Bessastaðaá
That’s why you can see it. Sometimes you see the eye. Sometimes you see the moment of your seeing.
Breiðulækur
Sometimes you glimpse your eye deep within the mind of the world.
Bessastaðaá
For that, you have to go on a journey to the centre of the earth.
Gilsáfoss
And there you are.
In the speech he read throughout the Third Reich in the spring of 1940, “Our Land” Gunnar spoke of how Icelandic rock rose in the chain-linked stanzas of traditional Icelandic verse. Here’s the gorge outside his house.
At its foot lies Melárett, the fold that was the largest public building in Iceland in his time, used to gather flocks in winter and separate them out, farm by farm: a place for people to work in unison, come together, and then separate by choice into their own private affairs.
I’m sure the two concepts were intimately linked in series in his mind. Hitler didn’t enjoy the suggestion, by the way.
When you’re in Iceland, it’s good to get off the beaten track. No tour guide will lead you to this troll at Skriðuklaustur.
Or this one. If people laugh about your troll finds, does that really matter?
You might even find an entire troll narrative. What does it matter if there are no physical entities called trolls?
You can find pictures of those things in bookshops, for children, without an explanation of the politics behind them. What is that politics? Guess.
Contemporary ecology is based on stories of trolls from Norway in the 1920s. I think it’s possible that ecology in the 2120s will be based on stories of trolls found today.
The old Norse runes are well known.
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.
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!
Jökulsárlón
The people stand silent before the glacier and wait. So has it ever been in the presence of gods.
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.
If smoke is the outpouring of a geothermal plant, such as that here below in Reykholt …
… is it pollution? I’d say, yes. What, though if it is art? What do you think? What is it?
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.
An Old Story Telling its Knot on the Road West of Sælingsdal
Over eleven hundred years, men can cut down all the trees, keep their horses for memory, erode the soil with sheep, battle frost heaves, put in a jeep track, buy a German tractor and some good American haying equipment, and strew nitrogen fertilizer around to stay alive, but the Cross that a woman ordered hammered into a stone to hold back the elves who lived inside it remains, and you will likely think of it as a children’s story. Still, your tractor can’t do a thing with it, nor your sheep, nor your beautiful horses.
A Farm in Iceland 
