (like lions) who need to be able to mate quickly and fast are likely to have smaller balls, as well as penis bones for speedy erections. Herbivores or other animals which experience less intra-species competition were less likely to have a penis bone, and also more likely to have large balls.

Here is Thor, explaining that there is nothing phallic about Icelandic and Nordic cultures.

(This, despite being the home of the world’s largest penis museum.)

Mediterranean cultures, on the other hand, were purported to be hot for phalluses. No explanation was proffered.

By the time I was almost done with my drink, it sounded like others had also made their way through their St. Patty’s Day stores. When we reached a question about troll penises, I left the zoom call, glad for this memorable introduction to the good people of the Natural History Society of Maryland, and glad, too, of the cover of night, as I giggled my way back to my apartment, and the cat, the couch, and comfort.