Author Archives: Harold Rhenisch

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About Harold Rhenisch

www.haroldrhenisch.com

The Secret Runes of the North

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The old Norse runes are well known.

The Codex runicus, a vellum manuscript from c. 1300 containing one of the oldest and best preserved texts of the Scanian law (Skånske lov), written entirely in runes. Source.

 

They were repeated many times and developed shared symbolic meaning, aside from their use as an alphabet suitable for carving in stone.

Nonetheless, there are other runes. At Ásbyrgi, for example, long strings of runes, alphabets essentially, written in a bodily script, are written in long lines across the faces of the cliffs.

The more you stare at them, the more they make sense, although each is written one time only, in constant modifications of basic patterns, no two the same.

The pleasure gained from spending a day reading them is no different from that in a gallery on the European continent, in the face of Rembrandt, Vermeer or Van Dyk, or in a vault in Mainz with Gutenberg’s Bible, or in front of Shakespeare’s First Folio in the British Library.

These are masterworks never repeated, but no less masterworks, and no less languages and texts, for being so.

You can’t read them in the pubs of Reykjavik. You are going to have to go north, so far off of Highway 1 that when you learn to read these runes you won’t tell anyone what they say.

How Much Do Icelanders Love the Land They Live From?

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The cliff at Ásbyrgi, in the far northeast, is full of ravens, trolls and elves. They’ve been camping out there (if you have eyes to see them) from the beginning of the world. If you don’t have such eyes, they are lovely lava flows cut by a paraglacial flood, with a birch, willow and rowan forest worth a trip across Iceland or around the world.

Or, you can just go to Reykjavik.

Now, that’s love for the land! Well done!

The Fully-Illustrated Rules of the Road for Driving Safely in Iceland

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Icelandic road.

Icelandic dragon car.

 

Icelandic driving training school.

Icelandic traffic.

 

Icelandic police.

Icelandic Campground.

Icelandic winter road.

Icelandic winter car.

Icelandic winter car, summer pelt phase.

Icelandic drivers.

 

Wrong kind of car! Wrong kind of car!


Icelandic driving manual: the fine print.

Icelander with good road smarts.

Tourist with good road smarts.

Icelandic accident clean up crew on stand-by duty.

Be safe out there.

The Two Icelands (Well, Really Three)

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There’s the pretty one.


Borgarfjörður Eystri

And across the street, the rusty one. All the fish are gone. Beautiful, though.

 

With ruins in the foreground.


And weird driftwood art.

Neither is Iceland, though. That’s something the Icelanders keep to themselves. What they present to you in its place are charms and gestures.

You know, stuff you remember from the world.

Splitting the Earth Wide Open

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In his novel Sworn Brothers, Gunnar writes engagingly of opening the green skin of the earth, forming it into an arch, and swearing an oath beneath it, before the sod is closed again, taking the oath into deep memory and deep time. So was the voyage that led to the founding of Iceland undertaken, with a few nudges from Oðin, that clever wanderer. One can see signs of this story throughout Iceland today. Have a look. The cairns will guide you to the opening.

Here we are at Geirstaðakirkja. Romantic, huh. Sturdy Viking stuff, machine-planed and the works. Note how the earth is split around the church, in traditional Icelandic turf house style. It’s a thing.

Note as well, that it’s not as romantic as it looks. Whew.

Even a Viking-Christian God needs some water for his sheep and a spare battery for his truck, and where to put that stuff, why, in behind the altar. Naturally. Power is power. But I jest. Look more closely at the surroundings. Here is Gunnar’s split Earth again. This time, a boulder broken by frost, and frost in Iceland is a force from beyond the world and deadly to humans.

Ironically, it also opens the Earth for them, and who steps forth but Lazarus drawn forth by the hand of Christ. You can go into their shared grave in the Earth…

… and you can step out again as a different person, into a different world, one cleansed by the journey…

… and then you can feast.

And then? Why, cross the sea.


With grass breaking across your prow and the wind for a sail.

The Secret of Álfaborg

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You can go visit the elves in Borgarfjörður Estri, if you like.

Off to Álfaborg with you!

You can read all the magical traditions about this rock here: The Alfaborg Story.

Still, it would do your mind well to forget all that and go walking among the stone heads in the rain.

You will find magic enough as the fog rolls in.

As the contours of the land turn to air and water, you will  begin to feel like rain yourself.

Every stone takes on great significance as the sky vanishes.

And that’s the point. The fjords south of here have been abandoned. The weather is just too terrible. You are alone with rock. There is no sky, only earth that has become it, and maybe a homestead you can scratch together out of mud.

The stones, though, are a kind of sight. You see them because out of this dissolving world, they stand out. Birds use them to see. They are, in face, eyes, or islands of sight in the rain.

They are shelter. Whether they are rising from the earth or sinking into it, is not the point, because both are true at once.


On Álfaborg, one sees in at the same time one sees out. It is you who becomes the person of the stone, as you gain its vision, and see with more-than-human eyes.

Don’t even try to come home.

The University of North Iceland Graduation Exam for Everyone

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In Iceland, so the story goes, you knew you were old enough to go fishing in a small boat on the big grey sea by how heavy of a stone you could lift. A pile of stones was much like a university examination is today. Here is the examination set at Skriðuklaustur, more for fun than anything.

Today no one goes to sea for cod in little wooden ships, but there are still lots of rocks to lift and measure yourself by, and, what’s harder, you can lift the with your mind…


The University of North Iceland

… to learn the language of the rain, now that gravity has torn them from their original story. Much fun can still be had.