The One-Man Religion of the Golden Circle

Every farming district has its characters. In Biskupstungur, when I was growing up, one of them was Njáll Þóroddsson. He was a greenhouse farmer who lived at Friðheimar in Reykholt, near the community hall Aratunga, and grew vegetables under glass like many of his neighbours. One thing set him apart from all of them. Njáll had a religion that nobody else in the district shared.

The older people explained it to us children simply. Njáll had his own faith. He had started it together with his twin brother, but the brother had moved to America, and now Njáll kept it alone.

We understood it best through food. Njáll’s son Haukur was in school with us. Njáll did not eat meat or fish, because his religion forbade it, and at home Haukur ate what his father ate. There was surely more to it, but what we children remember is skyr and cucumbers, and that other families in the district liked to give Haukur a hearty meal when he came by.

For years that was all the story was: something the grown-ups told us, half explanation and half warning. Then I found Njáll in print, three times over: in a Morgunblaðið interview from 1970, in a second interview from 1974, and in a 1996 article about a memoir written by his wife. The story was true. Parts of what we had been told were not, and the real one is stranger and sadder than the version we knew.

What the Older People Told Us

To the adults in the district, Njáll was a well-known figure. Everyone agreed he was strange, and he never hid what he believed. He had his own Bible, and he tried to convince anyone who would listen that it held the only true faith.

Nobody was convinced. Over the years many people came to work for him, and they listened, did not believe, and eventually gave up the argument. No one in Biskupstungur ever joined him.

That is how the story reached us: two brothers who made up a religion of their own. One of them left, and the other kept it alone.

A Teacher Who Believed in Inspiration

Njáll did not start out as a grower. He was a teacher, and taught for many years in schools in South Iceland, the last of them in Mýrdalur, near Vík, where he told a journalist he had been happy.

He was also, from early on, a man who took guidance from somewhere other than the people around him. In 1947 he bought a piece of land in Reykholt: about 2,000 square metres of waterlogged bog. He had no particular plan for it. “In my eyes there is nothing strange about that,” he told Morgunblaðið in 1970. “I believe in inspiration and guidance from beyond.” Later, he said, the same inspiration told him to settle there.

In 1954 he planted 1,800 trees on the bog. He had not forgotten that nobody noticed: “The mayor of Reykjavík planted one tree in Heiðmörk and got his picture in the papers. I planted 1,800 trees in 1954, and no picture was ever taken of me.”

Twins at Iceland’s First Iron-Frame Greenhouse

Njáll had a twin, Þór. The Laugarás local history names them both, Þór and Njáll Þóroddssynir, as twin brothers who worked as gardeners in Laugarás, the hot-spring settlement on the Hvítá river not far from Reykholt, and notes that Njáll later lived at Friðheimar.

The place they worked has its own story. In 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, the physician Sigurður Sigurðsson, then Iceland’s chief tuberculosis doctor and later its Director of Health, built a small summer house in Laugarás. According to the Laugarás history, the original reason was that he wanted a refuge for his family in case Reykjavík was bombed. Beside it he put up a 300 square metre greenhouse, which the same source describes as probably the first iron-frame greenhouse built in Iceland. The twins were among the gardeners who worked in it.

“Tarzan”

One story from those years survived long enough to reach me. In Laugarás, Njáll was known as Tarzan, because he worked out in the fields in nothing but his swimming trunks. As it turns out, that was how he would meet his wife.

A Truck on a Road in France

In the district we knew Njáll had a bad back, and I had always heard it came from a motorcycle accident in France. The 1970 interview tells it differently, and its author was there.

The journalist, Elín Pálmadóttir, was working at the Icelandic embassy in Paris in 1950. On 9 August that year the embassy got a call: an Icelander had been in a road accident in the south of France and was lying in a Catholic hospital, barely expected to live. He had been travelling by bicycle when a large truck hit him and dragged him a long way. The gravel tore away the muscles of his back and thighs.

That was her first meeting with Njáll. He survived and reached Paris before Christmas, but he was assessed as 40 percent disabled for life. Muscle does not grow back, and for the rest of his life he struggled with his back and tired easily at work. It is why he always needed people working for him.

