Robert Robertsson

Stand on the footbridge where the Öxará river spills east out of Almannagjá on any summer afternoon and count the phones. Couples lean on the railing with the white water behind them. A tour group waits its turn for the same frame. Someone films the river foaming over the rocks, then walks on toward the car park.

Very few of them look down.

The pool beneath that bridge is Drekkingarhylur, the Drowning Pool. Between 1618 and 1749, at least 18 women were put into sacks and pushed into this water. They were held under with a pole until they stopped struggling. The bridge stands almost exactly where the executioners stood.

Many English-language accounts place this scene at Öxarárfoss, the tall waterfall further up the gorge. That is the wrong waterfall. Öxarárfoss is where visitors go to admire the river. The place where the river was used to kill is downstream, at a lower fall that older Icelandic sources call Neðrifoss, right under the bridge everyone crosses on the way back to their bus.

A parliament that also kept the axe

Þingvellir is sold as the birthplace of Icelandic democracy, and it is. It was also where the Alþingi carried out its own sentences. Icelandic legal historian Páll Sigurðsson counts 72 people executed here after formal judgment. Archaeologist Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir’s list of executions names 75, and 55 of them were men.

None of those sites has a gate, a fence or a ticket desk. Two of them sit beside the most-walked paths in the park. One lies partly under a road. Most visitors pass all four in a single afternoon without knowing it.

The killing at Þingvellir did not begin with the Vikings. The Commonwealth law code, Grágás, had no death penalty at all. Its harshest sentence was full outlawry. The state that later carried out executions at the Alþingi was a different creature: royal, Lutheran and, after the Reformation of 1550, determined to police the private lives of its subjects.

Who actually wrote it

English summaries often say the Danish king imposed Stóridómur on Iceland. The document itself tells a different story. The National Archives of Iceland hold a copy written around 1635, and it opens with the names of 24 Icelandic men who sat in judgment at the Alþingi on Friday, 30 June 1564. They acted at the request of the king’s governor, Páll Stígsson, and the two lawspeakers. King Frederick II confirmed the judgment a year later. Icelanders sat in judgment over Icelanders.

The judges wrote down their reason. They pointed to the óhæfa og fordæðuskapur, the abomination and wickedness, that befell so many people „ár eftir ár, mest sökum hegningarleysis“: year after year, mostly for lack of punishment.

What the law actually said

The old church law listed seventeen degrees of kinship and marriage within which sex was forbidden. Stóridómur made every one of them a capital crime. In the judges’ own words, those who broke it:

„skulu falla til óbótamála og hafa fyrirgjört lífinu, karlmenn höggvist en konur drekkist“
(shall be beyond atonement and have forfeited their lives, the men to be beheaded and the women drowned)

Half of the condemned person’s property went to the king. The other half went to their heirs, the text says, „sakir fátæktar landsins“, because the country was poor.

Below the death penalty ran a ladder of fines, and the ladder was built for the poor to fall off. More distant relatives paid fines for a first offence, then lost „húðina“, their skin, meaning a public flogging, if caught again. Anyone who could not pay took two strokes of the rod for every mark they owed. Unmarried parents paid a rising fine for each child together and were flogged at the fifth. Married people caught in adultery a third time received the same sentence as incest: the men to lose their heads, the women to be drowned.

The National Archives’ own commentary adds two facts English accounts usually leave out. The fines that used to go to the Church now went to the king’s agent, which made the law a real source of royal income. And the harshness of the law sometimes drove women to hide a pregnancy and let the newborn die, the crime that would later fill the Drowning Pool.

One crime, two deaths

The law split its punishment by sex. A man convicted of the worst offences was taken to Höggstokkseyri, the Block Spit, a gravel bank in the Öxará where the executioner’s block stood, and beheaded. A woman convicted of the same act was taken to Drekkingarhylur, put into a sack and drowned.

Höggstokkseyri: the gravel bank in the Öxará where the block stood, with the assembly’s booths behind.

The National Park’s own records note that drowning sentences under Stóridómur were not carried out until 1590, a generation after the law passed. Once the machinery started, it ran for roughly 160 years. Páll Sigurðsson dates the executions at Þingvellir from 1602 to 1752, when the last person put to death there was beheaded.

The executed were almost always buried close to where they died, without ceremony and without the church. Höggstokkseyri itself no longer exists as a gravel bank. The river has shifted its channels over the centuries, and the spot most likely lay on an islet off the mouth of Brennugjá that is now overgrown with grass.

The Drowning Pool gets the plaque, but most of the people executed at Þingvellir were men. Archaeologist Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir at the University of Iceland has compiled every recorded execution in Iceland, 236 of them between 1550 and 1830, each traced to the annals and the published Alþingisbækur. Seventy-five of those entries name the Alþingi as the place of execution. Of the 75, 55 were men and 20 were women.

• 42 died under the sexual laws or for hiding a birth: incest, adultery, “debauchery”, or a newborn found dead.
• 16 were hanged for theft. Another man was hanged for adultery.
• 9 were executed for murder.
• 8 were burned for sorcery.

By method, the list records 21 beheadings, 17 hangings, 17 drownings and 8 burnings. For 12 more, it says only that the person was “taken from life”.

Who they were

The youngest was Sigurður Skúlason, 17, hanged for theft in 1697 alongside Jón “Gráni” Jónsson, who was 20. The oldest was Sigmundur Guðmundsson of Klúka in the Strandir district, 80 years old, beheaded in 1738 on the same day his 36-year-old daughter Halldóra was drowned. Lassi Diðriksson was 70 when he was burned.

They were farm servants, tenant farmers, a fisherman, a housekeeper, a vagrant. In 1703 four men were hanged at one Alþingi, and one of them, Jón Þórðarson, for theft and vagrancy together. In 1705 three men were beheaded for incest at a single Alþingi.

Families died together. A stepfather and stepdaughter in 1639, again in 1647, again in 1650. An aunt and her nephew in 1618. A father and daughter in 1738. A widow and her dead husband’s brother in 1749.

Worse than death

Two men on the list were punished beyond the sentence of death. Guðmundur Narfason, a farmer from Kílhraun on Skeið, was beheaded for murder in 1650, his body cut apart and his head set on a pole. The last person executed at Þingvellir, Jón Jónsson of Bær in Hrútafjörður, known as Kjöseyrar-Jón, was beheaded for murder in 1752. Before the axe fell, he was pinched with glowing tongs. His head, too, was set on a pole.

The full roll

Year · name, age and home district where recorded · crime · how they died.

1602 · Björn Þorleifsson, 47, Snæfellsnes · Debauchery · Beheaded at Höggstokkseyri
1606 · Bjarni Hildibrandsson, 31 · Incest · Executed
1618 · Þórdís Halldórsdóttir, 43, Sólheimar, Skagafjörður · Incest · Drowned
1618 · Guðbjörg Jónsdóttir, East Iceland · Incest with her nephew · Drowned
1618 · Unnamed man, East Iceland · Incest with his aunt · Beheaded
1624 · Hildibrandur Ormsson, 44, Dýrafjörður · Incest with his wife’s sister · Executed
1624 · Sesselja Jónsdóttir, 29 · Incest with her sister’s husband · Executed
1639 · Unnamed woman, Eyjafjörður · Incest with her stepfather · Drowned
1639 · Unnamed man, Eyjafjörður · Incest with his stepdaughter · Beheaded
1641 · Helgi Þorgeirsson, 56, Strandir · Adultery · Executed
1647 · Jón Þorsteinsson, 47, Húnavatnssýsla · Incest with his stepdaughter · Executed
1647 · Björg Andrésdóttir, 22, Húnavatnssýsla · Incest with her stepfather · Executed
1650 · Guðmundur Narfason, 50, Kílhraun, Skeið · Murder · Beheaded, dismembered, head on a pole
1650 · Jón Jónsson, Snæfellsnes · Incest with his stepdaughter · Beheaded
1650 · Sigríður Einarsdóttir, Snæfellsnes · Incest with her stepfather · Drowned
1667 · Þórarinn Halldórsson, 42, Westfjords · Sorcery · Burned in Almannagjá
1671 · Sigurður Jónsson, Vatnsfjörður · Sorcery · Burned
1673 · Bjarni Sveinsson, 38, Þingeyjarsýsla · Incest with his wife’s sister · Executed
1674 · Páll Oddsson, Vatnsnes · Sorcery · Burned
1674 · Böðvar Þorsteinsson, 39, Gufuskálar · Sorcery · Burned
1675 · Lassi Diðriksson, 70, Rauðasandur · Sorcery · Burned
1677 · Bjarni Bjarnason, 62, Önundarfjörður · Sorcery · Burned
1677 · Þorbjörn Sveinsson, 37, Borgarfjörður · Sorcery · Burned
1678 · Eyvindur Jónsson, 38, Ölfus · Adultery, living as an outlaw · Beheaded
1678 · Margrét Símonardóttir, 38 · Adultery, living as an outlaw · Drowned
1680 · Sæmundur Þorláksson, 25, Fljótshlíð · Incest with his cousin, hidden birth · Beheaded
1681 · Þorkell Sigurðsson (“Lyga-Þorkell”) · Theft · Hanged
1681 · Þorgeir Ingjaldsson, 51, Árnessýsla · Adultery · Hanged
1681 · Ari Pálsson, 51, Arnarfjörður · Sorcery · Burned
1682 · Jón Pétursson, Westfjords · Theft · Hanged
1682 · Jón Þorsteinsson, Skutulsfjörður · Murder · Beheaded
1683 · Helga Gunnarsdóttir, 33, Hrútafjörður · Incest · Drowned
1683 · Vilkin Árnason · Theft · Hanged
1684 · Guðrún Jónsdóttir, 29, Bessastaðir · Hidden birth · Drowned
1684 · Sigvaldi Jónsson, 24, Rangárvallasýsla · Murder · Beheaded
1686 · Jón Þorláksson, Norðfjörður · Hidden birth · Beheaded
1687 · Borgný Brynjólfsdóttir, 47 · Incest · Drowned
1693 · Unnamed man, Múlasýsla · Theft (probably) · Hanged
1695 · Þuríður Bjarnadóttir, 25, Bolungarvík · Hidden birth, incest · Drowned
1697 · Jóreiður Þorgeirsdóttir, 32, Ölfus · Hidden birth · Drowned
1697 · Jón Jónsson (“Gráni”), 20 · Theft · Hanged
1697 · Sigurður Skúlason, 17 · Theft · Hanged
1697 · Ólafur Brandsson, Saurbær, Dalir · Murder · Beheaded
1697 · Þorsteinn Þorleifsson, Saurbær, Dalir · Murder · Beheaded
1699 · Jón Sigmundsson, Snæfellsnes · Theft · Hanged
1700 · Andrés Þórðarson, Borgarfjörður · Theft (probably) · Hanged
1701 · Ásmundur Jónsson, 41, Dalir · Theft · Hanged
1701 · Jón Jónsson (“Bitru-Jón”) · Theft (probably) · Hanged
1702 · Ásmundur Marteinsson, 42, Vopnafjörður (probably) · Theft · Hanged
1703 · Katrín Þorvarðsdóttir, 33, Hvítanes · Hidden birth · Drowned
1703 · Jón Þórðarson, Gnúpverjahreppur · Theft and vagrancy · Hanged
1703 · Jón Þorláksson, Hrunamannahreppur · Theft · Hanged
1703 · Gísli Einarsson, Borgarfjörður · Theft (probably) · Hanged
1703 · Jón Jónsson, Ísafjarðarsýsla · Theft (probably) · Hanged
1705 · Kolfinna Ásbjörnsdóttir, 36, Esjuberg · Hidden birth · Drowned
1705 · Árni Björnsson, 44, Grásíða, Kelduhverfi · Incest with his wife’s sister · Beheaded
1705 · Salómon Hallbjörnsson, 52, Staðarsveit · Incest with his niece · Beheaded
1705 · Ólöf Jónsdóttir, 20, Staðarsveit · Incest with her uncle · Drowned (place uncertain)
1705 · Sumarliði Eiríksson, 22, Borðeyri · Incest with his half-brother’s daughter · Beheaded
1705 · Ragnhildur Tómasdóttir, 24, Borðeyri · Incest with her father’s half-brother · Drowned (place uncertain)
1706 · Ólafur Kolbeinsson, 36, Borgarfjörður eystri · Hidden birth · Beheaded
1708 · Hallfríður Magnúsdóttir, 37, Borgarfjörður eystri · Hidden birth, adultery · Drowned
1709 · Helga Magnúsdóttir, 32, Lón · Hidden birth · Drowned
1722 · Þorsteinn Jónsson, Tálknafjörður · Hidden birth · Beheaded
1725 · Jón Eyjólfsson, 56, Seyðisfjörður · Incest with his daughter, hidden birth · Beheaded
1725 · Jakob Jónsson, Arnarfjörður · Theft · Hanged
1729 · Jón Ingimundsson, Fljótsdalshérað · Murder · Executed
1731 · Sigurður Árnason, 18, Snæfellsnes · Murder · Executed
1738 · Halldóra Sigmundsdóttir, 36, Klúka, Strandir · Incest with her father · Drowned
1738 · Sigmundur Guðmundsson, 80, Klúka, Strandir · Incest with his daughter · Beheaded
1738 · Jón Guðmundsson, 58, Víðidalur · Hidden birth, incest · Beheaded
1740 · Ásmundur Þórðarson, 30 · Murder · Executed
1749 · Guðríður Vigfúsdóttir, 39 · Incest with her late husband’s brother · Executed (drowned, per the National Park)
1749 · Bjarni “öskubak” Jónsson, 39 · Incest with his late brother’s wife · Executed
1752 · Jón Jónsson (“Kjöseyrar-Jón”), Hrútafjörður · Murder · Tortured with glowing tongs, beheaded, head on a pole

“Executed” means the record does not say how. “Hidden birth” translates dulsmál: a birth concealed, after which the child died.

