I like the west of Iceland. It’s a lot more chilled than the south-west – there’s enough to keep you busy but there’s no pressure of “you need to see this, this and this before you go back!” and there’s definitely no crowds. Oh, I don’t say you won’t see a single tour bus sitting at Reykholt or Deildartunguhver sometimes but if you’ve been to the Golden Circle, you’ll often see ten or twenty coaches parked there in the middle of the day. You don’t get that out in the west.
So when I’ve had enough of tourist country, I tend to head for the west and I did it again on this trip. Actually, I spent the best part of two days in the west but I think I did the cultural stuff in one day and only really did Krauma on the other one.
Let’s start at Borgarnes.
Borgarnes is my favourite town in Iceland. Right now, the main road that leads down the peninsula from the commercial end of town and the Ring Road towards the Settlement Centre and the pool is being dug up and for non-locals, finding your way around is difficult but that’s a temporary thing. Borgarnes is named after the farm Borg á Mýrum, which you’ll find just outside town if you’re heading north towards Snæfellsnes. The signpost is small and discreet and it’s very easy to overlook if you don’t know where you’re going.
That’s probably because there’s not much to see at Borg nowadays. There’s a car park and a church and someone’s home next door and that’s about it. Take a peek around the side of the church and you’ll see a low rocky cliff. That’s the Borg of the name – it means Rock. Backalong, and I’m talking the ninth century, this was the home of Skalla-Grím Kveldúlfsson, who appears in Egils saga and in the Book of Settlement. He was the father of Egill Skallagrímsson, hero of Egils saga, and a saga character in his own right – he had a feud with King Harald Fairhair of Norway, which resulted in his family moving out to Iceland. I hasten to add that these were real people who really existed, they’re not just characters from a story. Skalla-Grím’s father Ulf Bjalfason, better known as Kveldulf, wasn’t actually a werewolf, as the saga and his name (Evening Wolf) suggests, but he was a berserker, which was a Viking who fought in a trance-like fury. On the other hand, Snorri interpreted “beserker” as “bare-shirt”, that they fought without armour and as you’ll see later, we should take that into account. So Borg, right here, is where my story begins.
Moving down to Borgarbyggð, the peninsula part of Borgarnes, we come to the Settlement Centre. I’m not a big museum person but I’d make time for this one. It has two exhibits, eachof which takes around half an hour while wearing an audioguide. The first is the Settlement Exhibit. It tells the story of the first settlers in Iceland, between about 874 and 930, between the arrival of Ingólfur Arnarson and the establishment of Parliament. There are two books detailing this, because Icelanders are big writers and big family history fans – Kveldulf and Skalla-Grím both appear in these books. It’s an interesting enough exhibit, with buttons to press and things to ride on but the really interesting exhibit is the Egils saga one.
This is less interactive but more… well, my guidebook describes it as gothic. It’s in the basement, it’s fairly dark with yellowish spotlights and it all smells of roast lamb, as there’s a good restaurant attached. It tells the story of Egils saga in a series of 3D pictures, sculptures, things in the glass floor and it’s really good! That’s partly because Egils saga is by far the most interesting and exciting of all the sagas (give or take Volsung’s saga, which falls a little further into the supernatural/fantasy category rather than the “this actually happened” category) but partly because of the way this exhibit brings it to life. For all it’s the best story, I’ve not read it. I just can’t get into it. I bought a child’s version which takes it down to about forty pages with one paragraph per page and I can’t even read that. But I’ve seen this exhibit twice and so I know the story. Oh! Iceland has some pretty well-known directors and film-makers – why has no one turned this into a movie? People eat up things like Vikings and Game of Thrones – Egils saga falls right in the middle. I’d definitely go and see it!
Anyway. Half an hour or so up the road from Borgarnes is a small village called Reykholt. It’s easy to think it’s nothing but a living history centre but when you wander around, you start to realise that there’s a village hidden up there, and a hotel, and locals ambling around. This was the home of Snorri Sturluson, the Snorri I alluded to earlier.
