Oraefi. Ófeigur Sigurðsson

Heavyset, they were uncontrollable because of their cautiousness; it was hard to catch them, they would leap onto the glacier, jump in rivers, and dive off cliffs to certain death rather than fall into human hands. The farmers in Núpsstaður would only allow themselves to seek a single sheep for food, and they did so for centuries, making the hazardous journey, an adventure, in harmony with nature. When I briefly visited Fippi, wanting to inquire about the wild herds so that I could write an article for Agricultural News, he said that so much nonsense had been said and written about the wild animals of Núpsstaður that I might as well just write whatever I felt like, giving me poetic license where his animals were concerned. Though the plan was to write a scientific report for Agricultural News, the idea popped into my mind that I should write a novel about the wild herd. But how do you write a novel about wild sheep? I thought, as I stood with Fippi in the farmyard. We locked eyes. Fippi is, like his father Hannes the rural mail carrier, oddly short and slim. People were often amazed to see the Willis on the sands: it would seem empty and gave rise to numerous ghost stories. Tourists often turned up at the Skaftafell Visitor Center greatly disturbed after going out to see the sands, not so much because they’d been caught in a sandstorm in a rental car whose paint was stripped off by the weather, but because they’d met the old Willis in the dark, yellow and red and bearing the number Z221 and with no one behind the wheel!

      At Núpsstaður, the last town before you go out onto Skeiðarársand, is Lómagnúpur, a sheer rockface rising 700 meters from sea level, wrote Dr. Lassi in the report; rational, intelligent men grow fearful and awestruck in his shadow, for inside Lómagnúpur lives the giant Járngrím; he appears to people who perish on the sand. It’s said that men are doomed if they merely see him; below Lómagnúpur raging whirlwinds whip up and noone is worthy of mercy. One time, the farmer at Núpsstaður was fetching water in pails down in the mudflats under the overhang, but as he came back up with his full pails a whirlwind whipped up and swirled him up in the air, face-to-face with the rock’s highest edge, then twirled him about and around and downward, slow and slower still until he was standing in front of his cowshed door, not a drop lost from his buckets.

      Fippi’s father, Hannes Jónsson, the rural mail carrier in the Skaftafell area, was known across the land as a heroic traveler, a man as modest and humble as Núpsstaður men tend to be, making nothing of the mortal danger he was placed in by his hazardous journeys across sands and glacial rivers and glacial scree; such stories had to be dragged out of him, like leading a ram to slaughter; he was tortured into writing about his journey over the glacier when the Skeiðará flooded in 1934, an enormous flood; at the time, Hannes was in Öræfi and wanted to cross the sand to deliver his mail and get back in time for Easter, but the sand was practically impassable because of the swelling water, so he detoured across the glacier while the flooding was at its peak, gushing so much water and glacial material and so many icebergs that the Skeidará measured forty kilometers wide across the sand, tumbling along carrying icebergs the size of apartment buildings like little ice cubes; telephone poles were washed away and even the highway, everything in the river’s way. Hannes went above this roaring glacial scree, right over the ebb, with the flood booming under his feet across the ice which had turned blood red from the ash columns steaming off the glacier as it towered over the mailman, all flecked with lightning and glare and flashes and thunderous booms and raining sand; the whole time large pieces would break off the glacier around him and where he’d just this second stepped peat-gray flumes flecked with cudbearred spouted up in the mist. New cracks opened everywhere about him; he had to crawl between them amid the raucous noise, hearing all kinds of murmurations, but he safely crossed with his deliveries, traversing the sands and rivers and glaciers and mountains and forests between Skaftafell and Núpsstaðarskógar, a journey which took eighteen hours and meant he could return home by Easter Sunday. More than once he was prevailed upon to write an account of this journey, and you have to read between the lines in his narrative, which is known by different titles: Minor Incidents during a Pleasant Journey or An Unremarkable Hike.