Eighteen women were drowned at Þingvellir between 1618 and 1749. The National Park lists their crimes as adultery, causing the death of a newborn child, and perjury. Many English-language sites say the women were drowned as witches. They were not. Iceland burned its convicted sorcerers, and all but one of them were men.

The method is recorded plainly. Each woman was put into a sack, pushed into the pool and held down with a pole until she stopped struggling. A 2002 parliamentary proposal describes the sack as coarse haircloth and suggests the women were thrown in from the east side of the rocks, where the current would take them under quickly.

Þórdís Halldórsdóttir, 1618

The first woman drowned at Drekkingarhylur came from Sólheimar in Skagafjörður, in the north. She was 43 when she died and had no farm of her own. In 1608 rumours spread that she was involved with her sister’s husband. Under Stóridómur that was a capital matter. Þórdís swore an oath that she was a virgin. She was in fact pregnant.

After the child was born she refused to name the father. Confessions in such cases were routinely forced, by flogging or by a small torture device known as the fingraklemma (Vísir), the finger-crusher, which was used on Þórdís. Under that pressure she named her brother-in-law. She withdrew the confession almost at once. Nobody today can say whether it was true.

The judges recorded that they found no sign he had seduced her through sorcery, and so the full guilt fell on her. Her brothers and other male relatives protested the sentence. They were ignored. The sentence was carried out at the Alþingi in 1618, roughly ten years after the oath that condemned her.

Her case has been retold twice in Icelandic fiction: Jón Björnsson’s novel Jómfrú Þórdís (1964) and Þóra Karítas Árnadóttir’s Blóðberg (2020).

Guðríður Vigfúsdóttir, 1749

The last woman drowned at Þingvellir was Guðríður Vigfúsdóttir from Snæfellssýsla in the west. She and her brother-in-law, Bjarni “öskubak” Jónsson, were found guilty together of incest by marriage. Both were 39. Guðríður was a widow, and Bjarni was her dead husband’s brother. That is the crime as the record gives it: two adults, related only through a wedding, condemned under a law that counted their relationship among the worst offences a person could commit.

One hundred and thirty-one years separate Þórdís and Guðríður. Across that span the law barely moved, and at least one woman on the list has no name at all.

The plaque and the list

A memorial plaque at the pool lists the drowned women by year and home district. For 1738, visitors’ photographs of the plaque show no name, only a woman from Ísafjarðarsýsla. Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir’s list names the woman drowned at the Alþingi that year: Halldóra Sigmundsdóttir, 36, from Klúka in the Strandir district. She died the same day her 80-year-old father was beheaded for the same crime.

Either the plaque and the list disagree about her home district, or the plaque has lost her name. Either way, she had one.

Drekkingarhylur as the records describe it: a woman in a sack, held under with a pole until she stopped struggling, while the assembly watched from the rims of the gorge.

The pool you see is not the pool they saw

Visitors expect a deep, dark pool. What they find is shallow water tumbling over stones. That is not how the women saw it.

Older sources describe a deep pool or whirlpool in front of a narrow rock ledge, with the river dropping over it in a substantial waterfall. In 1897 a timber bridge was laid across the Öxará here. It was replaced by a stone bridge in 1911 and reworked again in 1944. The building work packed stone into and around the pool and largely filled it.

In 2002 two members of the Alþingi proposed restoring Drekkingarhylur toward its old form, and dedicating the work to the memory of the women who died there. The bridge still stands over the pool, and the crowds still stop on it for photographs.

Drekkingarhylur is the execution site everyone has heard of. Two others lie within a short walk of it, and almost nobody stops at either.

Brennugjá, the Chasm of Fire

Brennugjá is a shallow fissure just east of the road that runs down to the Þingvellir farm and church, the same road that crosses Peningagjá, the Money Fissure. Many visitors cross it without noticing. The road crosses the chasm partly on a built-up embankment, and the burning place itself, near the mouth of the fissure, went under that road when it was laid in the early twentieth century.

Iceland’s burning age ran from 1625 to 1685. Across the country 21 men and one woman were burned for sorcery. Nine people were burned at Þingvellir, most of them men convicted of using runes, magical staves or spells. The last burning in Brennugjá took place on 4 July 1685, and that final victim died for blasphemy rather than witchcraft.

The list names eight men burned at the Alþingi between 1667 and 1681. The first, Þórarinn Halldórsson from the Westfjords, was 42. The list gives his place of death as Almannagjá itself, the gorge every visitor walks through. In 1674 two men, Páll Oddsson and Böðvar Þorsteinsson, were burned at the same assembly. In 1677 two more followed: Bjarni Bjarnason, 62, and Þorbjörn Sveinsson, 37.

The annals record doubt even at the time. One man, Lassi Diðriksson, was burned at the Alþingi on a charge some thought nearly baseless. Heavy rain fell on the assembly that day, and the fire went out three times before it took. By one old reckoning, burning a single person to ash consumed twenty horse-loads of brushwood. Human bones have been found in the chasm.

Gálgaklettar, the Gallows Rocks

The English name is usually given as Gallows Rock, singular. The place name is plural: two bare rocks on the east wall of Stekkjargjá, the fissure that continues Almannagjá north-east beyond Öxarárfoss. They stand roughly 400 metres north of the waterfall, beside the old path that led up to Langistígur.

Gálgaklettar: a beam laid between two rocks in Stekkjargjá, with room to hang one person at a time.

There was no gallows frame. A beam was laid across the gap between the two rocks, and the condemned were hanged from it. A nineteenth-century account, taken down from an old Þingvellir priest, judged there was room to hang only one person at a time, perhaps two. Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir’s list records 17 hangings at the Alþingi: 16 for theft and one, Þorgeir Ingjaldsson in 1681, for adultery. The thieves included two young men hanged together in 1697, aged 17 and 20. In that era, a single stolen lamb could begin the chain of events that ended here.

The same account records that six or seven skulls were found in a hole at the site shortly before 1830, and that the priest of the day had them moved to the churchyard.

Between Gálgaklettar and Drekkingarhylur lies Öxarárfoss, the most photographed waterfall in the park. Walk from the bridge to the falls and on to the rocks, and you have walked between two execution sites without passing a single sign that says so.

The four sites form a single walk through the rift valley: Drekkingarhylur under the footbridge, Öxarárfoss, Gálgaklettar in Stekkjargjá about 400 metres beyond the falls, and Brennugjá by the road to the Þingvellir church, with Höggstokkseyri in the river below it.

After 1752 the axe left Þingvellir, but it did not leave Iceland. One case on Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir’s list links to a local history of the farm where it began, written by historian Kjartan Ólafsson from the original court papers. It shows how the system worked in its last decades, step by step.

Gljúfrá is an abandoned farm in Arnarfjörður in the Westfjords, empty since 1943. In 1758 the parish priest recorded an 18-year-old girl there named Ólöf Jónsdóttir. She had been confirmed that year, could read, and knew her catechism. The priest’s entry says she „þénar hjá stjúpföður sínum, Ívari Jónssyni á Gljúfrá, hegðar sér vel og frómlega“: she serves her stepfather, Ívar Jónsson of Gljúfrá, and behaves well and honestly.

A year later her stepfather made her pregnant. The birth was hidden, the child did not survive, and the truth came out.

The sentence

On 16 May 1761, at the local assembly site at Auðkúla, the acting sheriff Sigurður Sigurðsson, nicknamed “Shadow”, and eight local farmers sentenced both to death. The charges were incest, a concealed birth, and failing to try to keep the child alive.

The sentence for Ívar went far beyond beheading. He was to be led to the place of execution with a noose around his neck and pinched three times on the way with glowing tongs. At the block he was to lose his right hand first, then his head. Ólöf was also to be beheaded, and her head set on a stake as a warning to others.

Two years in a cell

The sentence was confirmed at a special assembly at Selárdalur in August 1761. Then the case went to the Supreme Court in Copenhagen, which confirmed it on 16 December 1762. The news did not reach the sheriff until the following summer. Ívar and Ólöf were executed on 22 August 1763, most likely at Auðkúla. They had spent 118 weeks in custody, probably in the sheriff’s own lock-up.

Kjartan Ólafsson concludes that this was almost certainly one of the very last executions in the Westfjords, and the last time blood was shed in Iceland for incest.

When they were led to the block, Ólöf’s mother, Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir, was still running the farm at Gljúfrá, about sixty years old. She had just lost her husband and her daughter to the same sentence.

The same soil, eighty years later

There is a twist in the farm’s later history. By the 1840s part of Gljúfrá belonged to Jón Sigurðsson, an archivist in Copenhagen and the man Icelanders now honour as the leader of their independence movement. Owning that share of Gljúfrá made him eligible to stand when the Alþingi was restored in 1844. The farm where a father and daughter were condemned helped put the country’s most famous politician into its new parliament.

No single person stopped the killing, and no single day ended Stóridómur. It wound down over 180 years, and the power that ended it was the same one that had profited from it: the Danish Crown.

1749 · Last woman drowned at Drekkingarhylur.
1752 · Last execution at Þingvellir: Kjöseyrar-Jón, beheaded for murder.
1760s–1790s · Women condemned at the Alþingi are now sentenced to beheading, not drowning. Death sentences go to the Supreme Court in Copenhagen for review.
1763 · Last known execution for incest in Iceland, at Auðkúla in Arnarfjörður.
Late 1700s · Prison sentences start to replace execution. A prison house is built in Reykjavík; the same building now holds the Prime Minister’s office.
1798 · The Alþingi meets at Þingvellir for the last time.
1830 · Last execution in Iceland: Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Friðrik Sigurðsson, beheaded at Vatnsdalshólar on 12 January.
1830–1869 · About ten more Icelanders are sentenced to death, mostly for sexual offences and hidden births. The king commutes every sentence.
1869 · New penal law, modelled on Danish law, removes the death penalty for incest and for hiding a birth.
1915 · Iceland’s last death sentence is confirmed in Copenhagen, then commuted to prison.
1928 · The death penalty is abolished.
1995 · A constitutional revision makes reinstating it unconstitutional.

Who stopped it

The honest answer is: Copenhagen. The sentences of the early 1600s were carried out at the same Alþingi that passed them, usually immediately or while the assembly was still sitting. By the 1760s, a death sentence had to travel to the Supreme Court in Copenhagen and back, which could take two years, and royal pardons grew more common. Legal historian Páll Sigurðsson credits the softening influence of the Enlightenment in the late 1700s. After 1830, the king commuted every death sentence an Icelandic court passed.

The law itself changed last. The penal law of 1869 finally removed death as the sentence for incest and for hiding a birth, the two crimes that had filled the Drowning Pool. By then nobody had been executed for either in more than a century. The Icelandic parliament abolished the death penalty altogether in 1928.

It is tempting to file Stóridómur under a darker age. That age is not over. Amnesty International recorded at least 2,707 executions in 17 countries in 2025, its highest total since 1981, and that figure leaves out China, which keeps its numbers secret. Iran carried out at least 2,159 and Saudi Arabia at least 356. Together they account for 93 percent of the recorded total.

Most of those executions were for drug offences. But Amnesty’s report also records people put to death for blasphemy and for sexual relationships outside marriage. Those are the same two kinds of offence, in modern form, that once filled the gorge at Þingvellir: words against God, and sex the law did not permit.

The parallel is not about one faith. Stóridómur was written by a Lutheran state, and its judges invoked God throughout the text. The pattern is the same wherever it appears: a state that treats private life and belief as crimes and answers them with death. Iceland took two centuries to climb out of it.

More from the archive: Peningagjá, the Money Fissure at Þingvellir · a local history of Gullfoss and the Hvítá · Brúarfoss, the waterfall that was a road · all the Untold Stories of the Golden Circle.

What is Drekkingarhylur? Drekkingarhylur, the Drowning Pool, is a pool in the Öxará river at Þingvellir, under the footbridge where the river leaves Almannagjá. At least 18 women were executed there between 1618 and 1749: each was put into a sack, pushed into the pool and held under with a pole.

Is the Drowning Pool at Öxarárfoss? No. Öxarárfoss is the tall waterfall further up the gorge. Drekkingarhylur lies downstream, at a lower fall under the footbridge. Building the bridges in 1897, 1911 and 1944 largely filled the old pool, so the water there today is shallow.

How many people were executed at Þingvellir? Legal historian Páll Sigurðsson counts 72 executions there between 1602 and 1752. Archaeologist Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir’s list names 75 people executed at the Alþingi: 55 men and 20 women. It records 21 beheadings, 17 hangings, 17 drownings and 8 burnings, and does not say how the other 12 died.

Were the women drowned at Þingvellir accused of witchcraft? No. They were drowned for incest, adultery, perjury or hiding a birth after which the child died. Iceland burned its convicted sorcerers, and all but one of those burned were men.

