Tag: iceland travels

(Photos here.)

I forgot to mention, in Part 1, the arctic tern I met at a picnic area, when heading out of the West Fjords. For the entire trip ravens had been kraawking warnings at me, and none of them scared me off. But a single little black-capped arctic tern, buzzing around my head, making it clear he would dive at me any moment if I didn’t get out of there–that I listened to! And that’s what got me wondering why ravens have so much more lore around them than arctic terns. Because arctic terns are seriously scary when they set their minds to it.

And now I know why one of the signs in the Fljótsdalur hostel said that claiming the artic terns were perfectly safe was a good way to mess with tourists, too. 🙂

Anyway, as we left Laxárdal, the hillsides grew steeper again, making the area feel a bit more like the south, only with more lakes, and also something else I couldn’t quite put a name to. Some lingering touch of the West Fjords’ wildness? Maybe, or maybe I was just imposing that on the land around me, letting the places I’d been influence how I saw the places I was.

We headed on to Eiríksstaðir, another reconstruction of a turf farmhouse, this one based on excavations of what may have been Eírik the Red’s home–the man who first settled Greenland, and whose son, Leifur Eiríksson, likely explored North America in turn.

The folks at Eiríksstaðir were dressed in period (around 1000 A.D.) clothes; when we arrived, one of them was up on the roof with a hose, joking about the fact that yes, he needed to water the roof.

We were led inside a farmhouse not unlike the farmhouse at Stöng, only the space was more crowded with artifacts of the time, and a fire burned in the hearth, filling the room with smoke. The farmhouse was more cluttered than at Stöng (though still less cluttered than it would have been in reality), but much larger and more open than the Sorcerer’s Cottage.

Our guide–the guy who’d been up on the roof–apologized for the fact that the log wasn’t period, but was in fact a Duraflame log. (Imported from America, just like real wood would have been in Leifur Eiríksson’s day.) At some point he explained, too, that the oil lamps in the walls were in fact operating via fiber optics.

Maybe it was the apologies for not being quite in period. Maybe it was the mention of how the folks there had been working the Viking festival the past few weekends. Maybe it was the kids outside, also in costume, practicing with bow and arrow. But slowly, we realized why this all felt, in its way, so familiar: we’d found the Icelandic equivalent of the Society for Creative Anachronism. We were on familiar ground. 🙂

The feel of the history was in some ways less deep than at Stöng, or at the Sorcerer’s Cottage–was indeed closer in feel to SCA events and Renaissance Faires in the States. And yet … there was something gained here, too, some sense of what it would feel like to actually be living in these reconstructed spaces, with the clutter and smoke and stuff of daily life all around you. What was lost in strict accuracy was gained in a sense of, well, motion.

Stöng and Eiríksstaðir were a good balance for each other, actually.

There was a loft here, above the entry way, beneath the rafters (not unlike the loft at Fljótsdalur in its way, actually), and our guides kindly indulged my desire to get a good look inside of same. (In Njál’s SagaGunnar of Hliðarendi fought of his enemies and died in the loft of his house; and there’s likely to be a scene set in a loft in the book I’m working on, too.)

And of course, being in a living history sort of place, we got to play a little. 🙂 Larry tried on a Viking helmet and shield; we both wielded the sword. The shield was surprisingly large–as I realized it would need to be; the sword was surprisingly light–also as it would need to be. One of the women there loaned me her red-fox skin scarf; I draped it around myself, only to find I no more have the knack for wearing scarves gracefully when those scarves have feet and head still attached than without them.

Since we were back in saga country, I also asked the man and woman in the farmhouse with us what they thought of Hallgerður Longlegs.

He (not hesitating): “She was a bitch.”
She (hesitating): “I think the saga women were all very strong.”

I got the feeling that being strong was not a good thing or a bad thing–it just was.

As we left Eiríksstaðir, we realized that those couple hours of living history had the effect of somehow returning us to the present, after a couple days of feeling deeply immersed in the past. This was not a bad thing at all; returning to the present is always necessary, sooner or later, and this was a fun way to do it.

We drove on to Laugar, and to a campground attached to the local Edda hotel, and pitched our tent near a trickling stream, with green hillsides all around us.

Laugar was where Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir, one of the main characters of Laxdæla Saga, grew up, meaning we’d visited both Guðrún and Hallgerður’s childhood/young adulthood homes that day. (A note in my journal reads: saga women, the teen version.)

I tried to picture Guðrún, much as I’d tried to picture Hallgerður, and the word that came to mind was poised. Guðrún was the poised sort of young person who could impress adults, because she could talk to them well. Perhaps she needed to be poised; from a fairly early age, she was involved with helping her father run the household.

That night I swam and soaked in a pool and hot tub fed by–I think–the same pool where Guðrún and Kjartan used to speak to each other, when they were young and in love; as I swam I stared out at the same slopes they would have stared out at then. These weren’t the Bishop Guðmundur’s blessed waters, but they were good waters nonetheless, still light, still pleasant to swim through.

(Photos here.)

I woke this morning feeling as if I was swimming in story–a stone beside the road where an evil spirit possessed a child; a valley filled with a sorcerer’s fog; a pool blessed by a homeless bishop. I was filled with thoughts of how stories and places are bound to one another, and of how neither exists without the other.

In those early moments, I felt more connected to those stories than to the present, and I was okay with that. The saga heroes I’d been chasing down seemed less real, just then, than everyday people whose names I didn’t know.

