Day 108-Egil's Saga

   April 21-We got home late the night before, so the kids got to bed late, and then the adults stayed up even later watching the aurora borealis, so everyone slept in today.  The day was clear again, so we figured we should not waste it sitting around the apartment and headed towards Borgarnes early in the afternoon.  Pulling onto the highway, the first thing we noticed was a plume of smoke rising to the south.  As befits our Colorado background, the first thing we thought was that there was a wildfire!  Then, we noticed that it was coming from the general direction of Varmaland, and we began to worry that the girls' school might be on fire.  In the end, it turned out to be a controlled burn of farmland.  This an old farming practice here, but it is now only allowed before May and more farmers are choosing to plow the previous year's growth under, rather than burn it. 
   After driving the country roads a while to find the fields being burned, we finally headed into Borgarnes.  Sally did some shopping and then we got started on the our primary intended activity for today: visiting the local sites that are associated with Egil's Saga.  This particular saga was written in the 13th century by a descendent of Egil named Snorri Sturluson.  Snorri was a powerful chieftain in the area and was quite knowledgeable of the region and his family's history, so it is deemed likely that the story is based on real people and historical events.  However, the stories Snorri wrote down had been passed down from generation to generation for over 200 years, so it is certain that inaccuracies had crept into them.
   The basic gist of the story is that this region, called Mýrar, was initially settled by Skallagrím Kveldúlfsson.  He and his father sailed from Norway in the initial wave of Icelandic settlement, but their ships became separated and his father died en route.  Before dying, he instructed his followers to throw his casket into the sea and to settle wherever it came ashore.  When the two groups made contact again, they searched for the casket and found it in the fjord near the present-day site of Borgarnes, so Skallagrím settled there.  Some time later, he had a son named Egil, whose adventures throughout northern Europe and the British Isles comprise a large part of the saga.  The saga finishes with stories detailing the dealings of his children with the descendants of Skallagrím's followers, who were given farms in the surrounding countryside.

The kids at Brákarsund with Borgarfjörður behind them.

   We had downloaded a tour onto the iPad that was produced by the Settlement Center in town and discusses the local sites that relate to the saga.  We started down by the Settlement Center, which sits at the end of spit, upon which Borgarnes lies.  The channel at the end of the spit is named Brákarsund, in honor of Egil's foster mother, Þorgerður Brák, whom Skallagrím killed here.  Skallagrím had flown into a fit of berserker rage while playing a version of ice hockey against Egil and his best friend.  He killed Egil's friend and was about to do in Egil as well, when Þorgerður stepped in and stopped him.  Skallagrím's rage could not be contained, however, and he pursued Þorgerður to this point and struck her with a rock as she tried to swim to the neighboring island.  The saga relates that, "neither the stone nor Þorgerður Brák where ever seen again."  The kids snickered mightily when the narrator of the tour called this story "beautiful."  Completing this story, the twelve-year old Egil killed the foreman of the farm before sitting down for supper with the family that night, in order to get back at his dad.  These sorts of stories are common in the sagas and provide an insight into the Viking mindset, at least as it was perceived by their descendants two centuries later.
   We drove into the center of Borgarnes, where Egil built a burial mound for Skallagrím when he died of old age.  Egil buried his favorite son in the same mound years later, after he drowned when his ship sank while sailing up the Hvitá river to gather wood.  The burial mound remained in existence for many centuries and was only destroyed in the 19th century, when the town of Borgarnes came into existence and residents started using stones from the mound to build homes and other structures.  Early in the 20th century a local women's group decided to recreate the burial mound and made it the centerpiece of a pleasant little park, which is named after Skallagrím.
   We next visited a site on the north end of Borgarnes, which was one of the twelve farms that were established by Skallagrím's followers when they settled Mýrar.  Most of the farms are still occupied and all are still called by the name that was given to them at the time of the Settlement.  Most of the names are "X's-place," where X is the name of the original settler.  This sounds quite amazing at first, but consider a similar situation closer to home.  When you listen to locals on the eastern plains of Colorado talk about farms, they essentially do the same thing ("We harvested the Akey place today.") even if the people the place is named after have not lived there or been associated with that farm for decades.  When you think about it like that, it becomes much less difficult to imagine farm names being passed down generation to generation virtually unchanged in Iceland.