America, and a Brother in Los Angeles

The district’s story sent Njáll’s twin to America. The newspapers show that Njáll went there too. In 1970 he told Morgunblaðið he had spent time in America studying “a certain philosophical teaching”, and that around 1956 he had thought about emigrating for good.

He stayed. Þór did not. Þór settled in Los Angeles, and he is the reason the Los Angeles connection runs through the rest of this story. Njáll later said it was through Þór in Los Angeles that he got to know yoga, which he practised for a time in America and meant to take up again. And it was from a publisher in Los Angeles that he ordered the book that became his faith.

A Parisian at Friedland

In 1963 a 23-year-old woman from Paris named Liliane Zilberman was travelling around Iceland alone. On the classic bus route past Gullfoss, Geysir and Þingvellir, she ended up stranded on a country road near Gullfoss, with nobody who could understand her. Njáll had heard there was a foreigner in trouble and came to help. He drove her to Gullfoss and Geysir himself.

Decades later, in her memoir, she described the first sight of him walking towards her: bare to the waist in the sun, in old work trousers, with his shirt tied round his middle by the sleeves. “He is tall, fair-haired, badly shaven,” she wrote, “in truth a very handsome man.” The district’s Tarzan, seen through the eyes of a Parisian.

Liliane’s family were from Eastern Europe. Her father was a doctor, and during the war they had sheltered from Nazi persecution in the mountains of southern France. She had studied pharmacy in Paris. Njáll was almost twenty years older. They wrote to each other after she left, and in September Njáll came to Paris and they married at the city hall. Instead of going straight home, they took a 72-day cruise from Southampton, round Africa to Australia, Tahiti and Mexico, and back through the Panama Canal.

Friedland, or Friðarheimar

When Morgunblaðið visited in August 1970, the bog Njáll bought in 1947 was unrecognisable. The journalist described turning off the main road onto a private drive and coming suddenly on a flower garden: 6,000 flowering pansies, with nemesias, chrysanthemums, snapdragons and orchids, set among lawns and stone walls, and a large house on a slope above. This, she wrote, was not a description of a house in Hollywood, but in Biskupstungur. The couple called their house Friedland, or Friðarheimar: homes of peace.

Njáll had five greenhouses, 2,000 square metres in all, growing mostly tomatoes and cucumbers. In summer he had staff, among them a French boy. In winter the couple were alone.

The pool with the stone arch

In front of the house was a swimming pool, 55 metres long, fed with the runoff water from the house’s heating. Njáll had just cast a stone arch over it. A photograph from 1970 shows Njáll, Liliane and a small boy sitting on that arch.

That arch must be the “bricks over the pool” I remember from childhood, which to us children was the most interesting thing on the farm.

A little prince in the castle

The small boy on the arch was Haukur. “Now a little prince has come to the palace,” the journalist wrote. He had joined the household the Christmas before, three years old, after Njáll and Liliane had spent several years trying to adopt a child in Iceland, France and Germany. They hoped to take more.

Friðheimar as We Knew It

As children we were nervous about going to Friðheimar. Njáll kept a dog we were sure was dangerous, and that alone made the place hard to reach. It was hard to reach in another way too: Njáll was known in the district for having no telephone. If you wanted to speak to him, you went there.

There were always people working in the greenhouses, because Njáll’s back would not let him do it alone, and there was always the conversation about his faith. By then it had a name.

The 1974 Interview: OAHSPE

On 2 June 1974, Lesbók Morgunblaðsins, the paper’s Sunday supplement, published a two-page interview in a series on religious experience. Elín Pálmadóttir had come back to Friðheimar, this time to ask about Njáll’s faith. The headline was a line of his:

“Erum á leið inn í ljóssvæði — því er öll þessi upplausn.”
We are on our way into a zone of light. That is why there is all this upheaval.

The photograph shows Njáll in a white sweater with Haukur, now a small boy in a patterned Icelandic sweater, on his knee, and a thick book in his hands. The caption names it: the great book, OAHSPE. The journalist writes that all she knew beforehand was that Njáll followed a religion almost unknown in Iceland and, because of it, ate only vegetables. Njáll was convinced her visit was no coincidence. He believed she had been sent by higher powers to make his faith known.

