One Week + Two Adventures = Long Post

Fögur er hlíðin svo að mér hefir hún aldrei jafnfögur sýnst, bleikir akrar en slegin tún (Fair is the slope, fairer than it has ever seemed to me before, the gold-brown meadows and the mown hayfields—Gunnar’s words in Njáls saga when he decides to die on his home farm rather than live in exile abroad)

Even with the remarkably good weather threatening to end very suddenly this week, we managed to squeeze in two more adventures in the last days before winter. The first was a class trip to the territory where Njáls saga takes place, in the south, between Selfoss and Vík, and the second was a four-girl trek up Mount Esja. First the field trip:


It’s remarkable how tied the sagas are to the land here. I’ve already mentioned how Icelanders in the know never seem to tire of pointing out a hill and saying, “That’s where such-and-such and event took place in so-and-so’s saga.” Whether the events are fictional or not, they are set in very specific locations, most of which still have the same names as they did a thousand years ago, and many of which look very much as they did when the stories are set—if perhaps without the trees, which were all cut down by the end of the Middle Ages.

We stopped at several places on our trip, most amusingly at a place in Hvolsvöllur called the Saga Center, where we ate watery cream-of-green-bean soup in an imitation Viking hall and wandered around amid freakish four-horned sheep taxidermied to the walls. Several members of our group go a hold of fake swords and replica tunics and had quite the epic battle in the parking lot. (I was not among them: I was transfixed by the demon sheep-heads!)

The real meat of the trip, though, was our stop at Hlíðarendi, the farm of the hero Gunnar, Njáll’s best friend, and then the stop at the site where Njáll himself was burned to death in his own home. Such are the wholesome contents of the sagas.

Hlíðarendi is still a farm, now with a charming nineteenth-century church and graveyard. It sits on a steep hill (the name means “Slope’s end”) overlooking the incredibly flat valley—also still farmland—that is bordered on the far side by the glacier Eyjafjöll, and the sea. When it’s clear, you can see the Westman Islands off the coast. It was probably while riding across this very plain that Gunnar spoke those famous words in praise of Iceland’s beauty; I referred to them before, in my entry about our horseback-riding trip.

The place is indescribable. We stood on the precipice staring, open-mouthed, barely breathing. The sight even inspired my avowed atheist friend to turn to me and say, “Whoever wrote the Bible must have been thinking about this place when he described what the Creation looked like.” Especially at the moment when we saw it, with the sun in our faces over the ocean and the blue-black clouds hanging over the glacier, it wasn’t hard to imagine what it must have been like when the light was separated from the darkness. I couldn’t help but think also of The Magician’s Nephew, when Aslan walks back and forth across the plains, singing Narnia into existence. It made all of us, if only for a moment, spiritual beings.

The area where Njáll was burned (Bergþorshvoll) is striking in less dramatic ways. It’s a quiet private farm, no ruins, no evidence that anything special ever happened there (though the burning, tragically, was in all likelihood a historical event). In fact, we were practically loved to death by two farm dogs to whom we were clearly the most exciting thing that had ever stumbled upon their corner of the world. It’s a lovely if unremarkable spot—it’s impossible to believe that something so terrible could have taken place there.

But on to Esja! We’d been told by friends for the past several weeks that they’d recently gone on the hike up the mountain and really enjoyed it. It’s supposed to be the home of Grýla, the she-troll whose twelve sons are the Yule Lads—the Icelandic version of a less-friendly Santa Claus, coming down into town each of the twelve days of Christmas and stealing as well as giving presents. I’ve wanted to climb Esja since I arrived and discovered there are trails up to one of the peaks (you might possibly have noticed my constant, bordering on obsessive, photographing of the mountain—in fact, the picture behind the blog title is of Esja). So yesterday we organized ourselves and took the long bus ride to the trailhead.

So late in the season? you might ask. Well, we’d checked the weather and it was supposed to be cold (about 37 degrees) but not rainy, and even though Esja was hiding her head in thick clouds, we were determined. What we didn’t bargain on was the wind! The only comparison I can make to the wind on a bad day in Iceland is what it feels like trying to walk across an open area in Nebraska in the middle of winter. The force is so powerful it knocks you off your feet (quite literally—I was thrown to the ground more than once!), it wrings tears from your eyes, it snatches the breath right out of your lungs (is this why the Icelanders say “yes” while breathing in instead of out?).

More sensible souls might have turned back, but actually there were quite a few people braving the slopes—and not just tourists, which I took for a good sign, as tourists tend to be rather stupid when it comes to taking risks. So, taking our cue from the Icelanders, up we went! On a good, calm day, I am told it takes about three hours to hike up and then back down (the vertical height is about half a mile, but the trail is about two and a half, one direction); it took us almost five hours. I’ll admit I’m not in as great shape as I might be, and I had to stop and rest quite a bit—fortunately there are plenty of friendly seat-height rocks along the way—but mostly it was the unrelenting wind, which was so incredibly strong that it frequently took all my strength just to move forward a few inches at a time. I felt barely tethered to the earth and wished for about thirty pounds of ballast in my bookbag.

Once you get past the first mile and a half or so, the trail gets much steeper, and in fact I lost the path entirely at several points and wandered along the heath toward where I saw the other hikers (my group got rather strung out along the trail), and I even ended up on the wrong face of the mountain once and had to backtrack. I felt very much like Frodo (can you blame me?) and not just a little like Bjartur from Independent People, if anybody has read that. The last hundred vertical yards are more scrambling up rocks than walking; they’ve put a few chains in the slope for people to pull themselves up on the steepest parts. I kept intending to quit and turn back, but then I was tempted farther and farther up—I was so close to the top, how could I give up?

And I made it. All the way to Þverfellshorn, which is not the highest point on the mountain but is nevertheless the end of the trail. It would probably have been a great view if it was clear, but the point was entirely in the clouds, which gave the impression of being much higher than it was. It was (as my Boston friends are fond of saying) wicked cold up there. The wind was no less powerful than it was on the lower slopes, there was no sun, and it was actually blowing ice crystals from some unseen source in the clouds. I hurriedly signed the guestbook (thanking Grýla for the visit) and began the long descent to the parking lot.

By the time the four of us girls had all reached the bottom (not before I fell several more times, my feet swept out from under me both by the wind and by loose rocks), our legs were about as steady as limp noodles, our faces were wind-burned and our noses chapped, and it was hailing. We looked at each other and kept saying, “Can you believe we just did that?” Next time we’ll check the wind-speed as well as the weather before we head up. But what an adventure!