Hidden People, Hidden Wonders * Northern Iceland

Northern Iceland exemplifies the country’s otherworldly appeal

At some point during my trip to northern Iceland, giddy with the otherworldliness of it all, I considered rechristening myself Thor Douglasson. I’m not sure what specifically brought the thought on. It may have been – and here I risk offending vegetarians and animal lovers right from the go – eating foal at a warm and classy new restaurant called Laxdalshus, in the northern capital, Akureyri. Eating foal (it was delicious, by the way, tender as a… well, a foal) seemed like a suitably god-like thing to do and, besides, mythical-sounding first names such as Glacier, Eagle and, yes, Thor, are two a penny here.

You’ll find no Trixibelles, Bronxes or Lourdes among native Icelanders: all new names have to be approved by a naming council to avoid diluting a linguistic atmosphere matching in purity a climate that allows the country to actually increase its greenhouse emissions by 10%. And, as for that “Douglasson”, it seems in keeping with this sparsely beautiful land that surnames are dispensed with. What you do instead is to clip “son” or “dottir”, son or daughter, on to your father’s name (mine, of course, being Douglas).

Sparse and beautiful: it’s a combination that explains a lot about this place. The hidden people, for example: Iceland’s version of elves or fairies, but with nothing cutesy about them. The hidden people are to be respected, even feared; many Icelanders still half-believe in them and will, for example, divert roads around the great boulders apparently beloved of their invisible compatriots rather than risk upsetting them.

There’s something compelling about such beliefs, especially when contrasted with a materialistic place like Britain, in thrall to shopping rather than ancient supernatural beings. But, despite sounding rather spiritual, the origins of the hidden people may lie in something quite sad and real. They may be the imagined ghosts of Icelandic children abandoned to this forbidding landscape.

In their times of greatest hardship, the early Icelanders would leave newborn infants they couldn’t feed out on the hillside to die. It is thought the grief attendant upon such an act may have given birth, if the phrase isn’t too ill-suited, to the legend that these children somehow lived on, as hidden people.

The north offers more
Most visitors to Iceland get enough of misty waterfalls, woozy hot springs and spouting volcanoes (Grimsvotn, which erupted recently, is to the south-east) within easy reach of Reykjavik. But the north offers more: or, rather, less. Fewer people, that is, to detract from the uniquely ethereal thrill of this country.

I came in mid-winter, when the shroud of snow over everything made the region feel even more untouched. Normally in Iceland, you are forbidden from driving off-road, but in the winter white-out you often just can’t see it. Certainly if our driver, Siggi, was following a road beneath the metre of snow we wound through on our way to Dettifoss waterfall, its engineer was either mad or drunk – or perhaps just avoiding the hidden people’s stones.

“I had some fun here yesterday,” Siggi shouted, laughing, as he expertly extricated us, our Land Rover’s wheels spinning furiously, from another slump. “I don’t think anybody had passed through in a fortnight!” With his palest-yellow hair, almost translucent skin and big, gleaming teeth, Siggi, a sheep farmer when he wasn’t driving, could have been assembled from the surrounding terrain. When he spoke his r’s fluttered for ages, like a trapped moth.

To me the landscape around us seemed almost featureless, a succession of leached, blurry shades, but within an hour Siggi had delivered us to Dettifoss, a huge foaming mouth jutting from the snow. There was no one else there, although you would probably find more visitors in the summer. Now the waterfall, the largest and most powerful in Europe, seemed to be painting the terrain in great spits of spray while we stood there. Sunk up to our thighs in velvet snow, with dense molecules dancing in the air around us and harbour-loads of liquid pounding into the canyon below, we had found ourselves in a dreamy world of water.

Sometimes in Iceland, particularly in the north, you wonder whether humans are meant to be here at all. You feel, nervously, as if you are encroaching upon quite alien terrain, and I could imagine whatever rules that terrain retreating to slumber sometimes in Lofthellir lava cave.

Eerie natural sculptures
We weren’t the only ones to have descended here but not that many people have: the cave, a jagged black breathing hole rupturing the frozen ground, was only spotted from the air a decade ago. This is strictly a slimmer’s cave: you have to crawl through a very narrow crevice for a couple of metres to get to the caverns. But it’s worth losing weight to be in the presence of these eerie natural sculptures within. One, the size of a car, squats in its own entire chamber; another hangs menacingly from the ceiling. Still more, candle-sized, look like tiny sentinels.

The names these formations have been given – the Castle, the Pulpit – if anything detract from them. They really do feel alive, their layers of ice making them seem to glow from some powerful core.

Iceland, indeed.

TRAVEL FACTS

Laxdalshús restaurant: Hafnarstaeti 11 461 2900 Thurs to Sun 2pm to 10pm

Simon travelled to northern Iceland with the assistance of Visit Iceland, Icelandair, Air Iceland, Discover the World and Saga Travel.

Discover the World (01737 218 800) offers a seven night Northern Highlights self-drive holiday from £884 per person, including international and domestic flights, seven nights’ accommodation and car hire on an unlimited mileage basis.

Saga Travel (00354 558 8888) can provide group or personal day tours from Akureyri including Lake Myvatn, Hussavik, Lofthellir, Dettifoss and Hrisey Island.

Source: Msn