North of Vatnajökull

By Poul Vad

One of Iceland´s rare stretches of woodland is to be found near Egilstadir, a delicate birch wood, whose light foliage was shining in the July sunshine. The area around Lagarfljot is generally luxuriant, and despite the ridges on its eastern and western sides it does not give the impression of being enclosed as do even large lakes in Switzerland. Perhaps this is due to one´s awareness of the Atlantic Ocean, which is not far away, or perhaps - despite these ridges with their greyish violet hues - to the absence of towering peaks and the far too oppressive proximity of enormous massifs combined with the sense of a huge, surrounding continent, which it is impossible not to feel in Switzerland. Lagarfljot is a lake on an island, and a fantastic island at that: the lake points southwest like an arrow towards Vatnajökull.

My having been so brutally obliged to see my dreams of a real classic literary expedition and pilgrimage to the farm of Adalbol in Hrafnkelsdalur - come to naught, had almost been offset simply by the sense of sitting in the Landrover and bowling along on those sturdy tyres that are so well suited to the metalled roads in Iceland. I had to think of my predecessor, Martin A. Hansen, who had driven round the island in a jeep; but of course, my project could in no way be compared to his, which had extended over several weeks and taken him to many famous places and through trackless wastes. He had defied thunderstorm and snowstorm and like any explorer he had together with his artist companion spent his nights in a tent and made tea on a primus. I thought gratefully of the good, civilised bed in which I had slept, of the white, fresh-smelling sheets and of the morning coffee with the tasty and plentiful bread. Moreover, he had travelled with the object of collecting material for a whole book on Iceland; but I - well, why was I travelling?.

Hansen had taken the sagas with him as intellectual baggage, far heavier and more encyclopaedic than mine - his travel account from Iceland is full of reflections on the saga characters, as though they are old friends and family members and in particular as though they are real historical personages and not simply the creation of authors. On this point, then, Hansen always agrees with ancient Icelandic tradition, but that presumably suited him well. It is the places that make the saga characters spring to life in Hansen´s mind, for that is really what happens when you travel in Iceland. The journey to Iceland is the pilgrimage into a literature.

I know a book-loving painter who went to Florence so as to be able to stand in front of the house where Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot. Exhausted by this experience he spent the rest of the day in a café, in company with small glasses. A week passed in this way. It is thus we furnish the houses where great writers were born, lived or wrote their works with an aura that transforms a banal facade into an eloquent hieroglyph. Some visit graves as though a reflection of the light emanating from the writers works should be particularly visible at that spot. By identifying a point in space with some spiritual value we ascribe significance to it, fill it with a power that acts on us in its turn - the magic of the high place. The pilgrimage is a spiritual exercise and almost a kind of necromancy worked by cultured tourists. For tourists - if not researchers - is what we are and shall remain, and Hansen is quite right when in his travel account from Iceland he writes that "the modern traveller is a doubter, an observer, a researcher - a critic at just those very places which he has longed to see more than any other."

It was the notion of such a pilgrimage that had taken me to the spot where I now find myself. As it was not possible for me to make a pilgrimage to a writer´s grave or to the farm, the parsonage or the monastery where the author of Hrafnkel´s saga had lived and written, I had to journey to the areas where his story is played out, and where after all he must be assumed to have moved. So while the authors played tricks on later generations with their anonymity, they did an invaluable service to the country by giving its geography an imaginary dimension. When, in the south, you pass the signpost indicating the road to Hlidarendi, you cannot but think of Njals saga; and even if, in contrast to the country´s own inhabitants, you perhaps do not remember the complicated action in all its detail and cannot give an account of who killed whom, and why old Njal - who, of course, lived in a completely different place - was burned in his house despite being so wise and likable, you nevertheless at least remember that it was here Gunnar lived, Gunnar who was so thoughtless as to give his wife a box on the ears, for which he subsequently came to pay a terrible price - his life. The countryside here, the flat plain stretching south as far as the eye can see, is of a confusing beauty - at once both grandiose and gentle - which to me will now always form the background to the saga´s action.
And had I not in the north stood looking out towards Drangey at the mouth of the Skaga Fjord while feeling the breath from the northern Arctic Ocean and thinking with a sense of horror that this was where the outlawed Grettir lived: with its perpendicular sides and its flattened top it resembled a piece of architecture fashioned by human hands and placed there with consummate theatrical effect; but it was literature that had endowed it with meaning and symbolical value; and if it had not been for the story of Grettir the Strong I would probably have forgotten Drangey, for Iceland so abounds in magnificent natural settings that one, as it were, stifles the other. The farm name of Adalbol conjures up ideas on Hrafnkels saga Freysgoda, which could almost as suitably have been called the saga of Adalbol, for in the course of the narrative the possession of the farm becomes the central symbol of the struggle for power which is the theme of the story.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones