Trotting and Tölting

Mig dreymir hesta (I dream of horses)

Iceland is a country of only one horse breed, but even if they had been hard to find (which they’re not), you know I would have found them eventually! Yesterday I had what I might title my best adventure here yet. The réttir was wonderful and Gullfoss is beautiful, but how can you compete with a two-and-a-half-hour horseback ride through lava fields? I have now experienced the Icelandic horse’s "tölt"—its famous fourth gait. (It’s a powerful, quick pace similar to the smooth gait of a Paso Fino; if you’re interested, check youtube for “Icelandic horse tolt” and you’ll find plenty of videos.) What more could I ask for from my Icelandic adventure than that?

As always, I couldn't take pictures on the drive over, and we weren't permitted to take photos while we were riding (you can imagine the havoc that could ensue with the combination of feisty horses and riders more interested in their cameras than the reins), so I'll do my best just to describe what it was like. Forgive me my florid tendencies and proclivity for simile; Iceland makes even the most prosaic observer wax poetic, and horses have always been my muse, so this post was doomed to effusiveness from the start.

The drive from Reykjavik to Eldhestar (the name means Fire-Horses) is like driving along the bottom of a drained seabed: unearthly shapes in stone covered with moss so thick it looks as though it could only have grown underwater. There are no trees and no grass in the highlands.

A comic interlude for which I am grateful not to have photographs: to protect us against the weather, we were given huge Michelin-Man-style suits, which would have been big on me in any case, but naturally they ran out of smalls before I got to the front of the line and I was given a large. The legs had to be rolled up at least ten inches in order for me to walk, and the crotch sat squarely between my knees. We were matched up with horses according to our riding experience, given a thirty-second lesson on horsemanship (“What was that last part? How do we stop?” a first-time-rider friend asked me anxiously), and we set out. Resume poetic:

We rode out from the farm alongside a sleepy stream, on a trail between grassy meadows used for grazing and, a few, for hay. On the straight, level stretches, we would “tölt.” My little mare, Mosa, a smoky blue roan, is newly trained and hasn't yet mastered the discipline of the gait, but I was able to persuade her to do it on and off, until she got excited and leapt into an extended trot instead.

We crossed the stream and the horses plunged in as though they didn't notice the water was only just above freezing. They even stopped knee-deep to drink! We kept riding in the grassy lava fields, where other horses grazed in the shadows of bizarre lava formations overgrown with moss. Some horses lay in the sun or stood on hillocks like goats, watching us impassively as we tölted by. We felt honored to be noticed by these kings of the plains.

From high up on a hill we could see the whole harvest-yellow valley stretched out below us, crossed with trenches dug in the lava, with the lava heaped into walls right alongside the ditches, dividing the meadows from the hayfields. The sky was a pale winter blue—so vast it might have been an inverted tropical ocean—and the mountains stretched broad beneath it, capped with a dusting of snow. The plain was dotted with horses of every color, and at every bend and turn we discovered more of them, grazing and gazing and popping out of the brush like natural animate outgrowths of the lava mounds.

Up on that hillcrest, with my beautiful little Mosa under me tossing her head in the clear cold air and urging us faster! faster!, I thought I could never be unhappy if this ride could simply go on and on forever.


There is a scene in Njal’s Saga in which the heroic Gunnar, outlawed and condemned to choose exile or death, stops on his way to the ships to gaze at his homeland. In a moment of descriptive feeling incredibly rare in the laconic sagas, he says, “How lovely the slopes are, more lovely than they have ever seemed to me before, golden cornfields and new-mown hay. I am going back home, and I will not go away.” On our ride, I think I understood, if just for a moment, what would make an Icelander die for his bare little hayfields huddled on this tiny isolated island just below the Arctic Circle.

We passed a marshy lowland bird sanctuary and the sound of our little sure-footed horses stirred up great flights of birds. Dozens of geese, half a dozen pairs of swans, even a falcon wheeled over us, and the swans splashed down nearby like seaplanes in formation. Passing a farm where a shaven waterdog barked at us excitedly and a gaggle of white domestic geese ambled out of our way, we crossed into more meadows, these densely populated with hundreds of grassy hillocks just a foot or two high, and not much wider. What they are and what strange process forms them I do not know, but seeing their hunched forms casting shadows on their neighbors, you can imagine why the legends tell of trolls caught out at daybreak and turned to stone.

The trails here were alternately muddy and grassy, and our horses' hooves cracked through frozen puddles like shattered glass and whispered through the rippling grass like waves hissing on a beach. But the wind roared with a fervor it usually reserves for mountaintops in winter, with nothing on the plains to check its rush from the highland to the sea.


Our ride ended back at the arena where we began, and we slid down from our horses (not a long drop), wind-burned and deafened, saddle-sore, unable to feel our face, hands, or feet, and (if I may only speak for myself) as blissfully happy as you could ever imagine.