Tag Archives: North Iceland

The Mountain at the Centre of the World

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Snæfellsjökull (Snow Mountain’s Glacier) makes its own weather at the Western end of the Snæfellsnes (Snow Mountain Point) peninsula and its 100 kilometres of volcanoes thrusting into the Atlantic. They came to it, not it from them. The volcano sat here alone for 300,000 years, washed by waves, formed by entirely different rock than the others that followed it west. Now, it creates clouds out of living air and holds them to its ice.

This image shows a strong gale (90 km/h) lifting the cloud away minutes before dusk, the sun coming in horizontally across the sea to the left, striking the ice, and shooting vertically into the cloud, lighting it from below. This moment stars in my poem “Whirlpool” in my book of spells and blessings weaving people and land into a cloth, as the mountain sure does. The poem begins in wind, with its lines snapping apart, barely held to the frame of the loom.

This thread appears again in the poem Findings, where Syrian refugees and the refugees who fled Germany in 1929 and gave me life, meet and feast together. It raises its back out of the Atlantic that is book, here again in Lifting the Sky. This time, this wave that lifts the mountains into the sky appears in Eyrarfjörður, the great “Estuary Fjord”, far to the Northeast.

Both poems answer this question with their weaving. You can find the answer in the book. In the meantime, here’s a farmer in the Eyrarland (The Estuary Country), dealing with his roof. No ladder needed.

I have no idea how he got out of the cab, up over the hydraulic arms, over the bucket, and up there, but he did. After all, for half of every year his sheep have to live in there, while the mountains and the sea do their thing outside. Curious? I hope so. There’s a link to the right of this page where you can order this book. While you’re waiting for it to arrive, here’s the south wall of Snæfellsjökull…

… where

This is just one of the many landings in Landings: Poems from Iceland. There was once an exodus from the Earth. Now there is a return to it. I hope you will come along.

Eider Farming

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A warm feather quilt comes from a relationship between an Eider farmer and the Eider ducks. Each neck is marked and protected.

Langanes

Fishers offshore are, perhaps, not so protected.

Note the flagged nest in the upper right.

Harvest is not always a killing. It can be the taking of surplus feathers after nesting, in return for protection from foxes.

These are simple and complex things. To learn them, go to the far North. It is a tenuous economy, but a proud one, which is more than can be said of most.

The Dragon of Gatastapi

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Most dragons in Iceland are in the West, but here’s one in the Northeast.

Nice looking wyrm! From the north side, in the mist, she looks like this:

The dragon of many faces! What does she have her eyes on? Ah, not you or I, but Gatastapi herself.

This is an old whaling station where you can look through things to the other side.

A Culture of Settlement

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One thing that makes Iceland dramatically beautiful is that its culture and landscape look like they were just plunked there recently and haven’t really taken yet.

Looking North from Meidavellir

That’s what you get after 1100 years of cultural replacement in response to environmental erosion. With very few exceptions, the buildings are less than a century old. With very few exceptions, the living landscapes are far younger. A century ago, the scrub above would have looked much like the outwash plain below it. The people, whose memory is longer, are in a constant state of change, unsettlement and resettlement, just as it was when they first arrived, a little over 1100 years ago. Settlement was the originating impulse, but it was driven by men, who felt unsettled in Norway. These tensions are still written in every moment of the land.

Old Red Nose, a North Icelandic Tale

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In the North East of Iceland, there is a cape with Eidars and puffins, called Raudanes, or Red Cape. “Nes” is an old term for a nes, or nose, of land, in the same way that mountains have shoulders, backs and arms, continents have icecaps, mountains have jökulls, as the Icelanders say, little jackets of ice, little land-based icebergs, or glaciers, and seacoasts, like mountains, have caps, or heads. On the coast, these caps are capes, in English, and they often have noses.

This is the nose of Red Nose itself. One notes that it is a dragon. Now, how fine is that!