We had breakfast at the hotel (sour milk, cold lamb, bread, cheese, pate, corn flakes–traditional!), then took some time to tromp up the hillside behind the hotel, getting to know the terrain better. We walked over long green and yellow grasses, cut through by deep, narrow streams. More of a trudge than a stroll–I had to lift my legs to walk these slopes, which were less gentle than they looked.

Patches of rock, half-submerged, broke up the patches of grass. Unlike the grass, the rocks were easy to walk on, grippy beneath my rubber sneaker soles, nothing like the slippery slickrock I was used to hiking over in the southwestern U.S. There were mosses too, of course, chalky in some places, a startling bright fluorescent green in others, especially near water. Sometimes, the ground turned from solid to marshy without warning, and brown mud squished beneath my feet.

We packed up the car, looked at the morning fog–higher fog than last night, not so low to the ground, though still very much present–and decided to make another attempt to find the sorcerer’s mountain.

As we drove, the seacoast–invisible the night before–appeared and disappeared out of the fog. We took a sudden turn, and then we saw a rocky gray slope, wheeling with white birds.

We had a map, but we didn’t need to look at it to know we’d found Kaldbakshorn, the mountain Svanur disappeared into (or not, depending whose account you listen to) when he died.

The old sorcerer didn’t let us see the mountain’s peak, but he did let us see its lower slopes, a tumble of gray rocks and mossy cliffs that moved in and out of the fog.

And birds. Gulls. More of them than anywhere else along this drive.

We drove on past Kaldbakshorn, and we came to a bay with a sign: Svansbúð. Svanur´s fishing camp, where he was last seen before he disappeared into the mountain? It seemed so.

We poked around Svansbúð, then headed back out, watching the fog dance around Kaldbakshorn as we passed it once more.

Again, the sky quickly cleared as we left Svanur’s mountain behind. As we drove away from Kaldbakshorn and from Laugarhóll, we saw patches of fog–including one valley filled with eerie blue fog, straight ahead of us, startling–but we saw nothing like the sorcerer’s fog again, not for the rest of our trip.

Before leaving Strandir and the West Fjords entirely, we stopped by the sorcery museum and chatted with Sigurður and Björk over coffee, while they shared more bits of folklore. Like that the Hidden Folk/Huldufólk only take babies as changelings before their teeth grow in, because the old people of their own kind they leave behind in the babies’ place don’t have teeth anymore, either. And that it’s said the largest city in Iceland isn’t Reykjavík, but is a city of Hidden Folk in the north, not far from Akureryi. And that while trolls may be bigger than people, they’re not dramatically bigger, perhaps the height of a one story building. And so on.

We talked, too, about the importance of ordinary people in all these stories. A good balance, to my searches for saga characters much of this trip.

Part of me really didn’t want to leave the West Fjords. I felt like I could have stayed there, wandering the hills, looking for stories.

Except, really, I’d need to learn Icelandic first. By then it was pretty clear I wanted to learn Icelandic anyway, both because it’d be more fun to visit speaking the language; and because if I really am going to remain fascinated with Icelandic literature, it’s time to work toward reading it in the original.

At any rate, we did leave the West Fjords, heading south down the coast. The land grew tamer; the hills less steep, less wild; the black cliffs and rock walls mostly gone.

After a couple hours, we left the coast and headed inland, toward Laxárdal, the Lax River Valley. We were back in saga country–specifically, Laxdæla Saga country. The valley flattened out, a river valley. Signs along the road indicated various farms.

I watched those signs. Somewhere near here, I knew, Hallgerður Höskuldsdottir grew up.

We saw the church of Hjarðarholt, home Ólafur the Peacock, Hallgerður´s half-brother, one of the main characters of Laxdæla Saga. (Hallgerður herself gets just a mention in that saga, though it’s largely concerned with her relations.)

Then, there — Höskuldsstaðir, her father’s home, and still a working farm today. We pull over. I get out of the car and look around. (Do you suppose the inhabitants of that farm are used to complete strangers pulling over beside their farm to look around?)

I see a valley, with gentle low slopes. Good farmland, this, fertile and lush.

I think of young Hallgerður growing up on this rich, fertile farmstead. I stare out at those slopes, and I try to picture her, standing there.

Words come to mind: Spoiled. Cossetted. I can almost picture a young Hallgerður — 10 years old? 12? 14? proudly tossing her head.

She was a rich man’s daughter. I’d not really thought about that before. And whatever demons tormented her — if they did — they tormented first her on this comfortable, well-off farmstead.

We drove on, out of the valley. The hills grew a little steeper again, a little more like the south had been, only with lakes and … a different feel, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the south touched with a lingering bit of West Fjord wildness? Or maybe it was just me, seeing that there. At any rate, within a few miles we were in a different country again–and on our way to another bit of history–saga history, and North American history, too.

(Pictures here.)
(June 18, Part 1 here.)
(Previous Iceland posts here.)
(lnhammer´s Iceland report here.)

The Hótel Laugarhóll is run by Matthias, a French chef who originally came to Iceland to work for the French embassy. lnhammer had what he claimed was the best meal of his entire trip the last time we were in Iceland, and had suggested we stay there this time. It was the only hotel (rather than hostel or tent) we stayed in during our trip; and unlike most of our trip, this night, at least, we had no intention of doing our own cooking.

As we checked in, Matthias asked whether we wanted the lamb or the haddock for dinner. He recommended the haddock, and we readily agreed.

