The responses he got from friends and family, he said, were “99 percent positive,” if a bit perplexed. After the 1986 international ban on commercial whaling, Hjartarson would drive several hours to the coast in hopes of a whale penis when he heard about an animal’s beaching on the news. Over the decade, his collection grew slowly: by 1990, he’d amassed 34 specimens. Though he’d simply dried the penises to start, he began preserving them in formaldehyde so they’d more closely retain their original appearance. By 1980, he had 13 total specimens: four large whale penises, along with nine from farm animals, brought to him by friends who worked at slaughterhouses. Over the first few decades of his collecting, he did it on the side, continuing work as a teacher and then school principal in the town of Akranes on Iceland’s southwest coast. “Collecting penises is like collecting anything else, I guess,” he said. Talking about his peerless shrine to the male anatomy, Hjartarson is modest-he considers himself a conventional person-and seems as bemused as anyone that he’d pursued an offbeat hobby to such extreme lengths.
Horae penis full#
Hjartarson explained to me that this was merely the tip of the whale’s full penis, which couldn’t be transported intact when the creature died, and was originally about 16 feet long, weighing upwards of 700 pounds. The museum’s largest specimen, from a sperm whale, is nearly six feet tall, weighs about 150 pounds, and is kept in a giant glass tank bolted to the floor. The walls are decorated with dried whale penises, mounted on plaques like hunting trophies, along with tongue-in-cheek penis-themed art ( a sculpture of the silver medal-winning Icelandic Olympic handball team’s penises, for instance) and other penis-based artifacts, like lampshades made from dried bull scrotums. Some are limp, resting against the sides of their jars, while others seem to have been preserved in an erect state. Among the collections are dozens of giant whale penises tiny guinea pig, hamster and rabbit penises wrinkled, grey horse penises and a coiled rams’ penis that looks unsettlingly human.
In the carpeted room lined with wooden shelves, Hjartarson packed an overwhelming number of specimens, mostly preserved in formaldehyde and displayed upright in glass jars. In doing so, he’d assembled what must be the world’s most complete collection of male sex organs.Īnyone in the capital city of Reykjavík with 1250 Icelandic Krona to spare (about $10) can see the collection, now housed in a modest street-level space on a busy corner downtown. He finally achieved his goal in 2011, when he acquired the penis of a deceased Homo sapiens. Over decades of meticulous collecting and cataloguing, Hjartarson acquired 283 members from 93 different species of mammals, housing them in what he’s dubbed the Icelandic Phallological Museum. It took a while, but given enough time, true dedication trumps all obstacles. “It might be an interesting challenge to collect specimens from all the mammal species in Iceland.” “Eventually, it gave me an idea,” Hjartarson told me when I recently met him in Reykjavík.
The joke caught on, and acquaintances at the island’s whaling stations began giving him the severed tips of whale penises when they butchered their catch. Soon, other teachers began bringing him bull penises. It was a dried bull’s penis, long and limp-the kind often used in the Icelandic countryside to whip farm animals-and a colleague of Hjartarson’s gave it to him as a joke at a holiday party after hearing how Hjartarson had one as a boy. In 1974, at the age of 33, an Icelandic history teacher named Sigurður Hjartarson was given a penis.
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