What was Stóridómur? Stóridómur, the Great Judgment, was a law on sexual offences passed by the Alþingi on 30 June 1564 and confirmed by King Frederick II the following year. It made sex within seventeen degrees of kinship and marriage a capital crime, with men beheaded and women drowned, and set fines and floggings for lesser offences.

Where are the execution sites at Þingvellir? Drekkingarhylur is under the footbridge over the Öxará in Almannagjá. Gálgaklettar, where thieves were hanged, are two rocks in Stekkjargjá about 400 metres north of Öxarárfoss. Brennugjá, where people were burned, is a shallow fissure by the road to the Þingvellir church, and Höggstokkseyri, where the block stood, was a gravel bank in the river below it.

When did executions end in Iceland? The last woman was drowned at Þingvellir in 1749 and the last execution there was in 1752. The last execution in Iceland took place on 12 January 1830. The 1869 penal law removed the death penalty for incest and hidden births, and Iceland abolished the death penalty in 1928.

Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir, list of executions in Iceland 1550–1830, University of Iceland. The roll of 75 executions at the Alþingi, with ages, home districts, crimes and methods, each traced to the annals and the Alþingisbækur.

Þjóðskjalasafn Íslands (National Archives of Iceland), Stóridómur: transcription of the 1564 judgment from a copy written around 1635, with commentary. The judges, the date, the wording of the penalties, the fines and the king’s revenue.

Páll Sigurðsson, “Aftökuörnefni”, Árnastofnun, 2019, from a lecture given on 26 February 2011. The count of 72 executions, the method of drowning, Gálgaklettar, Höggstokkseyri, Brennugjá and the Enlightenment.

Þjóðgarðurinn á Þingvöllum (Þingvellir National Park), place-name entries for Drekkingarhylur and Brennugjá. The first and last drownings, the bridges of 1897, 1911 and 1944, the nine burned at Þingvellir and Lassi Diðriksson.

Alþingi, proposal for a parliamentary resolution on restoring Drekkingarhylur in Almannagjá, 127th session, 2001–2002. The original pool and fall, the haircloth sack and the bridge works.

Vísir, “Öll þessi andlit í Drekkingarhyl”, drawing on an article by Steinunn J. Kristjánsdóttir. Þórdís Halldórsdóttir and the fingraklemma.

Kjartan Ólafsson, “Gljúfrá”, a local history of the farm from the original court papers. The case of 1761–1763.

Morgunblaðið, “Þar rauður loginn brann”. The last burning in Brennugjá, 4 July 1685.

Vísindavefurinn, “Hvenær var síðasta aftakan á Íslandi?”. The last executions, the pardons after 1830, the 1869 law and abolition in 1928.

Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025, as summarised by the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions worldwide.

The illustrations are charcoal-style reconstructions made for this article. They interpret the written record and are not historical images.

On a summer afternoon the Golden Circle barely pauses. Rental cars and coaches run between Þingvellir, Geysir and Gullfoss, and many of them cross Grímsnes, the low district of lava fields and wetland that also holds Kerið crater.

Almost nobody in those cars knows that a fair distance from the main road, on a farm few people ever visit, stands a 1,400-square-metre concrete building that was meant to change how Reykjavík trained its young athletes. It never opened.

The farm is called Reykjanes, and the name trips people up, so it is worth being plain about it. This is not the Reykjanes peninsula near Keflavík airport. It is a farm of the same name in Grímsnes, on flat, wet ground whose land reaches the spring-fed Brúará, the same river that pours through Brúarfoss.

When Morgunblaðið wrote about the building in 2020, its headline needed only one word for it: Kastalinn, the Castle.

The building has not been forgotten, exactly. When it comes up in conversation in Reykholt, on the Biskupstungur side of the river where I grew up, everyone knows it is there. What has been forgotten is its story. In its place, theories have grown: about rotten concrete, about demolition costs, about why nobody has ever been able to sell it. The newspapers of the time tell a different story, and a stranger one. It starts with hot water.

The dream is older than 1987. In 1969 Iceland’s national sports federation opened a sports centre at Laugarvatn, not far away, and it quickly became a favourite for team training camps. After only two summers, the Reykjavík Sports Union concluded that demand would outgrow it and that the city’s clubs needed a camp of their own.

A farm chosen for its hot water

The flat, wet lowland around the site, July 2017.

In February 1971 Íþróttabandalag Reykjavíkur — ÍBR, the umbrella body for the city’s sports clubs — bought Reykjanes. That September its board invited Reykjavík journalists out to see the land: about 320 hectares (roughly 790 acres), flat and wet, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the city, with hot springs and pools giving around 30 litres a second of water at 70–90°C (158–194°F).

The heat was the whole point. ÍBR’s leaders told the press that a training centre with heated buildings and a swimming pool was practically unthinkable without geothermal water. Construction, they said, would hardly begin within two or three years. It took ten.

ÍBR’s own anniversary timeline, compiled in 2019, gives the purchase year as 1975. The papers of the day say otherwise: Morgunblaðið reported in September 1971 that the purchase had gone through that February, and in 1987 Tíminn wrote that ÍBR had owned the land for fifteen years.

What was actually built

The plan was a complete training centre: playing fields, a sports hall, a swimming pool, and a main building where visiting teams would sleep and eat. ÍBR applied for state support in 1971 and received a building permit in 1980. The concrete went up between 1981 and 1983.

This is the detail that keeps getting lost: what stands at Reykjanes was never a sports hall. Tíminn described it in 1987 as a 1,400-square-metre building (about 15,000 square feet) meant for accommodation, dining and meeting rooms, the residential heart of a youth camp. The pitches were to go on the slope below it, where the wet ground had already been largely drained. The sports hall, the pool and the playing fields were never built. Even a 2020 newspaper headline called the building a sports palace. It was always a lodge.

How much went into it? ÍBR never published a full tally. What the record does show is where some of the money came from. In 1981 the city of Reykjavík bought ÍBR’s 8 percent share in Laugardalshöll, the capital’s big indoor arena, and most of the proceeds went to Grímsnes. The figure that would decide the building’s fate came later.

The headline of August 1987

By the summer of 1987 the concrete had stood silent for four years. On 6 August, Tíminn gave the story its back page under a headline full of confidence: Reykvíska æskan mun skokka í Grímsnesinu — Reykjavík’s youth will go jogging in Grímsnes.

That was the promise. There were signs, the article began, that Reykjavík’s athletes would have a complete sports centre in Grímsnes in the coming years, and the photo caption imagined the city’s young sportspeople staying there for training camps in fine comfort.

Read on, and the story underneath was different. Little had been done for three years. The roof was on, the concrete had been treated with silane, a water-repellent coating against concrete damage, and drains had been laid around the building, but it was still a closed-in shell. ÍBR’s chairman, Júlíus Hafstein, told the paper he could not say what the site’s future would be. The question had come up at ÍBR’s last general assembly and been postponed. He expected a decision at the next one, and said it was no secret that individuals and organisations had shown considerable interest in the property.

Then a second caption gave the game away. The ground floor, it noted, had already been taken into use by the horses of Grímsnes, whose droppings lay across the floors.

The headline promised jogging teenagers. The countryside had already moved in.

One of the long corridors, July 2017.

Seen from Reykjavík, Reykjanes was a promise to the city’s young athletes. Seen from the farms around it, it was something else: a city organisation’s building site on a local farm, its future decided at meetings in town. Even Tíminn admitted in 1987 that the project had never made much noise.

When the money stopped, it did not stop with a bang. ÍBR’s own history says inflation and a shortage of money dogged the project from its first day, and Iceland’s inflation in those years was ferocious. In 1983, the year work on the building ended, consumer prices rose by about 84 percent, the highest annual rate in the World Bank’s records for Iceland.

The end came on paper. Some time after the work stopped, ÍBR had the investment reviewed. Its managing director later told Morgunblaðið what the review found: given the total investment and the cost of getting started, the centre could not be expected to pay its way. Finishing the building and the sports facilities was estimated, at 1986–87 prices, at roughly five to six million US dollars at the exchange rates of the day, well over ten million in today’s money. The board decided to put the building and the land up for sale.

Deep-set windows along the facade, July 2017.

When these photographs were taken, on a bright morning in July 2017, the building looked less like a ruin than like a building site that had been paused and never resumed. Long corridors of bare concrete run the length of the floors, and the grain of the timber formwork is still printed sharp on the walls and ceilings. The floors are gravel and packed earth. Window frames sit in some openings and are missing from others, and at the far end of a corridor the daylight pours in through an opening.

Stacked timber inside the building.

Inside lie stacks of timber, piles of insulation board, plastic tubs and sheets of corrugated metal. On the ground floor the earth is soft underfoot, and a wide doorway opens straight onto a fenced pasture. Outside, rows of deep-set windows run along the concrete facade, looking out over flat green wetland and the glint of water in the distance.

A ground-floor doorway onto the pasture.

It is eerie in the way only an unfinished building can be. A ruin has had a life. This one never got to begin. It never opened for the camps it was built for, and the pitches meant to lie below it were never laid. Whatever the headlines have called it, this sports palace never hosted a single game.

The weather has had more than forty years to work on it. In 1996, ÍBR’s managing director insisted there was no concrete damage in the building and that the roof was sound, though he admitted it had often been broken into and that animals had taken shelter inside. When Morgunblaðið visited in 2020, it described the building as open to the weather, a long way from the main road and rarely visited.

A word to anyone tempted to go looking: Reykjanes is private land, in use by its owners. The building is not open to visitors, and an unfinished shell is no place to explore. This is a story best enjoyed from a distance.

When the building comes up in Reykholt, the conversation always lands on the same question: why has nobody ever been able to sell it? The theories follow close behind:

• that forty winters of frost have got into the concrete and rusted the steel inside it, so the whole thing would have to come down to its foundations;
• that pulling down that much reinforced concrete would cost more than the land is worth, so any developer would sooner buy the empty field next door;
• that it was built as a giant sports hall, the wrong shape for a hotel and too big for any farmer;
• and that the municipality once talked of simply blowing it up.

They are good stories. The paper trail answers most of them, and its answers make the mystery deeper, not shallower.

It did sell

In September 1996 ÍBR advertised the shell together with about 270 hectares (some 670 acres) of geothermal land and fishing rights in the Brúará, for about $240,000 in cash at the time, roughly half a million dollars in today’s money. Its managing director, Kolbeinn Pálsson, admitted the earlier asking price had perhaps been set too high. He said there had been considerable interest that summer, and quite a few offers from individuals and organisations. In 2020 Morgunblaðið reported that private owners had bought Reykjanes more than twenty years earlier and that they use the land. The building, the paper said, has been a side issue.

The concrete

The concrete theory is the one the record cannot settle, but it is not the one the record supports. In 1996 the seller stated plainly that there was no concrete damage and that the roof was sound. A seller has every reason to say so, of course, but it remains the only first-hand statement on record. The shell had been treated with silane in the 1980s precisely to protect it, and in 2017 the formwork grain was still crisp on its walls. No engineering assessment has been published since. Whether the frost has finally won is a question for an engineer with a core drill, not for a newspaper or a website.

The wrong building

The “wrong building” theory is the opposite of the truth. The block was designed for exactly what people imagine it could become: beds, a dining room, meeting rooms. In 1996 ÍBR said many people thought it could serve all sorts of purposes, being close to the highlands for summer and winter trips. Kolbeinn pointed to about 80 hectares (some 200 acres) nearby that suited summer houses, and said that when they drilled for hot water they had to go only five metres (16 feet) down. Ideas have come and gone since: a monastery, a retirement home, and a peace centre that the businessman Ástþór Magnússon wanted to run there. As for being too big for any farmer, the local horses had moved into the ground floor before Reykjavík had decided what to do with it.

The explosives

That part is real, as far as it goes. A note filed with Morgunblaðið’s photographs of the building in 2020 records that blowing it up had been discussed. By whom, and how seriously, it does not say.

So the real mystery is not why nobody could sell it. Somebody did. It is why a lodge built for precisely the use everyone imagines, on land where hot water lies five metres down, just off Iceland’s most famous tourist route, has stood unfinished since 1983, through the tourism boom and beyond it. The public record does not say.

People also say the paperwork is a nightmare: that a Reykjavík organisation’s project on rural Grímsnes land left behind a tangle of ownership and zoning that no developer wants to touch. The record does not bear that out. ÍBR bought the farm in 1971 and sold it in the late 1990s, and nothing in the records we have found suggests the Reykjavík connection left anything behind but the concrete.

What the record does show is that Reykjanes has never been a blank sheet. A 15-hectare (37-acre) parcel of the farm, the greenhouse holding known as Reykjalundur, has been held on a hereditary lease since 1939, more than thirty years before ÍBR arrived. In 2000 the municipality approved a local plan for fourteen summer-house plots on Reykjanes land, and some were built. When the municipal plan was revised for 2008–2020, that summer-house area was designated as farmland. The planning committee concluded in 2013 that this had been a mistake, and the council moved to restore it. Along the way, the national planning agency noted that the area was on Iceland’s nature conservation register. That same year, two of the farm’s owners appealed a planning decision for the greenhouse holding to Iceland’s Environmental and Natural Resources Board of Appeal. The board rejected the appeal in 2015, noting that disputes over property rights were outside its remit.

None of that proves paperwork is what froze the building. The appeal concerned the greenhouse holding, not the old ÍBR block. But it does show why “just buy it and turn it into a hotel” is never as simple as it sounds. Any new use would have to go through the municipality’s planning process, on land with a long and layered history.