In the dining room, we looked out into a valley where strange, low fog hung beneath a clear blue sky. The edges of that fog were oddly well defined. The fog seemed at times to be retreating into the valley, and at times to be reaching out, clawlike, toward us. We thought, of course, of Svanur’s fog, the fog that had blocked a mountain pass, as we watched it. Even from a distance, it did not seem like ordinary fog.

The haddock was doused in brandy; set aflame from the candle on our table, wafted beneath our noses. A lovely smell. And lovely fish, perfectly flaking, melting in the mouth. The lake-caught trout earlier in our trip had been nice; but this was a whole other level of nice. A lovely meal.

After dinner, the sun still hours from setting, we headed out in search of Kaldbakshorn — in search of the mountain where Svanur had disappeared. In doing so, we headed out into the fog.

The fog thickened as we drove. It muted the near ground, turned the more distant hills to shapes without color or texture. It seemed to the land, turning everything soft and silver-gray, caressing the rocks as it rolled close over them. The fog moved in close around us and our car, and it seemed almost a solid thing, something one could reach out and touch.

This was the fog of fantasy novels. The fog that lures people away from home, that leads them to unknown lands from which they do not return.

I opened the car window. Stuck out a hand. The fog wasn’t soft; it was cold and sharp as ice.

The fog deepened the further in we drove. I felt a sort of wide-eyed wonder as watched it thickening around us.

Because we weren’t in a fantasy novel, eventually we decided to follow the course of wisdom and turn back. To accept that tonight, at least, the sorcerer did not want us to see his mountain.

Almost, we didn’t mind. Even as we drove back, I think we knew that failing to find Svanur’s mountain was more interesting–and made a better story–than finding it would have.

Besides, we could always try again in the morning.

Once we turned around and started back toward Laugarhóll, the air quickly cleared, making it hard to believe the fog had really been so thick. Yet we still could see it, when we looked back down the valley, for all that the air around us was clear.

We were not quite done with magic yet, though.

It must have been around 10 by then, but there was still plenty light left, so we changed into our bathing suits and headed out for a pool fed by a hot spring that was once blessed by the displaced bishop Guðmund the Good.

The water felt incredibly … well, good. Lightweight. Easy to move through, silky on the skin. I felt, almost, like I was swimming through liquid light.

Steam rose from the pool as we swam. A child’s colored beach ball drifted in and out of that steam.

lnhammer retrieved the ball, tossed it around a bit. There was something about that water that made one laugh as one splashed about, and even the splashing had a joyous sound to it.

After a while, we realized we were not only seeing steam on the water. The fog had moved in again while we swam, surrounding us, hemming us in.

Later still–at twilight, nearly midnight–I went for a walk in that fog.

Only the very peaks of the mountains were visible. A cairn stood out, muted, ghostly through the fog, and I could see how that marker would have been a welcome sign, to someone who had lost their way.

Some sheep followed a road through the mist, heading toward an unknown destination, their movements eerie and strangely dignified at once.

Yet by midnight proper, the fog was nearly gone again, just a low band, leaving the upper slopes of the mountains clear and detailed once more.

I finally headed in to bed, and went to sleep still feeling the touch of the bishop’s blessed water on my skin.

(Pictures here.)

(I took way, way longer to get back to my Iceland trip reports than I intended–sorry about that!)

On June 18 we left Ísafjörður early by local standards, around 8:30 a.m. Our destination was Hólmavík, home of the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which lnhammer visited five years before (he got quite a bit of mileage out of the story of the necropants), and which I’d been wanting to visit ever since.

The drive from Ísafjörður to Hólmavík is not very long, as the raven flies. Not being ravens, our route was a couple hours longer, winding our way along a series of deep, narrow fjords, past a few lone farmhouses and clusters of colorful seaside buildings. Fun driving; the phrase “you are in a twisty little maze of fjords, all alike” got bandied about a lot. Except, of course, they weren’t all alike, and I spent much of time during which I wasn’t actually driving trying to look out all the car windows at once, taking in changes at every turn.

We felt the land around us changing yet again–the sharp vertical hills of Ísafjörður giving way to green-yellow hillsides and low walls of gray stone. The land was every bit as rugged before, but it was a different sort of ruggedness.

We left the fjords and crossed a bit of the interior, then descended into Hólmavík, a pleasant seaside down overlooking its fjord.

We grabbed lunch in a cafe, then headed for the museum, and spent the next two hours or so thoroughly absorbed in its exhibits. The museum’s focus was on what’s known of the historical practice of sorcery in Iceland. A room downstairs laid out in detail several spells that have been found in grimoires–the objects used in those spells and the runes that were written for them (very different from Fuþark runes one usually thinks of), and also many of the other small details. What ink to use to carve the signs. What fingers and toes to draw the blood for them from. What the consequences would be, if the spell went wrong.

Detailing the spells would be a post in itself, but here´s a sample to give a feel for them–a spell for creating wealth (not surprisingly, a pretty common sort of spell):

– Carve the rune hringhálmur on the skin of a black tomcat, using the menstrual blood of a virgin
– Catch a carnivorous sea mouse in a net of a virgin´s hair.
– Put the hair and the mouse in a wooden box.
– Lay hringhálmur over the mouse to prevent its escape
– Lay a stolen coin in the box
– The sea mouse will now draw money to itself from the ocean
– But … if the sea mouse escapes, it will dive into the sea, and cause a devastating storm that will claim many lives

There were spells for healing, for turning invisible, for raising the dead, for catching thieves, for stealing milk, for making sheep easier to handle.