A new bible from New York

Oahspe: A New Bible was published in the United States in 1882. Its author, the New York dentist John Ballou Newbrough, said he wrote it by automatic writing on one of the first typewriters, before sunrise every morning for a whole year, without knowing what he was writing. Its followers call themselves Faithists, and a vegetable-only diet is one of its central teachings. According to the interview, small groups in the United States and Britain followed it in 1974.

How Njáll found it

Njáll said he had read metaphysical books for years. He had studied the ideas of the Icelandic thinker Helgi Pjeturss, looked into theosophy and gone to séances in his school years. Then a book he had ordered from Los Angeles arrived in the post. He read it, put it aside for four or five years, and could not get past it. Some people called it a science-fiction thriller, he said, but he could find nothing in it he could argue against.

What Njáll believed

Much of the interview is Njáll explaining the book: an almighty Creator above everything, spirit worlds around the earth, and a history of humanity running through cycles of darkness and light of about 3,000 years each. By his reading, the earth was just then entering a zone of light, which explained the upheaval in the news. Giving up meat and fish was one step in purifying yourself, because the spiritual body was not content with food that had blood in it. He admitted it was hard to live on vegetables in Iceland.

Parts of it read like science fiction, and Njáll knew people said so. In his account, humanity began when an “archangel” came to earth in a spaceship to raise up early man. 450,000 years ago, ten million volunteers followed in spaceships to lift the people of earth towards higher thought.

For all that, he did not present himself as a prophet. Asked what he himself did, he answered:

“Ég geri ekkert. Ég bíð og er alltaf að burðast við að þroska mig … Sjálfur er ég ekkert — bara venjulegur maður.”
I do nothing. I wait, and I keep struggling to develop myself. I am nothing myself, just an ordinary man.

He cooked the journalist a meal of many kinds of vegetables, with plant-based ice cream for dessert. The interview ends with Njáll and little Haukur walking her out to her car.

What the District Got Right, and What It Did Not

Put the newspapers next to what we were told as children, and most of the story holds. Njáll held a faith almost nobody in Iceland had heard of. It ruled out meat and fish. He was sure it was the true one. And he held it alone.

What the district got wrong is where the faith came from. Njáll did not invent his religion, and there is nothing in the record to say his twin shared it. His Bible was a real book, printed in America in the 1880s, and it reached him from Los Angeles, the city where Þór lived. The district remembered two brothers who founded a faith. The newspapers show one brother who found a faith, and another who was the reason it reached Iceland at all.

Starships, and a Darker Comparison

The vocabulary in Njáll’s book matters. Oahspe describes graded heavens that souls rise through, and beings who travel between worlds in ships of light. Its author is credited with possibly being the first person to use the word “starship”. Ideas of this kind, with spirit hierarchies, levels above the human and visitors arriving by ship, later became common ground for the movements now grouped together as UFO religions.

The best known of them is Heaven’s Gate, the American group led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, known to their followers as Do and Ti, a movement that did not leave a good name behind it. There is no direct historical link between Heaven’s Gate and Oahspe, and the Faithists who follow Oahspe are a small and peaceful movement. The family resemblance is still easy to see: renunciation of the body, a level above the human, and ships from the heavens.

In Biskupstungur, people have drawn that comparison themselves. When Njáll’s story comes up today, locals say it was a good thing his faith never took root in the district.

How the Faith of One Ended

In 1996 Liliane published her memoir in Icelandic, Bláu trén í Friðheimum (The Blue Trees at Friðheimar), translated by Sigurlaug Bjarnadóttir. The newspaper Alþýðublaðið summed it up: a love story and an adventure that turned into a tragedy.

Liliane is clear that the faith was part of it. When she met Njáll, she wrote, he belonged to the national church without being a churchgoer, but he talked often about the book Oahspe. That interest, the paper noted, played its part in the tragedy that led to their separation. Liliane went back to France. Njáll stayed at Friðheimar with Haukur.

Her memoir also gives the plainest confirmation of the one-man religion anywhere in print:

“Njáli tókst ekki að afla Oahspe fylgis eða ná saman neinum hópi um þessa kenningu.”
Njáll never managed to win followers for Oahspe, or to gather any group around its teaching.

