In the Saga of the farm of Grimstunga, Grim’s Tongue, (tunga is frequently used with reference to a narrow strip of grass land in a sand waste or between masses of lava), at the head of the valley, we find the following story of Ingólfr:—

“An autumn feast was held at Grimstunga and a playing at the ball. Ingólfr came to the game, and many men with him from the Dale,” (Water Dale.) “The weather was fine and the women sat out and watched the game. Valgerðr, Ottar’s daughter, sat on the hill-side and other women with her. Ingólfr was in the game and his ball flew far up among the girls. Valgerðr took the ball and hid it under her cloak and bade him find it who had cast it. Ingólfr came up and found it and bade the others go on with the game; but he played no more himself. He sat down by Valgerðr and talked the rest of the day.”

It was the story of love that did not go smoothly for he flirted and did not propose to her father for her hand in marriage. Her father sold his farm and moved to the south. Man-slayings followed and Valgerðr was forced by her father to marry another man when Ingólfr deserted her for another maiden. He had many love affairs for he was inconstant. In the end he was wounded by outlaws and when dying he requested that he might be laid in the mound with his forefathers near the river path in Water Dale that “the maidens might remember him when they walked that way.”

Valgerðr had a famous brother, Halfreðr nicknamed Vandaeðaskald, signifying the “Troublesome Scald.” He was the favorite scald of the powerful Norwegian King, Olaf Tryggvason, who reigned from 995 to 1000 A. D. A full account of this King and of his favorite singer is given in Heimskringla by Snorri Sturlason, the Norse Historian, from which the following brief account is condensed.

Halfreðr was a wayward youth, given to wandering and adventure, a real Viking in spirit. He was born in 968 and raised at this very farm of Haukagil, Hawk-Gulley, where the notes for this chapter were roughly penned in 1910. He was “a tall man, strong and manly looking, somewhat swarthy, his nose rather ugly, his hair brown and setting him off well.”

A little brook tumbles down from the heath behind the house, the rolling meadow reaches away to the river and beyond it the mountains rise in glorious colors in this evening light just as they did when Halfreðr played beside this same brook as a child and Ingólfr flirted with Halfreðr’s sister. The turf house and the tún, the noisy dogs bringing up the ewes for the evening milking, the swish of the scythe in the grass and the call of the plover on the heights,—all are as in the days of old and it requires little fancy to place this sturdy youth in his old surroundings.

He was a poetical genius, a favorite of kings and a terror to his enemies. He did not so often unsheath his sword in a quarrel as he employed his stinging rhymes which cut his enemy deeper than the sharpest sword. Like his sister, Halfreðr had his love troubles. Kolfina loved him and he reciprocated but her father chose otherwise and betrothed her to Griss, a man who had accumulated great wealth in the service of the Emperor at Constantinople. Griss was “rather elderly, short-sighted, blear-eyed;” but he could see well enough when he went to woo Kolfina that a handsome youth was kissing her at the door of the lodge. Caught by Griss in the very act, Halfreðr shouted to him as he took his reluctant departure:—

“Thou shalt have me for a foe, Griss, if thou wilt try to make this match.”

The parents gave Halfreðr a good scolding and ordered him away at once. As he rides away he makes this rhyme:—

Longfellow says:—

This passage shows the wide poetic license which Longfellow took in dealing with the Sagas and the Heimskringla of Snorri. Scott’s harpers were always old and gray and Longfellow infers that the Scalds were the same. The fact is that Halfreðr did not live beyond forty years of age. He was gay and reckless as were all of his cult; he was reckless of speech even in the presence of the king. He was always ready with a song whether at the court of Olaf, in the camp, on the sea in storm or in calm or in the brunt of the fight. He was constant in love and although he married a beautiful and wealthy woman he never forgot his early love for the fair Kolfina.

King Olaf had much trouble in converting him to Christianity and in getting him to take the christening. He succeeded as we shall see from the following quotation, but Halfreðr clung in secret to the faith of his fathers, the hope of a future life in Valhalla as we note from the many references to the old northern gods in his songs and the way in which he talks of them. So frequently did he call upon the pagan deities that Olaf often talked to him about it and mistrusted that he was not really converted to the Cross.