There were descriptions, too, of the burning times when, as in much of the western world, sorcerers were burned. Though there were fewer burnings in Iceland than elsewhere; 21 in all, twenty men and one woman.

A random fact that somehow put the scope of what burning someone to death really means in perspective: it took 20 horses to carry enough wood to burn a single human being. (And Iceland was–is–a wood-poor country; wood was expensive.)

But the most intriguing part of the museum, perhaps, was the room upstairs, which contained cases filled with the everyday artifacts of sorcery. There were random scraps of skin and wood, inscribed with runes in ink and blood; small spellbooks; raven wings (sorcery must make ravens exceedingly grumpy); eggshells; bones; wooden boxes; animal skulls; crushed herbs; black stones. One could easily see all these small bits lying around in someone’s home, a thousand years ago or maybe just last week; much like the scraps of paper on which one leaves grocery lists or phone numbers one doesn’t want to forget. It was those everyday fiddly bits that made the practice of sorcery feel most real to me.

Most of the artifacts were re-creations based on descriptions, but we also visited a room containing a thousand-year-old sacrificial bowl, used in Norse ritual, excavated just a few years ago; tests had confirmed that the bowl did indeed contain traces of animal blood.

Perhaps because we spent so much time in the museum, Björk, an enthnologist working there, asked if she could interview lnhammer and I for the museum’s web site, which every week features an interview with museum guests. We spent a pleasant half hour chatting with her outside the museum, looking out over the harbor. The day was warm, and we were comfortable in our short sleeves. The interview is online here. (I know there are versions in both English and Icelandic, but my browser keeps forwarding me to the English version whichever version I click on.)

Eventually we did pull ourselves away from the museum, and headed out toward an annex of same, the Sorcerer’s Cottage, which was built just a few years ago, and which turned out to be located right beside Hótel Laugarhóll, where we were staying that night.

On the way to the Sorcerer´s Cottage, we drove through the pass where in Njál´s Saga the sorcerer Svanur (Hallgerður´s uncle) once turned back his enemies by chanting a spell and filling the pass with fog.

Like the farmhouse at Stöng, the Sorcerer´s Cottage was a re-creation of a turf dwelling, though a more imaginative one–no one home served as its model. Unlike the farmhouse at Stöng, the Sorcerer’s Cottage wasn´t concerned with the lives of wealthy landowners, though, but with the lives of poorer everyday tenant farmers.

It was also much smaller than Stöng, just two rooms (plus a third added as exhibit space) to house an entire family and all their livestock. The rough edges were allowed to show through here–I could smell the drying fish and wet wood and mold that would, of course, have been part of day-to-day life; could imagine how those smells would have been far stronger in a real home. The walls were scratchy against my skin; stray bits of straw fell onto the floor, got into my hair.

Small runes were carved everywhere in the house–in the doorway and on the beams and by the animal pens and sleeping quarters. Again, sorcery as the stuff of everyday life. Sorcerers not as wealthy landowners–though they could be that too–but as ordinary people whose names we often didn’t even know.

The turf walls seemed to melt more readily into the surrounding ground than the turf walls at Stöng. I could imagine that, deprived of its occupants, a house like this would quickly disappear into the land, and no one but those who had once lived there would know.

Like in the museum, we took our time in the Sorcerer’s Cottage, then headed to the hotel.

And then, something delightful happened. I was told, much to my surprise, that I had a phone call. It was Sigurður, the sorcery museum´s manager. It turns out he’d been reading my blog the past few months, ever since I ordered pretty much every English-language book the museum stocked and blogged about it afterwards. He´d seen Björk´s interview with us, and he was wondering … would we like for him to come by and guide us around the Sorcerer´s Cottage?

Of course we said yes! A delightful couple hours ensued.

Sigurður arrived in full costume and showed us around the sorcerer´s hut, explaining that only those who were doing relatively well would have even managed quarters such as these. Life was hard, he told us, and sorcery gave people hope–hope that somehow, tomorrow, things would be a little better.

He offered, too, to cut us some fresh hákarl from the dried fish hanging from the hearth, but sadly had to retract the offer when he couldn’t find his knife. Ah, well. We’d just have to find our rotten shark elsewhere. 🙂

We learned that the weathered beams of the cottage came from an old shepherd´s hut that had been taken down. The worn wood felt smooth, cool to the touch. Lived in.

A corner exhibit was focused on Svanur’s sorcery. Sigurður pulled a goat skin from the exhibit over his head, took a staff from same in hand, and chanted deep, resonant words, words Svanur might have used to call the fog.

The Cottage was within view Svanshóll, Svanur´s home, which was still a working farm. Sigurður pointed to a mountain in the farm´s vicinity, identifying a spot where Svanur was said to have stepped into the stone, taking a sorcerous shortcut through the mountains and emerging from another mountain, Kaldbakshorn, near his fishing camp some miles away.

In fact, some reports say that at the end of his life Svanur walked into Kaldbakshorn and was never seen again. lnhammer and I had plans to seek out Kaldbakshorn later, if we could find it.

Outside the Cottage, Sigurður pointed out different kinds of rocks to us, identifying which sorts of stones trolls might live within, which sort of rocks the Hidden Folk (or elves) might live beneath. As we walked along beside a stream, he explained how some people say the hidden folk are just a way to get children to behave–in the sense of, “Don’t climb here; don’t throw rocks there; you’ll anger the Hidden Folk.” But, he told us, there are also so many stories about people who have been helped by the Hidden Folk. “I think it is safer to believe,” he said.

