President honours Reykjavík classics teacher with Falcon Order

Kolbrún Elfa Sigurðardóttir, a Latin and classics teacher who has worked at Reykjavík Upper Secondary School for nearly 30 years, says she was surprised and moved to receive the Order of the Falcon. In an interview with mbl.is, she discusses the honour, her studies in Freiburg and changes to Iceland’s education system.

President Halla Tómasdóttir awarded Kolbrún the Order of the Falcon on June 17 for her contribution to education and classical learning.

“I did not exactly burst into tears, but I was a little surprised. Teachers are not really used to being rewarded for their work, but I was certainly moved and happy,” Kolbrún told Morgunblaðið.

She joked that the award showed that “someone thinks you have walked the road for good” and described her academic and teaching career as “extremely simple”.

Kolbrún studied at Reykjavík Upper Secondary School, where she attended the classics department and began learning Latin in her fourth year under Ragnheiður Torfadóttir. At the time, students completed four years of study for their matriculation examination and attended grades three through six, a remnant of an older system in which the school covered grades one through six. The first two grades later became grades eight and nine in compulsory school.

Latin appealed strongly to her, making the decision to pursue classics an easy one. She went on to study at the University of Iceland under Siggi P., a widely known lecturer in Greek and Latin, and Kolbeinn Sæmundsson. She then moved to Freiburg in Germany for postgraduate study and lived there for seven years.

Her bachelor’s degree had Latin as its major subject and Greek as a minor. She continued with postgraduate studies in Latin, Greek and ancient history at Albert Ludwig University, while also teaching Icelandic there.

“Icelandic is extremely difficult to teach compared with Latin, which is in a much more fixed form,” she said.

After returning to Iceland, she began teaching at Reykjavík Upper Secondary School in 1999. She continues to work to keep the ancient and fascinating language of Latin alive. She said that most of her university courses had no more than ten students, adding that Latin is not widely studied at the University of Iceland today.

Asked whether the Latin textbooks written by Kristinn Ármannsson are still used at the school, Kolbrún said they had been a source of “a great headache”. Kristinn was a lecturer in Greek at the University of Iceland and also served as the school’s rector for nearly a decade. His daughter, Þorbjörg, also taught Latin at the school for many years.

“They are not very modern, but it must be said that Latin itself has not changed much since these books were written,” Kolbrún said. She added that English-language books had also been used in recent years.

Kristinn also taught Danish in broadcasts on Iceland’s national radio service from 1934 to 1956, when that instruction was discontinued.