In 1014, after a great sea fight in which a yard arm fell and inflicted a mortal blow, Hallfreðr lay dying on board of a crippled vessel which was drifting before the gale. Still mindful of conditions around him he makes the following stave, which was translated by Miss Oswald:—

With his dying breath he chanted the following stave, showing that his early love, Kolfina, had not been forgotten during his long years of warfare and wanderings:—

Thus died in middle life one of the greatest of the Norse scalds. His had been a “troublous” life indeed. The duties of the scald were to improvise poetry on the instant, in praise of the King and in recounting the deeds of his favorite warriors in battle. He was the historian and the periodical at the same time; his utterances were respected and he was feared by prince and peasant. The scald had liberties at court and in the royal camp or on board the royal fighting ship not accorded to any other retainer.

CHAPTER XVI
REYKHOLT

The present house at Haukagill is finished inside with unpainted spruce from Norway, beautiful as old mahogany, having become soft reddish brown with age and frequent polishing with fine sand. Our bed chamber contained the pride of the family, a Connecticut clock adjusted to strike the hours and the quarters. Its gong was far from musical. The bells of Bruges had raised havoc with our sleep with their persistent struggle to be heard, but this clock, on a shelf at the head of the bed, reminded us every fifteen minutes that it also came from New England as well as we and was clamorous for recognition. After hours of sleeplessness we wished it had never left the Nutmeg State.

At nine in the morning we turned our backs upon this charming valley, climbed the steep hill and looked down at the farm house, the last we were to see for two days. We were now fairly upon the great plain of Grimstungaheiði, Grim’s-Tongue-Heath, an extensive tract of desolation between the fertile valleys of the north and the glaciers of the great central plateau of Iceland. For a while there was a trace of a trail which soon disappeared. Hour after hour we plodded on, guided solely by the glimmer of the glaciers on the horizon and an occasional tumbled-down cairn of former days.

This tract is a broad and fresh moraine from the recently receded glacier, chaotic, empty, vast and dreary. There is nothing to relieve the monotony of the scene save the increasing mass of ice as the glaciers loom higher above the stony horizon. The angular fragments of lava, somber, gray, variously riven and confusedly hurled in piles, are as though some vast mountain had been crumpled like an eggshell and the fragments scattered by a titanic hand. No touch of verdure enlivens the cold ruin and weary waste, save at the margins of the numerous ponds and pools which glimmer like sheets of light in the dim distance. Otherwise, everything everywhere is like everything everywhere else. This heath is similar to the vast interior of Iceland, except that the traces of vegetation found here are often entirely wanting throughout large sections, notably north of Hoffs Jökull, as my pack train had occasion to testify in the summer of 1913. There are large sections of bristling lava, life-destroying sands and death-presaging glaciers which man has never explored.

All day we rode to the southward, and, save the wild swan on the ponds, no living creature crossed our trail. It was three in the afternoon before we found sufficient grass to afford the hungry ponies a bite; this was at the margin of a pool of glacial water that had filtered through the moraines. We regaled ourselves from the contents of our packing boxes, rested an hour, changed saddle horses and then pushed on over an unusually rough mass of terminal moraine at the foot of Láng Jökull. We turned towards the southwest, crossed a bog and arrived at the small saelhus, refuge, at Arnavatn, Eagle-Lake. This shelter of turf and stones was built for the protection of the sheep gatherers, who resort hither in the autumn to gather the sheep that have strayed to the highlands during the long summer.

This shelter stands on the shore of the lake just under the shoulder of Eyriks Jökull. As this was one of the most unusual so was it the choicest of our experiences this summer. In front of the hut is a waterfall which connects the upper with the lower lake. Here upon this point of land Grettir lived for many years during his exile, six I believe. In ancient days this desert was infested with outlaws, desperate men, living upon sheep and cattle stolen from the farmers along the borders of the desert. Usually these were men who had taken human life and were ready to take others if it would secure to them their wild liberty. Considering the history of the place, its rough and weird aspect, its proximity to the life-destroying glaciers and the chaos so heavily stamped upon the land, it is not to be wondered that imagination has peopled this unfrequented area with trolls and witches, nor that a few people may be found to-day who tell their children that outlaws still live in the interior around the glaciers and in the lava caves.

In the summer of 1913 I was camping at Hvitávatn, White-Lake, on the east side of Láng Jökull with the same Icelander, Ólafur Eyvindsson, who was with us in 1910. He said that he first visited White-Lake in 1909 and that after he had retired with another Icelander to their tent which was beside that of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Wright of Washington, D. C., they were thinking about the outlaws and Ólafur wondered if there was really any truth in the current stories of outlaws living here at the present time. At the close of conversation when sleep had fallen upon him, he awoke as with the sound of two men talking in a low tone in the Icelandic. He cautiously put his head out of the tent and with something like fear. He listened a few moments, the men drew nearer and he went to meet them.