      Freysnes lies between Skaftafell and Svínafell, Dr. Lassi’s report explains at the end of the regional description, since the report was intended for both academic and popular audiences. No-one had lived in Freysnes since that fateful year, 1362: the ruins of dwellings lay about Freysnes for all time, or at least until they were leveled to the ground by a bulldozer one fine winter’s day, and today no one knows where the ruins are. More than that: the ruins are a source of shame in the region. Ragnar, the farmer at Skaftafell, sold his land to the State in 1966 so that Skaftafell could become a National Park and so the Icelandic population, not just farmers and their friends and family, could enjoy its natural beauty, an unsurpassed beauty, and it was agreed it should belong to the populace—in fact, Skaftafell’s beauty should belong to humanity as a whole, said Ragnar. Everything was changing and few people kept up the traditions. Farming was declining even as tourists started streaming toward Öræfi now the Skeiðará had been bridged on Iceland’s National Day, 1974, completing a ring road around the entire country; that year marked 1100 years since Settlement and there were magnificent celebrations. Farming wasn’t to be allowed within the Park, for it does not suit the tourism industry; the hotel in Freysnes was designated for those who didn’t want to, or couldn’t, camp in tents within Skaftafell National Park, such as the elderly and the elegant; Freysnes’ beauty is comparable to Skaftafell’s. And now all kinds of little houses stand in ancient Freysnes, dotted around the big structure, which has wobbled on its foundation: decorated, furnished prefabs and containers tourists can use, Dr. Lassi wrote; Icelandic ingenuity can change trash skips into hotels.

      Documents flooded into the hotel room in the form of books and magazines while Bernharður slept. The chronicles record that one morning in 1362 Knappafells glacier exploded and spewed over the Lómagnúpur sands and carried everything off into the sea, thirty fathoms deep: deposits of large rocks, water flumes, sand floods, volcanic detritus, falling rocks, and gray mud left behind desolated sands. The Province was destroyed, all its people and creatures annihilated; no sheep or cattle survived, no creatures left alive anywhere in the province around the glacier, both the historical chronicles and contemporary accounts agree, volcanic material fell everywhere, surging in such great abundance out to sea that ships could not navigate; the corpses of people and animals washed up on beaches far and wide, alongside debris and other rubbish; the bodies were cooked and tender and the flesh so loose on the bones it fell apart. This was the most destructive and fatal volcanic eruption in the history of Iceland, one of the greatest tephra eruptions anywhere on Earth in the last millennium; the eruption surprised everyone with its so-called gusthlaup, the latest scholarly theories contend in a back issue of Nature Studies, Dr. Lassi wrote, sweaty with excitement at the surge of evidence the interpreter dumped onto the table beside her, seventy farms were destroyed in one moment that morning, a gusthlaup rushing with tremendous speed down the steep mountainsides, taking with it seventeen churches copiously furnished with books, vestments, bells, chalices, and other belongings; nothing survived of this thriving civilization. Beauty and fertility instantly turned forbidding and barren in this storm of destruction, the area now a gaping wound; even the place names were scraped off the land, and everything had to be named fresh when the settlements snuck back in fifty years later, humans bedding down on the new land like fragile plants; Hérað, the Province, became Öræfi, the Wasteland; Klofajökull became Vatnajökull; Lómagnúpssandur became Skeiðarársandur; Knappafellsjökull became Öræfajökull; Knappafell became Hnappavellir; Tvísker became Kvísker … N. B: I should put that in a table as a convenience to readers of the report, Dr. Lassi had written, the amputation of place names and their transformation—you’ll like this, Bernharður, you place-name-pervert! Dr. Lassi said, loud and clear.

      What the hell is a gusthlaup? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter, I keep writing this damn word in the report, taking it from the accounts that stream in here, but I have no idea what a gusthlaup is! The interpreter replied that she didn’t know what gusthlaup meant. Get Hálfdán from Tvísker! Dr. Lassi ordered the interpreter, he’s down at the meeting, no, Hálfdán is the ornithologist … Sigurður! Fetch me Sigurður, or whichever of the brothers is the geologist? Just get any of them, they must all know the word, they’re so learned, these people, and it has to be clear in the narrative.

      No area has ever endured such an extensive natural disaster as Hérað did in 1362, Dr. Lassi’s