Saga & Settlement Buffs

About an hour south and west, fifty-five kilometres of easy road, Skálholt is where medieval Iceland stops being only farms and open-air assemblies. On a low green hill stands a plain white cathedral with a steep black roof, and it looks almost too modern for the job, consecrated as it was in 1963. Do not be fooled by the paint. The first bishopric in the country was founded on this ground in 1056, the first formal school opened here the same year, and for more than 700 years Skálholt ran as a religious, political and educational capital all at once. You can walk the nave, drop into the small crypt exhibition of medieval and early-modern pieces beneath it, and be back at the free car park inside forty-five minutes, none of it asking anything of you physically. What the tidy modern building does not advertise is how the Reformation ended here: in 1550 Jón Arason, the last Catholic bishop in Iceland, was executed on this spot along with his two sons.

A bit over an hour on, seventy-odd kilometres east across the Rangárvellir, the turf farm at Keldur sits low under the bulk of Hekla, and it carries the sharpest saga edge of any stop on the trip. It turns up in Njáls saga, it was a stronghold of the powerful Oddaverjar, and the timbers in its old hall are among the oldest surviving wood in any Icelandic building, parts of them reckoned to the twelfth century, which makes the house the oldest of its kind in the country. Getting here is simple; getting around inside is not, and that is exactly the point. For the better part of an hour you stoop through low doorways, step over raised timber thresholds, and cross uneven earthen floors that no wheelchair is getting over, in dim turf rooms that had people living in them right up until 1946. The best of it runs underneath: a jarðhús, an underground passage toward the stream, of precisely the kind the feud stories describe as an escape route when the killers come, lost for centuries and dug out again in 1998.

From Keldur it is close to two hours and a hundred and fifteen kilometres back to the capital, which makes this the night you sleep in Reykjavík and the morning you start the second day underground. The Settlement Exhibition, signposted as Reykjavík 871±2, is built directly around the in-situ remains of a Viking-age turf-walled hall found beneath Aðalstræti, a longhouse lived in from roughly 930 to 1000 and holding one of the largest hearths ever dug up in Iceland. You circle the whole excavation in under an hour, in dim low-lit galleries with the modern city carrying on somewhere over your head. The piece that earns the stop is a fragment of turf wall to the north, tied to the 871±2 settlement tephra layer, which is about as precise as a founding date ever gets in this country. Adult entry runs 3,100 ISK, it is central and fully accessible, and there is enough interactive material to keep a child moving. Best of all it is concrete rather than imagined: not a reconstruction of settlement life, but an actual early dwelling still sitting quietly under the streets you just walked in on.

The National Museum is an eleven-minute walk across the old town from the longhouse, near enough that you can break for lunch in central Reykjavík on the way and still call it one morning. It is the material anchor for everything the outdoor sites scatter across the map. The permanent exhibition, 'Making of a Nation,' runs from settlement-era objects clear through the twentieth century across some two thousand pieces: Viking-age grave finds, weapons and jewellery, carved drinking horns, church art salvaged from the Reformation, and the carved Valþjófsstaður church door, a Romanesque oak door of about 1200 with its knight, its lion and its dragons. Clear a couple of hours and let the pace drop; the building is fully accessible, low on hazard, and the one stop where the whole story sits within your hands' reach instead of a windscreen's throw away. Slot it here, on the day you are not spending in the car, and it does exactly its job.

Out of the city and an hour up the coast, seventy-five kilometres to Borgarnes, you are now in Egil's Saga country, and the Settlement Center knows exactly what it is standing on. It fills an old harbour-side warehouse with two audio-guided walk-throughs, one on the landnám (the settlement of Iceland) and one on the life of Egill Skallagrímsson, the Viking farmer-poet whose saga plays out across the farms and headlands right around here, beginning with his father Skalla-Grímur's claim at Borg á Mýrum just outside town. The two exhibitions run to about two hours between them, staged in enclosed rooms worked with dramatic lighting and soundscapes, and parents of small children should know Egil's Saga is not shy about its violence. Handily, the same warehouse holds a restaurant and the centre runs its own saga theatre, so make Borgarnes your base for the night and eat here before the short run inland to Reykholt. For a grown reader it is one of the cleanest bridges going between the text and the ground you can actually stand on.

Forty minutes further inland, forty kilometres, Reykholt is where saga literature and raw medieval power sat down at one table. Snorri Sturluson settled here in 1206, served twice as lawspeaker of the Alþingi, grew into one of the wealthiest chieftains in the country, and wrote or compiled the Prose Edda and Heimskringla from this farm, with Egil's Saga widely pinned on him as well. An unhurried hour on foot takes in the free grounds, the preserved Snorralaug bathing pool fed by a hot spring, and the remains of the passage that once ran from it to the farmhouse, both among the oldest man-made structures left standing in Iceland and both named in Sturlunga saga. Keep children well back from that water, which is scalding and closed to bathing, this being emphatically not a hot-pot stop. Then stand a moment by the pool with the steam coming off it. The cellar of Snorri's farmhouse is where his enemies caught him on the night of 23 September 1241, led by his own former son-in-law Gizur Þorvaldsson, and killed him as he is said to have begged, 'Eigi skal höggva,' do not strike.