To his pleasant surprise he found them to be a well known physician and his friend from Reykjavik. And this is all the truth there is to-day about outlaws in the interior of Iceland. There is only one thing to fear,—shortage of grass for the ponies. Grass the pony must have and feeding it to him is like feeding shavings to a roaring furnace. It is a rare sight to see an Icelandic pony lying down, for he will carry you all day and feed all night.

During the evening Ólafur and I shod the ponies, for the rough blocks had made havoc with their little feet. This was my first experience in the art of farriery. We hobbled them for the night and turned them into the bog beside the upper pond. Then we made great inroads upon our provisions. We gathered a few fragments of birch twigs and roots and some dried sheep manure and with this fuel were able to warm two cans of soup and to smoke the hut thoroughly. The smoke had the wholesome effect of driving out the dampness.

That evening is long to live in memory. We were fortunate in having no fog and a perfectly clear atmosphere. The vastness of the lava-riven plain, rolling away to the distant mountains, the network of ponds and glacial streams, glimmering in the lingering sunlight of the Arctic summer night, the great glacier, with blue-green walls and prismic domes, upon whose front hung scores of streams like strings of shining pearls,—such was the framework of the picture. The smoke from our root fire curled lazily upwards into the clear and rarified air from the diminutive pile of turf and lava that was to be our shelter for the night. The swan led their young from lake to lake in front of the camp and sang throughout the glorious night.

The hardness of the improvised bed of boards and saddles, or, perhaps it was the charm of the landscape, forbade my lengthened morning slumber and three o’clock found me crouched in the shelter of the cairn, drinking in the wonders of the scene,—glacier, lake and rolling moraine with the sunlight over all.

Eight in the morning, breakfastless, found us in the saddle. The ponies had fared poorly here, and if we were not to spend another night in the desert we must ride until we found grass, where pony and man could eat to repletion.

The heath over which we took our morning ride is uninviting, dreary and somewhat awe inspiring. There are many beds of flowers in sheltered places. The purple armaria, sandwort and stone-crop are the smiles of Flora upon the face of an Arctic desolation. As one reclines upon the flowered mounds between the tussocks of grass, basking in the genial sunshine and piling the empty tins around him, he forgets for the moment that he is under the cliffs of a mighty sheet of perpetual ice, that he is entirely dependent upon his ponies and the scanty grass they are now so greedily eating. Breakfast over, we rode for hours under the front of Eyriks Jökull, with many a stony moraine to climb and glacial torrent to ford. There is a legend concerning the name of this mountain which is worth relating as it shows something of the stirring times of the old days in spite of the absurdity of the conclusion.

A band of outlaws assembled in the great cavern of Surtur and lived upon ponies, sheep and cattle stolen from the farmers near Kalmungstúnga, Kalmungs-Tongue, and became a great menace to the entire region. Many attempts had been made to capture them but without avail. Finally a lad volunteered to leave his home and join the outlaws and act in the capacity of a spy. He did his work so well that he won the full confidence of the outlaws for he killed sheep belonging to his own father and brought them to the cave. The time came when, at the signal from the boy, the farmers assembled to take the outlaws unawares. Gathering at the entrance of the side cave in great Surtshellir in large numbers they slew all of the outlaws except Eyrik. This man was the strongest of all men of his time and made a stout resistance. However, the farmers hacked at him with their swords and cut off both feet at the ankles and both hands at the wrists. Having no way in which to longer defend himself, Eyrik turned a cartwheel on his bloody stumps across the blistered lava, up the ice slope and to the very summit of the glacier. In this manner he escaped and if you doubt it you can still see the blood red crags of fire scorched lava over which he rolled a human wheel. He is, if this story is true, the only man who has ever gained the summit of this, the second mountain in height in Iceland and from him the mountain takes its name.

In the afternoon we came upon the great Hallmundarhraun, Hallmundar’s-Lava, twisted, crumpled, cracked and tangled, grey with lichens and Icelandic moss in patches and alive with ptarmigan, plover and whimbrels. Beneath this lava sheet is Surtshellir, Surtur’s-Cave. Before we explore this chamber of fire origin it is well to pause for a moment and glance at the Norse mythology relative to Surtur.

