Iceland: Horseback tours in saga land

by W. S. C. Russell

“The king refreshes his warriors with the pure mead,—mead which soothes the sorrows of man. The horns are seldom empty. The aged and magnanimous monarch, who wields off the darts with his shield, divides the honey-drink among his warriors.”

Henderson.

The organ in this humble home suggested this digression. Supper over, let us return to the farm. Down by the stream there is a diminutive grist mill with hand-hewn stones fifteen inches in diameter and turned by a most primitive water wheel. The mill never stops. The rye or barley, imported from Europe, is placed in the hopper and ground whole. There is no differentiation of the botanical parts as in America, where the live stock get the nutritious portions and bread is made out of the remainder because it is “white.” When the meal bucket at the house is empty the maid goes down to the brook, removes the flour, refills the hopper and thus in rotation for years, or until the mill must be repaired. To appreciate this mill in all its simplicity one must see it. The stones are placed on the upper end of a vertical shaft. At the lower end of the shaft there are simply two paddle blades attached to turn the shaft under the pressure of the water. Simple, but effective, always at work and producing nutritious flour as long as the grains are added to the miniature hopper.

After an inspection of the mill, the same as found on many farms, I visited the mowers. They were at work with vigor, swinging the scythe with a powerful stroke. This a mower does for about an hour when he suddenly drops it in the swath, goes to the house for a bowl of Skyr, curds, a cup of coffee or lounges on the ground to smoke or take snuff with a companion in a similar degree of exhaustion. After an hour of rest he returns to his scythe and thus from early morning till midnight does he labor during the haying season. There are always some men and a few women mowing but one can usually find two or three scythes deserted by their users in the swath. I had an introduction to the crooked, hand-blistering, ache-producing instrument of America in my tender years which ripened into an acquaintance of great familiarity, which, true to the proverb, bred contempt. I examined this Icelandic turf-parer not without misgivings as to what I could do with so strange an implement. The scythe is twenty inches long, straight and two and a half inches wide. The blade is extremely thin and buckles and bends in contact with the turf. The snath is the peculiar feature. It is made like a rake handle and is six feet long, perfectly straight and attached to the scythe at right angles. The nebs are unlike; that for the right hand is like ours and similarly placed, that for the left is a straight strip about eighteen inches long and is placed on the snath at right angles and just below the shoulder, reaching down to the palm of the left hand. At the end of this strip is a cross piece to fit the palm much like the end of a canoe paddle. The end of the long snath protrudes over the left shoulder.

The men quit their work and watched me with a quizzical expression as I picked up one of these abandoned implements and swung it in the air once or twice before venturing to set it into the grass, after the fashion of a golfer before the drive. When the faces of the mowers had broken into a smile, I knew that I must try it and into the grass it went with the long steady swing of the old habit. After a few strokes I was cutting a wide clean swath and paring to the turf so that the soil showed in the approved Icelandic style. A middle aged man, who had been whetting his scythe, struck in behind me close to my heels while the others stood to watch the race. May I modestly state that my New Hampshire training had not been in vain? I had counted upon the Icelandic custom of slashing vigorously for a distance of about two rods and then stopping to use the whetstone. If I could hold out that distance I knew that my honor would be safe. I did. In his anxiety to mow me out he ran the whole length of the blade into the tough turf and in pulling it out lost several strokes, whereupon he decided to use the stone and I dropped the scythe in the swath and stepped aside. The onlookers burst into a roar of chaffing at their companion and rushed to shake my hand and pat me on the back. On smooth ground I afterwards found that I could hold my own with them but on the rough and hummocky land, which constitutes by far the larger portion of the mowing, I could not cut over as much ground as they. Seeing the thousands of adjacent hummocks the size of a wash tub, covering acres of the best mowing land and caused by the heaving of the turf under the influence of the frost, I understood the reason for the shape of the Icelandic scythe snath. In this kind of mowing the Icelander does not try to cut a straight swath. He mounts a hummock, slashes the grass and a part of the turf from the hummocks around him, mounts the decapitated hummocks and deftly shaves the sides and pares the hollows. There are no stones in the mowing lands; scarcity of hay, the necessity for getting all the short grass during the thousand years of mowing has removed every trace of lava fragments. Whenever we arrived at a farm I worked an hour or more with the haymakers in order to get acquainted with the people and study their methods of work. After a half day in one field the farmer told Johannes that I ought to stay in their country, as I would make a good Icelander. This was after I had had considerable experience with the scythe, the fine-toothed rake and the reipe, rope, for binding hay for transportation.

