Ogres are a bit like weather. When the sun shines, you see them. “Ah, the ogre is here,” you say.
When the sun doesn’t shine on them, you don’t see them. Then you say, “there’s no ogre.” Either way, though, just imagine getting up every day and checking the ogre weather!
In 1914, local boy Johannes Kjarval was starving. Ladies in town asked him to paint an altar for the Bakkagerðiskirkja, the Bakkagerthi Church. He’d spent his childhood herding sheep on the mountain and dreaming of elves, so he painted Christ giving the Sermon on the Mount on the Alfaborg, the elf city behind the church, with all the townsfolk listening, elves and humans.
It has yet to be consecrated by any bishop! But if you go to visit it today, you can see his Iceland still. The elves have been replaced by tourists in campers, and the church remains in darkness, as all good Icelandic interiors are, with 1,000 years of turf houses in their memory.
The Icelandic subconscious lives in a darkness warmed by human presence and looks out through small windows into the light, which is the Earth and not the sun. It’s simply the way it is.
It’s not about T-shirt weather.
Beaches don’t have to be for lying on. And a peninsula can be on dry land. Welcome to the North East.
While driving on the north shore of the Lagarfljót east of Gunnar’s house, I was keeping an eye out for the Wyrm who lives there. At first, I was convinced that the river of cloud holding above the lake was Wyrm enough for me.
I presume that the Wyrm is projecting this magical eye into the sky above the lake. I guess I might be looking for dragons, but that’s not to say they aren’t keeping an eye out for me.
Your life can depend on a cairn.
To the east the road to the south goes around Strutsfoss (the falls in the distance) and over the glacier. To the west …
… the highway goes up over the glacier. The cairn marks this bridge:
You’ll be needing it.
For four hundred years an ogre threw travellers over the cliff trail between Bakkagerði and Njarðvík. It was awfully steep and in the fog, dark, rain, snow and whatever else the East Fjords undoubtedly threw at them. It was terrifying and very dangerous.
A bit of Christian-Norse magic took care of that, though. The rocks at the cross’s base are funereal stones, left by travellers. The road was fixed up in 2019.
Here’s the deal. For over 1,000 years, that’s 40 generations or so, maybe more, or about 2.5% of the human experience on Earth,when you wanted a drink of water for 8 months of the year, this is where you got it: from within ice.
Out the Back Door of a Lost Croft on Stekkur
And ice was a power of negation from outside of the world. You had, in other words, to reach into the enemy, right outside of the human world, to survive. And you sent your kids out to get this water. From there. And they did it. And this was called independence; for almost all Icelanders, if you wanted children you had to accept a bargain of absolute poverty like this. There is no moral to this story. Still, when we look at Inspired by Iceland’s images of the country:
Well, just remember you’re looking at 40 generations of Icelandic children approaching the Frost Giants and stealing life. The theft goes on.
Well, Grótfjall is a handsome mountain, to be sure. Viewing it from the Njardvik Beach, its easy enough to see that some of it is down here, making the valley floor, rather than up in the sky, making its hat.
But what’s that on the mountain? A dragon? And isn’t the sod collapsing over the cliff into sea, its wings? And aren’t there dragon shapes a-plenty, in the wet-dry patterning of the cliff? You tell me. I just know that walking through this fjord as a dragon story makes every relationship significant, in the way every word and sound in poetry means more than the poem’s sense.
If nothing else, it reveals the more of the mountains lies on the shore than in the air. A flat mountain. That’s a fine experience in climbing! But, wait, isn’t that a troll peeking out from the bottom of the cliff on the left? What’s his story?
It is good to remember that humans are prey. It keeps us on our toes.
Njardvik
Nowhere but in Borgarfjördur Eystri have I found mountains that so clearly express beings from another dimension of understanding. It’s no wonder that the great Icelandic painter Kjarval got started here.
The show changes daily, too:
All around. At distance…
… or up close:
Every step is through two worlds at once, and it’s your moving that makes the images move. Here, for instance, is the elf from the first image, three hours later, from a different angle. She’s like a very slow wind taking our measure.
Beauty is in the eye of the holder.
A Farm in Iceland 