Icelandic Phallological Museum

The museum's founder, Sigurður Hjartarson, was a teacher and principal for thirty-seven years, teaching history and Spanish at the Hamrahlíð college in Reykjavík for the last twenty-six of them. As a child he owned a bull's pizzle, given to him to use as a cattle whip. He began collecting in 1974, after a friend who had heard the story of the whip gave him four new specimens, three of which he passed on to friends of his own. Acquaintances at whaling stations then began bringing him whale specimens, and the collection grew through gifts and purchases from around the country. His family helped with the collecting: his daughter Þorgerður was once sent to a slaughterhouse to fetch a frozen goat specimen, and afterwards said she would never collect for him again.

The sources were divided by trade: farm animals from slaughterhouses, seals and the smaller whales from fishermen, the larger whales from the commercial whaling stations. That last source dried up after the International Whaling Commission brought in a global ban on commercial whaling in 1986, after which Sigurður took his whale specimens from the twelve to sixteen animals stranded on the Icelandic coast each year. He also obtained the organ of a polar bear shot by fishermen who found the animal drifting on ice off the Westfjords.

The collection was at first kept in Sigurður's office at the college. When he left teaching he decided, more as a hobby than a job, to put it on public display in Reykjavík, and a grant of ISK 200,000 from the city council supported the opening of the museum in August 1997. By 2003 it was drawing 5,200 visitors a year, 4,200 of them from abroad.

The finances did not follow the attendance. Sigurður put the museum up for sale in 2003 and in the same year offered it to the city of Reykjavík as a gift, but obtained no financial support from either the state or the city. When he retired in 2004 he could no longer afford the rent on the museum's premises.

Sigurður moved with the collection to Húsavík, a fishing village of about 2,200 people some 480 km north-east of the capital. The museum was housed there in a small former restaurant, marked with a large wooden phallus and a stone one standing outside on the street. The villagers were sceptical of the new arrival at first, but accepted it once they were persuaded there was nothing pornographic about it.

Sigurður handed the collection to his son, Hjörtur Gísli Sigurðsson, who moved it back to Reykjavík, to Laugavegur 116 on the city's main shopping street; the Húsavík building now holds the Exploration Museum. An offer from a wealthy German to buy the collection for ISK 30 million and a proposal to move it to the United Kingdom were both refused, Hjörtur holding that the museum had to be in Iceland.

For many years the museum sought a human specimen. Sigurður obtained human testicles and a foreskin from two separate donors, the foreskin given by Iceland's National Hospital after an emergency circumcision operation. The museum also holds fifteen sculptures based on the Iceland men's national handball team, made in a silvered material because the team had taken the silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games; they were made by Sigurður's daughter Þorgerður Sigurðardóttir, and the team's goalkeeper has denied that they are casts. Four men, an Icelander, a German, an American and a Briton, pledged their own organs to the collection, and the American donor sent a cast in the meantime.

The Icelandic donor, Páll Arason, was a ninety-five-year-old man from Akureyri who wanted to give his organ to the museum to secure lasting fame. His pledge was given priority over those of the foreign donors, in keeping with the museum's aim of displaying the organs of Icelandic mammals. He died on 5 January 2011 and the organ was removed surgically. The procedure did not go as intended and left the specimen a greyish-brown shrivelled mass, which went straight into formaldehyde; Sigurður said afterwards that he should have stretched and sewn it to hold it in position, and that he expected to obtain a better one. Accounts of when the museum formally took receipt of it differ, one giving 8 April 2011 and another July of that year.

In May 2014 it was announced that the American writer and actor Jonah Falcon had accepted an invitation, made through The Huffington Post, to donate his organ after his death. In May 2022 the museum announced that it would display a plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix taken in Chicago in 1968 by Cynthia Albritton, known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, who had given it to the museum in April 2022 shortly before her death. In December 2024 the museum began displaying a cast of Matt Barr, a British man, measuring over 36 cm and described as the largest verified cast of its kind.

The size of the collection has been published two ways: as 280 specimens from 93 species of animal, and as more than 300 from more than 100 species. The largest exhibit is a 170 cm section of a whale's penis weighing 70 kg, only the tip of an organ that would have been about 5 m long whole; the smallest is the baculum of a hamster, 2 mm long and needing a magnifying glass to be seen. The museum aims to hold a specimen from every mammal in Iceland. Most of it has been given rather than bought, the only purchase to date being an elephant's penis of nearly a metre. Sigurður preserved the specimens by formaldehyde, pickling, drying, stuffing and salting.

A folklore section exhibits specimens attributed to creatures of Icelandic folklore: the catalogue lists elves, trolls, kelpies and the ghost of Snæfell, along with a merman, a Beach-Murmurer, an Enriching Beach Mouse and an Icelandic Christmas Lad reported found dead at the foot of Esja in 1985, whose specimen was presented by a former mayor of Reykjavík. The elf specimen cannot be seen, since Icelandic folklore holds elves and trolls to be invisible.

The museum opens every day, and by July 2011 was attracting up to 11,000 visitors a year; a figure of more than 70,000 a year has also been published. Sixty per cent of its visitors are reported to be women. Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson, an anthropologist at the University of Iceland, has argued that Icelanders' tolerance of the museum indicates how far Icelandic society has changed since the 1990s, when a newly elected neoliberal government fostered a more open outlook on entertainment, creativity and tourism; he set out the museum's place in Icelandic culture in a book, Phallological Museum. The museum is the subject of a documentary by the Canadian film-makers Zach Math and Jonah Bekhor, The Final Member, which follows Sigurður's search for a human specimen and premiered on 1 May 2012 at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival. The museum itself moved once more within Reykjavík and opened at Hafnartorg on 15 June 2020, with a substantially updated display and a café.