Snorri was a writer and politician who lived in Iceland between 1179 and 1241. He was a descendant of Skalla-Grím and Egil, he spent part of his married life at Borg and he was assassinated at Reykholt. He’s generally acknowledged as the writer of Egils saga, just about the only saga with an author attached to it. So when I said that bare-shirt was how Snorri interpreted beserker, you should probably keep that in mind when/if you read it. He wrote the Prose Edda, which is one of two books that tell us just about everything we know today about the Norse religion, the other being the Poetic Edda. These two books are known as the Younger Edda and the Elder Edda for their respective ages. And he wrote Heimskringla, a saga about the Swedish and Norwegian kings. I’ve already told you that I can’t read Egils saga but I have read the Poetic Edda. Incidentally, if you’re tempted by Neil Gaiman’s book Norse Mythology, he’s basically just rewritten the Eddas. Read the originals, they’re astonishingly readable for their age and contain far more detail than a modern writer could squeeze in without making it sound unnatural. (The links to those books are affiliate links to bookshop.org, which supports local bookshops rather than Jeff Bezos, and gives me a couple of pennies if you buy anything from them.)
Today, there’s very little left of the Reykholt Snorri would recognise. There’s a church and exhibition centre, which appears to be closed on Sunday even though its Google Maps pin say it’s open. There’s a smaller church in the graveyard – now, that does allegedly contain Snorri’s grave. There’s a big patch of gravel on your right if you go in the front gate with a stone in the middle that just says Sturlungareitur on it. We don’t know for certain that Snorri’s buried there, along with other members of his family, but it seems reasonably likely, other than that very few graves last 800 years.
The bit that everyone’s interested in here is Snorralaug, Snorri’s pool. It’s a small round pool clad in stones which is supposed to be hot enough that you’re warned not to bathe in it. I stuck a hand in and it’s stone cold. I don’t think this is is Snorri’s actual pool. I think it’s a recreation built from the archaeological remains. Likewise, the wooden door that leads to a short section of passage is absolutely a recreation. Snorri did have an underground passage that led from his house to his pool. Well, I was there on a reasonably sunny day in August and it was freezing. It’s quite sensible to want a covered walkway for getting between the two when you’re wet and naked. I mean, I don’t know that Snorri would have used it naked but what did thirteenth century men’s swimwear look like? And he was at his own home.
Snorri was Lawspeaker twice, the highest office in an Iceland that wasn’t ready to take real authority. The Lawspeaker announced the Law at Parliament and then the Law was upheld by four regional courts and a kind of supreme court as a fifth established a bit later. The early Icelanders came to this uninhabited land precisely to escape authority – many of them had grown tired of kings and earls and taxes and this really was the land of the free. Fast-forward a couple of hundred years and we have Snorri. He became friendly with the Norwegian king Haakon IV. The other chieftains didn’t like this – Haakon hoped to use Snorri to bring Iceland into the Norwegian kingdom. Snorri became unpopular, Norway fell into conflict, Haakon went off Snorri as well and the upshot of it all was that 70 men, acting on Haakon’s behalf, raided Reykholt and murdered Snorri in the cellar, or possibly in his private passageway. Haakon continued his mission and in 1262, more than twenty years later, Iceland unified with Norway after all.
And now let’s run down to Þingvellir, the Parliament Fields and one of the big three stops on the Golden Circle. This is where all the legal stuff happened.
Let’s rewind a little bit. Settlement between 874 and 930 as people largely left Norwegian authority, Parliament established in 930. Broadly, that would probably have been around the time the first settlers’ grandsons came of age and began inheriting, grandsons who would not have experienced life under kings and earls. Is it human nature to crave authority? We’d all say no and yet…
So Parliament was established in this rift valley. A river was rerouted to provide water and buðs were built, encampments with low stone walls over which a kind of tent roof was stretched. There’s still some evidence of buðs around Þingvellir if you know where to look. The Law Rock, where the Lawspeaker stood to speak the Law, is just a best-guess. You can’t miss it, it’s a got a big flag flying from it and a platform for better explaining the history to tour groups. But as for precisely where it was in 930… well, a big earthquake about five hundred years lowered the floor of the plains by a good few metres and the early Icelanders didn’t draw detailed maps for future reference. Parliament itself, according to the Settlement Centre in Borgarnes, was held down below the Law Rock, next to the rerouted river.
