Every Saturday since mid-October, when the dramatic extent of their country’s economic meltdown hit home, a swelling stream of angry Icelanders has flooded into Austurvollur square, outside the Reykjavik parliament, to call for the heads of the prime minister and central bank governor. (Their ire is understandable: up to a third risk losing their homes and life savings, and the krona has shed more than half its value.)

On a stage at the front of each rally has been the slight and bespectacled figure of one Hordur Torfason, described in news reports as the protest movement’s leader but, on

the face of it at least, a rather unlikely insurrectionist.

Torfason is a mild, unassuming actor, playwright and singer/songwriter who has been around for a long time in Iceland; a household name there, he is best known as a kind of latter-day troubadour, having hawked his melodic, deceptively simple guitar folk — he calls it “singing storytelling” — round this bleak volcanic outcrop since 1970.

He has 23 records to his name. Catchy numbers all, his songs deal mostly with themes of nature, freedom and the land, with titles such as Litli Fugl (Little Bird) and Brekkan (The Slope). Many, he says, are about “an individual, struggling with life with the aim of making the best of it, despite everything”.

Torfason says he has never been political, but he has stood up to be counted before. In 1975, he came out — the first public figure in Iceland to do so — and, three years later, founded the country’s gay rights movement.

The reaction from an isolated, still largely inward-looking island population was so strong that, “I had to go into exile. I lived in Copenhagen for 19 years, with short trips back to Iceland to keep doing my job.”

Torfason’s engagement today, he says, stems from a firm belief that “the purpose of an artist is to criticise authority”.

The government has “failed the nation”, and Iceland’s whole system is “corrupt and worn-

out”. Urbane, humane, and harbouring more than a hint of steel, he seems somehow a

fitting hero for Iceland’s newest — and, perhaps, scariest — saga.