Looking out from the site, July 2017.

Every era leaves something in this landscape. The twentieth century left power stations on the Sog, summer houses across the lava fields and, at Geysir, the 1963 drilling that brought Strokkur back. Reykjanes is what the early 1980s left behind: a plan born in 1971, poured in concrete in the inflation years, then reviewed, priced and quietly let go.

In August 1987 a newspaper promised that Reykjavík’s youth would go jogging in Grímsnes. They never came. The horses came, and the weather, and the summer houses, and the stories told in Reykholt about rotten concrete, ruinous demolition bills and a building nobody could sell. Most of those stories are wrong. The question underneath them is not: why has nothing been done with it?

Until someone answers that, it stands where it has stood since 1983, roofed, walled and waiting: a concrete time capsule of 1980s ambition, resting quietly just off Iceland’s most famous tourist route.

More from the archive: Peningagjá, the Money Fissure at Þingvellir · a local history of Gullfoss and the Hvítá · Brúarfoss, the waterfall that was a road · all the Untold Stories of the Golden Circle.

What is the abandoned building at Reykjanes in Grímsnes? It is the unfinished main building of a training centre that Íþróttabandalag Reykjavíkur (ÍBR), the umbrella body for Reykjavík’s sports clubs, began building in 1981. The 1,400-square-metre concrete block was meant to house visiting teams, with accommodation, dining and meeting rooms. Work stopped in 1983, and it never opened.

Was it a sports hall? No. The building that stands was designed as the camp’s lodge. The sports hall, swimming pool and playing fields planned around it were never built, even though later headlines called it a sports palace.

Why was it never finished? Inflation and a shortage of money dogged the project from the start: Iceland’s consumer prices rose about 84 percent in 1983, the year work stopped. A later review for ÍBR found the centre could not be expected to pay its way, and finishing it was estimated at roughly $5–6 million at 1986–87 exchange rates. ÍBR then decided to sell.

Who owns it today? ÍBR advertised the building and about 270 hectares of land for sale in 1996. According to Morgunblaðið, private owners bought the Reykjanes property in the late 1990s and use the land; the building has been a side issue.

Can you visit the building? No. Reykjanes is private land in use by its owners, the building is not open to visitors, and an unfinished concrete shell is not a safe place to explore.

Is it on the Reykjanes peninsula? No. Reykjanes in Grímsnes is a farm in the Golden Circle area of South Iceland, on land that reaches the Brúará river. It has nothing to do with the Reykjanes peninsula near Keflavík airport.

Will the building be demolished? Nothing had been decided when Morgunblaðið reported on the building in 2020, although the paper’s photo notes record that blowing it up had been discussed. Ideas for reusing it over the years have included a monastery, a retirement home and a peace centre.

When did ÍBR buy Reykjanes? In February 1971, according to Morgunblaðið’s report that September. ÍBR’s own 2019 anniversary timeline gives the year as 1975, but the contemporary reports contradict it.

Tíminn, “Reykvíska æskan mun skokka í Grímsnesinu”, 6 August 1987, p. 20. The 325 hectares owned for fifteen years, the 1,400-square-metre lodge begun seven years earlier, the planned pitches, the three years of little work, the roof, silane and drains, Júlíus Hafstein’s comments, and the horses on the ground floor.

Morgunblaðið, “ÍBR kaupir Reykjanes í Grímsnesi”, 10 September 1971, p. 30. The February 1971 purchase, the size and setting of the farm, the hot springs, and why geothermal heat was essential to the plan.

Morgunblaðið, “ÍBR vill selja fokhelda 1400 fermetra byggingu í Grímsnesi”, 4 September 1996, p. 9. The 1971 grant application, the 1980 permit and 1981–83 construction, the review of the investment, the 1986–87 completion estimate, the sale, and Kolbeinn Pálsson’s account of the building’s condition.

Sigurður Bogi Sævarsson, “Kastalinn verið fokheldur í áratugi”, Morgunblaðið, 27 July 2020, summarised on mbl.is as “Íþróttahöll yfirgefin í áratugi”. The building’s state in 2020, its sale to private owners, and the ideas for its reuse. Caption notes filed with the paper’s photographs of 25 July 2020 record the discussion of blowing it up.

Íþróttabandalag Reykjavíkur, “Saga íþrótta í Reykjavík”, timeline compiled by the historian Stefán Pálsson for ÍBR’s 75th anniversary, 2019. The Laugarvatn background, the money troubles, and the 1981 sale of ÍBR’s share in Laugardalshöll.

Úrskurðarnefnd umhverfis- og auðlindamála (Environmental and Natural Resources Board of Appeal), case 110/2013, ruling of 12 November 2015. The hereditary lease on Reykjalundur, the 2000 summer-house plan, the planning error and the conservation listing.

World Bank, World Development Indicators: consumer price inflation for Iceland. Dollar figures are approximate, converted at the average exchange rate of the year in question and adjusted with US consumer prices for today’s money.

The photographs were taken on 27 July 2017 and are from the author’s collection. How the building is talked about in Reykholt is local knowledge from the author.

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.

Millions of people drive the Golden Circle every year. The version they get is tidy: a 300-kilometer loop from Reykjavík, three famous stops — a rift valley, a geyser, a waterfall — a photo at each, back in the city by dinner. None of it is wrong, exactly. But almost none of those visitors know the history of the land they are driving through.

I was born and raised in Biskupstungur, the farming district that holds both Geysir and Gullfoss. I spent my first twenty years here, and the decades since running a business in the district — which, in a place this size, means being involved with everyone: the farmers, the landowners, the families I went to school with. My father came to this district in 1935. Between his memory and mine, our family has watched this land for more than ninety years: the hayfields behind the parking lots, the sheep gathered every autumn, the neighbors, the funerals, the deals sealed with a handshake because paper would have felt like an insult. The tour buses drive through a landscape. I know it as a community.

This page is my attempt to write some of it down before it thins out. Call it a living archive: my family’s memories, our photographs going back to the 1940s, and documented local history from newspapers, annals, and survey records. My rule is simple. Where a story stands in the written record, I say so. Where it rests on memory — mine, my father’s, our neighbors’ — I say that too. A surprising amount of what the English-language sources repeat about these places is wrong, and I intend to correct it here, one story at a time.

The couple at the top of this page were photographed at Syðri-Reykir, the farm where my father worked. I don’t know who they are — perhaps someone reading this does. Behind them stand the mountains of the Golden Circle, and the notch in the ridge is Brúarárskörð, where the Brúará gathers before it runs down to Brúarfoss. Photographs like this are what this archive is made of.

I will keep adding to this page as new stories are ready. Here are the first seven.

Strokkur’s Secret 1963 Reboot: The Drill That Brought Strokkur Back to Life

The Strokkur borehole in section, drawn 8 August 1963. The last two lines read „39 m stórgos í holunni“ — at 39 metres, a major eruption in the hole — and „39,40 hætt við holuna“, the hole abandoned at 39.40 metres. Orkustofnun, borehole 91751.

Strokkur in everyone’s photographs — erupting on schedule, every few minutes, all day long — spent most of a century as a hole in the ground. The earthquakes of 1896 rearranged its underground plumbing, and Strokkur went quiet. For sixty-seven years it sat there, a rubble-choked shaft that visitors walked past on their way to the great Geysir, which by then was barely erupting either.

Then, in July 1963, the Geysir Committee brought in a drill. A 39.4-meter borehole was sunk down through the blocked channel, and Strokkur came back to life. It has hardly paused since. The reliability that everyone credits to nature is, in part, engineering — and the locals have always known it. The full article tells the story properly: the silent decades, the committee and the drill, and why almost nobody mentions any of it today.

Read the full story: the 1963 drilling that brought Strokkur back →

Peningagjá in 1947: When the Money Fissure Was a Working Road

The hay transport, 1947. Húnbogi Hafliðason on the left; the man on the right is not yet identified. Photographed by my father. Family archive.

At Þingvellir, the guides tell Peningagjá as a wishing well: drop a coin into the clear water, watch it flash all the way down, make a wish. They will tell you the custom goes back to the Danish king’s visit in 1907, and that part is true enough.

What they don’t tell you is what happened after the king went home. For decades this was not a monument — it was a route, part of the working landscape that farmers crossed with animals and machinery. In 1947, in the middle of the rationing years, my father and Húnbogi Hafliðason drove a fully loaded hay truck over the fissure. Nobody was throwing money into the water that day; people were counting it. The full article follows Peningagjá from royal spectacle to farm road and back — and what that says about how quickly a place can be reinvented for visitors.

Read the full story: the real history of the Money Fissure →

Brúarfoss and the Broken Bridge: The 1602 Story Behind the Name

Brúarfoss, around 1950 — photographed by my father, long before the internet found the color. Family archive.

Brúarfoss is the waterfall people cross the world to photograph for its color — a deep, almost unreal blue that comes from spring-fed water, not glacial melt, whatever the captions say. But the name has nothing to do with the color. Brúarfoss means “bridge falls,” and there really was a bridge: a natural stone arch that once spanned the river.

In 1602, during a famine, a steward of the Skálholt estate had that bridge deliberately broken — to stop starving, displaced people from crossing the river and reaching the bishop’s seat. The arch was never restored. The name stayed. Every visitor who says “Brúarfoss” today is repeating the memory of something destroyed on purpose. The full article traces the bridge, the famine, and the thousand-year road that died in 1961.

Read the full story: Brúarfoss and the broken bridge →

The Hvítá River and the Brattholt Handshake: Rent Paid in Salmon

Gullfoss, photographed by my father. Family archive.

In the 1980s and 90s, my father and I fished for salmon in the Hvítá river, just south of Gullfoss. The stretch belonged to the farmer at Brattholt, and our rent was not a number. It was every third salmon we caught. No contract, no invoice, no reminder ever needed. That was the entire agreement, and it held for years.

I include this story not because anything dramatic happened — it didn’t — but because it shows how this district actually ran. Trust was the currency, and a man’s word carried further than his signature. The full article is about that stretch of river, the farm below the falls, and a way of doing business that never needed paper.

Read the full story: Gullfoss, Brattholt and the Hvítá →

The One-Man Religion: A Faith Nobody Else Would Join

The book at the centre of the story. Public domain.

When I was a boy in Biskupstungur, one greenhouse farmer in the district had a religion that nobody else would join. The older people told us children that Njáll had made it up with his twin brother, that the brother had moved to America, and that now Njáll kept it alone. We knew it mostly through food: no meat, no fish, ever, because his faith forbade it.

For years that was all the story was. Then I found Njáll in print: in newspaper interviews from 1970 and 1974, and in a memoir published in 1996. The story was true. Where his faith came from was not what the district believed. The full article follows it from a wartime greenhouse in Laugarás, to a roadside in France, to a book printed on the other side of the world.

Read the full story: the one-man religion of the Golden Circle →

The Unfinished Sports Palace: A Concrete Promise in Grímsnes

The building at Reykjanes in Grímsnes, July 2017. Author’s collection.

Off the main road through Grímsnes, on a farm that few people ever visit, stands a large concrete building that was meant to change how Reykjavík trained its young athletes. In August 1987 a newspaper promised that the city’s youth would go jogging in Grímsnes. They never came, and the building never opened.

Ask about it in Reykholt and you will hear theories: rotten concrete, ruinous demolition bills, a building nobody can sell. The newspapers of the time tell a stranger story, and it starts with hot water. The full article follows it from a farm bought for its springs to the question nobody has answered yet.

Read the full story: the unfinished sports palace of Grímsnes →

The Execution Ground: What the Bridge at Þingvellir Stands Over

Drekkingarhylur as the records describe it. A charcoal-style reconstruction, not a historical image.

On a summer afternoon at Þingvellir, the crowds stop on a small footbridge in Almannagjá for the same photograph: white water tumbling over the rocks below. Very few of them look down, and fewer still know what the pool beneath them was used for. The parliament every guide celebrates here also carried out its own sentences, a short walk from where it met.

The English-language accounts tell it as a short story about drowned women, and most of them even have the wrong waterfall. The written record tells a larger one, with names, ages and home farms, and the law behind it was written by Icelanders, not imposed on them. The full article follows it from that law to the long, quiet way it ended.

Read the full story: the dark side of Þingvellir →

More Stories Are Coming

There are more stories from this district than one page can hold — some standing in written records, some living only in the memory of people I can still call. I publish each one when it is checked, dated, and where possible, photographed. If the Golden Circle is on your route, read a few of these first. The road looks different when you know what happened beside it.

Most people see Brúarfoss — often written Bruarfoss — before they hear the name. It is one of the images Iceland travels on: pale blue water folding into a narrow rift in dark rock, photographed from a small wooden footbridge between Laugarvatn and Geysir.

Almost nobody standing on that footbridge knows they are standing at a road.

For something close to a thousand years this was a crossing — the place where you got over Brúará and into the district beyond. It is the reason the river has the name it has, the reason the waterfall has the name it has, the reason a famine in 1602 turned violent here, and the reason a Danish king and two parliaments came through in 1907. The waterfall itself was incidental to all of it. Nobody came to look at the water. They came because this was the way across.

Then in 1961 the crossing moved four to five kilometres downstream, and Brúarfoss went quiet for fifty years — until photographs found it, and nobody who came knew it had ever been anything but a view.

