Iceland: Sagas, Snow & Steam

So in the middle of our recent heatwave - too much already! - I've been reading the wonderful Laxdaela saga about Gudrun Osviksdottir and reliving the big chill of our Easter trip to Iceland. Here's another extract from my travelblog - prepare to shiver!

Tuesday April 6th

This morning all colours are muffled by the snow drifting across the road. Further east and north, there have been avalanches and schools closed, Bragi says. Outside the bus, black lava pokes through a white landscape. Yellow grasses quiver into the wind. On the heights, mist is smothering the ridges - or it might be snow pouring down gullies. The sky is tearing hanks of grey cloud, a milky light curdling in the gaps beyond.

Bragi reveals that Iceland's tradition of poetry and storytelling is very much alive and thriving with poetry clubs and radio/TV competitions. The tight forms and highly symbolic language of the original sagas are still used, as well as more modern forms. And I'm delighted that our first destination today is Reykholt, the home of Snorri Sturlson, a landmark figure in medieval Icelandic literature. Sturlson penned the famous Prose Edda which recount the doings of the Norse gods as well as Icelandic settlers and several sagas, including one about his ancestor, the warrior-poet, Egil Skallagrimsson. Sturlson was a poet himself and canny politician but when he double-crossed the King of Norway, he was hacked to death in his own cellar at Reykholt. Should have stuck to the pen perhaps ...

Next stop was Hraunfossar, a truly spectacular series of waterfalls that seem to stretch for miles. The wind had dropped at last and the landscape was etched in black rocks, white snow and the piercing blue of the waterfalls and river below. Photographs cannot convey the thundering gush of the water or the creaking of the snow underfoot but you can see we were lucky to catch this place in its wintry colours. It was blistering cold with great ice splinters hanging from the waterfall but we could hardly tear ourselves away.

Back at the Foss Hotel, we were treated to a delicious buffet lunch of home-made soups & breads, salads, coffee and fruit. The sweet tomatoey bread was studded with lumps of salt and the tomato soup was flavoured with chips of aniseed - heavenly. This was typical of the fresh produce we encountered for lunches. We ate till we burst. Bragi was telling us how the local greenhouses were heated by the bubbling hot springs of nearby Deildartunguhver which pumps out water of 97 degrees centigrade and is piped to towns over 60 km away.

The snowy morning at Hraunfossar had been utterly magical. But this was the land of fire as well as ice - and the afternoon was to bring us to the great valley of Thingvellir and the continental rift that runs through Iceland. But that's a whole other story, that place ...

Pilgrim's Progress In Iceland

So the saga of our recent trip to the volcanic isle - between eruptions! - continues:

Day 2 Easter Monday: Snaefellnesnes Peninsula

Were we something like Chaucer's Pilgrims, a gathering of 10 strangers come together for an April journey? Or maybe Tolkien's Fellowship – he was after all inspired by those Norse myths. And certainly we had our own kindly wizard of the roads in Bragi Ragnarsson on a package tour entitled 'Iceland with an Expert'. With a gravelly Icelandic voice and easy manner, he settled into the driving seat of our mini-bus, delivering a stream of patter that took in socio-economic trends of modern Iceland (60% of its population living around the capital city), geological facts, Viking history and ancient legends of the landscape.

In a country where stories flow like lava (the highest no. of published authors per capita), he regaled us with tales of laughing mermen, exploding whales and Viking gangster-poets. At the roadside, he pointed out boulders painted with tiny doors and windows to mark the homes of the Hidden People. And Bragi also broke into a snatch of traditional Icelandic singing, a nasal chanting very like the Saami joiku in sound.

How could we not then be predisposed to the poetry of the place? On a windswept, isolated beach, the tiny Budir church was a black stub against a distant ice-capped mountain range. And these arctic winds were ferocious, battering us to the ground as soon as we emerged. Fingers froze instantly as I tried to fumble with the camera – not even the sand-dunes or craggy brown rocks offered shelter. At Arnarstapi, we stumbled along the cliff walk, amazed by the basalt sea-stacks and black promontories, stark against a deep blue sea. Further along this coast, we tumbled out onto the pebbly beach of Djupalonssandur where white surf tore over black shingle and sand.

Blue, black and brown were the day's colours. Then the vivid orange of rusted metal – remnants of a Grimsby trawler cast by tides across the lava-field, its orange shapes drawing the eye to an even stranger sight – a frozen mass of river that flowed down from the great Snaefellsnes glacier. Here at its edge, where it had frothed into nothing and frozen in an instant, I picked up glassy wafers, striated and fragile. Beyond thick shelves of ice layered one on another and swirls of blue, grey-green and brown stirred into the white.

Even on the bus, we were mesmerised by the sight of water frozen into giant splinters, often blue, spilling down the brown gorges and gullies, a world fastened tight by the spell of ice. As we rolled into Grundarfjordur, thick fat snowflakes bobbed against the windscreen, giving a promise of the morrow's weather. In a room overlooked by the fish-processing factory and white mountains, we were lulled to sleep by howling windsong.