Borg in front of mountains of the Snæfellsnes peninsula.

   We next checked out the views
from atop the Borgarnes water tank.  The standard issue viewing
dial allowed us to identify all of the interesting sites around us, including the farmsite of Borg, to which we went next.  Like most Icelandic words, "borg" has a multitude of meanings, but in this case, the farm was named after the borgs, or cliffs, behind it.  Given the ubiquity of cliffs in this country, we were a little surprised that these particular cliffs would be worthy enough to highlight with a placename.  In any event, "Borg" was the name that Skallagrím chose when he established his farm here.  It was subsequently passed down to Egil and Egil's descendants.  

From front to back, Borg, Borgarnes, Borgarfjörður,
(and Hafnarfjall), as seen from the "borgs" behind Borg.

   As the home of the leading men in the area for a few generations, Borg commanded a certain amount of respect and was a cultural center of Mýrar. Consequently, it was the location at which one of the first churches in Mýrar was built after the decision was made at the Alþing of 1000 AD that Iceland would convert to Christianity.  The current church is much newer, but it is almost certainly located on the spot where the first church was built, given the tradition of building new churches on the sites of old ones. 

   The cemetery has definitely not moved around in the intervening millennium, as is evidenced by one particular grave for a man who is mentioned in a "sequel" saga to Egil's Saga.  The narrator specifically pointed out that this grave is noteworthy for its north-south orientation, as opposed to the Christian tradition of east-west grave orientations.  As she noted, the decision to convert to Christianity was not accompanied by a great deal of liturgical education.  Since Icelanders were also largely illiterate at the time, they also could not read the contemporary Latin Bibles.  Consequently, they mostly were left to figure out this whole new religion on their own.  So, when Egil's grandson, Kjartan, was buried soon after the conversion, his uncle, Þorsteinn Egilsson, only knew that it was customary to bury the dead, but was ignorant of issues such as orientation, consecration, and the such.  This particular burial is all the more interesting,  because the runic headstone placed upon it 1000 years ago has survived.  By 1947, the ravages of time had broken it into thirds, so it was moved to the National Museum for safekeeping and a replica was put in its place.

   With our self-guided tour at an end, we headed for home.  We stopped briefly at the elf hill so the kids could finally have a chance to see some of the elf houses up close.  We have some rocks and hillocks on our property back in Gunnison that we think would be great homes for elves.  According to Icelandic folklore, all we need to do is make these locations inviting, so the kids want to build some houses and doors on our own elf hill when we get back home.

   We also finally took the time to stop at the Gljúfurá, which we have crossed countless times in our trips between Bifröst and Borgarnes.  The river's name, which means "canyon river," needs no explanation.  What we found most impressive about this river is the straight line that it follows.  Since lava tubes and lava gullies are often fairly straight, one possibility is that this is the source of the original channel that this river started following.  However, we are certainly not geologists and this explanation may not be correct.  Nonetheless, it is a striking canyon and river.

   We got back home before it was too late, so everyone was able to relax, play around outside, and even get some work done.  It was another nice, clear evening and there was a decent chance for more northern lights due to a coronal hole high speed stream becoming geoeffective, so we carried out our routine inspection of the night sky before going to bed.  Lo and behold, we got another light show.  The kids got up to look at it, but they were tired and maybe actually a little jaded by the aurora borealis at this point, so they headed back to bed rather quickly.  Meanwhile, the adults took pictures out the back door of the apartment and enjoyed the show until we hit the sack around midnight.