You may or may not have ever worried that the person with whom you were about to hook up (or the person with whom you just hooked up) was related to you. But in Iceland they take their incest (prevention) seriously. That’s because, being a fairly tiny island nation, lots of Icelanders are related to lots of other Icelanders. In fact, there is a massive database (the Íslendingabók, or Book of Icelanders) in which would-be lovers look up that very information. Of course, in the heat of the moment, running to the computer may be second only to “What do you mean you don’t have a condom?” in terms of killing the mood. Now Icelandic lovers can can stay right in bed (or the car, or the alley), and whip out their smartphones to look up that same information, using the new Íslendinga app. In fact, if they each have the app, all they have to do is have their phone “do the bump”.
In fact, the app’s slogan is “Bump the app before you bump in bed.”
The Íslendingabók database is based on more than 1200 years of Icelandic genealogical data.
Explains the NewsOfIceland.com site, “The Icelandic population is very small and all Icelanders are related. But yet, it is big enough so everyone doesn’t know one another. This means that each and every Icelander that is in a relationship, is dating a relative. In most cases those relations are distant. But not always. But how can they know?”
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They also point out that such closeness has its perks – such as, everyone in Iceland is related to Björk.
Explains one of the apps’ developers, Arnar Freyr Aðalsteinsson, “We wanted to find new creative uses for the information contained in the database. Our main goal with the app was to implement all existing features of Íslendingabók and also to add some new and exciting features.”
Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir, an Icelandic writer, observes that the Íslendingabók is “the only genealogy database in the world that covers a whole nation.”
“More than 95 percent of all Icelanders born since 1703, when the first national census was taken, are registered into the database and half of all Icelanders who have lived on the island from the settlement in 874 and until 1703. The registrations in Íslendingabók are based on a whole range of sources, such as censuses, church books, the national registry, ancient scripts, annals, obituaries etc,” says Arnarsdóttir.
At the time of this writing, the app is only available in the Android store, but we’re sure that an iPhone app will be coming along soon.
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