Oh, it was the big political and legal event of the year, when all injustices were fomally settled and so on, but it was also the social event of the year. Heads of household came from all over the country and so did a lot of their household. There would have been drinking and partying and competitions and games and it would have been a bit of a festival. Your nearest neighbours could be quite a distance away and people who’d been family friends back in Norway could be on the other side of the country. But once a year, you could almost guarantee that you’d meet up with them again. There would also be people looking for work, treating it as a big job fair, there would be the 10th century equivalent of sideshow entertainers, stalls and services, beer-sellers, skyr-sellers and I daresay you could find someone who’d sell you a plate of roast lamb for those days when you were just too busy to cook for yourself.
In 1262, as I said, Iceland became part of Norway. The Lawspeaker position was abolished and power was held by the Norwegian king and his officials. Then Denmark came along. Olaf II of Denmark, aka Olaf IV of Norway, died aged 16 and without heir in 1387. Through various grandparents, he had been king of both Denmark and Norway, as you can tell from his titles and he had also been “true heir of Sweden” via his grandfather Magnus IV, who had been forced to abdicate. Officially, Albert was King of Sweden, but it happened via something of a revolution. Olaf’s mother, Queen Margaret, was instrumental in creating the Kalmar Union and that led to the Dano-Norwegian Realm better known as Denmkar-Norway which in turn led to the Danish Trade Monopoly, a particularly dark period in Iceland’s history. Trade was controlled entirely by and with Denmark between 1602 and 1786 – and by “with Denmark”, I mean most of it was “with Copenhagen”. But that’s not really relevant to Þingvellir. The relevant bit is that Denmark was an absolute monarchy, which meant no local Parliament in Iceland. The Alþing continued to exist but it didn’t make laws or run the country anymore and it was finally disbanded in 1800.
But that wasn’t the end! Iceland is a modern, democratic country. Of course it has a Parliament! It was re-established in 1845 in Reykjavik, with members selected by the Danish king, regained actual power in 1874 , got home rule in 1903 and Iceland finally became independent again in 1944 – well, it started in 1940 but it’s a lot of paperwork to sever two countries during a world war. Since 1800, Parliament has been held in Reykjavik and the new Parliament House, which is still used today, was opened in 1881. Of course, it’s been a while and life has changed and I believe it’s currently having some major extension work.
One more stop – and this one I did the day before I headed for the west. Sorry about that. My cultural day was already long enough and I wasn’t going to re-do things 36 hours later for a blog post I didn’t know I would be writing. I made a stop at Laugarvatn on the Golden Circle. It was pouring with rain and freezing so I ran off to Fontana, because when the weather is revolting in Iceland, seek hot water. I spent the night at the little campsite over the road.
Now, Laugarvatn is interesting because there are hot springs in the lakeshore. These days they feed the spa – the steam rooms are built directly over the vents – and you’ll see them on TV being used to bake rye bread for every TV chef and Zac Efron. But in 1000AD, the king of Norway, Olafur Tryggvason, decided that although he didn’t actually have any authority over Iceland, he wasn’t having them worshipping Odin and Thor and all those heathen types. He’d gone around Europe converting them to Christianity, he founded the city of Trondheim complete with cathedral and he wasn’t afraid to use violence to get his way. Yes, the history of murder and torture in the name of a supposedly-loving God began a long time ago. King Olafur sent missionaries to Iceland – the first couple failed but Þangbrand, the fiery, eventually got things going. He converted two chieftains (one of whom held the wonderfully Tolkien-esque name Gizur the White) who took the issue to the Alþing and Lawspeaker Þorgeirr Þorkelsson signed it into law, with the compromise that it was a public conversion and people could worship who they liked in private. The chieftains marched off to be baptised there and then. Oh, no at Þingvellir! The early Icelanders were practical people. The river and lake at Þingvellir were freezing! The warm lake at Laugarvatn was only twenty or miles away. Definitely worth the forty mile round trip to be baptised in warm water!
And that, in a slightly jumbled order, is the history of Iceland in five easily-doable stops. I did them all except Laugarvatn in one day but there’s no need to try to pack things in too much – you can definitely spend longer in the west and you can definitely spend longer on the Golden Circle.