At midsummer (at Lóndrangar), the little ogre babies sprout pretty flowers and grasses.
The rest of the year, they’re just lumpy. Don’t worry. At midsummer, everyone is alive and well and it’s OK to be charmed. In winter, though, a wave might take you.
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.
Siðu-Hollar settled the farm Þvolté on the East Coast around the year 1000. He was unpopular, as he was a Christian. Check out his farm:
Trolls and ogres everywhere! What a flock!
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.
If you’re hunting for ogres and trolls, pick your rock carefully, seek around waterfalls, and come in winter, when the world approaches their state. They’re shy. They won’t come all at once. Bring warm gloves and boots. Those are the first parts of your body to leave you for their world.
A rich narrative of non human life forms at Sheep’s Falls. December 24, 2019.
Could this motherly nudge be why some maps call this “Whale Bay”?
Öxarfjörður in June
The land itself is frightening.
Ogre in Njardvik Fog
It watches us and has intent. Well, it does that in Reykjavik, too…
…but at least there one can ignore it.
Humans. The dears need their fantasies!
An Ogre and her suckling calf need a little space, that’s all.
Shh, just keep driving along.
A tough choice, I know. Just a few kilometres apart, way out there on Snæfellsnes (so likely of the same species) there are the Ogres of Djúpalónsandur …
So sweet!
…wading together out into the storm…
…and just a few kilometres west, out at Dritvik… splashing in the waves …
…the Ogres of Dritvik, the now-abandoned Second City of Iceland, staring out into the open Atlantic.
But, hey, no problem. It’s always a good day to sit back and enjoy the sights.
But watch out!
We are not kidding about the magic. Or the storm.
Gunnar argued for the independence of Iceland during Germany’s military struggles of the 1940s, on the principle that the land is written in the chain-linked patterns of the Icelandic sagas, with the suggestion that the Icelanders wrote the sagas in response to the chain-link rhymes of the land.
Grundarfjördur
His observation is obvious. Equally obvious is how poor a tool such observations are for deflecting a military conqueror. Less obvious is the point that when you are from the land and have nothing and yet have to do something, you use what you have. Still, the approach has its dangers. It might stress one form of pattern, for instance, but it obscures another. So, let’s look at Gunnar’s saga again. This time, note the story of trolls and ogres written in the rock.
Gunnar was a humanist, a twentieth century man. This tale of ogres and epic battles is one he could have told as well, including how it generates the water of life as cold passes into warmth. That he didn’t is an example of how writers adapt to their audience. It is also an example of how we can re-read them, and free them… and us.
A Farm in Iceland 