In 1974, at the age of 33, an Icelandic history teacher named Sigurður Hjartarson was given a penis.
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. Soon, other teachers began bringing him bull penises. 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.
“Eventually, it gave me an idea,” Hjartarson told me when I recently met him in Reykjavík. “It might be an interesting challenge to collect specimens from all the mammal species in Iceland.”
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. 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. 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 has obtained "legally certified gift tokens" for four human penises.On display are 56 penises from 17 different kinds of whales.