Evidently no one had occupied the guest room at Galtalaekur for some time. When Icelanders arrive at a farm to stay over night they, according to ancient custom, go to the baðstofa, sitting and sleeping room, where all the people sleep. In early days baðstofa signified “bathroom,” but it has lost that meaning. Mrs. Russell had retired early in anticipation of a hard day on Hekla. When I came in from the hayfield she was sitting up in bed and laughing. On being asked the cause of the merriment, she replied,—

“As soon as I had retired, three women came into the room on tip toe, whispering and pointing to me. I feigned to be asleep and after some hesitation two of them approached the bed and gazed at me a long time. Then one of them quietly drew from between the coverlets several skirts and other articles of wearing apparel. They went out and I heard them giggling in the passage way. In a short time they came in again and this time pulled out from under the bed enough dishes to set a table, and several packages. Then they, thinking I was sound asleep, lifted up the eider-down at the foot of the bed and drew out a big platter laden with what I suppose was smoked fish.”

I had no sooner reached the room and was wondering where I was to sleep, than these ladies came again bringing more eider-down covers and a box. The box was placed at the end of a chest, a bed was made upon the combination and I turned in to await an early call. But those two boxes were possessed to separate and I found myself on the floor between them in a smother of covers. I then made up my bed on the floor and in the morning rearranged the boxes to give them the appearance of having been used as intended. This I did on the following night. The people did the best they could to be hospitable, served us excellent food and attended to every thing possible for our comfort, even to removing our clothes and boots during the night and cleaning them. True hospitality is in the spirit of the service and not in the quantity or quality and this fact must be recognized in order to do justice to these friendly people.

Hekla was our goal. Across the noisy river, out of the folds of its mantle of wrinkled lava ridges, rose the icy shoulders and hooded head which we hoped to win this day. We engaged an additional guide at the farm to go with Johannes and taking our best ponies, Michael Sunlocks and Greba, we left the farm at six in the morning. This is early in Iceland. From ten to one is the usual hour for beginning the ride of the day. A short trot across the field brought us to the Vestr-Rángá, West-Wrong-River. There is an Eastern as well as a Western “Wrong-River,” so named because the eruptions of Hekla have so often changed its course. We passed close to the tún of Noefrhólt, Clever-Stony-Ridge. The stony ridge is there but why “clever” I can not surmise, unless the people have been clever in dodging the big masses of rock that roll down from the mountain. The buildings are close in under the steep lava wall and there are hundreds of great stones around the buildings, any one of which would have destroyed them, that have tumbled down from the mountain wall. Many homes have been demolished in this country and people killed by the rolling stones. This ridge is palagonitic conglomerate, the refuse of preglacial eruptions. The term preglacial in Iceland means the same as in other glaciated countries, but the geological time is much more recent than in North America. More of this when we reach the glaciers. We climbed the ridge beside a beautiful stream of water sluicing down a grooved ledge and saw two pairs of Harlequin ducks, Histrionicus minutus, swimming in the swift water. It is remarkable how these swimmers can hold their position in such strong currents. The bluish-gray plumage of the males slashed with bars of white and the dark brown dress of the females made a pretty picture as the lively birds zigzagged in the glistening stream. They were quite fearless and did not dive until we were within ten feet of them.

Coming to a great quadrangular enclosure in the lava walls we stopped to rest and to feed the ponies, as this is the last spot where grass can be obtained. The great ridge to the right which is deep red and compact like jasper is the lava of the recent eruption. It terminates in a fissure in the mountain side far below the summit. The wall to the left turned in front of us in a long sweep to join the base of the above mentioned rift. From our position no egress appeared from this formidable cul de sac and we expected that the guides would leave the ponies here with the ascent just begun and that we would have this tangled mass of lava ropes to scale as best we could. A mile further on a twist in the flow, where the viscid lava rose in a billow and broke back upon itself, we found a precarious egress which the ponies negotiated with the agility and sure-footedness of mountain sheep. We dodged about between the basalt fragments and over the ash ridges rising higher and higher with every turn. The travelling is somewhat dangerous in places, as I had occasion to testify, the lava is full of cracks and holes and the lichens have woven a treacherous carpet over this floor. High above loom the red walls and the obsidian points bristling like a cheval-de-frise. We had not yet reached the snow line but the fog hung low upon the shoulders of the mountain and we despaired of even a momentary lifting of the mantle should we gain the summit. We next came to an ash ridge so steep that we dismounted and sometimes walking and sometimes riding we gained the top of this ridge, an elevation of 2,000 feet above the sea. Descending into a wild glen of chaotic fragments, like huge masses of broken glass, we found a patch of level sand and here we left the ponies. We tied them in pairs, the head of one to the tail of the other and here we left the poor beasts without food or water till six at night to shiver in the blast.