The third day opens gently after a night in Borgarnes: a bit over an hour north-west into the Dalir, eighty kilometres, to Eiríksstaðir in the Haukadalur valley. This is the best shot on the whole trip at getting the Vinland sagas into a single room. On grass and gravel you cross on foot sit the excavated ruins of a small Viking-age turf longhouse, and about a hundred metres off, a full-scale reconstruction built with period tools, driftwood and turf and staffed in costume through the summer. Tradition puts Erik the Red here before he was outlawed and sailed off to found Greenland around 985, and puts the birth of his son Leif Erikson here as well; the excavations, worked between 1895 and 2002, did turn up a tenth-century longhouse foundation of about fifty square metres with a long central hearth. The hour it takes to see both houses comes with a low turf doorway you fold yourself through and, when the hearth is lit, smoke and a deep interior dark to go with it. Adult entry is 2,900 ISK, the ruins alongside are free, and for a saga reader the payoff lands the second you step down onto that earthen floor.

An hour and a quarter on toward the coast, eighty kilometres, brings you to Helgafell, small enough to look almost harmless. Seventy-three metres of steep grassy hill near Stykkishólmur, and that is the whole of it, yet the pile of story on top is absurd: Eyrbyggja saga, Thor worship (the settler Þórólfur Mostrarskegg held the hill so sacred that no one was to look on it unwashed), the old Þórsnes assembly, an Augustinian monastery moved here in 1184 and kept as a centre of manuscript-making until the Reformation, and Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir, the tragic heroine of Laxdæla saga, who spent her last years here and is said to be buried by the small church at the foot. The climb and the summit and the walk back down come to about forty-five minutes, on a path that is short but steep, unfenced in places and slick on wet grass, so it counts as easy only the way a small hill is easy, not in any wheelchair sense. Folk tradition says a first-time climber who goes up from Guðrún's grave in silence, without looking back or speaking, and turns to face east at the top, may make three wishes that come true if they are kept secret and made with a good heart. At the summit the wind is honest and the whole of Breiðafjörður opens out below. This is the last stop before the long haul, so eat in Stykkishólmur first: the rest of the day is road.

The leg out of Snæfellsnes is the big one, and there is no softening it: over two hundred and fifty kilometres and the better part of four hours east, until the road finally drops you into Skagafjörður in the evening. Sleep in Sauðárkrókur; the final day is a compact one and can wait for morning. It opens at Glaumbær, which shows the turf architecture at a scale Keldur never could: thirteen connected rooms of stacked turf, stone and timber under grass roofs, strung along narrow internal passages, mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century in the form you walk through, on a spot farmed since the earliest days of settlement. Reckon on an hour of stooping through the low rooms, where once again no wheelchair is getting inside, though the grounds and a café in one of the old timber houses out front are far easier going. The saga hook is real: Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir and Þorfinnur Karlsefni are tied to the farm after their Vinland voyages, and their son Snorri, held to be the first child of European descent born in the Americas around 1005, to its first church. Adult entry is 2,200 ISK, with a combined ticket over to the nearby Víðimýri turf church, and a statue of Guðríður and her boy stands out front: one of the most travelled women of the Viking age, come home to a farm at the top of the country.

Forty minutes up the valley, forty-odd kilometres, Hólar is Skálholt's northern counterpart, and the pair is worth completing. The diocese was founded here in 1106, gave the north a bishop's seat to match the south, and ran for close to 700 years as a centre of learning as much as religion. The cathedral you walk into, built of red sandstone sledged down off the mountain Hólabyrða between 1757 and 1763, is the oldest surviving stone building in Iceland, and it lands very differently from Skálholt's bright modern replacement: this is the real early-modern article, still standing where it was raised. The church and the small memorial tower beside it take about three quarters of an hour between them; the tower went up in 1950 to Jón Arason, the last Catholic bishop in the country, whose resistance ended with his execution down at Skálholt. Deep in the quiet farming valley of Hjaltadalur, still an active parish and sharing its ground with an agricultural university, Hólar reads less as a museum than as an inhabited church, free to enter through the short northern summer.

Half an hour back down to Sauðárkrókur, thirty kilometres, and the trip ends on its wildcard. 1238 The Battle of Iceland is a VR and augmented-reality exhibition, and it earns the last slot precisely because the Sturlungaöld (the Age of the Sturlungs) should never be allowed to feel tidy. You strap on a headset and it drops you inside the civil war that pulled the Commonwealth apart, above all the Battle of Örlygsstaðir, the decisive clash of 1238 that cleared the way for Norwegian rule. It is ninety minutes indoors with screens strapped to your face, best for school-age kids and adults who can take both the medieval carnage and the hardware; a toddler wanting something hands-on will be lost here. Adult entry runs about 3,400 ISK, 2,400 for a child, 8,900 for a family of four. And it is the right ending. You opened four days ago on an open plain where Icelanders gathered to make law and settle feud in daylight; you close inside a headset, watching that same society tear itself to pieces and hand its independence to a foreign king.