In the Edda of Saemund, the Wise, we find the “Song of Vafthruðnis.” This is a dialog between Odin, who, under the disguise of Ganrade, visited the Jötunori to converse with their gigantic chief Vafthruðnis, to determine which was the wiser. Their discourse was concerning the origin of the world and the races of men. When Odin entered the giant’s hall he was accosted by the master as follows:—

After a lengthy and interesting dialog, Odin proposes a question which the giant can not answer, so Vafthruðnis replies:—

In this Ode we are told that Surtur was the adversary of Odin, that he dwelt in the Antarctic,—

This was on the fabled plain of Vigriði, where “a hundred miles around” on the wreck of the fiery elements the gods battled with their enemies and with the enemies of the mortals whom they protected. One article of the Norse mythology states that Surtur, the black prince of the nether regions, should come from the south and set the world on fire. Here where the devastation of volcanic fire blast is terrible, where a whole valley is filled with the scorched and blistered lava flow from the ice-crowned volcanoes, here where the great, black cavern extends for a mile under ground, the early settlers located the abode of the dread black prince, Surtur, and most fittingly. It was with a knowledge of this cave in his mind that Jules Verne wrote his story of “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.”

Beside the entrance and on a mound of crumpled lava stands a varða, cairn, to mark the way. Hundreds of these cairns have been built in the past centuries throughout the travelled portions of Iceland to guide the traveller over the mountain passes, across the sandy deserts and extensive wastes of glacial moraine as well as to point the direction to places where grass may be found for the ponies. There is a style in Icelandic cairns as in women’s clothes and one can tell by their outward appearance at what period they were built. They reminded Henderson of the passage in Jeremiah xxxi, 21,—“Set thee up way-marks, make thee high heaps.”

A portion of the roof of the cavern fell in at some remote period and this is the entrance. We climbed down with some difficulty to the snow bank and found a ptarmigan perched upon a block of stone. I had no difficulty in approaching within ten feet and she waited for me to take two photographs. This is the largest and the longest lava tunnel known. It is not, by any means the largest cave, but the largest underground passage by which lava formerly flowed that has been explored. It was formed by the lava filling the floor of the valley and cooling on top and then draining out underneath to some lower level. It was in exactly this same manner that the great lava flow came down from Skjalbreith, filled Thingvellir and then drained out and left the great plain between the mountains to fall to form that wonderful formation previously described in chapter six.

Vergil says,—“facilis descensus Averno” but we did not find it easy to descend into the Averno of Surtur, nor to follow the cavern once we had made the descent. We purchased candles at Akureyri for this purpose and lighting them we entered the chamber with one in each hand; there being three of us we had six candle power. “How far that little candle throws his beams,” of Shakespeare, was all too short a distance in this blackness. A little beyond the entrance is a side passage which we entered and where we found hundreds of bones of sheep and horses. This was the place formerly occupied by the above mentioned outlaws and thus far the legend above related is a truth. There being no animals in Iceland large enough to carry flesh into this corner it is clear that they were taken here by the hand of man. There are many hundreds of them showing what an extensive use was made of the retreat in the old days. Henderson mentions them in 1817 and Olafsen and Povelsen found them in 1753 so there is no doubt of their great age and we may justly conclude that these bones are those left by the outlaws. As I write I have two of them before me, one a vertebra of a sheep and the other a rib of a pony. This rib had been broken while the horse was living and had been healed again as the callosity testifies. As I look at this ancient bone I often wonder what a story it could relate of the cave where it has rested these hundreds of years and of the deeds of that lawless age.

For the first quarter of a mile the floor of the cave is strewn with great basaltic plinths that have fallen from the roof from time to time. Each stone was damp, dripping wet or coated with ice from the water that has percolated through the roof. The blocks were so large that in climbing over them we frequently found ourselves in holes up to the waist and as our candles gave only a baleful glimmer it was difficult to make progress. One can not step down into these holes without first assuring himself where the bottom is. Once down he must crawl up over the slippery stones on the opposite side.

The cavern runs straight as if laid out with a theodolite and the roof is arched with plinths and the walls are covered in places with patches of lava stalactites, which spread their nets of lace-like lava in strange fantastic forms. The dome is from forty to sixty feet high and the cavern is about thirty feet in width. As we proceeded we found more and more the deficiency of our candles in giving sufficient light for us to take advantage of the way, if indeed there is any advantage of one place over another.