Then he asked if we wanted to see the place where the sacrificial bowl had been found.

Of course we did! So we loaded into Sigurður´s truck. he drove us through rugged green valleys and along rivers, across waters that lnhammer and I wouldn’t have dared try to ford in our rental car.

The drive was worth the journey by itself, really. Earlier in this trip, I’d been places where I felt power, or joy, or a sense of the sacred. But more than anything, the Hólmavík area — the Strandir region — felt … enchanted.

We reached in the valley where the bowl had been found — isolated enough a place that I could see how the old practices might have held out longer there than elsewhere. Except, as Sigurður pointed out, the whole concept of a place being isolated is actually a modern one. Historically, when cities were few and farmhouses spread out, everyplace was isolated.

As we drove back to the Sorcerer´s Cottage and the hotel, we talked about our respective homes, and how different lands shape people in different ways. At the hotel,
Sigurður drew a couple stones from his pouch, with runes for protection drawn upon them. He gave one to each of us, and then we parted ways, promising to stop by the museum for coffee on our way out of town the next day.

As I headed back into the hotel, I looked down at my stone. I told myself the red rune was almost certainly written in magic marker, not the blood; that surely magic marker held no real power.

But I decided it was safer to believe. I slipped the stone into my pocket, and I headed in for dinner.

(Just one photo today.)

The last time we were in Iceland, lrcutter, who was there as well, shared one of her traveling strategies: every seventh day, she says, she does nothing. Visits no tourists sites, has no schedule, has nowhere she has to be and nothing she has to do. lnhammer and I thought this made an awful lot of sense, and have kept it in mind when traveling ever since. After 7 days, one really does need a day off from, well, actively working at having fun. 🙂

So June 17, up in Ísafjörður, was our planned do-nothing day.

It was also Iceland’s National Day, or independence day. While home rule was achieved in the early 20th century, full independence from Denmark wasn’t declared until 1944, which puts it well within living memory. (The king of Denmark responded with a congratulatory telegram. Being under house arrest by the Germans at the time, I suppose that was about all he could do.)

We slept late, lingered over breakfast and books at the guesthouse, and eventually, early in the afternoon, headed out into town to watch the festivities. (We’d decided that joining in the local celebrations might be stretching the bounds of do-nothing day, but only a little, and not so far that we were about to miss out on same.) I left the camera behind, taking a day off from picture-taking, too.

The festivities began by the city square, with lots of formal speeches by local officials. We understood none of the words, of course, but we didn’t need to; the tone of such things is the same everywhere, I think. The adults stood listening, while the kids ran around, trailing helium balloons decorated with Barbie and Spiderman. There were hot dogs and sodas, too. I’ve grown quite fond of Icelandic hot dogs.

After the speeches there were some musical performance, probably patriotic music, though we weren’t quite sure. After the music, the local Scouts (girls and boys are part of the same organization in Iceland) did a flag ceremony, which was fun for me, as a Scout leader, to watch. Then a woman in historical costume read a poem, per tradition; and the national anthem was sung. Then everyone headed, en masse, from city hall to the town square, forming a sort of parade through the town.
In the town square there were performances: students from the local dance school (modern dance, including one very young break dancer); story tellers; teen clowns making jokes we didn’t understand. Didn’t care that we didn’t understand. We were having fun in spite of–or more likely because of–the fact. More hot dogs and sodas were sold, along with cotton candy (candy flosi).
And sugar in general–lollipops, ice cream, and so on. The amount of sugar consumed by the children this day was truly staggering. 🙂 I don’t know that some of the younger ones were ever without sugar in some form.

Late afternoon things broke up for a while–by then the local grill/ice cream shop was doing a booming business–and then, in the evening, there was a professional band and a dance.

The singer was fabulous. The time for official music was long past now; she focused on pop and disco, which could have sounded incredibly painful, but with her voice and attitude was terrific fun instead. Much of the music was in English; I don’t think I’d quite appreciated before that English in the language of cheesy pop music, but here in this northern town, it was.

There is something very, very strange about hearing someone belt out “Play that funky music white boy …” in a town where, well, it’s pretty much all white boys. (Well, not all. Ísafjörður does have a Thai population, and a few Hispanic residents as well. But even so.)

The Hokey Pokey, on the other hand, was translated into Icelandic. Which made that even more surreal.

The children got up on stage and danced. After a while, the younger teens danced, too, in front of the stage. The adults didn’t dance, just some foot tapping here and there, but somehow one got the impression they were having fun, too.

Occasionally, a bicycle would cross the square. No one seemed to mind.

At 10:30, when the concert ended, the kids were still wide awake, still dancing, pouring sugar from the local equivalent of pixie sticks into their mouths. When we headed into bed around midnight, young teens were still roaming the streets, still consuming lollipops. Still celebrating.

A fun way to spend a day off. 🙂

(Photos here.)

Got up early (already I’ve begun to think of 7 a.m. as early!) and took the ferry from Stykkishólmur, north across Breiðafjörður and into the Westfjords.

I watched gentle ripples move across the broad waters, watched Stykkishólmur’s green-topped black cliffs recede behind us. I thought of all the people who’d made their livings from these waters, during settlement and saga times, and since then, too. I thought, too, one more time, of the husbands Guðrún had lost to these waters.

Looking back, I could see Helgafell in the distance. I could see, too, Snæfellsjökull, the glacier-capped volcano at the end of Snæfellsnes, the peninsula on whose north shore Stykkishólmur lies. Also, the volcano from which Jules Verne began Journey to the Center of the Earth. Only the lower slopes were visible, though. Unlike Hekla, Snæfellsnes chose to remain hooded with cloud today.

We stopped briefly at flat, cliffless Flatey island, then continued on, docking in the Westfjords.

Even before I got off the ferry, I had the feeling I was in a wilder country than I’d been a couple hours before. The slopes were sharper, more brown mixed in with the green grasses, more sweeping stretches of black rock above where the grasses ended. And there was so much snow, on the higher slopes. Much more than in Stykkishólmur.

We stopped in the tourist center, got our bearings, and then followed a lovely brown dirt road, first along the coast, then across the interior. Lovely in the sense of steep drops and frequent curves. Our guidebook described it as rather alarming, but we were used to this sort of road from our travels in the west in the U.S.–though in snow or rain, I suspect it would have seen far less pleasant. But as it was, it was a glorious drive.

Several times we gained altitude, heading up above the tree (okay, lichen and moss) line, into a jagged rocky gray wilderness. Oddly, though, it wasn’t as volcanic a wilderness as we’d seen in the south, especially in the region’s under Hekla’s grip. But it was very, very barren.

This is an interesting thing about the Westfjords, which I thought about often while there: that the wildest, least settled part of Iceland–also the region, according to some, most known for sorcery–should also be the geologically quietest, the rocks here older than those of most of the rest of the island.

The patches of snow were large, above the moss line. Once, we came to a faded red emergency rescue hut, a place for hikers and other travelers to stay should they find themselves stranded and needing shelter here, a reminder that it doesn’t take much, for barrenness to change from fascinating to threatening.

The wind blew and blew as I examined that hut. Winter or summer, I don’t doubt that the storms in those passes can be fierce.

Not that the wind ever fully stopped blowing for long, during our trip.

Eventually we descended our final pass, and somewhere–near the small town of Þingeyri, perhaps–stopped at a dark gray sandy beach along a fjord. I trudged through its turfy grasses, listened to red seaweed crunch beneath my feet. Nearer the water, that seaweed turned browned, slicker. A single bone, the vertebrate of some animal, lay outlined against the dark sand. That sand felt crumbly between my fingers.

There was no one clear place where the water began; the sand simply became wetter and wetter until, in my shoes at least, I couldn’t walk any further, even though the edge of the water proper was still a ways out.

We drove on, past some small seaside towns, clusters of brightly colored buildings; and past some isolated groups of farm buildings, too, all with sharp green and black hills rising behind them.

We drove through an impressive five kilometer tunnel; sometimes, apparently, it’s easier to dig one’s way under a mountain than to drive over it. That tunnel was long enough that there was even a fork in the road. We took the right branch, and emerged, at last, into the town of Ísafjörður.

Ísafjörður is not a large town–it has somewhat more than 4000 residents–but it is the largest town in the Westfjords. And it doesn’t really feel small, in many ways; it has a deeply settled and European feel to it. Colorful buildings, many with corrugated metal siding, lined the streets, against a backdrop of steep, steep hills. There was peeling paint, given the harsh weather much of the year, but the town wasn’t at all tired-looking for that. Square gray bricks cobbled the sidewalks, and everywhere, it seemed, were children out riding their bikes.

Dress was more casual here than in Reykjavík, which meant us tourists stood out a little less, in our fleeces and walking shoes. Or maybe it was just that there were so many fewer tourists here, far from the Golden Circle tours and the Ring Road. Fewer signs were translated into English here, which we took to be a good sign.

We checked in at our guest house, then walked around a while. Ísafjörður is, of course, along a fjord, which made for pleasant walking, especially given the bright red tulips planted not far from the water’s edge. We visited the local Folk Museum, too, which was focused on maritime history. We did see one tour group there, a bus of French tourists on a cruise who were in and out in 20 minutes. The young people in historical costume outside had clearly practiced their French hellos, and were, I think, a little disappointed when their polite Bonjour received a Góðan daginn back from us. Then again, it’s also possible that our accents were awful, and that they were reacting to that. 🙂

Eventually, after dinner, lnhammer and I settled in to a cafe/bar for a while over cups of tea, one occupied by us, a couple of Icelandic women, a friendly bartender named Hawk (though I can’t imagine that’s also his name in Icelandic), and a fairly drunk Canadian from Nova Scotia who was in Iceland building summer homes for German tourists.

The drunk Canadian shared his Icelandic vocabulary with us; he seemed to have learned rather quickly how to tell women they were beautiful in Icelandic. I had just enough vocabulary in turn to thank him for the compliment.

Around 10 p.m., folks began making their way into town and out onto the streets to hang up; by 11 p.m. quite a few cars were cruising the town, round and round. The sun had dipped beneath a tall hill by then, and the air had chilled up, but the sky was still blue, twilight an hour or more away.

I felt like I was heading to bed early, when I turned in around midnight. The children had mostly stopped riding their bicycles, but everyone else, it seemed, was still awake.

(Photos here.)

Before leaving the lovely turf hostel at Fljótsdalur, I decided to get in a shower–which wouldn’t be of note, except for the fact that the shower in question was an outdoor shower.

Here’s how it worked: First, take a bucket and fill it with hot water at the sink inside the hostel. (Getting hot water used to require boiling, but a couple days before we arrived, the hostel installed a hot water heater.) Then, climb the stairs outside the shower, and pour that bucket into another bucket, one that lies directly atop a showerhead. Turn the spigot on, which starts the water flowing through the showerhead.