Start with the question most people actually arrive with, because the answer is also the reason any of this happened.

Brúará is not a glacial river. It is spring-fed, rising out of the ground at Rótarsandur, and the water reaching Brúarfoss has never been near Langjökull — a detail most descriptions get wrong.

That is the whole explanation for the colour. A glacial river carries suspended rock flour and runs opaque grey-green. Brúará runs clear, and what you are looking at is clean water over dark volcanic rock, with the depth of the rift concentrating the blue. It is the opposite process from glacial milk, which is why Brúará looks like this while Hvítá, a short distance east, does not.

The geologist Guðmundur Kjartansson, who studied this stretch of river closely in the 1940s, called Brúará one of the most pronounced spring rivers of its size in the whole country. It never rises violently, and it does not freeze until well below Brúarfoss. Its flow, he wrote, is exceptionally steady whatever the weather does.

Which is also why there had to be a crossing. A glacial river swells with summer melt and falls away in autumn; sooner or later you can wade it. Brúará does not oblige. A river like that either stops you or gets bridged.

At the falls it was bridged, by the river itself. A natural stone arch spanned the water where it narrows into the rift.

The older form of the name is Brúarárfoss — the waterfall of Brúará. And Brúará means bridge-river.

Read that in order and it tells you the whole history. The crossing came first. The river was named after the crossing. The waterfall was named after the river.

So the most famous natural feature on this stretch of water is named, at one remove, after a piece of infrastructure. English descriptions usually collapse this into a single step and end up muddling what was named after what. The extra syllable in the older form is the giveaway.

Biskupstungur is the tongue of land between Brúará on the west and Tungufljót on the east. The district is defined by its water — which means a crossing on Brúará is not a convenience. It is the door.

Landnámabók records that Ketilbjörn the Old came from Naumudalur in Norway in a ship called Elliði, landed at the river mouth in Reykjavík that still carries the ship’s name, and rode inland looking for land. He claimed all of Grímsnes up from Höskuldslækur, all of Laugardalur and the whole of Biskupstunga up to Stakksá, and settled at Mosfell. His son was Teitur, his grandson Gissur the White, and his great-grandson Ísleifur — the first bishop of Iceland, at Skálholt, downstream on this same river.

So from very early on, the crossing at Brúarfoss belonged to whoever held the land beyond it. For most of the following centuries, that was Skálholt.

You only bother to destroy a bridge that people are using.

The oldest written account comes from Jón Halldórsson of Hítardalur, in his Biskupasögur. In the hard years around 1602, he says, destitute and displaced people were coming to Skálholt from every direction in great numbers. The steward of the estate judged that the pressure would ease if the natural stone arch on Brúará — the one the river was named for — were broken. He had it done with a work crew, with the knowledge, if not the counsel, of the bishop’s wife Helga Jónsdóttir, but without the knowledge of Bishop Oddur, who took it very badly when he learned of it. The steward drowned in Brúará shortly afterwards.

Jón Halldórsson was born in 1665 and came to school at Skálholt in 1679, roughly seventy-seven years after the events he describes. Close enough that the account is unlikely to be invented, far enough that the detail cannot be leaned on too hard.

Three things the usual account gets wrong

The direction of travel. The story is usually told as starving peasants being blocked from reaching fertile church land. The oldest source says the opposite. People were flocking to Skálholt, and the point was to reduce the number arriving at the door.

Who did it. Not the Church as an institution, and not on the bishop’s orders. A household official acting on his own judgement, against the wishes of a bishop who found out afterwards.

Which church. Skálholt is often described in English in terms that read as Catholic. By 1602 the Reformation was half a century old and Skálholt was a Lutheran seat.

And the arch is still there

This is the part that is missing from every English account, and it is not a legend.

There is a stone arch across Brúará at the falls today. Few people notice it, because it lies under the water. Guðmundur Kjartansson, who published a study of it in Náttúrufæðingurinn in 1948, had been to the spot seven or eight times and could always make it out through the white water breaking over it. Between the waves, he reckoned, it is barely knee-deep. In very low water the river is said to run entirely under the arch except for the surf, and it has been claimed that a man once took his chance and ran across the river on it.

I first heard this from Óskar at Brekka, whose farm sits on the old road to this crossing. He told it as it is told in the district: that Skálholt’s men did not destroy the arch at all, but broke enough off the top of it to put the crossing out of use — and that what is left is still down there.

Guðmundur considered exactly that explanation and did not accept it. His view was that the arch now in the river is unbroken, sits too low to have ever served as a crossing, and that taking the top off it would have been work too difficult and too dangerous for 1602 tools. He thought the original stood a little upstream, where the fissure narrows to about a metre across and only thirty centimetres at water level.

So the district and the geologist disagree, and both accounts are careful ones. What neither disputes is that a natural stone bridge crossed this river here, that it was deliberately put out of use in a famine year, and that something of it is still under the water.

One honest caution on the story itself. Broken stone arches recur as a motif in Icelandic folklore — Brúarhlöð on Hvítá carries essentially the same tale, and there are others. The named individuals and the estate setting give the Brúará account more weight than a wandering story. But it was written down a century after the fact, and it is best read as a well-attested tradition rather than a documented event.

What happened next is the strongest evidence that this was a working road rather than a curiosity.

Around 1680 — some eighty years after the arch was broken — the farmers of Biskupstungur took the matter into their own hands. Biskupasögur names the man who led them: Jón Jónsson smiður í Miklaholti, the smith at Miklaholt, with other leading men of the district. They rolled large boulders down into the narrows of the river to get a bridge across it again, and built the crossing up on top of them.

It did not hold. The winter floods on Brúará broke the work apart, and the repairs had to be done again and again.

People do not haul boulders into a river repeatedly, across generations, for a scenic spot. They do it for a road.

And some of that work is still in the river. Wedged between the walls of the fissure at its narrowest point, about thirty centimetres below the surface, sits a single large stone — a few hundred kilos, of the same grey basalt as the gorge walls, and somewhat water-worn. In July 1941 the water was so low that the stone stood clear of it, and Guðmundur was able to climb down onto it in the gorge and up the other side, crossing the river that way. By October 1946 there was more water and it was submerged, but still plainly visible.

He worked through four explanations for how a stone that size came to be there and settled on the last one: that it is the final remnant of the bridge the men of Biskupstungur built around 1680.

In 1907 Frederik VIII of Denmark came to Iceland with a retinue of around two hundred, including a large party of Danish parliamentarians, and the Icelandic state built him a road.

It ran from Reykjavík over Mosfellsheiði to Þingvellir, east through Laugardalur, across Brúará, and up into Haukadalur to Geysir and Gullfoss. It was dug and cleared by hand with shovels, picks and horse-carts, and it has been called Kóngsvegurinn — the King’s Road — ever since. The same journey left another bridge that people still stand on today, at Peningagjá in Þingvellir.

It crossed Brúará here, on a wooden bridge built for the occasion and set just below Brúarfoss.

What the road actually cost

The Icelandic national accounts for 1906 and 1907 were passed together. Road improvement costs across those two years came to 220,257 krónur, of which the King’s Road was the largest part, against total treasury expenditure of a little over 3.1 million — roughly fourteen percent of what the state spent in a year. Measured against the public purse it is probably the most expensive road ever built in Iceland.

The same figure is often repeated as a share of national output, with a modern equivalent of hundreds of billions of krónur attached. That is a different measure and it inflates the claim by an order of magnitude.

A light carriage was brought along for the king, with a driver named Guðmundur Hávarðarson, on the assumption that a monarch would not ride. He turned out to be a capable horseman and rode the whole way. The carriage travelled the entire route empty.

Who built it

The clearing of the road was supervised by Guðjón Helgason, road foreman and farmer at Laxnes in Mosfellssveit, who held charge of the Þingvallavegur and other roads from the year he moved to that farm until his death in 1919. His son was three years old when the family arrived there. He later took the farm’s name as his own and won the Nobel Prize in Literature as Halldór Laxness.

Further east the work was done by local men, and it is close enough to living memory that I have known some of their families. I spent a summer working at the farm at Múli as a boy, and the farmer there had a father who worked on building this road. So did a neighbour of ours near Strokkur. This is a small district, and that road went through the middle of it.

What the road was for

There is a case that it bought Iceland more than a fortnight of ceremony. Ólafur Örn Haraldsson, former warden of Þingvellir National Park and former president of Ferðafélag Íslands, has argued that the preparation for the visit, the journey itself and the relationships formed on it laid the foundation of trust that led to Icelandic sovereignty in 1918.

It was not a straight line — a draft union treaty was produced in 1908 and rejected by Icelandic voters the same year — and 1918 brought fullveldi, sovereignty within a shared monarchy, rather than the full independence that came with the republic in 1944. But two parliaments spent a fortnight together on horseback, and the road they rode crossed the river at this waterfall.

A man who drove a car over it

We know what that 1907 bridge was like because someone drove across it and wrote it down. In Lesbók Morgunblaðsins in 1963, Egill Hallgrímsson described crossing it in August 1927 on what he believed to be the first motor journey to Geysir. The track met the bridge at an angle, so the party had to lift the car bodily to line it up. The bridge ends rested on bedrock on both banks and it stood high above a roaring torrent. The timber was old and had never been meant for cars. One man drove it over alone while the others walked.

By 1948 that bridge was worn out and closed to motor traffic altogether.

A photograph taken from the bridge

Brúarfoss, around 1950, photographed by my father. Family archive.

My father photographed Brúarfoss around 1950, and for three-quarters of a century the picture sat in the family archive as nothing more than an old view of the falls. Then, in putting this archive together, I looked at where he was standing.

There is no foreground in the frame. The bottom edge of the photograph is white water — no bank, no grass, no rock a man could stand on. The camera sits a few metres above the river and almost exactly over the middle of the channel: both banks fall away symmetrically from the corners of the picture, which is not a view you can get from either shore. Whoever took this photograph was standing on something that spanned the river, a short way below the falls.

In 1950 there was exactly one such thing. The King’s Road bridge of 1907 stood just below Brúarfoss, its ends resting on bedrock on both banks. It had been closed to cars since 1948 — but a closed bridge still carries a man with a camera. Unless some structure below the falls has escaped every written account, my father took this picture from its deck, and in doing so recorded, without meaning to, where the bridge stood.

I state that as strong inference rather than settled fact, because that is this page’s rule. The geometry of the frame allows only one standing place I know of, and it can be tested: the sightline in the photograph can be walked out on the bank until the lip of the falls and the skyline align, and bedrock keeps the scars of bridge ends — bolt holes, cut seats — for a century. I intend to do exactly that, and this section will be updated with what the rock says, either way.

If the reading holds, the photograph is a small document of the road’s last years: the falls entirely alone, no path and no visitors, seen from the last working piece of a crossing that had carried people for a thousand years — about a decade before the new bridge downstream retired it for good.

When the 1907 bridge failed, something larger went with it, and Guðmundur named it plainly in 1948.

The old travellers’ route through here was called með hlíðum — along the slopes — and it was the shortest road between Laugardalur and Geysir. With the crossing gone, that road was abandoned. He wrote that in an age of general tourism it would surely have to be renewed before long, and made a proposal for how to bridge the gorge cheaply: it is only about two metres wide at the narrows, with good basalt bedrock on both sides, and Brúará’s steady spring-fed flow means there is no need to fear the floods and ice that make bridge-building expensive on most Icelandic rivers.

Nobody built it. The road never came back.

Brekka and Miðhús, the two farms in Hlíðar where I used to go as a boy to play with Jói and Hallur from school, sit on that road. Óskar and Hildur farmed at Brekka. What is a quiet lane now was the main way between two of the busiest places on the Golden Circle, and it stopped being one because a bridge fell down.

In the autumn of 1961 a new bridge over Brúará was completed and joined to newly laid road, four to five kilometres downstream of the falls.

That bridge is the reason the Golden Circle exists as a drive. Before it you could not simply go from Laugarvatn east through Laugardalur and Biskupstungur to Geysir by car. Afterwards you could.

For Brúarfoss the effect was the end of a thousand-year job. For as long as anyone had travelled through this district, people had passed the falls because that was where you crossed the river. After 1961 the traffic went over the new bridge, and there was no longer any reason to come here at all.

The place went quiet, and stayed quiet for roughly fifty years.

I grew up six or seven kilometres downstream, and in the 1980s we went up to the falls as children. It was the most beautiful place I knew and there was never anybody else there. That is still the Brúarfoss in my head, and it is not the one people photograph now.

How thoroughly it had been forgotten is easiest to show with one detail. Ungmennafélag Biskupstungna, the local youth association, organised a field trip to Brúarfoss — not for visitors, but for the farmers and families who actually lived in Biskupstungur, so they could go and see it and learn what it was. People living a few kilometres away had to be taken to the waterfall on their own river and told about it.

What eventually brought people back had nothing to do with getting across the river.

Around 2010, as visitors started coming to Iceland in numbers again, photographs of Brúarfoss began appearing online. Slowly at first, and then not slowly at all. Those images did what no road had done since 1961. What makes that remarkable is that there was no easy way in. You parked on Route 37 and you walked. The original path ran across private land and was never made for the numbers that came; it was worn out and littered until it was closed, and the route that replaced it ran around seven kilometres there and back, two or three hours on your feet. People did it anyway, in numbers, purely to look at the water.

In a thousand years of use, nobody had ever walked to Brúarfoss. They walked past it, on the way to somewhere else.

In April 2023 a car park was opened much closer to the falls, with a fee and a walk of about five minutes at the end. There is an irony in that whole sequence which applies to this article as much as to any other: Brúarfoss was damaged by being written about, and every piece that called it a hidden gem helped make sure it stopped being one.

So the waterfall never changed. What changed is what it was for. It spent a thousand years as a piece of the road network and about a decade as a photograph, and the people who arrive now are, without knowing it, queuing to stand in the middle of a road. The quiet place I walked to as a boy has a car park and coaches in it, and none of that has anything to do with why anyone came here for the first thousand years.

This is the part worth reading before you go.

People have drowned in Brúará, including visitors on the walk to the falls. The reasons are unremarkable, which is exactly the problem. The path runs close to the water for long stretches. The ground is often wet and the rock is slippery. The river is fast and cold, and someone who goes in has very little time before the cold takes their strength — and on this path there is usually nobody positioned to help.

None of that is a reason to stay away. It is a reason to treat the thing in front of you as a river before you treat it as a photograph. I grew up beside this water and I have never once been casual about it.

• Stay well back from the edge, particularly where the path narrows above the water.
• Wear boots with grip. This is not a walk for trainers, and in winter it is not a walk without spikes.
• Do not climb down towards the water for a better angle. The photograph everyone comes for is taken from the footbridge and the marked viewpoints.
• Do not enter the river at any point, in any season. The arch under the water is not a crossing and has not been one for four hundred years.
• Keep children close on the stretches beside the water.

Getting there

The falls are reached from Route 37 between Laugarvatn and Geysir. Since April 2023 there has been an official car park close to the falls, with a walk of about five minutes from it. Parking is paid through the Parka app, currently 750 ISK for a car or an SUV and more for larger vehicles. The track in to it is rough in places.

The older and longer trail is still open, and plenty of people still choose it: around two hours there and back, passing two smaller waterfalls, Hlauptungufoss and Miðfoss, on the way up. It is mostly flat but it can be very muddy after rain. Conditions change with the weather, and in winter both the access track and the path can be genuinely icy.

Why is Brúarfoss so blue? Because Brúará is spring-fed rather than glacial. The water runs clear instead of carrying rock flour, and clear water over dark volcanic rock, concentrated in a deep narrow rift, reads as that intense blue. It has nothing to do with Langjökull, despite what many descriptions say.

Is it Brúarfoss or Bruarfoss? Both refer to the same waterfall. Brúarfoss is the Icelandic spelling; Bruarfoss is what most English speakers write, because the accented ú is awkward to type. The older form of the name is Brúarárfoss.

Where does the name come from? From a natural stone arch that once crossed the river at the falls. The river was named after the crossing — Brúará, bridge-river — and the waterfall after the river.

Is the old stone bridge still there? A stone arch does still cross the river at the falls, submerged and easy to miss. Whether it is the famous one is disputed: local tradition holds that Skálholt’s men broke only the top off it in 1602, while the geologist Guðmundur Kjartansson argued the original stood slightly upstream. It is not a crossing and must not be treated as one.

Was the bridge at Brúarfoss built for the Danish king? Not the one you walk on; the footbridge is modern. But the King’s Road bridge of 1907 stood just below the falls, and the King’s Road ran past Brúarfoss. The royal party crossed the river here.

Was Jón Gerreksson drowned at Brúarfoss? The bishop was drowned in Brúará in 1433, and the story is often attached to the waterfall. The tradition places the killing downstream, near Skálholt, rather than at the falls.

How long is the walk? About five minutes each way from the official car park, which opened in April 2023. The older trail takes around two hours there and back and passes Hlauptungufoss and Miðfoss.

Is Brúarfoss safe to visit? On the marked path, with proper footwear, yes. People have drowned in this river, including on the walk, so stay back from the edge, do not climb down to the water, and do not go in.

Is there a fee? Yes. Parking is paid through the Parka app — currently 750 ISK for a car or SUV, more for larger vehicles.

Guðmundur Kjartansson, “Steinboginn á Brúará”, Náttúrufæðingurinn, 1. tölublað 1948, pp. 42–47. The surviving arch under the water, the stone wedged in the fissure, the spring-fed character of Brúará, the 1680 rebuilding, the road með hlíðum, and the state of the 1907 bridge.

Jón Halldórsson of Hítardalur, Biskupasögur (Sögufélag edition, p. 190). The breaking of the arch in 1602, the steward, Helga Jónsdóttir and Bishop Oddur; and Jón Jónsson smiður í Miklaholti and the rebuilding around 1680.

Landnámabók (Sturlubók), ch. 99, in Íslenzk fornrit I. Ketilbjörn’s claim to the whole of Biskupstunga and the line from Teitur to Bishop Ísleifur.

Egill Hallgrímsson, “Fyrsta bílferð að Geysi”, Lesbók Morgunblaðsins, 1st issue 1963, p. 4. The 1907 bridge as it stood in August 1927.

Icelandic national accounts (landsreikningur) for 1906 and 1907. Road improvement costs of 220,257 krónur against total treasury expenditure of a little over 3.1 million.

Ólafur Örn Haraldsson on the 1907 royal visit and its part in the road to Icelandic sovereignty in 1918.

Óskar at Brekka in Hlíðar, for the account of the arch as it is told in the district. The childhood memory of the falls before the crowds, the Ungmennafélag Biskupstungna field trip, and the families of the men who built the road through this district are local knowledge from the author.

A family photograph of Brúarfoss from around 1950, by the author’s father, taken from a position over the river below the falls. The reading of the camera position, and its identification with the 1907 King’s Road bridge, are the author’s — stated as inference pending verification on the ground.

The fissure is not really called Peningagjá. The coin tradition probably does not begin where the guidebooks say it begins. The wishing well was a signpost put up in the 1920s, not a folk tale. And the bridge everybody stands on was not built for tourists at all — it was built for a king, and then it spent decades being used as a working road, including by a hay truck in the summer of 1947 that had no business being anywhere near Þingvellir.

Most visitors reach Peningagjá about four minutes’ walk from the church at Þingvellir. They stop on the bridge, look down through the water at a scattering of coins on the bottom, take a photograph, and walk on. The fissure gets perhaps ninety seconds of a Golden Circle day.

That is a shame, because almost every detail in the standard account of this place is either incomplete or quietly wrong. What follows is what the documented sources actually say.

Peningagjá is not a separate fissure. It is a stretch of a larger one, and the naming runs three layers deep.

The parent feature is Flosagjá, one of the major water-filled rifts at Þingvellir, named after Flosi Þórðarson of Svínafell — the chieftain who led the burning of Njáll and his sons in Njáls saga. Opposite the assembly site the fissure splits along a long stretch, and the eastern branch of that split is Nikulásargjá. Between the two branches lies Spöngin, the narrow tongue of lava that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians believed had held the original Lögberg.

Peningagjá — money fissure — is the name attached to the section of Nikulásargjá directly beneath the bridge. Many visitors, and a fair number of guides, know the place only by that nickname and have no idea it has a proper name at all.

It also gets confused with Silfra, constantly, including in tour listings. They are different fissures with different rules. Silfra lies further east, largely submerged in Þingvallavatn, reaching around 60 metres deep, and it is the site permitted for diving and snorkelling. Peningagjá is crossed by a road bridge, is looked at from above, and is not a swimming site. They share a water source and a geological origin. They are not interchangeable.

The fissure carries the name of Nikulás Magnússon, district magistrate of Rangárvallasýsla, born around 1700, who died at Þingvellir on 24 July 1742 during the annual assembly.

Most English-language pages compress this into a single clause — named after a magistrate who drowned here in 1742 — and move on. The Icelandic sources are a good deal more specific, and a good deal less settled.

The closest thing to a first-hand record comes from Sveinn Sölvason, who was sitting at the Alþingi that summer for the first time as deputy lawman for the north and west, and who later compiled Íslands árbók, an annal covering 1740 to 1781. His account describes the magistrate leaving his bed one night and wading east across the river Öxará. A boy went with him — old enough to follow, not old enough to stop him — and tried to keep watch, but was sent away. The boy ran back to Þingvellir in fear to raise help. By the time men came, the magistrate had vanished.

That is a materially different story from “a magistrate drowned in this fissure”. It is a night, a river crossing, a witness who was dismissed, and a search that came too late.

The folk-tale version, collected in Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, says he threw himself in because he feared he would lose a case then pending against his reputation. Whether that was the reason or a story built afterwards to explain the death, it is the explanation that survived orally, and it is why the place-name stuck rather than fading.

This is the detail that almost never surfaces in English.

Some sources place the death in Nikulásargjá itself, which would be circular but consistent. Others place it in Flosagjá, the parent fissure. Espólín records that he made away with himself in Vatnsgjá and was found there dead — a different name again. And Nikulásargjá is itself recorded under an older variant, Nikulásarpyttur, Nikulás’s pit.

The honest position is that the fissure is named for Nikulás Magnússon, but the precise stretch of water in which he died is not established by the sources. Anyone standing on that bridge is standing at a memorial whose exact location is uncertain. That is a more interesting thing to be told than a false certainty.

The bridge across Nikulásargjá was laid in 1907, and it was not built for tourism. It was built because a king was coming.

Frederik VIII of Denmark visited Iceland in the summer of 1907 with a party of around two hundred, including Danish parliamentarians and foreign journalists. In preparation the state built a carriage road from Reykjavík to Þingvellir and onward east to Geysir, Gullfoss and Þjórsártún. It became known as Konungsvegur, the King’s Road.

The scale of it is easy to underestimate. The road cost the Icelandic treasury the equivalent of fourteen percent of a full year’s state expenditure. It was built up in sections with culverts, bridges and well-made cairns. The king’s party reached Þingvellir on the evening of 1 August after eight hours of travel, and the crowd lining Almannagjá called out for him as he rode down. Having built a carriage road at considerable expense, the state then watched the king decline the carriage. He preferred to ride.

The bridge over Nikulásargjá was part of that road. And the road did not go to Þingvellir. It went through Þingvellir, to Bruarfoss Waterfall and onward east, into the farming districts – and Geyser and Gullfoss waterfall area. That is the detail everything else in this article hangs on.

During resurfacing work on the approach west of the bridge, the asphalt was stripped back carefully — because at Þingvellir you can turn up archaeology anywhere — and stone edging appeared almost at once. First on the north side of the road, then more clearly on the south. Those are the built kerbs of the original Konungsvegur, still in place beneath the modern surface.

The modern road and the 1907 King’s Road are the same road. Nothing was abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere. The route persisted, and so did its use.

The standard story is that once the bridge was built, visitors began throwing small coins into the water below, and the stretch gradually acquired the nickname Peningagjá. That much is well supported, including by Þingvellir National Park’s own place-name register.

But there are two complications that are almost entirely absent from English-language coverage.

The first is older. The park’s place-name records trace the name to two possible events, not one. The second is an eighteenth-century case tried at Þingvellir concerning counterfeit currency — coins adulterated with a cheaper metal. According to the sources the offending coins were cut apart and scattered into the fissures at Þingvellir as part of the disposal. Which fissure received them, whether Peningagjá or Silfra or another, is not recorded. But it means the association between this landscape and discarded money may predate the tourist tradition by more than a century.

The second complication is that the wishing well is not folklore. It is signage. In the 1920s a sign reading “to the wishing well” was put up directing visitors to Peningagjá, and the story that you could make a wish there spread from that point. Þingvellir National Park states plainly that there is no folk tale attached to Peningagjá — that the coins in the freezing water are better read as a symbol of what the water itself is worth.

This is worth saying clearly, because a great deal of published travel writing presents the wishing tradition as ancient Icelandic custom. It is roughly a century old, and it started with a signpost written in English.

As for the claim that Frederik VIII threw the first coin from the new bridge: accounts say so, and it is repeated as established fact across a large number of travel sites. The park’s own wording attributes it to accounts rather than to record. Treat it as tradition.

This has changed, and a lot of published guidance has not caught up.

Coins are metal. Metal sitting in still, cold, extraordinarily pure water does not simply lie there looking picturesque. It corrodes, and heavy metals from decades of accumulated coins have been measured entering the water system at levels beyond what is acceptable.

Rangers have spent years clearing coins not only from Peningagjá but from Flosagjá, from the river Öxará, and — most uncomfortably — from Drekkingarhylur, the Drowning Pool, where women condemned under the moral statutes were executed by drowning between 1590 and 1749. Rangers have pointed out the obvious wrongness of treating an execution site as a wishing well. Drekkingarhylur is also deep, and hazardous to dive, which makes clearing it genuinely difficult. Coins recovered by rangers have historically been collected and given to charity rather than thrown away.

The practical position today is simple. Throwing coins into the fissures at Þingvellir is not something to do. Look at the ones already down there, understand what they cost the water, and keep your change.

The water in Peningagjá is not run-off and it is not river water. It begins as meltwater from Langjökull, roughly 50 kilometres to the north, and travels underground through porous post-glacial lava before surfacing in the fissure system at Þingvellir.

The park’s own figure for Silfra is around thirty years underground. The wider range cited in the literature is thirty to a hundred years. Either way, water surfacing in these fissures today fell as snow on the glacier before most of the people photographing it were born.

That journey is what produces the clarity. Decades of filtration through lava strip the water of suspended particles, giving visibility that in the adjacent fissures routinely exceeds 80 to 100 metres. The temperature holds at roughly 2 to 4 degrees all year, which is why the fissure neither freezes over in winter nor warms in summer.

Most of the water that forms Þingvallavatn arrives this way, from beneath the lava rather than across it. There is an old Icelandic saying for it: fertile is the water that runs under lava.

Þingvellir sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and Eurasian plates pull apart, in one of very few places on earth where that boundary is visible on land rather than hidden under ocean.

The figure everybody quotes is about 2 centimetres a year. That figure is correct for full plate motion. It is not the rate at which Þingvellir itself is pulling apart, and it is emphatically not the rate at which any individual fissure widens.

Spreading in south Iceland is split between two parallel rift segments, the Western Volcanic Zone — which runs through Þingvellir — and the Eastern Volcanic Zone. Þingvellir does not get the whole 2 centimetres. GPS measurement across the Þingvellir graben has produced a spreading rate of roughly 6.7 millimetres a year. The graben is also subsiding rather than only widening: levelling profiles show continuous downward movement, and since the lava flowed the valley floor has dropped around 40 metres while the rifting has amounted to about 70. Þingvellir National Park’s own estimate for how fast individual fissures widen is one to five millimetres a year.

So the honest answer to how fast Peningagjá is getting wider is: slowly, at a rate measured in single millimetres, but continuously — and the movement is downward as well as outward.

It does not always move gently. In the summer of 2000 two severe earthquakes struck south Iceland with epicentres 40 to 50 kilometres from Þingvellir. Stones fell from the ravine walls. Water surged up out of the rifts. And the water in Flosagjá, normally glass-clear, was thrown into such turbidity that the coins on the bottom could not be seen.

The rift is not a museum exhibit. It is load-bearing geology that periodically releases.

I have a photograph, taken in 1947, of a loaded hay truck at Peningagjá. My father is driving the first car and is taking the photo.

The interesting question about that photograph is not what a truck is doing on the bridge. It is what hay is doing on the truck.

Icelandic farmers cut hay on their own land. That is what the home field was for. Hay was not hauled between districts, let alone between one end of the country and the other, because there was no reason to do it and no cheap way to do it. A truckload of hay crossing Þingvellir is not a picture of ordinary farm work. It is a picture of something having gone badly wrong.

What had gone wrong was the summer of 1947.

The weather record for that year is unambiguous. Through July the rain fell almost without pause across the south and west of Iceland, while the northeast and east had good haymaking weather. August repeated it — more rain in the south and west, very favourable conditions in the northeast. That is most of the haymaking season, and the south simply could not get a crop dry.

It was not the only thing pressing on the land that year. On 29 March 1947 Hekla erupted after more than a century of quiet, throwing a plume some 30 kilometres into the air, and it went on erupting for thirteen months, with heavy lava flow and repeated tephra fall over the farming districts of the south.

So farms across the south of Iceland went towards winter without enough hay to feed their animals, and hay had to be brought down from the north, where the summer had been kind.

Which brings in the third thing about 1947. Iceland’s foreign currency reserves had run out that year, and the country was deep into what Icelanders call the skömmtunarár, the rationing years — import restrictions and ration coupons on a long list of goods, at their most severe between 1947 and 1949. Fuel was not something you simply bought as much of as you liked. Marshall aid did not begin arriving until 1948, and the rationing eased only gradually after that.

Put those three things together and the photograph stops being a snapshot and becomes a document. A wet summer, an erupting volcano, and fuel under rationing — and trucks nonetheless driving the length of the country with hay on the back, over a bridge built forty years earlier for a Danish king, because the alternative was livestock starving.

The hay on that truck was going to the farm at Skálholt, in Biskupstungur.

My father drove the trip in his own truck. Also in the photograph is Húnbogi Hafliðason from Hjálmsstaðir in Laugardalur — the valley the road runs through between Þingvellir and Biskupstungur — presumably at the wheel of the second truck.

Húnbogi is worth a paragraph of his own. He was born on 27 November 1891, and Hjálmsstaðir was known across the district for verse; the household turned out so many rhymers that people spoke of the Hjálmsstaðir academy. He was a reciter of rímur, and said of himself that he had been born down into the age of them. He was also the kind of man who could turn his hand to anything.

In November 1966, a few weeks before his seventy-fifth birthday, Vísir sent a reporter to interview him. They found him at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Reykjavík, where he worked from eight in the morning until six at night handling crates of twenty-four bottles — thirty-six cases to a lift, a lift roughly every five minutes, at seventy-four years old. The paper described him as the industry of the whole nation compressed into one man. Asked what the greatest gift in life was, he said: courage.

Nineteen years before that interview, he was on the road over Þingvellir with a load of northern hay.

This is why the photograph matters more than anything else on this page. Peningagjá is presented to visitors as a curiosity — a pretty crack in the rock with coins at the bottom and a wishing-well story attached to it. In the summer of 1947 it was a bridge on the only sensible route east, being crossed by men hauling emergency winter feed the length of Iceland during a rationing year.

The coins in the water and the hay on the truck belong to the same bridge, forty years apart.

It is one of the easiest features in the park to reach — a short walk from Þingvallakirkja and the farmhouse, on the road past Spöngin. Nikulásargjá is the proper name; Peningagjá is the nickname for the stretch under the bridge. Do not throw coins. There is no swimming or diving here; that is Silfra, and it requires a permitted operator.

The clarity of the water reads best when the sun is not directly on the surface. Overcast conditions, or low angled light, will usually give you the bottom rather than a reflection of the sky.

And take the extra ten minutes to walk out onto Spöngin, between the two branches. Most visitors photograph the coins and turn back without realising they are standing beside what earlier generations believed was the original Lögberg.

What does Peningagjá mean? It translates as money fissure or money gorge — peningur meaning money or coin, gjá meaning fissure or rift. It is a nickname. The proper place-name is Nikulásargjá.

Why is it called Nikulásargjá? After Nikulás Magnússon, district magistrate of Rangárvallasýsla, who died at Þingvellir during the assembly on 24 July 1742. Contemporary accounts describe him leaving his bed at night, crossing the Öxará, and disappearing. The exact fissure in which he was found is recorded inconsistently across the sources.

When was the bridge over Peningagjá built? In 1907, as part of Konungsvegur, the King’s Road, built for the visit of King Frederik VIII of Denmark. The coin-throwing tradition dates from after the bridge was in place.

Can you still throw coins into Peningagjá? No. Coin-throwing is no longer permitted, and heavy metals from decades of accumulated coins have affected water quality. Rangers have been removing coins from Peningagjá and from other fissures at Þingvellir.

How deep is it? The Flosagjá system reaches depths of around 25 metres in places. The clarity of the water makes it look far shallower than it is, which is a common source of misjudgement in photographs.

Where does the water come from? Meltwater from Langjökull, around 50 kilometres north, which travels underground through porous lava for an estimated thirty to a hundred years before surfacing in the fissures at Þingvellir. That filtration is what produces the clarity, and it holds the water at roughly 2 to 4 degrees all year.

Is Peningagjá the same as Silfra? No. Silfra is a separate, deeper fissure to the east, largely submerged in Þingvallavatn, and it is the permitted diving and snorkelling site. Peningagjá is viewed from the bridge above.

Þjóðgarðurinn á Þingvöllum, örnefnaskrá — entries for Peningagjá and Nikulásargjá.

Þjóðgarðurinn á Þingvöllum — Þinghelgin; Tectonic Movements; Silfra.

Sveinn Sölvason, Íslands árbók, annal covering 1740–1781.

Jón Espólín, Íslands Árbækur í sögu-formi.

Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, Viðburðasögur — “Nikulásargjá”.

“Heilir hildar til — heilir hildi frá”, interview with Húnbogi Hafliðason, Vísir, 7 November 1966, p. 7.

Veðurstofa Íslands, monthly weather summaries for 1947.

Sigurður Þórarinsson, “The eruption of Mt. Hekla 1947–1948”, Bulletin Volcanologique 10, 1950.

Islam, M. et al., “Continuous subsidence in the Thingvellir rift graben, Iceland”, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 2016.

LaFemina, P. et al., on partitioned spreading rates across the Western and Eastern Volcanic Zones, 2005.

Contemporary press coverage of the 1907 royal visit and the building of Konungsvegur.

Strokkur stopped erupting in the autumn of 1896, when earthquakes in South Iceland shifted the plumbing beneath the Haukadalur hot spring field. For sixty-seven years it did almost nothing. On 16 July 1963 a state drilling rig arrived from Selfoss with orders to wake it up. It took eighteen days. At 39 metres, on 23 July, the hole erupted with such force that nobody could get near the rig. Strokkur has erupted ever since.

Strokkur goes off every few minutes — roughly nine times an hour, with something like seven minutes between eruptions on average. The crowd stands in a loose ring behind the rope, phones up, and waits. The water swells into a blue dome a second before it goes, which is the moment everyone is trying to catch and mostly misses.

It is the most reliable geyser in Iceland, and reliability is why it sits on every Golden Circle itinerary in the country, alongside Þingvellir and Gullfoss. What almost nobody standing there knows is that the reliability is recent, and that it was arranged.

This trips up most visitors, and a fair amount of published writing too.

Geysir — the original, the one that gave every geyser in every language its name — is dormant. It has been more or less quiet for decades. What you see there now is a large, still, steaming pool.

Strokkur is a separate hot spring a short walk away. Smaller, and the one actually erupting. Nearly every photograph captioned “Geysir erupting” is Strokkur.

The two are connected underground, and their histories run against each other: through the recorded past, when one has been active the other has tended to be quiet.

The idea of intervening at Strokkur is not modern.

In 1708 Strokkur was deliberately blocked with turf and stones. The reason was agricultural: it was damaging the hayfield at Laug, the farm alongside the hot spring field. A hay meadow was worth more than a spouting hole in the ground.

Worth holding onto that, because the question people ask about 1963 — whether it is acceptable to interfere with a natural feature like this — was answered by the people who lived here 255 years earlier, in the other direction.

In 1789 a strong earthquake struck the region and Strokkur began erupting powerfully.

Four years later, in 1793, the naturalist Sveinn Pálsson recorded the geyser and its name. Strokkur means “churn” — the wooden butter churn, with its plunger driven up and down. Anyone who had made butter recognised the motion immediately.

The nineteenth-century record is a list of heights, and it reads like a decline with interruptions.

1804: around 45 metres, with Geysir reaching 65. 1809: 45 metres again, sustained for something like an hour and a half. 1810: 24 metres. 1815: over 60. By 1830 it was clearly weakening. In 1863 it managed 15 metres — but that eruption was induced, with gravel. By 1871 there was virtually no natural activity at all. In 1880 it was back to 25 or 28 metres.

That word induced is the part usually left out. For much of the nineteenth century Strokkur erupted mainly when people made it. Turf and gravel were thrown into the conduit to choke it and force a reaction, and visitors who had travelled a long way expected a show. The later soaping of Geysir was the same instinct with better chemistry.

So by the time anyone arrives at 1963, the site already has a two-hundred-year history of people reaching into it — first to stop it, then to start it.

In the autumn of 1896 a sequence of earthquakes struck South Iceland, and the hot spring field rearranged itself.

Strokkur stopped almost completely. Geysir took over, erupting powerfully for the next two decades — which is precisely the period when Geysir’s international fame was established.

You will see 1907, 1920 and vague phrases like “around the turn of the century” given as the date Strokkur went quiet. Those are wrong. The event is the 1896 earthquake sequence, and the local record is clear about it.

Sixty-seven years.

Over that time the water level in the conduit fell steadily. In 1931 the water stood about a metre below the surface, with a surface temperature of 80.5 degrees. In 1937 the conduit was measured at 11 metres.

The clearest description of what it had become comes from Kristbergur Jónsson, who lived at Laug. He described a hole around 12 metres deep, narrowing as it went, with no standing water — only a small pool at the very bottom. Part of that account he had from his mother.

That is what was there in the summer of 1963. Not a geyser. A hole with rubble in it.

I met his son. Jón Kristbergsson lived in a turf house that is still standing near Strokkur, and my father took me there when I was eight or nine years old. My father was a tall man and had to bend to get through the doorway. We sat inside and drank black coffee. I was too young to ask him about Strokkur, which I have regretted since.

What I remember is him telling my father how strange he found it that the tourists coming to watch Strokkur had no idea the whole thing was partly man-made. He had been alive when it was not erupting. I do not remember his exact words — I was a boy, and it was a long time ago — but that was the sense of it, and it stayed with me.

Everything written about the 1963 drilling until now has come down to a sentence: locals cleared the blocked conduit on the advice of the Geysir Committee.

The men who did it kept a daily log. Fifteen sheets, one per working day, handwritten in ballpoint on the printed forms of Rafmagnsveitur ríkisins, Jarðborunardeild — the State Electricity Authority’s drilling department. Each one is signed at the bottom by the rig foreman: Þórir Sveinbjörnsson. The same three men are listed alongside him on nearly every sheet — Ólafur J. Jónsson, Reynir Guðmundsson, and a Sigurðsson whose first name I cannot read with confidence.

Those are the “locals.”

The first sheet is dated 16 July 1963. No drilling was done. They moved the rig up from Selfoss, laid water pipes and set up pumps, and the foreman wrote down what they had come to do:

Borinn fluttur frá Selfossi að STROKK í Haukadal, en gera á tilraun með að laga hverinn og vekja hann til lífsins aftur, en hann hefur legið að mestu niðri frá því fyrir 1896.

