Reykholt, Ancient Stead of Snorri, Typical Icelandic Farm.
But he recovered his power and again won the confidence and esteem of nearly all of the people and in 1222 they again made him Speaker for the second time. It is quite probable that Snorri repented of his plan to betray Iceland to Norway and we know that his excuse was to save Iceland from immediate invasion. It is to be regretted that Icelanders did not fully understand his reason. Most of Snorri’s troubles came from feudal strife with his own relatives, especially his nephew, Sturla. At one time this ungrateful nephew appropriated all of his uncle’s estates in Borg and endeavored to make himself the mighty man of Iceland. We can not enter into the long conflict, how the people took sides with both parties, how a thousand armed men marched down on peaceful Borg, how Snorri in sorrow returned to Norway, tarried awhile and then came back to his home in Borg only to meet death in the cellar of his own house. It may all be read in the story written by his nephew, Sturla Thordson.
Snorri was a man of peaceful disposition, avoiding arms when arbitration could be employed, a man of business but not a man of action as men were active in his day. He did not choose the turmoil of political strife into which he was drawn. It was love of wealth and vanity that led to his weakness at the court of Hakon and which was misunderstood in Iceland and which gave his enemies an opportunity. This was the one great mistake of his life and he endeavored to atone for the weakness, but his enemies, though they never knew the full story of this affair, never forgave him. He paid for his error by being hewn to pieces in the cellar of his home at Reykholt on September 22, 1241. The mound of the great house that was pulled down upon his remains has never been disturbed and the beautiful marguerites have bloomed above it for centuries.
As a historian Snorri will always hold high rank. The Heimskringla, the Story of the Kings of Norway, is a faithful picture of the times, impartial, straightforward,—it is the story and not the historian that the reader has before him when he opens these pages. Only once in that long history is there any comment by the author. There is none of the so called “philosophy of history” which has fogged so many historical pages that have been written in modern days. Writers may well take a lesson from Snorri, who “let facts deliver the verdict, keeping his own judgment to himself.” Here in the dale of Reykholt, beside his steaming springs and with his flocks and herds about him, Snorri writes of the great kings of Norway, of their wars and their wanderings, their labors for Christianity and the uplifting of their subjects. He bears us away to Scotland and to England and often to Ireland, we learn of the correspondence with the Emperor Frederick and King Louis of France, we learn of James of Aragon, of William the Conqueror and Alphonse of Castile,—he takes us to far away Algeria, to Tunis and to Greece, to Venice and Constantinople and to holy Jerusalem. In 1300 he was described as “a man to our knowledge most wise and fair-minded.”
Snorri’s language is simple, yet dignified, clear in thought and vivid in the picture portrayed and in scenes described. His sentences are short and graphic, clear and concise. His dialogs are frequent and to the point. Silence, where it is sure to arouse the interest of the reader, is artfully employed as is shown in the kidnapping of Harek and in the mysterious loss of two of King Olaf’s ships at Faroe. In humor, also, Snorri is a master and brings into his story bits of mirth and wit that make his pages sparkle and give point to the story he is writing. Witness the good wife who objected to the King’s using the middle of the towel in the morning to wipe his face when he should have used the lower end in the morning, the middle at noon and the top at night, thus saving her two towels. His wit and his stories give point to his writings and will insure their life as long as people love to dwell upon the customs of their predecessors. Impartial, faithful, clear, Snorri brings the story of the ancient times among the Norsemen down to his own day, weaving into his warp the threads of fact that bound the Viking to the British Isles, the sunny Mediterranean and the Holy Land as well as to his beloved Iceland. He has erected for himself an enduring monument.
It is a tumbled mound, this grass-grown pile at Reykholt, but it is all that is left of Snorri’s stately manor. In the quiet of the evening I stood upon the heap, and the past of Iceland’s history rushed before me, its long Viking period, the coming of the Cross and the troublesome times that followed; in the story of Snorri I had learned of Norway’s ancient days and Iceland’s matchless heroes. It is the same quiet meadow at my feet and the same blue ridge in the distance that met the gaze of Snorri, the people are the same in race and customs but in other things how changed. The Cross has wrought its full influence. Were this mound in other lands the spade would long since have explored its recesses in search of relics and mementoes of this great man. It is sacred to the Icelander and has never been disturbed.
Beside the mound is Snorrilaug, Snorri’s Bath. Next to the Heimskringla the bath is his greatest monument and serves better to perpetuate the memory of the Sage of Reykholt than any thing that other hands could have wrought. It is circular in form, fifteen feet in diameter and constructed of split stones which were fitted in an exact manner and joined by means of a cement made on the spot by Snorri himself out of the pulverized geyserite. The floor of the bath is of split tufa and cemented with care. A stone bench, capable of seating thirty persons is built around the inside of the bath with the wall for a back. A hot spring, called Scribla, is located 500 feet from the bath and from Scribla to the bath Snorri constructed an underground passage out of stones all carefully cemented together. In 1733 this conduit was shaken by an earthquake and the Rev. Finn Jonson, Bishop of Skálholt, repaired it. Aside from this incident, the bath stands to-day as when Snorri was killed beside it. The steps from his house led directly down into the bath. It is a masterpiece of work that remains intact after the centuries so that one may turn on the hot water from Scribla and use it to-day as did Snorri during the first half of the thirteenth century.
The valley of Reykholt contains many excellent hot springs, some of which have lost part of their former power and do not spout because of the disarrangement of their tubes by recent earthquakes. On a quiet day steam rises from many places in the valley and along the banks of the river. There is one spring of unique formation and peculiar in its situation, the Áhver, River-Hot-Spring. It is in the middle of the river that divides the valley. The river is broad but shallow and the water is cold. In the middle of the stream rises the mound of the hot spring several feet above the water. This mound contains three orifices out of which boiling water pours vigorously. We waded out to this hot mound and climbed to the top. There is no danger of being scalded because the springs no longer spout as in former days on account of the before mentioned earthquake, which has disturbed the tubes. In place of the former periodical spouts of hot water there is now a continuous flow in which the water rises one or two feet above the mouth of the tubes and escapes with much spluttering and accompanied with large volumes of steam. These tubes are a foot or more in diameter. It is a singular location for a hot spring but there is another phenomenon even more surprising. Below the mound of geyserite in the channel of the river there is a long series of holes in the river bed out of which boiling water spurts with such violence in places as to eject steam up through the cold water. Our ponies in fording this stream were quite shy of these hot holes in the bed of the river and insisted on going far down stream.
The valley is rich in grass, with many fine herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. It was one of these rich pasture lands at the foot of the snowy mountains, in Iceland that led Henderson, who realized how dependent was the farmer upon the grass, to quote from Proverbs as follows:—