This half-frozen waterfall just above tideline, with its troll and its troll sheep, is not on any tour route and, like most of the beautiful places in Iceland, is not on any map.
The really beautiful stuff you have to find on your own. When you do, after that effort, you’re not likely to tell anyone where it is, and it wouldn’t matter if you did, because the moment would be past. This is called respect.
In Borg
Welcome to the idea that before the world of book knowledge became dominant in human culture, the opening of the world through human imagination had real and measurable effects many layers deep — ways of opening human imagination through the world, in a series of moments in which world and imagination flow without direction, together, from world to mind and mind to world, at once. It is the way of this planet.
A Waterfall Brings the Dead to Life near Höfn in Borgarbyggð.
Of course, these effects cannot be measured, but the effects of ignoring this responsibility of care can, even when the reasons are sound, as is the case with the abandoned house in the image below: cold, starvation, crushing poverty and isolation in a transition from a barter economy to a capitalist one in Twentieth Century Iceland.
Grief in Snaefellsnes
We have all sought a new world, as the people who lived here did. There is, however, only the old one. It is time to come home to the Earth, as our indigenous brothers and sisters have been asking, for a long time.
Winter Settling into Borgarbyggð
Borgarbyggð
This is a waterfall. It is not a swan.
Ah, but this is a waterfall, too, the same one, in fact, a little later in time, and flowing up against 8500 year old lava, and it is not a swan, either.
Many days and years of this waterfall are not swans either, but they do lure swans down from the sky, and become filled with their spirit.
It would be fair to say they were their spirit all along.
Some things take time, that’s all.
In his speech “Our Land”, with which he tried to prevent a German invasion of Iceland in 1940, Gunnar Gunnarsson wrote that the long months of Icelandic winter darkness were as much a part of the Icelandic soul, in a positive way, as the long months of light, and that an Icelander, a person of the land, could not be removed from it. I read that as an attempt at planting the suggestion in Hitler’s head that an Icelander was a true person of the land, and a German was not — either in Germany or Iceland. Those were dangerous and courageous words, whether they were true or not. There is a report that after Gunnar gave this speech in forty cities in Germany and Occupied Europe, Hitler screamed at him and threatened him with … wedon’t know with what, but most writers threatened by Hitler and his inner circle were threatened with death should they ever write again. Gunnar scarcely did. Was it that he was frightened? Or was it that his work was over, because the British invaded within two weeks, denying any possible German foothold? The answers are lost to history, but the observations about the land remain. I have come in these months of darkness to try to understand. Look how dark it is here:
Looking South
What do you think? Is this darkness?
Looking North
In his book Advent, another of Gunnar’s psychological manipulations, Gunnar wrote about a man’s true friends, a dog, a ram and a horse, and how they gave their lives freely to a man who one day would have to take those lives.
Sheep Will Roam
Gates optional.
In Advent, Gunnar was writing about many things: Christ, writing, Gunnar, and the Germany of 1936. Was he telling his German readers that Hitler would ask for their death one day, in ways without the Christian mercy or poetic symbolism of his own faith? We will never know (although it seems likely), but the animals remain, as human companions in this vast space.
Is that darkness? Is that an empty space? Is it people who spring from this land, or something else? Faith perhaps? At any rate, people are not alone here.
And, let’s face it, with his lines about darkness, Gunnar was not talking about Iceland. He was talking about something symbolic, something psychological, something that did not come from a world of light but which was expressed, in Gunnar’s Iceland, in a world of light. It is not something which falls easily into non-Icelandic categoreis. The image below shows a place of human habitation in Gunnar’s world.
Notice how the house is not a dwelling. The land is the dwelling. The house is a small shelter to protect human weakness, but the dwelling place is out in the fields, between stone and sky. Even the water flows with primal force here: the sky made liquid.
Even the setting sun. This is Borgarfjördur, where Gunnar bought property from his book sales, before moving back to East Iceland from Denmark in 1939, shortly before his disastrous (or successful?) speaking tour in wartime Germany. This would be the land and darkness he was talking about, here in one of the seats of Christian Iceland, on the shoulders of its darkest pre-Christian sagas. Let this be a warning to all of us trained in post-Christian intellectual traditions: we do courageous men such as Gunnar wrong to read him outside of his faith.
It erupts from the earth and then falls back, slowly. In between, it gets mixed with light. People live there.
Berserker Lava Field, Snaefells Peninsula
What a mysterious mountain.
And so full with light.
Light and cloud together.
That’s what the glacier is made of up there, mixed with rock and fire. Oh, and lower down?
Add life. Pouring to the sea and climbing to the sky.
It will be hard to leave this mountain tomorrow.
But þor’s Shield awaits!
It sheds water like burnished silver. Salmon, who are burnished silver, too, leave the sea to follow its path.
Trolls!
It’s not the safest spot for sheep.
Berserk Lava Field Falls at Dusk
Life is an intersection that is not crossed.
It has no dimension, yet is infinite.
At dusk, this volcano broods under its glacier, far from its sisters, above a land the colour of blood.
Welcome to Snaefells. Jules Vernes went to the centre of the earth here. Surely, Bilbo fought his dragon Smaug here. This mountain is greater than that, though. She pulses with power, alive and potent within her cloud, creating weather. As an indication of its power, look to her eastern flank.
See that? The mountains around Snaefells turn to light in the afternoon, and open up a pathway into other worlds. Snaefells does not. She is here, physical, and present. That is quite the feat, because look at the Atlantic at her feet.
If you thought Iceland was in the North, don’t forget the Gulf Stream, because this is not North. So, yes, Snaefells is at the centre of the Earth. This is Middle Earth, between the worlds of Fire and Ice. For a view of the strength of this effect, compare the water that has bled out of the land, with the bright sea below.
Iceland is a living animal. Snaefells herds her. Forget this at your peril.
A Farm in Iceland 