The rig moved from Selfoss to Strokkur in Haukadalur, to attempt to repair the spring and wake it back to life, it having lain mostly dormant since before 1896.

Note the date in that sentence. In 1963 the men standing at the spring knew perfectly well when it had stopped. It is the modern sources that lost it.

The next day they tried to pump the spring out and found it too hot to work with — 83 degrees. They gave up on pumping, built a timber platform over the hole, and started to drill. By evening they were at 19.5 metres, and the foreman recorded what was down there:

Hitt nú er á vatn 1.60 m. Dýpi í hver 5.60 m. Rusl í botninum frá 5.60 m niður í 12 m.

Water at 1.60 m. Depth of the spring 5.60 m. Rubble in the bottom from 5.60 m down to 12 m.

Those are exactly the figures the local histories give. Here they are in the hand of the man who measured them.

By 19 July they were at 36.4 metres and there were signs of something happening — steam showing from 34 metres down. They pulled the drill string and the hole spat out the water standing in it, with a trace of steam. It was not enough.

So they tried everything else. They took the casing back out. They poured in soap. They added carbide. Nothing.

The next day, 20 July, is the sheet that changes the story:

Gerðar miklar tilraunir til að fá Strokk til að gjósa, en vegna fyrirmæla um að fara “sérstaklega varlega” þá vildum við ekki bora meira í bili fyrr en fullreynt væri hvort hægt væri að ná hvernum til að gjósa. Sett var sápa 45 kg. Sett úr karbít — mikið, en allt kom fyrir ekki.

Great efforts made to get Strokkur to erupt, but because of instructions to proceed “especially carefully” we did not want to drill any further for the time being, until it had been fully tested whether the spring could be made to erupt. 45 kg of soap was added. Carbide added — a great deal — but none of it did any good.

Read that twice. The 1963 drilling is usually told as an era that simply did things. It was not. Somebody gave these men an instruction to go especially carefully, and the foreman thought the phrase worth putting in quotation marks. They stopped drilling and spent three days trying to avoid it.

And they soaped Strokkur. Forty-five kilos. The soaping of Geysir is a well-worn story; nobody mentions that the same thing was tried on Strokkur first, and that it failed.

They went home for the weekend. They came back on Monday 22 July and tried the soap again, and pumping again. The spring sat there, brim full, trickling slightly over the edge, and did nothing.

On the Tuesday they went back down.

Borað með 4¼” krónu niður í 39.40 m, en í 39. m gaus holan mjög öflugu gosi.

Drilled with a 4¼” bit down to 39.40 m, but at 39 m the hole erupted with a very powerful eruption.

They stopped at 39.40 metres. Not because the hole was finished, but because it was no longer possible to get near the rig. They tried to pull the drill string out and managed nine metres before the spring began spitting up under the platform and through the gaps in the boards — while water was being pumped into it at eight to ten litres a second to hold it down.

Sixty-seven years of nothing, a week of soap and carbide and pumping, and then three metres of rock.

What follows in the log is not triumph. It is a week of hard, awkward work trying to get their own equipment back out of an erupting geyser.

They pumped in 15 to 20 litres a second and it was not enough. They mixed heavy drilling mud and pumped that down; the hole threw it straight back. They tried Fiberlex. Same. On 29 July the foreman wrote, with what reads like a mixture of exasperation and admiration:

Hverinn er stórkostlegur vegna gosa uppi gegnum pallinn sem er ofan á hvernum.

The spring is magnificent, erupting up through the platform that is on top of it.

The steel casing — 19.4 metres of 5-inch pipe — was stuck fast. It took them from 25 to 31 July to get it out, and when it finally came free it came up in one piece. This matters, because it means there is no pipe left in Strokkur. The hole is open rock.

That same day, 31 July, the rig was taken away and the platform dismantled. The foreman’s last line on the sheet:

Upp vakinn Strokkur er að vísu skítugur, en gosin eru kröftug ef hverinn fær nóg vatn.

Strokkur, woken up, is admittedly dirty, but the eruptions are powerful if the spring gets enough water.

Two days of clearing up followed. And then, on 3 August, the last sheet records something nobody writing about Strokkur has mentioned since. As the old basin filled and the water level rose, the eruptions changed character: they came further apart, and they got bigger.

Þegar vatnið hækkaði í hvernum þá hækkuðu gosin um leið og urðu strjálli, allt frá því að vera 30 sekúndur á milli gosa upp í 10–15 mínútur milli gosa, og þá komu einka 40–50 m gos. Veður var stillt og auðvelt að bera saman við borsmastrið.

As the water rose in the spring the eruptions rose with it and became less frequent, going from 30 seconds between eruptions to 10–15 minutes, and then came eruptions of some 40–50 m. The weather was calm and it was easy to compare against the drill mast.

Forty to fifty metres. Measured against their own rig mast, on a still day, in the first week of August 1963.

Strokkur has erupted continuously since that August, and it is the borehole that made it dependable rather than occasional.

Measurements since: a flow of about 2.5 litres per second in 1967, and roughly 2 litres per second measured for Iceland’s Nature Conservation Council on 17 September 1994, with water temperature at depth somewhere around 120 to 125 degrees.

It no longer throws water forty metres. What it does instead is go off nine times an hour, every hour, in every weather, which is worth more to a coach schedule than any single spectacular column.

The old habits took a while to die. Geysir was still being coaxed into performing after 1963, and the method was the same soap that had failed at Strokkur — poured in to lower the surface tension and set off an eruption on demand, usually for an audience.

My sport teacher at grammar school was one of the men who soaped Geysir. He went up at night, because it was not really permitted.

The site is now protected. Since 17 June 2020 it has been a protected natural monument, and interventions of the 1963 kind are no longer on the table.

Partly. Honestly, yes, partly.

The heat is natural. The water is natural. The conduit is natural, and it erupted on its own for long stretches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the Strokkur you watch today — the one that goes off nine times an hour, reliably enough to build a tour schedule around — exists in that form because four men drilled 39.4 metres into it in the summer of 1963. Without that, it would be a small pool. Roughly what Geysir is now.

That is not a scandal, and it is not a secret. It is the continuation of something that had been going on at this site since at least 1708: people blocking it, choking it, throwing turf into it, soaping it, drilling it. The 1963 borehole is the most successful thing anyone has done to it, not the first.

What strikes me, having read the log, is that they were not reckless. That was what I expected to find and it is not what is there. They had orders to go especially carefully and they followed them — they stopped drilling for three days and tried every gentler thing they could think of first. Only when the pumps and the soap and the carbide had all failed did they go back down, and then it worked immediately.

Nobody would do it now. Geysir sits quiet a short walk away, and the reason nobody drills it is that the ground underneath is not well enough understood to know what a borehole would do to the rest of the field. That caution has been argued out in public, in the newspapers, over years.

So the difference between 1963 and today is not that they were careless and we are careful. They were careful. The difference is that in 1963 being careful still ended with a decision to drill, and a geyser that has run for sixty-three years. I am not sure the modern answer is wrong. But it is worth saying plainly what the cautious answer would have cost in 1963: Haukadalur would have two silent pools and nothing to watch.

None of this was hidden. The drilling reports have been sitting in a public state archive the whole time, scanned and free to download, findable by anyone who thought to look for a borehole rather than a geyser.

The gap in the English-language record was never a missing document. It was that everybody copied everybody else.

Two things in the record I have not been able to settle. The national borehole registry names the rig as Ýmir; the daily sheets appear to name a different rig. And the registry gives the operator as Jarðboranir ríkisins, where the sheets are printed with Rafmagnsveitur ríkisins, Jarðborunardeild. I have left both out of the account above rather than guess. If you know the answer, or if you have a photograph of the work — no image of the 1963 drilling has surfaced anywhere — I would like to hear from you.

Borskýrsla — daily drilling reports, Strokkur, 16 July – 3 August 1963. Rafmagnsveitur ríkisins, Jarðborunardeild. 15 sheets plus cross-section. Digitised by Orkustofnun:

Daily reports, July–August 1963 (PDF)

Borehole cross-section, 8 August 1963 (PDF)

Borholuskrá — the national borehole registry, Umhverfis- og orkustofnun. Borehole 91751, Strokkur í Haukadal.

Ingólfur Guðnason, “Strokkur og hverasvæðið í Haukadal”, Litli-Bergþór, magazine of Ungmennafélag Biskupstungna.

Helgi Torfason, article on Strokkur in Eyjar í eldhafi (1995), festschrift for Jón Jónsson.

Helgi Torfason, “Geysir vakinn upp”, Náttúrufræðingurinn 53 (1–2), 1984, pp. 5–6.

Ísleifur Jónsson, “Hvers vegna sefur Geysir?”, Morgunblaðið, 22 July 1997, pp. 26–27.

Umhverfisstofnun, Stjórnunar- og verndaráætlun — Geysir 2022–2031.

This is the single most important shift in mindset, and it changes everything.

Come to Iceland for Iceland — the waterfalls, the black beaches, the glaciers, the steam rising off the ground, the empty roads through landscapes that don’t look real. Enjoy that. Then treat the northern lights as a wonderful bonus on top, not the reason the trip succeeds or fails.

People who come only to see the aurora often go home disappointed, because they pinned an entire trip on something no one controls. People who come to experience Iceland, and stay ready for the lights, tend to go home happy either way — and they’re the ones who actually catch the aurora more often, because they’ve built their trip the right way.

So the goal is simple: enjoy the journey through Iceland, and shape that journey so the bonus becomes as likely as possible. That’s exactly what we try to do.

If you base your whole trip on day-tours out of Reykjavík, you’ll spend most of your time in and around the city. Those tours can be excellent — this isn’t a knock on them. But the trade-off is real: you end up seeing a fraction of the country, because you keep returning to the same base each night.

Being on a rental car and travelling around the country is a different kind of freedom. You see far more of Iceland by day, you stay in the countryside at night, and — crucially for the aurora — you can move. More on why that matters in a moment.

To be completely fair: staying in Reykjavík and taking evening aurora tours is a perfectly valid choice. It’s simpler, and you don’t drive. It’s a genuine option, and for some people it’s the right one. But if you want to both see more of Iceland and improve your aurora odds, self-driving gives you both. It’s a choice, and I want you to make it with open eyes.

Here’s the rhythm that matters.

During the day, you explore and enjoy. The aurora isn’t a daytime event, so daytime is simply for experiencing Iceland.

The opportunity opens in the evening, usually starting around 7–8pm and lasting until 4–5am, with midnight being the statistical peak based on the research. So the period that really matters is after you’ve arrived at your hotel for the night. That’s the window. And being ready in that window is what separates a good chance from a missed one.

This is exactly why, on our self-drive trips, we analyse the area around each hotel we use — and tell you where you could go that evening. Sometimes it’s worth driving a short distance to get out of light pollution. Sometimes there’s a beautiful spot nearby that makes a stunning backdrop for photos. Every hotel is different, so we look at each one through that lens and give you the local knowledge in advance.

People often think the aurora forecast is the whole story. It isn’t.

A geomagnetic storm can hit and the activity can be high — but you still have to actually see it, and clouds are usually the hardest problem. The lights can be dancing brilliantly above a thick cloud layer and you’ll see nothing.

This is the real reason being on a car matters so much. If clouds sit over your hotel, you want to be able to drive — even one or two hours — to find a clear patch of sky. A fixed base can’t do that. Mobility is the single biggest practical advantage you have against clouds.

So when you’re at your hotel in the evening: check the aurora forecast (activity level and cloud cover both). Talk to reception — they often know the local conditions and the best nearby spots. And ask about an aurora wake-up call. This one is genuinely important: many good hotels will wake you if the lights appear, so you can sleep without stress and not miss a sudden display. Because here’s the truth — it often happens unexpectedly, even when the forecast said otherwise. It’s nature; you can’t use science to predict it 100%.

That readiness — being on a car, watching the forecast, talking to locals, having a wake-up call — is what turns “we got unlucky” into “we were ready when it happened.”

Putting it all together: a self-drive trip lets you see far more of Iceland by day, puts you in the countryside (often darker skies) at night, and — most importantly — gives you the mobility to chase clear skies when clouds get in the way. Paired with knowing where to go around each hotel and being ready in the evening, that’s the strongest position we know how to put you in.

We can’t promise the aurora. But we can do everything within our power to improve your chances — and help you be ready when the moment comes.

Being mobile is your biggest advantage, but only if you do it safely. A few things I ask of everyone:

Be on a good 4×4. Weather and road conditions in Iceland can change fast, especially in winter. A capable vehicle isn’t a luxury here — it’s safety.

Always put safety first. If conditions are bad, the aurora is not worth a risk. It will come another night.

Tell reception your plans before you head out in the evening.

Keep the road-assistance number ready in case something happens and you end up waiting in the car for a while. Have warm clothing, water, and a charged phone.

And one thing locals will thank you for: never park in the middle of the road. People do this — they stop on the road and wander around in the dark to watch the lights — and it’s genuinely dangerous, because other drivers can’t see them. Always pull your car fully off the road into a proper spot, so you’re not a hazard to anyone while you wait for the aurora to dance.

Come for Iceland. Stay ready for the lights. Do it safely and respectfully. That’s the honest formula — and it’s the one we build every self-drive trip around.