Icelandic mythology

Two books, and why they matter more than the gods

Norse mythology is usually described as the religion of the Vikings. It is more accurate to say it is the literature of medieval Iceland. The Norse world was oral; almost nothing was written down at the time. What we have came later, from an island on the edge of it, from people writing about a religion their own great-grandparents had abandoned.

The Poetic Edda is a collection of anonymous poems — Völuspá, Hávamál, and the heroic lays — preserved in one book. That book is the Codex Regius, shelfmark GKS 2365 4to, written in Iceland in the 1270s on 45 vellum leaves. For most of the poems in it, it is the only source there has ever been. Eight leaves are missing, a gap scholars call the Great Lacuna, and the stories on them are simply gone.

Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson found the Codex in 1643 and, in 1662, gave it to King Frederick III of Denmark. It sat in Copenhagen for three hundred years. On 21 April 1971 it was carried back to Reykjavík by ship, under naval escort, and crowds met the dock. It is now at the Árni Magnússon Institute. Iceland does not treat this as a book. It treats it as the country.

The Prose Edda is the other one, and it has an author. Snorri Sturluson — born 1179, chieftain, lawspeaker, historian, and by most accounts not a pleasant man — settled at Reykholt in west Iceland around 1206 and wrote there. His Edda was a handbook for poets: to write in the old style you needed to know who Óðinn was, so he explained. Nearly every retelling of Norse myth since is downstream of that handbook.

He was killed in his own cellar at Reykholt on 23 September 1241. What he built there that still survives is his bath: a round stone pool fed by a hot spring, which you can walk up to today. It is on this site as Snorralaug, and it is one of the oldest preserved structures in the country.

The gods, briefly and accurately

Short version, with the Icelandic spellings — because if you are reading a map here, that is the spelling you will meet.

ÓðinnOdin

Chief of the Æsir. Hanged himself on the world-tree for nine nights to win the runes, and traded an eye for a drink from the well of wisdom. A god of poetry and knowledge before he is a god of war.

ÞórThor

Óðinn’s son, the hammer, the thunder. By a distance the most popular god in Iceland — which is exactly why Þór- place-names are unreliable evidence of him: half the country was named Þorsteinn.

FreyjaFreya

Of the Vanir, not the Æsir. Love, gold, war and seiðr — the magic Óðinn learned from her. Half of everyone who dies in battle goes to her hall, not to Valhalla; the sources are explicit about it and usually skipped.

Loki

Not a trickster with a heart of gold. In the Edda he engineers the death of Baldr, is bound under a serpent that drips venom on his face, and breaks loose at Ragnarök on the other side.

BaldrBalder

The beautiful one, killed by a sprig of mistletoe because his mother had asked every other thing in the world not to hurt him. His death is the moment the end starts.

FreyrFrey

Freyja’s brother. Harvest, weather, peace and fair sailing — the god a farming island had the most day-to-day use for. Gave away his sword for a giantess, and is short one at Ragnarök.

What we do not know is most of it. There was no single Norse creed, no scripture and no clergy; practice varied by valley and by century. Snorri was a Christian writing two centuries after conversion, ordering material that may never have been orderly. Anyone who tells you exactly what a Viking believed is filling in a blank.

The hidden people, and the rule about sunrise

The gods are literature. The huldufólk — the hidden people — are something else: a folklore that never stopped. They are not small, they are not winged, and they do not live in mushrooms. They look like people, they live inside particular rocks and hills, and the rule is that you leave their rock alone. Icelanders will very rarely tell you they believe this. They will also, very often, not move the rock.

Trolls work differently, and their rule is the most useful thing on this page for reading the landscape: daylight turns a troll to stone. Caught out at sunrise, a troll stays where it stood — permanently, as rock. That single mechanic explains the shape of our data. Of 67 folklore place-names, 21 are trolls, and almost all of them are crags, stacks and summits. The myth exists to explain rock, so it lands on rock.

The third layer is ghosts, and Icelandic ones are not wisps. A draugur is a corpse that gets up: heavy, strong, bad-tempered, and generally found near its own grave. Four places in our data carry the name.

The 67 places named after them

This is the part no one else has. Every guide to Icelandic folklore tells you the landscape is full of trolls and elves; none of them tells you where. We hold 5,924 named landscape records with coordinates, so here is the list — 67 distinct places whose Icelandic name names a mythological being. 54 of them have a page on this site; the rest have coordinates, which is enough to find them.

How the list was built, and what it deliberately leaves out. The count is derived from our records by a script, not typed by hand, and the exclusions are the whole method: Þór- (commonest personal-name element; Þorskafjörður is "cod fjord"); álft- (whooper swan, not elf); built things: petrol stations, campsites, huts, pools, museums, churches; hikes/ and tours/ (user- and partner-written titles, not place-names). Getting Þór- wrong alone would have added 46 places that have nothing to do with Thor. If a name is ambiguous, it is not counted.

A name is evidence of a story, not proof of one. Some of these carry a tale everyone in the district knows; others are simply what somebody called a hill eight hundred years ago and it stuck. Kerling in particular means “old woman” before it means anything supernatural — on a mountain it usually describes a pillar of rock read as a troll-woman, but not always. The list is a list of names. It is not a claim about belief.

Where to actually go

• Snorralaug — Reykholt, west Iceland. The stone pool Snorri Sturluson built, still fed by its spring, a few metres from where he was killed. If you visit one place on this page, this is the one that connects a book you can read to a thing you can touch.
• Þingvellir — where the Alþingi met from 930, and where in the year 1000 the lawspeaker Þorgeir ruled that Iceland would become Christian. It is also, geologically, a rift valley on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and the first stop on the Golden Circle.
• Goðafoss — north Iceland, straight off the Ring Road. “Waterfall of the gods”: 12 m high and 30 m wide, in a horseshoe. The story attached to it is that Þorgeir, having made that ruling, went home and threw his carvings of the old gods into this water. The story is later than the event; the name is old.
• Hvítserkur — Vatnsnes, north-west. The troll in the photograph: 15 m, standing in shallow water, holes worn through the base. Best at low tide, and a long but worthwhile detour off the Ring Road. Worth knowing before you photograph it as untouched nature — farmers reinforced its base with concrete in the mid-20th century to stop the sea taking it. Iceland holds its trolls up.
• Álfaborg — Borgarfjörður eystri, east Iceland. The name means “elf rock” and the district is the one most associated with the queen of the elves. Our own record is more specific and more interesting than the tourist version: it describes a single large standing stone above the farm at Úlfsstaðir, which an avalanche came down the gully and shifted in the 20th century, leaving a visible furrow. A stone that got moved is a stone people keep track of.
• Skessuhorn — Borgarfjörður, west, 967 m. “The ogress’s horn.” You see it from the road up through Borgarfjörður and it is unmistakably a horn.
• Hólmavík, Strandir — the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft, in the Westfjords, on the coast where most of Iceland’s witch-trial executions happened in the 1600s. The victims there were overwhelmingly men, which is unusual in European witch-hunting and is the museum’s actual subject.
• Draugasetrið, Stokkseyri — the Ghost Centre, an hour from Reykjavík on the south coast. A walk-through of Icelandic ghost stories in the dark, and the only place on this list that is explicitly trying to frighten you. It is also the easiest of them to reach.

Almost none of this is reachable by bus. Álfaborg is 700 km from Keflavík by road, Hvítserkur is a gravel spur off the highway, and Snorralaug is a village with a car park and no service. Plan the driving first — our can-I-drive checks and live road conditions are the honest way to find out what is open today.