Then–knowing that you don’t have much time, because when the bucket is empty, your shower will be over–run around to the shower door, toss your clothes off onto the grass, and jump into the shower.

Stepping out of the shower afterwards, to dress in the chilly gray air of the glacier valley, was actually quite lovely. There’s something exhilirating about standing, just out of the shower, in the open air, staring out at the green grass, at a few sheep grazing on the upper slopes, feeling the wind against your skin.

Not that I would have wanted to do this for more than a few minutes. 🙂

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Shower accomplished, we packed our backpacks, stuffed our sleeping bags into their sacks, and left the Fljótsdalur [valley] behind. My notes for the day say that we left saga country behind, but looking back, that’s not really true.

We drove through flat stretches of yellow and green grasses, with black hills in the distance. A different landscape from home, and yet one that was, in its way, reminiscent of the long stretches of empty interstate one drives through in the desert. We took a tunnel under one fjord; bridges over a couple others; and eventually crossed Snæfellsness [peninsula] and arrived in the pleasant seaside town of Stykkishólmur, which looks out over the waters of Breiðafjörður.

How could I have said we’d left saga country? I’d just finished reading Laxæla Saga, which is all about the men and women who lived along–and drew their livelihood from–Breiðafjörður.

After stopping in at the local tourist office and scoping out camping and hostel options, we backtracked a little to visit Helgafell, location of the farm where Guðrun, one of the main characters of Laxdæla Saga, spent her later years. Guðrun is best known, perhaps, for having had four husbands, and losing them all: one because she divorced him, two because they drowned in the Breiðafjörður; and one, Bolli, because Guðrun pushed him into killing his foster brother, Kjartan, and Kjartan’s kinsmen took revenge on Bolli in turn.

Not that Bolli was quite blameless, to my reading–Guðrun and Kjartan had been more or less engaged before Kjartan and Bolli left for Norway. Bolli returned ahead of Kjartan, told Guðrun that Kjartan was enjoying the company of a woman overseas, and then turned around and proposed marriage to Guðrun also immediately after. Making Bolli either clueless (at best) or manipulative (at worst).

At Helgafell, there is a mountain–more of a hill, really–that was, in the years after settlement, considered sacred to Þór. That hill was also later the site of a chapel, perhaps the chapel where Guðrun spent her days praying, late in life, after her fourth husband died.

There’s a tradition around Helgafell, and we followed it.

First, we walked to Guðrun’s grave, faced east, and made three wishes.

Then, we started up the mountain, not speaking, not looking back. (Only–I forgot about the not looking back part, being focused on the silence, and did turn around, once, when I lost the trail.) I felt–a sort of slow building of power as I walked, broken only during that moment when I turned around, and soon gathered up again.

At the top of the hill, within the stone ruins of the chapel where Guðrun once prayed, I faced east and made my wishes once again, because I wasn’t certain whether they were supposed to be made at the top of the hill or the bottom.

Tradition says that if one follows all the rules, and if the wishes are made with a good heart, they will be granted.

My wishes made, I found I still had no wish to speak. I walked around atop that hill in silence, and as I did I had the very strong feeling–as I had throughout my climb–that I was walking on sacred ground. Sacred to pagans or Christians, I did not know. It did not matter.

I walked down the path in silence, too, and I returned to Guðrun’s grave, where, still not ready to speak, I mouthed the words of a prayer there–a part of a Jewish prayer for the dead, which is also a prayer for peace. I felt my chest catch on the last few words, though my prayer was neither pagan nor Christian, and perhaps did not belong there.

I looked at Guðrun’s grave and thought: Five lovers she lost.

And I thought: I hope you find peace.

And I thought: I am sorry for your loss.

As I walked away, I found I wanted to weep for the woman buried here, for the weight of all that loss, no matter the role she played in same.

I did not take any pictures at Helgafell. I did not need them for my story–and to take them, it seemed, would have been to deny the power of the place, to turn it to nothing more than one more tourist attraction.

And even if I did look back, and perhaps in doing so break the spell–I did not speak my wishes then, and I do not speak them now. Just in case.

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We returned to Stykkisholmur, where we visited a couple of museums. First, Vatnasafn, the Library of Water, recommended by both al_zorra and the woman and the tourist information center. Vatnasafn consists entirely of clear columns, filled with water gathered from glaciers throughout the country. As one walks around, the angles and views of the museum and the town through the columns shifts and changes. On the floor, words describing various sorts of weather–in both Icelandic and English–were written.

It was a playful place. A good place to go after Helgafell, and in doing so return to the lighter day to day world.

We also visited the Norwegian House, focused on domestic life in the mid 19th century. The best part of this was the attic, where all the random historical artifacts that didn’t fit in the museum were stored, unlabeled. We walked past collections of saddles, spinning wheels, birds, eggs, sewing machines, wooden toy trains–all manner of the artifacts of daily life.

One item in the museum proper I do remember: a box of shells and animal horns and bones, which would have been a child’s toys. Earlier, in Reykjavík’s National Museum gift shop, I’d run learned that old bones were toys once, and that children would sometimes make toy farms out of the bones of various animals, each bone representing the creature it had come from. Children cheerfully playing with old bones–there’s something compelling about that image.

The sky was pretty gray and rainy at museum closing time, so we opted for the hostel instead of the campground. We picked up some groceries, cooked dinner, and then, during a lull in the rain, headed out for a walk to the cliffs and lighthouse at the edge of the town.

