Following myths and legends on a hike through Iceland’s Highlands

“See that hut?” says my guide, Dagný Björg Stefánsdóttir. “That’s one of the most haunted places in Iceland.” I can believe it. The Hvítárnes mountain hut — the only building in sight — looks unassuming enough: a modest corrugated-iron structure in the middle distance, with white walls and a red roof. But its surroundings, deep in the Icelandic Highlands, are so wild and wondrous they could thaw the imagination of the most hard-bitten sceptic.

It’s June, and the black volcanic earth sprouts green with summer grass, but there’s a bitter chill in the air, blown in from the face of the Langjökull glacier: a great white tongue that lolls between the dark hills of the horizon as if waiting for the wind to bring a taste of any interlopers that venture into its domain. Sunshine glows in bright filaments on the mountaintops, catching the drifts of snow that abide here even in midsummer, streaked across the black rock like the stripes on a zebra’s back.

I won’t be getting a tan, but the warmer weather has melted the worst of the snow and ice, laying the country’s barren interior open for exploration. An upland area covering more than 16,000sq miles, the Highlands make up some 40% of Iceland’s total landmass. I’ve come here to immerse myself in a landscape that’s closed off by severe weather for most of the year, and to discover how the often-hostile environment has led Icelanders to create a rich imaginative landscape, where nature, fact and folklore intertwine.

Dagný and I enter the hut, which is the oldest of its kind in Iceland — it was built in 1930 by the Iceland Touring Association to give shelter to those weary wayfarers brave enough to penetrate this far into the country’s interior. Despite its age, the hut is well maintained, with a fully stocked kitchen, shelves stacked with books and board games, and bedrooms with pine bunk beds.

“As soon as it was built, they felt a presence here,” Dagný says. “To this day, people hear the rattling of pots and pans, and see the form of a lady dressed in grey.” Dagný relays the local legend: that the hut was built close to an abandoned farm, which had once been home to a young woman whose lover drowned her in the river after she fell pregnant. “Her ghost comes back to take revenge on men who stay in the hut,” says Dagný. “She kicks them out of bed in the night.”

I leaf through the hut’s guest book, which is full of references revelling in stories of the ‘lady ghost’. “I felt a strange, deep energy,” reads one. “I guess this place really is haunted…” says another. Far from putting off travellers, though, tales such as these are part of the appeal of the Highlands, helping bring to life a landscape where the extreme weather means that little survives. Its desolate beauty stirs the imagination so strongly that an Italian explorer, Giancarlo Gianazza, spent well over a decade searching for the Holy Grail here, convinced that he’d decoded clues to its location in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Documented in the 2021 film Finding Thule, Gianazza’s quest took him to Iceland for the first time in 2004 and occupied him for the next 17 years.

“People who spend a lot of time in the Highlands are a different breed,” says Dagný with a smile. A young, dark-haired woman, Dagný is from a remote part of Iceland — she grew up on a farm in the Westfjords region, a large peninsula in the north west that was cut off for eight months of the year by ice and snow during her childhood. Nowadays, as co-founder of specialist tour operator Hidden Iceland, she helps visitors unlock the country’s secret corners for themselves.

“I love the winter, but in summer it feels like Iceland comes alive,” she says. “In my family, we pretty much lived each summer in tents. Immersion in nature and connection to the landscape is part of who we are in Iceland.”

The Hill of Bones

We get back in the car and venture further into the interior, expertly driven by Dagný’s fiancé and colleague, Scott Drummond, who fords a couple of glacial rivers and reduces the tyre pressure to allow our 4WD to bounce along the bumpy terrain. Scott’s a safe pair of hands: a calm, broad-shouldered Australian, who originally trained as a geologist and was drawn to Iceland by the chance to explore its unique natural landscapes.

Eventually, the car can go no further and we disembark, finding ourselves in a landscape even more unearthly than the last. The floor is littered with huge, black volcanic rocks, cracked open at the top along great seams, like burnt loaves. Others assume strange forms that suggest a kind of animal agency — a petrified crab’s claw, a charred cockerel’s comb. There’s no evidence of civilisation. “Not many people make it here,” Scott says. “There’s a good chance we’re the first this year.” The porous rock of the lava field feels strangely spongy beneath my feet, infused as it is with hardy moss — one of the few things capable of surviving the hostile winters. It gives me an uneasy feeling, as if the earth could give way at any moment beneath my feet, sucking me down into the underworld. It’s clear why Jules Verne chose Iceland as the setting for his subterranean sci-fi novel, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. While Verne populated his fictional world with anachronistic dinosaurs, however, we’re here in pursuit of something very real.

“The graveyard must be around here somewhere,” Scott mutters, consulting his phone’s mapping app. We’ve been walking for over an hour before we make out a line of cairns on the horizon, left here by previous visitors. As we follow them, Scott explains what it is we’re looking for here on the Kjölur, a plain between two glaciers that was once the main north-south route across the Icelandic interior.

“In the year 1780, two brothers set out to cross the country with their livestock and two farmhands,” Scott says. “Winter closed in before they made it across the Highlands, and the following spring, their remains were discovered. However, when a search party returned to that spot to bring them back home, the bodies had vanished.”

Whisperings of ghostly intervention soon began to grow, fuelled by a sorcerer consulted by the bereaved family who had a vision that the brothers’ bodies were buried beneath a rock in the lava field. Sure enough, that’s exactly where they were found, pinned beneath a sharp pillar like butterflies in a case — but not until 1845, a full 65 years after they’d gone missing. In the intervening years, the road had fallen into disuse, travellers deterred by the ghost stories and the possibility that they’d meet the same grisly fate.

“I think that’s it,” says Scott, gesturing towards a small hill crowned with a black column of rock. As we approach, we see white shards of bone scattered across the ground, crunching beneath our boots — the remains of the ill-fated expedition’s horses and sheep. Most of them are fragments, but occasionally we find a jawbone or femur, still intact after being battered by the wind, rain and snow of close to 250 winters. We climb the mound to find a basalt pillar, placed here in 1971 as a memorial by the brothers’ descendants. ‘Beinahóll’, it reads — ‘The Hill of Bones’. We sit beside it and eat chicken sandwiches and chocolate cookies, gathering our energy. It’s a long hike back to the car, and our next stop will take us even further from the land of the living.

Between heaven & hell

The geothermal valley of Hveradalir is barely 10 miles from Beinahóll, but it feels far away, as if we’ve landed on a hostile moon. No plants grow here, but the landscape gives the illusion of life. Mineral deposits spread on the hillsides like blue mould on heels of bread, and the piebald patterns of snow on the tan-brown rhyolite mountains make the whole scene look like it’s draped in a giant cowhide rug. Boiling mud pools sputter and belch beside our feet and the air is heavy with the sulphurous stench of rotten eggs, delivered by fumaroles billowing constant plumes of steam. After an hour or so’s walk, the environment begins to soften: the smell dissipates, and the path descends to a grassy river canyon. The black deserts and steam vents of the landscapes we’ve been travelling through so far resemble a vision of hell, but this valley, Ásgarður — named for Asgard, the domain of the gods in Norse mythology — is more heavenly.

We come across hot pools that are no longer seething and boiling, but gently steaming — cool enough for swimming, with access provided by a wooden ladder and boardwalk. We go for a dip, and Dagný explains how geothermal energy — which nowadays provides around 70% of Iceland’s power — made this otherwise inhospitable environment just about survivable in centuries past. “One of Iceland’s great folk anti-heroes is Eyvindur, who spent 20 years in the 18th century as an outlaw in the Highlands with his wife Halla.” They survived thanks to the hot springs; not far from here is Eyvindarhver, a bubbling vent in which they’re said to have boiled stolen sheep.

Eyvindur and Halla were real people, although, like the Hvítárnes hut and the Beinahóll graveyard, they’ve been so highly mythologised that they seem to stand at a place where history and folklore meet. It’s a feeling that becomes all the more familiar the longer you spend in rural Iceland, particularly in the summer, when more than 21 hours of sunlight cast the landscape in a soft glow, and days feel like an endless dream.

The forest of Thor

“Thórsmörk is a Shangri-La for Icelanders,” says Ingimundur Stefánsson, my guide on the following day. It’s not hard to see why. We’re walking to the summit of Valahnúkur, a 1,500ft-high mountain in the valley of Thórsmörk in the southern Highlands. It’s just three hours’ drive from Hveradalir, but everything is lush and green: moss covers every craggy rock; bushes burst with inky-black crowberries; and golden buttercups and purple lupine flowers sway in a warm breeze. To either side of the path are forests of dwarf birch trees; few of them are taller than five feet, lending credence to a wry local proverb: ‘If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, stand up.’

After 40 minutes, we reach the summit and are rewarded with a view of preternatural beauty: green hills crested with snow plunging to a black valley floor drizzled with braided rivers, like a nest of silvery snakes. “They call this place the Land of the Gods,” Ingimundur says. “Nearly all of what we know about Norse mythology was preserved by Icelandic literature. Thórsmörk means the ‘Forest of Thor’. You know Thor, right? Son of Odin. Big guy — bit hot-tempered. Not very bright.”

Ingimundur — a middle-aged man in glasses and a checked shirt — is the kind of brilliant yet modest character that Iceland produces as a matter of routine. Halfway through our conversation, he casually lets slip that he was the first person ever to cycle across Vatnajökull, Iceland’s largest glacier.

As we descend the mountain, I ask him about an abiding cliche: that Icelanders hold a widespread belief in supernatural entities, particularly elves or huldufólk (hidden people). A survey in 2022 reported that 31% of Icelanders believe in them, and several construction projects in Iceland have been halted or re-routed after it was discovered that they’d disturbed a rock traditionally said to be home to elven folk.

“Respect for the elves is widespread — there was an elf rock on my grandparents’ farm, and we’d never cut the grass around it, because the elves needed it for themselves,” says Ingimundur. “But it’s not about a literal belief in elves. It’s about keeping in touch with cultural tradition.”

This same sentiment, he says, is reflected in many realms of Icelandic life. “What is being an Icelander? Part of it is the history, embodied in the literature and the language, which has been preserved since Old Norse times. And then there’s the interaction with nature. Icelanders live with nature. We can’t be fighting it.”

A midsummer feast

“What do you think of the music?” says Ingimindur, his voice straining to be heard above the car stereo. “An interesting fusion, I’d say.” I can’t disagree — the soundtrack to our drive from Thórsmörk to Thingvellir is a glorious farrago of drum-and-bass beats, Icelandic rapping and chanted Old Norse poetry, produced by the man I’m travelling to meet: musician and high chieftain of the Ásatrú religion, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson. Ásatrú is a revival of the pre-Christian Viking religion of Odin, Thor and the other Norse gods, but its growing appeal in Iceland has less to do with theology or mythology, and more to do with its central tenet of fostering a connection with both Icelandic culture and the natural world.

Ingimundur drops me off at the entrance to Thingvellir National Park and I walk through what’s one of Iceland’s most striking landscapes: a rift valley between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, rippled with fissures and canyons that mark the point where two continents are slowly drifting apart from one another. This is the only place on Earth where you can walk between two tectonic plates. Thingvellir’s significance isn’t only geological, but historical, too — this was the site, in 930 CE, of the world’s first parliament. It’s not hard to see why Hilmar has chosen it as the setting for Ásatrú’s midsummer blót (feast).

I soon come across a crowd a few dozen strong gathered at the foot of a cliff, their gazes fixed towards a line-up of 10 people in Viking dress. In the middle is Hilmar, a white-haired man in a splendid blue tunic. In one hand, he holds an ox drinking horn, inscribed with runes, from which he repeatedly splashes golden mead onto the ground. In the other, he clutches a wooden ring, the other side of which is held by a woman in a white headdress and a red hangerok — a traditional dress fixed at the shoulders by brooches — who chants from a book of poetry. With a final flourish from Hilmar’s drinking horn, the ceremony is over.

As the crowd applauds, I approach Hilmar. It’s a glorious evening, and I suggest that the gods must be smiling on us. With a knowing smile of his own, Hilmar says, “I had my people speak to their people.”

A kind-faced and softly spoken man, Hilmar talks me through the basic precepts of Ásatrú — namely, that there aren’t any. “There are no thou shalt nots,” he says. “Worship isn’t what we’re really about either. We talk about the Old Norse gods, but we think in symbols and metaphors rather than actual beings. But we believe nature is alive.” A growing public awareness of the climate crisis has helped position Ásatrú as Iceland’s fastest-growing religion for the last 20 years, with membership up from 540 in 2003 to almost 7,000 today.

“We were talking about ecology when no one else was, in the late 1960s, early 1970s,” says Hilmar. “Now, people are catching up, partly through interest in nature-based religions like ours. Events like this make people feel rooted in the cycle of the year, but they’re also about human connection and feasting. Please, eat.”

Where once a Viking banquet might have meant piles of seal blubber and gallons of mead around a campfire, nowadays it means a large marquee, multiple barbecues and mountains of pylsa, the beloved Icelandic lamb, beef and pork hot dog. In the food queue, I get talking to Alda Vala Ásdísardóttir, a grey-haired lady in a flaxen tunic who was another of the goði (priests) standing with Hilmar during the ceremony. Like Hilmar, she’s keen to emphasise the metaphorical and nature-based aspects of Ásatrú belief.

“The old gods to us are more like powers of nature,” she says. “I don’t really believe there’s a god with one eye riding a horse with eight legs through the sky. They’re parables, metaphors for other things. As a community, we’re culture-bound — we honour our stories and our past. But we’re also nature-bound. Living in such a wild place — with the weather, the volcanoes, the glaciers — it becomes part of who Icelanders are, whether they realise it or not.”

I feel privileged, for a short time, to have been among them, exploring Iceland during its fleeting summer. I look out to the national park, to the rift between two continents, illuminated now by the long twilight, and recall a comment from the guest book of the Hvítárnes mountain hut. ‘I don’t know how I’ll get used to darkness again,’ it read, ‘after all this light.’