After a weary climb over the slippery rocks we came to the reaches of ice, the accumulations of water that seep through the vault. Here the roof is hung with ice stalactites that often extend from the dome to the floor and present a wonderful sight, for the light of the candles, which refused to reflect from the blackened walls, glitters and plays on the ice in a beautiful manner. Great stalagmites of ice stand out of the murky gloom like spectres of the departed outlaws who haunted these underground chambers in the ancient day of Iceland’s lawlessness. We fastened the candles in the top of these huge white candlesticks and made a flashlight of the ice wall before us, which had brought us to an abrupt stop and where the journeys of most of the tourists end. The vapor hung heavily in the freezing air and the smoke from the candle flame, in the absolute quiet of the air, hung suspended or twined in long, curling bands of moisture laden smoke, which assumed fantastic forms, reminding us of the wraiths that disturb the midnight slumbers of guilty dreamers in the castle-haunted dungeons of mediaeval days.

At first it seemed impossible for us to scale the ice wall with any means at our disposal but by dint of much exertion it was accomplished. We knew that Povelsen in his visit and later Henderson, had deposited coins in the cairns which Povelsen had built at the far end of this cave. We had brought with us two Lincoln cents of the date of 1910 for the express purpose of placing them in the cairn. Ólafur ascended on my shoulders and gripping the lava stalactites on the wall managed to ascend. With his feet engaged in the crevices of the wall, he reached down and drew up Mrs. Russell, who stood on my shoulders. The two then formed a living chain by which I climbed to the top of the ice. Under the ice wall there was some water but the passage was too long and the ice columns too near together for a passage in this direction. Once on the top the way became easier. The ice sloped in a gentle declivity to the floor of the tunnel and when we left it we found a continuation of the heavy blocks of stone for some distance. This was followed by finer material and eventually by sand which made the walking much better. At the end of an hour of hard labor we arrived at the end of the tunnel and found the ancient cairn. We removed the capstone and with the wax of our candles cemented the two Lincoln cents, left our cards, replaced the capstone and retraced our weary way.

The return was as arduous as the inward journey, for we had slipped over the icy rocks and into the holes so often that our woolen gloves were cut to threads and our boots still show the scars of those ignominious slides. Nowhere else in Iceland have I ever felt the least fear of danger, neither in fording the glacial rivers, in the terrible deserts, on the ice mountains, nor in sleeping in the crater of Askja, Bowl, with ice beside my tent and columns of steam and sulfur gases rising from the solfatara in front, but, in this cave the thought was ever present with me,—“those blocks of stone, some of them weighing a ton, each has fallen from that lofty dome, when will the next one fall?” The experience was worth all the labor for we had been in the actual home of the outlaws, had worked our way to the far end of the longest and grandest lava tunnel known, we had seen the beautiful ice barrier, beautiful as the altar screen in the great cathedrals of Europe and we had left positive proof of our labor in the ancient cairn. No one should omit this visit if he is near this portion of Iceland. When he has issued from the darkness into the sunlight, if he desires more of the same experience he will find a similar tunnel not far from Surtshellir, which was discovered in 1909.

That night we reached Kalmungstúnga, a prosperous farm within the shadows of Geitlands Jökull, Goat-Land, and Ök Jökull, Yoke. This is a new farm house with spacious and airy rooms and well furnished. The farmer is obliging though he has a reputation of overcharging his guests. After a well cooked dinner we repaired to rest, not having slept more than three hours out of the last forty-eight. A little after midnight I was aroused by Mrs. Russell, who was saying:—

“There is some one in our room.”

After a little I awoke sufficiently to see a man standing at the foot of the bed occupied by Mrs. Russell. I asked,—

“Who is there and what is wanted?”

“It is Ólafur. The Governor of Iceland with his daughter has arrived and he wishes a bed,” replied the guide.

“Well, let him have one if he can find it. We are too tired to give up these.”

“The farmer does not want them, but there is one folded up under your bed. If I can get it the Governor will have it set up in the hall and sleep there.”

So saying, he took away the bed and we were soon asleep and did not awaken till the Governor sent word to us at ten in the morning that he would like our company at breakfast. The farmer’s wife prepared a special breakfast, cooking a young lamb. The good wife brought our her best dishes and loaded the table with her choicest food, for even in Iceland, it is not every morning that the Governor takes breakfast with the peasants.

