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[nineveh_uk]

Hard as it is to beat the headline seen on a newsboard in Bridlington "Horse Fetish Flashed in Court"* for headline of the week, the Iceland Review managed it with Seven-Year-Old Wins Iceland Ram Groping Contest. Even better, this story really is about a seven year-old who won the amateur section of a ram groping contest - prizes include (ram) sperm from the Insemination Center of West Iceland. Despite said prizes, I assume that groping is a mistranslation of a word/phrase about judging the quality of rams. Anyone can read Icelandic and would be good enough to tell me what was actually meant by groping and how the error, er, arose, the source is here.

The competition involves laypersons attempting to rank rams that have been ranked by professional ram-rankers, and explaining why. Says the organiser:

“One year a contestant was able to rank the rams correctly and described them all in a poem. That was very interesting.” Evidently there isn't much to do in Iceland in summer.

*Which turned out to be a mis-print for "Horse Fetish Flaster in Court", and is unfortunately a rather more sad and less funny story than one might have hoped for.

Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

I just spent way, way too long translating the article, and while it does not go into any detail about how the ram-groping is done, my dictionary avers that þukla means "to feel" or even "to finger."

So, yeah. Groping.

There doesn't seem to be any information in the original article that wasn't in the (somewhat expanded) translation, unless it is conveyed by í kramið, which I cannot parse at all. (Or, I can't make out kramið as anything but the perfect participle of kremja, "to crush," which doesn't make any sense in context.)

[antisoppist]

From Swedish/Norwegian/Danish I was guessing that as "hugging" but it's probably better that it isn't.

[nineveh_uk]

Now that's dedication to the cause, thank you! It is all very, very strange...