On a rainy afternoon, I stopped by the Settlement Exhibition right in the middle of downtown Reykjavik. It’s part of Reykjavik City Museum – there are five exhibitions in the group which also includes Árbær Open Air Museum, the Museum of Photography, the Maritime Museum over at Grandi and Viðey Island, which I did a very quick evening trip over to back in about 2013. I’d have liked to pop back over but it’s a bit of a trek to the ferry on foot and it only runs for two hours at weekends. That said, I had the time on Sunday. Anyway, I finally crossed the Settlement Exhibition off my list.
The main entrance is 125m up the road from the Parliament Building, on the corner – and it’s actually underground. This place is an archaeological dig, left in situ. Over 1000-odd years, street level has increased by about two metres so you go in, pay at reception, leave your stuff in a locker (it’s far too warm to be carrying February clothes and your waterproofs for a couple of hours when you could just lock them away) and go in. The main attraction is a 10th century longhouse which was built right here. Everything around and above it has been dug out and it’s now in a huge dimly-lit room with banks of screens around the sides.
As you walk around, you can see what life was like around the longhouse. The Tjornin, the big pond, was here when the early Icelanders arrived. It was separated from the sea by a gravel bank in those days, which has now become 400-odd metres of city and probably reclaimed land but it was here. Ingolfur Arnarson knew the same pond I know. Just about everything else would have been different, though. Reykjavik didn’t really become more than a village until maybe 200 years ago. In the age of Settlement, this would have been farmland, with lots of trees, hot springs and columns of steam rising up from the beach.
There are buttons that light up certain areas of the longhouse so you can better identify them. There’s a fire projected onto a piece of perspex, in an unusually large fireplace which I think suggests it was someone of fairly high status who lived here. There’s a porch which was a later edition. There’s a wall outside which was part of an animal pen. Most importantly, there’s ash from a large eruption that happened in Iceland in 871, give or take two years. Ingolfur, Iceland’s first permanent settler, moved here in 874 so it’s a pretty good marker of things that happened around the time of the Settlement. Had he moved here a year or three before the eruption, the evolution of Icelandic society might have been very different – would he and his brother/in-law/in blood have stayed? By all accounts, the Torfajökull eruption was “catastrophic”. It’s the best part of 150 miles from Reykjavik and there’s ash from it in the walls of this house. That’s how far away its impact was felt.
At the back of the dimly-lit Settlement Museum was a corridor, all bright white lights and small artefacts on the walls. It reminded me very strongly of a spaceship, especially compared to the long low longhouse room. What on Earth is this place? Well, it’s a bit of Reykjavik history, leading to a dark room at the bottom of some stairs with some more Reykjavik history and a lift labelled “Time Machine”. At the bottom, in red, was 871-1906 and above, in white, 1940-2020 and 1906-1962. Curious, I went up the stairs. Is this the same museum? What is going on here?
Well, upstairs was “the story continues”, the modern history of Reykjavik, with a set of screens pretending to be the windows of a bus and a large model of Reykjavik Domestic Airport giving the history of the city becoming a city. On the middle floor was a model of Reykjavik with digital binoculars to let you examine it more closely, then around the corner was a reception desk and gift shop and opposite that, a model house.
There was a little model grocery store, presumably from somewhere around the 50s and behind that, an old-fashioned room which was apparently once the home of the local bishop or important priest. Evidently I didn’t take a photo of that information board. But the weirdest thing was peering out of the windows and finding myself overlooking Ingolfstorg, the concrete square at the very end of Austurstraeti, which I regard as an extension of Reykjavik’s main tourist street.
This was where I’d bought my star-shaped crisps and chocolate this morning while waiting to phone Hvammsvik, this was where I washed my feet in a fountain back in 2012 and although this was only 65m up the road from the building I’d entered, I hadn’t really had the feeling that I’d travelled while prowling the museum. I guess mostly it just goes to show how disorienting it is to be underground. Above ground, later on, I counted that I’d bypassed four reasonable-sized buildings without even realising.
Astonished as I was to be transported like that, I don’t think there was a lot in the 1906-onwards section that particularly interested me. The longhouse was worth the visit, though – an archaeological dig in situ. Now that’s interesting. It’s hard to imagine that someone lived right here, right in downtown Reykjavik, 1000 years ago. On a less philosophical note, it’s a great place to escape the rain and winter weather for a couple of hours.