Iceland’s Otherworldly Beauty
Iceland isn’t just a country — it’s a mood, a waking dream, an alternate realm of cliffs and moss, a place where you can still experience the sublime, that shiver of fear in the face of monumental nature. A field of flammable moss — gray-green, like the ocean on a stormy day, stretching away under a sky the color of ice. On the first morning I woke on this remote island, it was all I could see.
About 315,000 people live here among eerie rock formations and shining glaciers, but the landscape is so austere and weird, you might think that you had woken in an outpost in an alien world. One imagines, at every turn, the darting movements of the hidden people (“Huldufolk”) among the crags. In “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” Jules Verne wrote that the entrance to a subterranean passage was on Iceland’s Snaefellsnes peninsula. It’s easy to see why he would have imagined this. To visit is to be enveloped in a physical landscape so extreme that visions of it invade even your sleep. Along the steepest mountainsides, small horses stick like burrs, grazing where no American horse could maintain its balance.
Iceland is a place of contradictions, at once archaic and modern, immensely gray yet strangely lush, covered in various mosses and bright green grasses, which thrive even amid stark lava fields. Everyone is known by first name, even the president. Icelandic people have one of the highest life expectancies in the world, and one of the best state health-care systems. But get past the immediate environs of Reykjavik, and you emerge into a chthonic world, a place of raw rock and ice dipping over the edges of mountains; it’s easy, on these plains, to imagine the Vikings building their villages, launching their ships.
At the national park, Thingvellir (spelled slightly differently in Icelandic, which still uses two letters from Old Norse), you can touch the mounded remnants of the booths from the Vikings’ annual gatherings. It was here that the first Icelandic council originally met in 930 A.D., and where every year an elected member read the nation’s laws out loud to the people.
The past is present everywhere: signs on the road point you to the former homes of characters from “The Sagas of Icelanders,” a set of interlocking prose narratives about life in the Middle Ages here, which remain central in the culture. At Gullfoss (“Golden Falls”), the island’s most spectacular waterfall, it is said that the falls get their yellow glow and their name from a man centuries ago who buried his gold when he died, not wanting anyone to have it.
In late summer, the light fades slowly, reluctantly. On the Ring Road — Iceland’s main “highway,” circling the island — waterfalls continuously pour and scores of sheep roam free, without dogs to guard them or fences to bound them. The Icelandic horses sleep on their sides — at first glance, they look dead — as their impossibly long manes lift in the wind. The vista is still, vast, apocalyptic... read more:
