Reykjavík Grapevine - 30.06.2017, Qupperneq 60

Gunnarshólmi
I’ll Ride Home and I Won’t Depart
Words: Eli Petzold Illustration: Lóa Hlín Hjámtýsdóttir
“Lovely are the slopes—never have
they seemed lovelier—the pale
cornfields and mown meadows.”
So proclaims Gunnar, gazing upon
his hillside settlement at Hlíðaren-
di in the south of Iceland. As re-
counted in Njáls saga—perhaps the
most beloved of the medieval Ice-
landic sagas—the
hero Gunnar faces
a three-year sen-
tence of outlawry
a f t e r c o m m i t-
ting an ill-advised
murder. Having ar-
ranged passage to
Norway, he sets out
riding through the
Markarfljót river
basin towards the
coast. When his
horse stumbles, he
leaps from the sad-
dle and lands, for-
tuitously, with an
idyllic view towards his hilly home.
Taking this pastoral vista as a
sign, he decides to defy his sen-
tence, despite the fact that remain-
ing in Iceland as an outlaw leaves
him liable to be killed legally. “I’ll
ride home,” he declares, “and I
won’t depart.”
Stumbling horse
Although the sagas are more fic-
tion than fact, Icelanders have dili-
gently identified and preserved key
settings in oral history and local
lore for centuries—no less here.
To this day, a site known as Gun-
narshólmi (“Gun-
nar’s islet”) sits
in the Fljótshlíð
region of southern
Iceland. Even as
this location has
remained alive in
local memory, the
landscape around
it has changed sig-
nificantly in the
millennium since
the events of Njáls
saga are purported
to have taken place.
The Markarf ljót
river, which origi-
nates amidst the glaciers Eyjaf-
jallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull, has
deposited sediment through the
once-fertile region as its various
tributaries have changed course,
rendering the grassy farmland into
a sandy wasteland. Still, one patch
of grass remains amidst the eroded
waste and it is here—so local his-
tory has it—that Gunnar’s horse
stumbled.
The early nineteenth-century
poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, whose
romantic works frequently invoke
Icelandic nature, found a certain
poignancy in the literary and geo-
logical history of this site. In his
poem “Gunnarshólmi,” he gazes
broadly across the landscape, still
verdant and fecund as it was in
Gunnar’s days. Only after Gun-
nar rides across the world of the
poem and, glancing back, decides
to remain, does Jónas return to
his present moment and portray
the landscape as the wasteland
that it is. But pondering the lush
tract amidst the eroded terrain,
he sees some “protective energy”
conspiring to keep this historically
charged spot as striking as it once
was to Gunnar.
Tragic irony
That Gunnar dies shortly after
deciding to remain only amplifies
the pathos of this episode. Jónas
underscores the nobility of Gun-
nar’s decision to accept death in
his native land—a fact which takes
on tragic irony in light of the fact
that Jónas himself died in Copen-
hagen and wasn’t reinterred in
Iceland until 1946. Perhaps Jónas’s
untimely death on foreign shores
only deepens the sense of Gun-
narshólmi as a symbol of unwaver-
ing devotion to one’s homeland.
60 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11 — 2017
SAGA SPOTS
“Jónas sees
some 'protec-
tive energy'
conspiring
to keep this
historically
charged spot
as striking as it
once was.”
There once was a man named
Bjarni, known as Bjarni the Strong,
who lived in Breiðavík by Borgar-
fjörður in the county of Múlasýsla.
One summer day, Bjarni was out
in the field in overcast and foggy
weather when he heard the sound
of cattle from the shore below the
farm. He gazed into the fog and saw
a herd of no fewer than eighteen
cattle. A small boy ran behind the
herd, followed by a calf. Bjarni took
off and ran in front of the herd, as
he suspected that these were sea
cattle. When the boy saw this, he
began egging the cattle on. Bjarni
saw that first among the cattle
was an ox with rings on its horns,
which rattled as it ran. Bjarni and
the boy raced until they came to
the shore, by which time Bjarni had
overtaken the calf. As the herd and
the boy disappeared into the sea,
Bjarni turned to the calf and burst
the bladder between its nostrils,
said to be present on all sea cattle,
thus preventing it from returning
to the sea. Bjarni then took it home.
The calf, which was a heifer, be-
came a fine cow from which a great
breed descended in Breiðavík.
Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og
ævintýri I, p. 129.
MONSTER OF THE MONTH
Sækýr
- Sea Cow Taken from 'The Museum of Hidden Beings' by Arngrímur Sigurðsson. Buy the book at gpv.is/dulbk
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