I found some ravens, huddled on a cliff just across from where the lighthouse stood, and walked down to a spot where I could sit and watch them. Two ravens flew away at my approach, but three remained huddled against the stone, fluffed up against the cold. One raven had its beak tucked under a wing, for warmth perhaps; the second bent its black beak around to preen or groom.

The third raven stared at me, and I stared back. Its eyes flashed gray as they opened and closed, opened and closed.

We were in a different sort of country now than the one we had left that morning: one defined by sea and fjord, not glacier and river.

(Photos here.)

South Iceland is very much Njál’s Saga country, and early this morning we met Lárus, our guide (and a high school teacher), in Hvölsvollur for a tour of some Njála sites. From the start, his love of the saga was clear; he described it to us as “the greatest novel ever written in Icelandic.”

We may have been able to find the hillside in Hliðarendi easily enough, but some of the other sites we would never have found. In a few cases, we might not even have realized that the roads to get there really were passable. 🙂 I don’t know that a simple listing out of those sites would make for a very interesting travelogue–but it was fascinating to get a sense of how close many of the farms where Njála takes place were; many of the characters really were neighbors, living nearly within view of one another. All but Njáll, Gunnar’s friend and neighbor, who would have been 20 kilometers–a four hour ride by horse–away, and thus somewhat isolated from his friends.

We saw the forest–now a bare, low hill–where Gunnar and Njáll would have shared rights to the wood growing there–and also where their wives, Hallgerður and Bergþora, began their own feud, and the killing off of one anothers’ servants. Around the other side of that hill, we saw the area where Skarpheðin may have slid on the ice of the Markarfljót [River], taking Þráin’s head off with his axe as he slid on by. The Markarfljót itself had long since moved on; it tends to dance about, to reroute itself from one location to another over time.

We saw Gunnar’s green hillside, of course, and learned that no one knows exactly where on that hillside Gunnar’s farm was actually located. We saw, too, the area where Gunnar fell from his horse, and looked back at that hillside, and decided not to leave. The ripening hay Gunnar found so lovely was long gone, a field of volcanic gravel and brown grass in its place. Beyond the gravel, we saw another view of the hillside–the same view, perhaps, that Gunnar would have seen long ago. My breath caught at that thought. Caught, in spite of some more reasonable part of my brain still thinking Gunnar foolish not to leave.

We saw a view of a mountain where those who burned Njáll alive in his home hid when the burning was through. That burning is the central action of the second third of Njál’s Saga, in much the way Gunnar’s death is the central action of the first.

And of course we visited Bergþórshvöll, Njáll and Bergþora’s home, the place where the burning occurred. I’d been to Bergþórshvöll once before, on my first trip to Iceland. I’d found the place surprisingly peaceful at the time–but then, I’d also been alone in a rental car with a failing battery, afraid to turn the engine off for fear it wouldn’t start again. I’d been wondering whether, this time, with the car engine off, with some time to walk around, I’d might feel differently.

But no, I didn’t. I stood in a field of green grass, filled with dandelions, and if I didn’t feel any deep peace, neither did I feel any sense of deep tragedy. This was a pleasant place, the land where Njáll and Bergþora died. It was also once again a working farm, and had been for some time. A lot of life–hundreds and hundreds of years worth–had taken place on the site of this tragedy, and perhaps left impressions of its own.

In the distance, 3 km away, we could see the sea. Lárus pointed out a gray island rising out of the water. Surtsey, a new island created by a volcanic eruption in the 1960s–new land visible from the old. Njáll never would have seen that island; he died almost a thousand years too soon.

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I did ask Lárus, during the tour, what he thought of Hallgerður. Like Kristín at Þingvellir, he hesitated a moment before answering. “She was a bad woman,” he told us then. “We don’t like her here. But some people feel differently.” People, I got the impression, who lived elsewhere, perhaps.

I remembered then that Hallgerður was not from the south, had not grown up among these close-knit farms. She came from the western Laxdæla Valley. Which meant Hallgerður really would have been something of an outsider when she came to Gunnar’s home. I began wondering, then, what role that might have played in the saga’s events.

After the tour, we returned to Hvölsvollur, where lnhammer spent a pleasant couple hours at the town’s Njála museum, then got sandwiches from the local grill and headed back to the hillside at Hliðarendi. As Lárus pointed out, once you’ve seen the saga sites, you want to go back to them, to just sit there and think for a while.

So I sat on Gunnar’s hillside, above a pleasant little church, eating my lunch while sheep grazed on the grasses above me. There was a graveyard beside the church, and looking down at it, I found myself thinking: This is a good place. Many people lived good lives here.

Again, if a great tragedy had taken place here, so many lives have been lived here since that the tragedy could no longer be felt. So much time, so much life. The saga stories aren’t the only stories that have taken place here, after all.

We eventually returned to the Fljótsdalur hostel for dinner and some reading and journaling time. While there, we learned that in the U.S. and England, horseshoes are placed above farmhouse doors open side up, to keep the good luck in; but in Iceland, they’re placed open side down, to let the bad luck out. The hostel, owned by an English couple, had one horseshoe facing either way, just to be safe.

We also got in a short hike to a nearby waterfall–volcanic stone crunching beneath our feet, bits of sheep’s fur caught on the rocks. Around midnight, we headed to bed. We were already learning to see twilight, rather than darkness, as a cue for sleep.

In the morning, we would leave the south behind, and head (indirectly, with a loop through the West Fjords first) toward Hallgerður’s country.