Iceland's Story - Natural marvels, saints and sagas

‘Here let the citizen, then, find natural marvels... the student of prose and conduct places to visit, / the site of a church where a bishop was put in a bag, / the bath of a great historian, the fort where / an outlaw dreaded the dark, / remember the doomed man thrown by his horse and crying / Beautiful is the hillside...’

Figures from the past are part of the landscape and intrigue of Iceland. Immortalised in the medieval sagas, they also live on in place-names and landmarks that have inspired literary and artistic figures for centuries.

The lines above, from W. H. Auden’s Journey to Iceland, appeared in Letters From Iceland, the collection of poetry and prose that Auden published with Louis MacNeice after the pair visited in 1936. William Morris was an earlier ‘saga pilgrim’, while Jules Verne eternally popularised the formidable glacier-capped mountain Snæfellsjökull on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, when he imagined it as the site of a hidden passage to the centre of the earth in his famous 1864 novel.

Recorded anonymously, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the sagas are foundation legends that describe how Iceland was settled from mainland Scandinavia – in some cases via Norse settlements in the British Isles from ad 871. Iceland had no monarchy or aristocracy until it came under Norwegian rule in the 1260s. Instead, the sagas are inhabited with warrior-farmers and chieftains, influential women, martial champions, poets, outlaws and the walking dead.

The real and half-real people and quasi-historical events they depict reflect the challenges of creating a new society in a previously unoccupied and hostile environment. This was a world characterised by violent and sometimes deadly disputes over honour and natural resources, but one that was also swiftly regulated – to a greater or lesser degree – by the laws adopted by the early republic.

Running through the sagas and integral to the tour, is the remarkable story of Icelandic Christianisation. The clash between ancient beliefs and the new religion in tenth-century Iceland has parallels elsewhere in the Viking world but the resolution adopted in Iceland was unique, and sheds light on many aspects of early Icelandic culture, society and law.

Iceland’s landscapes remain much more than a mere backdrop to the saga action. Exploring these phenomenal feats of nature is a powerful, even emotional experience. Nearly 30 years after his first visit, Auden wrote: ‘In my childhood dreams Iceland was holy ground; when, at the age of twenty-nine, I saw it for the first time, the reality verified my dream; at fifty-seven it was holy ground still, with the most magical light of anywhere on earth.’