In all her finery!
Hellissandur, Christmas Day, 2019
Queen of the Sea
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Monthly Archives: December 2020
The Four Eyed Raven of Hellissandur
In Indigenous traditions on the North Eastern Pacific shore, Raven steals the light. In Ísland, he collects eyes. The more, obviously, the better.
A Culture of Settlement
One thing that makes Iceland dramatically beautiful is that its culture and landscape look like they were just plunked there recently and haven’t really taken yet.
That’s what you get after 1100 years of cultural replacement in response to environmental erosion. With very few exceptions, the buildings are less than a century old. With very few exceptions, the living landscapes are far younger. A century ago, the scrub above would have looked much like the outwash plain below it. The people, whose memory is longer, are in a constant state of change, unsettlement and resettlement, just as it was when they first arrived, a little over 1100 years ago. Settlement was the originating impulse, but it was driven by men, who felt unsettled in Norway. These tensions are still written in every moment of the land.
Old Red Nose, a North Icelandic Tale
In the North East of Iceland, there is a cape with Eidars and puffins, called Raudanes, or Red Cape. “Nes” is an old term for a nes, or nose, of land, in the same way that mountains have shoulders, backs and arms, continents have icecaps, mountains have jökulls, as the Icelanders say, little jackets of ice, little land-based icebergs, or glaciers, and seacoasts, like mountains, have caps, or heads. On the coast, these caps are capes, in English, and they often have noses.
This is the nose of Red Nose itself. One notes that it is a dragon. Now, how fine is that!
Spot the Gull! A Fine Icelandic Tourist Game
Up here in North Iceland, with the cities far away, one makes one’s own fun. When you tire of the Spot the Gull game, you can start in on the spot the troll nest game, which is just as much fun.
After all, Gunnar Gunnarsson moved to Denmark and became a writer, not precisely in that order, because he was given a walnut for Christmas, and raced its shell down the parsonage stream, imagining it was a big sailing ship. So, if little Gunnar could do it, we can look more closely, too.
I wouldn’t play this game in Reykjavik, though. They might think it kind of country bumpkinish. As they thought Gunnar was.
A Troll Finds its Lost Sheep
Hvallág
As the sheep is stonier, I think it can wait the little earth-and-grass guy out.
Troll House in Kopasker
North Iceland is so underpopulated, that in Kopasker one farmer has built a house for trolls.
Better the troll you know and feed than the wild one that comes in from the crowded South and feeds on you.
Icelandic Pearls Are a Little Different Than Others
You won’t find them in the glitzy shops on Laugavegur (Laundry Road) in Reykjavik, but if you go out to the Fossá (The River of the Falls), right where it empties into the Sélvallavatn (Lake in the Valley of the Seals) in the Berserkjahraun (The Berserker Lava Field), you might.
See them? No? That’s because you have to stomp down through the drifts in the wind and get down on your hands and knees beside the river, just before it touches the frozen lakeshore. See them? Under the goofy elf sheep of snow?
No? Then closer, it is. (Aren’t pearls worth it?)
Just like shark teeth.
The Naustá Enters the Greenland Sea So Sneakily
It’s a mysterious little river in North East Iceland, appearing and disappearing, like it’s playing tag.
And then it’s gone.
Wait, there’s an encore:
Look at that: tiny river, huge falls. Now, that’s a great trick!
Dunes at Work
Look at them here, swallowing up a salmon farm on the estuary of the Brunná.
Sand just won’t stay where you put it.
A Farm in Iceland 