The farmer at Kalmungstúnga, in former days, was accused by English writers of overcharging travellers. In comparison with other Icelandic rates it must be stated that there is still some truth in the assertion. However, he is enterprising, has built a fine large house with many arrangements for comfort and all his supplies have to be transported from the coast on the backs of the ponies. These things are expensive. If the traveller enjoys unusual comfort here or elsewhere in Iceland it is no more than common justness that he should pay unusual prices for his accommodation. On this farm there has recently been constructed a reinforced concrete stable, spacious enough for housing 500 sheep besides numerous horses and cows. The Governor pointed out to me the signs of prosperity while we were saddling the ponies and stated that more of the farmers might do as well if they had the enterprise. I might say with reference to our own bill at this farm that it was moderate but this is possibly due to the fact that I had been of some assistance in treating one of his favorite ponies that had a bad saddle gall on the shoulder.

It was one in the afternoon when we parted with the Governor to meet him some days later in his beautiful home in Reykjavik. We then rode down the green slope, and through the birch copse to the river, which we found easily fordable, though it has a bad reputation. Looking up from the hayfield, with its harvest in the full gathering, with men and women busy, the ice-crowned pyramids stand,—

This view is of great interest and beauty and I gazed longingly to the peaks that enclose Thórisdalr, Thief’s-Dale, and desired to climb those ridges of tumbled moraine and examine that great wall of eternal ice that hangs above. The lack of sufficient time made it impossible. This pleasure was experienced in 1913 when I came into Kaldidalr, Cold-Valley from the opposite direction, having pitched my camp at Brunnar, Springs, for several days. This view from Kalmungstúnga leaves no doubt in the mind of the traveller that he is in the land of ice; but when he turns towards the west, passes into the green valley of the Hvitá and comes into close proximity with the numerous hot springs scattered over the plains and along the banks of the river a more temperate climate is suggested.

Having crossed the Geitlandsá, Goat-River, we followed it down to the Barnafoss, Child-Falls, so named because of the drowning of some children at this place by accident. Some guide books call these falls the Geitlandsáfoss, Goat-River-Falls. In ancient times, when places were named in Iceland there must have been many goats in various portions of the country for we came across the name in various places; thus there are several “goat” mountains, “goat” gullies, “goat” rivers, etc. Personally I have seen one flock of goats only in the entire range of my travels and that was near Ljósavatn. The explanation is that they will not stand the wet climate as well as the sheep. When the cold driving rains sweep down the mountain slopes the goats run to shelter while the sheep will continue their feeding.

At these falls the water, in a series of three strong leaps, drops over one hundred feet into the canyon. The rock formation at this point is of interest to the geologist, for there is a large mass of metamorphosed obsidian. It is the only rock formation of this character that I have ever witnessed, either in position or as samples in a collection of minerals and rocks in science museums. An examination of this formation leads to the following conclusion. In an early eruption a large mass of obsidian was formed at this place. During a more recent lava flow the heat of the adjacent flowing rock rendered this mass of obsidian plastic; this caused it to stick to the passing lava stream, like molten glass, and it was thus pulled, twisted and stretched into its present shape.

This is a lovely series of fosses. The water from the rapidly melting glaciers pours out of the narrow confines of the basaltic canyon and at the foot of each fall forms a grand basin of emerald green water in a weird rock setting. Towards Kalmungstúnga there is a good sized forest, for Iceland, and the grass plains, through which this canyon cuts a great gray gash, form a real oasis in this elevated lava waste, shut in by towering mountains capped eternally with adamantine ice.

But by far the greatest interest here is the series of waterfalls, at the foot of the Barnafoss, which pour out of the lava in a half-mile series of cascades and waterspouts. North of Kalmungstúnga the waters from Eyriks Jökull flow into the lava and doubtless into subterranean channels like the tunnel of Surtshellir. This river flows many miles under ground and reappears at this point beside the brink of the Hvitá canyon. The rock formation which makes this strange waterfall possible is as follows:—