When illness overtook Njáll in his later years, the ties to Friðheimar were cut. Haukur went to Litla-Fljót, a farm close by, where Júlíana and Halldór took him in and, in Liliane’s words, cared for him as their own child. When Liliane came back to Iceland in 1994 for the first time since the separation, Njáll was in a nursing home, and the house at Friðheimar stood neglected. Of Haukur, grown up by then, she wrote that he bore no bitterness, “because he is good and warm-hearted.”

A Faith of One, in a District of Individualists

It would be easy to tell this as a joke. The district never quite did. People said Njáll was strange, and said it often. They also worked in his greenhouses, listened to him talk about his faith, fed his son, and in the end took that son in and raised him.

That is Biskupstungur in those decades: a farming district of independent people who made their own decisions, and a community small enough that it had to live with every one of them. A man who settled on a bog because he felt guided to, planted 1,800 trees on it, built a 55-metre pool in the countryside and followed a bible from New York was an extreme case of the first. The family at Litla-Fljót is the second.

The Golden Circle is a coach route today. But the district it runs through was shaped by people like Njáll Þóroddsson: a teacher, a twin, a gardener in what was probably Iceland’s first iron-frame greenhouse, the survivor of a roadside accident in France, and for the rest of his life the only member of his faith. His religion ended with him. The district still tells his story.

This story is part of The Untold Stories of the Golden Circle. Other stories from the same district include why Strokkur stopped erupting, the hidden history of Peningagjá at Þingvellir and the history of Gullfoss and the Hvítá river.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the one-man religion of the Golden Circle? The faith of Njáll Þóroddsson, a greenhouse farmer at Friðheimar in Reykholt, Biskupstungur. Locals believed he and his twin brother had invented it. Newspaper interviews from 1970 and 1974 show it was Oahspe, a 19th-century American scripture. His wife’s 1996 memoir confirms he never won a single follower.

What is Oahspe? Oahspe: A New Bible, published in the United States in 1882 by John Ballou Newbrough, a New York dentist who said he wrote it by automatic writing. Its followers are called Faithists, and it teaches a vegetable-only diet.

Was Njáll’s religion connected to Heaven’s Gate? Not directly. There is no organisational or historical link between Oahspe and Heaven’s Gate, the American UFO group led by Do and Ti. Oahspe’s ideas of graded heavens and ships of light belong to the same broad family of beliefs, which is why locals in Biskupstungur sometimes make the comparison.

Who was Njáll Þóroddsson? A teacher in South Iceland who bought land in Reykholt in 1947, worked as a gardener in Laugarás with his twin brother Þór, and built up a greenhouse farm and garden at Friðheimar with his French wife Liliane.

What was Friðheimar called in Njáll’s time? In 1970 Njáll and Liliane called their house Friedland, or Friðarheimar, meaning homes of peace.

Where was Iceland’s first iron-frame greenhouse? Probably in Laugarás, Biskupstungur, according to the local history there. The physician Sigurður Sigurðsson built it at his wartime refuge from 1942. The twins Njáll and Þór were among its gardeners.

Sources

• E.P. (Elín Pálmadóttir), “Friðheimar í Biskupstungum. Þar hafa Njáll og Lilian búið um sig innan um tré og blóm,” Morgunblaðið, 187. tölublað, 21 August 1970, pp. 10–11. Available on Tímarit.is (in Icelandic).
• Elín Pálmadóttir, “Erum á leið inn í ljóssvæði — því er öll þessi upplausn. Viðtal við Njál Þóroddsson garðyrkjubónda um trú hans — OAHSPE,” Lesbók Morgunblaðsins, 15. tölublað, 2 June 1974, pp. 12–13. Available on Tímarit.is (in Icelandic).
• “Bláu trén í Friðheimum,” Alþýðublaðið, 4 December 1996, p. 6, on Liliane Zilberman Þóroddsson’s memoir Bláu trén í Friðheimum, trans. Sigurlaug Bjarnadóttir (Fjölvaútgáfan, 1996). Available on Tímarit.is (in Icelandic).
• Laugarás local history, “Krosshóll / Sigurðarstaðir 1942”: Sigurður Sigurðsson’s wartime refuge, the iron-frame greenhouse and the twins Þór and Njáll Þóroddssynir (in Icelandic).
• Wikipedia, “Oahspe: A New Bible”: author, publication and teachings.
• Robert Robertsson: childhood memories of Biskupstungur, and what older people in the district told him.