Just up the valley from Gunnar’s house, on the ancient road to the South, yet another Icelandic fence demonstrates the Icelandic idea that a fence is a kind of net. You cast it when there is something to catch.
Sturluflöt, Villingadalur
Otherwise, it’s likely to be tangled up on the deck. Sometimes, I know, it’s hard to remember that the island is not a boat!
As we can see here on Hverfisgata In Reykjavik, they’re all ghosts stories and the Icelanders are the ghosts within books their parents read, or they read when they were young themselves.
Charming.
As you can see, the relationships between technology, Icelanders, and time is haunting and complex. It’s a language in and of itself.
Who else do you know who lives so deeply within books that they have a transit system within them?
Reykjavik: always worth a read!
Old Reykjavik Gives a Norse Black Magic Curse to the New One at Sunrise
Borgarnes
No argument, for sure. Who wants a headless dog in a football game?
When you live on the beach, well, that’s nice.
But if you have a church on the beach, you build a wall. That’s nice, too.
A bit dark, though. So it is. But not half so dark as the church!
Kind of a repetition of the motif of the cliff, really, but, heck, in this place, even the sea is a cliff wall.
Skriðnafell
The land has its way with us.
Welcome to Kjarvalshvammur, the Icelandic landscape painter Kjarval’s summer house in East Iceland.
As you can see, the house is the yard (you open the gate, which is the house, to enter it), and the house is a painting (literally) within it. Sounds about right to me!
2. Improved Old Style Hot Spring
3. New Style Hot Spring in the Neo-Viking Style
4. Fully Modern Hot Spring Tech
Laugar í Sælingsdal
Hooked up to the grid, too.
No wonder Icelanders write so many novels. It appears to be a shepherd’s residence, in decay, for the sheepfold I showed you before:
Vettárnes
For four weeks, I studied this stone wall above the old monastery, trying to catch it in a light that revealed it. My gut told me that these rocks were culturally-altered, but nothing came clear that I could identify — nothing that couldn’t also be explained by geological processes of decaying, exposed basalt. The archaeological team came to the same conclusion, so used the rock as support for a viewing platform … while also protecting it from the weather. Clever.
So, what do you think?
I was pretty sure that there was a raven in this sculpted gouge, worn out by some peri-glacial river long ago.
And ravens are important in Norse mythology, and, if you’ll look below the raven’s wing, the raven’s companion, the god Oðin, was known, like Christ, to hang on a cross from time to time.
Was there a language here? It’s simply not possible to tell, although we do know that some of the patients at this hospital had come from Greenland — what kind of glyphing had they brought with them? Deep within the monastery, the rocks suggest some kind of talismanic scratching of simple crosses into the rock in the near-dark, but here, in the light?
Was the old practice of tracing natural forms in the rock to gain their power. One wouldn’t have to carve. One would receive the energy, without any intermediary art. It is the reverse of normal pictograph-making, where a pattern is worn by a finger dipped in fish grease and sand and run thousands of times over the same groove, to transfer power that can then be picked up by the sea, but here, where is no sea, and no humanly-created shapes? Might they be, nonetheless, humanly-imagined and traced? Here, look again, later in the afternoon…
There was a ritual in the Monastery of Maulbronn in Germany (far older than this one), of pouring wine into a crack in the stone, so the simple monks could catch it in their fingers… so good, they said, it was “eleven finger wine.” The spirit of God in the wine, in other words, united with the spirit in the rock, a fine Christian symbol, and came to life through the hands of monks lifted to their mouths. Might the same thing have been happening here? We’ll never know, but we’ll never know if it didn’t, either.
Keep your eyes on the ladies and you will miss the lousy stone work on the cobbles.
Aw, did you look? Well, it’s Reykjavik, so try again…
Still looked? Oh, here. Don’t, please, look at the railing that doesn’t fit the steps.
You managed this time, right?
A Farm in Iceland 