A rift in the ancient basalt, doubtless the result of an earthquake, formed the canyon of the Geitlandsá; later, another flow of lava swept down the valley and stopped at the very brink of this rift so that two great lava flows stand in sight, one above the other. Between these two sheets of lava flows the lost river from the glaciers and here it spurts out in a long series of cascades side by side. It is one of the finest sights in Iceland and one that the traveller in Iceland usually misses because it is off the regular trail. The guides do not always call attention to it and I fear that many of them do not know of its existence. It is a fact that few Icelanders know their own country, even the portion of it which they sometimes attempt to show to tourists. There are a few guides who know the travelled portion and know it thoroughly; these men look askance upon their fellows who act as guides and do not know every detail of the route, its history and its legends. The real Icelandic guide will, if you encourage him the least bit, show every point of interest and relate all the history and the legends. A story is told by the guides at Reykjavik of one of their fellow countrymen who attempted to guide a man from Geysir to Gullfoss, a distance of from one and a half to two hours ride. After wandering about the country all day and a part of the night they returned to Geysir without having seen the falls. He will never hear the end of it in Reykjavik. We have Ólafur to thank for many profitable hours in his beloved land. The real guide loves every spot to which he takes you and he feels that there is nothing like it, nothing half so good anywhere else in the world. The enthusiastic guide, filled with the love of his country and steeped in its traditions is a boon to a traveller, no matter in what land he seeks new scenes.

It was late when we left the falls and so we hastened across the rolling, grass-grown hills to Reykholt, Steam-Stead. Down the long slope and across the usual grass bog we rode and into the enclosure by the house where we were welcomed and given comfortable quarters by the pastor. This is historic ground, the site of the stead of Snorri Sturlason, “The Herodotus of the north.”

Snorri was born in 1178, when only three years of age he went to fostering at the home of Saemund, the Wise, at Oddi. Saemund died when Snorri was nineteen. Snorri’s father had considerable property but after his death, Snorri’s mother, described as a “gay young widow” wasted the substance and left the son to enter life’s activities with little. In 1199 Snorri married the daughter of Bersi, the Wealthy, who lived at Borg, the home of the famous Skallagrim. Snorri was now twenty years old and he entered directly into public affairs. He early became embroiled in partisan feuds but continued to gain power and following. This lead to his attaining the position of the Goði of his district. The Goði was a priestly ruler whose power and influence was supreme. If one desires to know more of the life and functions of this ancient official of the early days of Iceland he can get no better account than that left in the writings of Snorri.

Snorri at this time obtained the stead of Reykholt as a freehold and at once separated from his wife. The date of this occurrence is prior to 1209 for we read that the Bishop of Hólar spent the “winter of 1209 at Reykholt with Snorri Sturlason.” He had thus won the choicest holding in the entire valley as well as the enviable position of Goði. “He now became a great chieftain with ample means.” In 1215 he was elected Speaker-at-Law, at the early age of thirty-seven and for a term of three years. This was the highest honor in the land.

Snorri was a statesman, a poet, a scholar and a historian. It is in the latter capacity that he is of the most interest to us. In 1218 he went to Norway and was made a welcome guest at the homes of several of the Earls and at the court of King Hakon on account of his winning ways, his ready wit, his commanding presence and the songs that he composed in honor of his friends. He tarried two winters in Norway and it was during the second winter that his love of wealth and power was used by the King as a lever to influence him to betray Iceland into the hands of the Norwegian monarch. Snorri and his warlike brothers had often been embroiled in feuds especially with the masters of the trading ships from Norway and from Orkney. From his position as Goði, Snorri had the power to fix the prices and he often took advantage of his power to enrich himself at the expense of the foreigners. The result of these troubles was that an armed expedition was to be sent to Iceland by the orders of King Hakon under the conduct of Earle Skuli to avenge their countrymen who had been put to death in Iceland. Snorri knew what would be the outcome of this expedition, how it would develop into a long and hostile strife between the two countries and with most persuasive language he assuaged the anger of the King and his Earle and held out prospects that Icelanders might become the vassals of Hakon. This suited the King, so Snorri was made a “landed-man,” the highest position to which one of the King’s subjects could be elevated. Snorri, as a vassal, immediately gave to the King all of his great estates in Iceland. The King immediately returned them all to Snorri as his “landed-man” and in the form of a Royal Grant. This swapping for an empty title was the greatest mistake of Snorri’s life, and one that eventually led to his premature death. The Icelanders never knew the real reason for this act and they could bear no treason. Snorri, with all of his shrewdness, did not forsee the outcome. In 1220 he returned to Iceland with great gifts from both Earle and King. When he landed in the Westmann Islands in pomp the people became suspicious of him and made slurring jests about him even making parodies upon his own poems which cut Snorri to the quick.