Here on the trail along the Selfljót, this rock stopped me in my tracks. Is it not an old story from the sagas or some old folk tale?
A bearded man (or elf? or dwarf?) on the left, and a fox on the right? There are a lot of rocks along the trail, but this one was unique.
In 1907, Gunnar Gunnarsson left this.
Under the spell of universal education and the promise made to all country boys that through book literacy they could be a part of the world of power, Gunnar Gunnarsson accepted a scholarship to study at the Askov School in Denmark. It ran a program for colonial boys, as a means of building belief in a unified Scandinavian country, the United States of Scandinavia, so to speak. It seemed a better idea than conquest by the Germans (again) or the violent revolutions of Nationalism that were, even then, sweeping through Europe, and which would bring their tragic consequences in 1914, the year the world ended. All that is repeating itself in the struggles between nationalism, liberalism, immigration and military alliance that is shaking Europe (and the world) right now, so it’s timely to look at what Gunnar left. Especially since the power he sought was denied, because it was always a ruse. What he left, as I said above, is this.
This is lichen, the little lick, the little læk or stream, or as we put it in English today, the little lake where the streams gather (and where we can come to lick. In fact, we are drawn to do so by a shared nature across states of be-ing.) It is a little world, or the big one in miniature.
In Gunnar’s Iceland, the one his education took him from, it was also an art form: a form of poetry.
Intriguingly, it was not written by humans; only found and read by them.
I suspect that the reading was not a matter of words, or at least the kind that appear in books.
It’s been 112 years now. The poetry is still here.
The whole literary discussion, now much out-dated, as to whether poetry is given or created by poets, replaced this art form. The readers of it knew the answer.
It still looks very fine.
~
Images from Starmyri.
Time to crouch down among the ghosts of summer’s birds and become a ghost yourself.
And you’re still chasing the Northern Lights, because….?
When cliff faces are too cold, lichen can do just fine by growing in a tension with heat conserving mosses.
But tufts of arctic grass gnawed to mounds by sheep work just as well. Look how purslane, grass, moss and lichens all work together to create a balanced environment, conserving heat, gathering rain, relatively impervious to sheep, and even collecting soil ot of the wind. 
Clumps like these, and there are billions of them in Iceland, are like reefs on a continental shelf, or miniature planets in the cold of space. The missing co-conspirators? Ah…
In Iceland, you could still learn to read.
Lichen Below Hengifoss
Books pale in comparison.
Power is where you find it.
You don’t have to take it away.
The lake that runs to the sea from this old monastery site in East Iceland is called the Lagarfljót. It is a long and beautiful thing that catches the light from the mountains and the sky and softens them — not that they are harsh to start with. It also has a wyrm, like the monster of Loch Ness or the “Ogopogo” of Okanagan Lake of the North America’s Pacific Northwest. Cryptozoology is good for tourism. Here in the sacred birch forests of East Iceland …
… with the elves catching the mid-day sun …
Lichen on Birch
(I hope to have the elvish connection to lichen ready for you in a couple days.)
… and a moment to enjoy the red berries that the birds missed in the winter …
… because I’m a poet and poets are easily distracted by pretty things (so are wyrms, whose stories are similar enough to the serpents of the Rhine and the Celtic Moselle and the Ring of the Nibelungs to raise a poet’s eyebrow or two), but finally things were looking up. The government was there first, helpful as Icelanders are …
A Good Place to See The Wyrm
Shall we? Down the trail through the old, slightly mouldering but still charming early-Nationalist picnic site, and, hey, look, already we see signs of an apex predator eating the locals…
We Must be On the Right Track
And then I lost my doubt, because I heard the birds singing…
See the Birds?
No, I don’t either.
There weren’t any birds, that’s why. It was the lake that was singing, like a choir of angels. That was actually better than birds.
All Winter Long the Ice Has Been Singing As the Waves Break it Up and Knock it Around
Then they do it in the spring. It is haunting. What a magical lake.
And that’s when I first saw the wyrm (well, after a few more steps) …
Wyrm
Being a Canadian and a bit biased towards polar bears, that’s what I thought it was at first. Here’s its head, so you can have a closer look …
Wyrm Head
Note the nice ribbing. Even the Worm in Dune has that. (Look to my upcoming posting on elves and lichen for an explanation of how forms like this are cast up by stone.)
Then I turned and saw this wyrm…
A Dead Ringer to Tolkein’s Smaug…
… or a crocodile. Note the hump, too.
Now, to set things straight, here’s the story of the Wyrm in Lagarfljót: Read it Here. And here’s a video that played on Icelandic TV a year ago … View it Here. And here’s my warning on reading mythic imaginations literally, with photographs of the dreamtime stone that is Canada’s “Ogopogo” — or would be if there were greater general understanding of how pre-industrial people thought. Read it here. This is important stuff. A little respect for the truth of ancient story, and how it was laid down and how it was not, goes a long way towards rebuilding human relationships to the earth. To tell those stories, I am here at Skriðuklaustur. It has been a beautiful day. Tomorrow, images of Easter in East Iceland, and if things go well the second part of my series on Gunnar Gunnarsson, Secret Agent.
A Farm in Iceland 