Land of myths and legends
Jill Worrall finds trolls and elves have a lot to answer for in this geologically active country.
Apparently, staff at the Reykjavik Saga museum sometimes answer the phone and dispense audio headsets while clad in Viking-style helmets and animal pelt jackets.
The day I visited was obviously mufti day as the young man on duty was more Icelandic Goth in his black jeans, T-shirt and multiple piercings. But once into the museum proper it was goodbye 21st century and hello to a thousand years of Irish monks, Viking raiders and settlers, civil war, Norse gods and Norwegian kings, Black Death and witch-burnings.
The Saga museum highlights key events in the history of Iceland – not all of them violent – there were intrepid explorers and prophetesses, noble rulers and pious bishops; but the impression on emerging beside Reykjavik’s thriving harbour was of a nation where myth and legend are interwoven with centuries of tumultuous human history.
While it’s Iceland’s icefields, glaciers, thermal areas and volcanoes that are the drawcards for most visitors, you don’t have to be in Iceland very long to realise that explaining and appeasing the islands’ rather overactive natural phenomena has a long tradition.
Iceland is one of the most geologically active places on the planet. The North Atlantic rift – where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet – actually runs through the country. At Thingvellir I stood in the canyon between the two.
Cliffs of jagged volcanic basalt reared up on either side, in the distance the landscape was ablaze with autumnal colour where once it would have been glowing with lava. It was an eerie sensation.
Iceland is also situated above a mantle plume, an upsurge of abnormally hot magma. There are about 130 active volcanoes and the most memorable eruption in recent years came when Eyjafjallajo¨ kull exploded, its ash cloud disrupting more than 100,000 flights and tying broadcasters’ tongues in knots for good measure.
Iceland’s earliest settlers, who probably arrived about 9th AD, did not know why their homeland was so often beset with natural catastrophes.
So, unsurprisingly in a landscape full of smoking volcanoes, steaming streams and lakes, boiling cauldrons of mud, fantastical shapes created by lava, ice and the Atlantic, tales of gods, trolls and elves evolved as well.
Estimates vary, but between 10 per cent and about 50 per cent of Iceland’s population may believe in the huldufolk or hidden people who live in Iceland’s rock-strewn landscape. The huldufolk are elves who dislike humans, destroying their homes, and who also have an aversion to electricity, crosses and churches.
There are places in Iceland where roadworks have come to a halt and roads diverted or narrowed to avoid certain rocks where its believed huldufolk live. Some folklore experts believe huldufolk are partly a way Icelanders over the centuries have protected children, especially from the perils of their environment.
Subconsciously Iceland guides seem to have absorbed this approach to dealing with Iceland’s often hazardous outdoors.
Many of the four million tourists who visit Iceland each year come from highly urbanised societies and are thus possibly unprepared for avoiding stepping into boiling mud, sticking one’s hand into erupting geysers, wading into mountainous Atlantic waves or standing too close to some of Iceland’s spectacular waterfalls to take selfies (all of which I saw taking place)
At the start of my circumnavigation of the island I was yet to witness these examples of tourist stupidity so was initially rather irritated by my guide Kirstin’s dire warnings issued almost every time we stepped out of our vehicle.
‘‘Be very, very careful on the cliff edge,’’ she told me in serious tones as we went to see the basalt columns on Snaefellsnes Peninsula, which incidentally is steeped in troll mythology.
A few days later in Husavik on Iceland’s northern coast, I boarded a whale-watching boat. Clad in bright orange survival onesies, all of us were given a lengthy lecture about the dangers of falling into the North Atlantic and what to do if we did. We spent over an hour following two humpback whales, no one went overboard.
Later I visited the town’s whale museum, the only one in the world to have a full skeleton of a blue whale. Along with displays dedicated to whale species in Icelandic waters, its whaling industry (and even a panel featuring our own Golden Bay pilot whale strandings) was information about local whale mythology. Apparently, we’d been lucky to have encountered two of the country’s good rather than evil whales. Whalers used to go to sea protected against the latter by talismans such as mashed fox testicles.
Iceland’s eastern fjords were tranquil and sunlit when we passed through. We skirted the calm bay of Eskifjordur where a goddess is believed to have protected the fjord from marauding Algerian pirates. Our destination was the Vatnajokull icefield Europe’s third largest, with a detour to Hofn’s columnular basalt cliffs where Kirstin pointed out a sign about ‘‘deadly sneaker waves’’.
She’d left the best to last. After I’d survived a trip among the icebergs of the Jokulsarlon lagoon we stopped at the glacier information centre. ‘‘It is very, very dangerous on the glaciers,’’ Kirsten intoned and took me to a cheerful display of the equipment and clothing that was all that remained of two visitors who had been foolish enough not to have heeded the warning signs.