After a few days in the saddle, I gave up trying to distinguish between past and present. We rode horses with a lineage 1,000 years old across farms that had borne their names for centuries, while the farmers and guides, on horseback, spoke an ancient language into their cellphones. In the south, riding toward Thorsmork National Park, we crossed into the country of Njal’s Saga, a cycle of stories—the basis of Icelandic literature—whose events happened nearly a millennium ago, a country where every cave, every river crossing, every waterfall recalls an episode, the name of a character, a saying. Sometimes the past was only as distant as the dormitory rooms we slept in at Husabakkaskoli, in the north, a modern schoolhouse built when district roads were still bad and children had to sleep at school. Now the roads are good.
Farmers made hay late into the evening outside the schoolhouse. The bright night was haunted by the chastising of black-tailed godwits and arctic terns—called kria—and the drumming of snipe. Sometimes the past was utterly imaginary. Riding toward Stadartunga, Jon Petur’s farm not far from the town of Akureyri, we stopped in a farmyard while Jon Petur, in riding breeches and a brown velvet hunting cap, talked to an old farmer in a blue tunic storing silage in his barn. As they chatted, Jon Petur leaned down from his horse and offered the farmer a pinch of snuff. For a moment, it was as though Trollope were dreaming all this, waiting to see how it worked out before he set it down in ink.
The richness that would overtake us in Iceland began on the very first day of riding, at Skalakot, a farm on the south-central coast. Skalakot lies in a quarter-moon of farms with a church in their midst, high green cliffs behind them, and the trickle of water working its way down in slender falls from the Eyjafjallajokull glacier. There were many riders here, 23 of us. One by one, we nervously took the reins of the horses offered to us—horses matched to the experience we had claimed at dinner the night before.
We saddled them, and then, after much checking and rechecking of gear, we mounted and walked slowly along the gravel roads toward the sea. Soon the pace quickened to a quiet trot and then quickened again, as the fields flattened and spread toward the coastal marsh. I asked the white gelding I sat upon if he would tölt, and when he did, I broke out laughing. Unlike the trot, which can be a punishing gait over long distances, the tölt cushions the rider, even the beginning one, seats him firmly and suspends him at the same time. My horse devoured the ground with small steps.
We poured down the roads, all of us, gravel rattling beneath us. We poured into wide ditches where the grass hushed us. We stopped for a benediction from an Icelandic priest who was out chasing his cows, then rode onto the beach and into the shallows, mud sucking at the horses’ hooves, sand whisking away underfoot. We rode out stirrup-deep into a still ocean that was suddenly mad with noise. It occurred to me, as I closed my eyes and listened, that I had never ridden with so many on horseback before. I had never before heard, from within, what once must have been the common sound of a troop of riders, in peace or war, making their way across country. It is a sound many Icelanders know as well as they know the sound of the wind.
Most Americans who ride tend to ride in circles, large or small, often alone, on horses that are usually kept individually in stalls. These are the wearisome accommodations one makes, even out West, in a country enslaved by cars, a limitation that is as much mental as it is physical. But in Iceland the horses are born and raised in herds. Farmers move them in herds all summer long to condition them for the autumn roundup, when the sheep are driven down from the rocks. The land is measured out in two- or three-horse days, and at just the right intervals riders and their extra horses come upon a rett made of stone or wood or cement, or a cliff wall where the herd can be penned in with a strand of electric twine.
At the big river crossings—like the one we made over the Svarfadardalsa, just behind the schoolhouse—there is a short wait while a farmer rides down from his barn to point out the proper ford by splashing back and forth on his proudest mount. The Icelandic horse, W.H. Auden wrote, “is, of course, an amphibian.” And, like his owner and rider, he is a social creature, happiest in a large group, riding to get somewhere under a wide-open sky, grateful for the light and grass of summer after so much winter darkness.
Auden called the Icelandic horses ponies, and he has a point, if size is all that counts. But over the hardest conditions we came across, I rode a horse by the name of Sörli. That is the shortest of his three names. When Ingoll handed the reins to me, he said only, “Strong.” Sörli has a mule’s coloring, a profuse shock of black thatch for a mane and forelock, and stands just under 14 hands tall. But to ride him, to tölt sweetly without halting, to pick our way through boulder fields and across glacial seeps for hours without ever missing a step—it was as though the earth were rolling forward in a smooth, unbreaking wave and I were sitting astride it.
We rode down, our last day, from yet another iridescent mountain valley where we had stopped to visit an old turf farmhouse. We came out upon the track to Jon Petur’s farm, where three dark rivers join in a congruent rush. The gorge where they meet can barely contain their impetus, and as Sörli gave in to where we were going, I could barely contain his impetus, either. I sat back and let him tölt as fast as he wanted to, as fast as though we were riding all the way back to the time of the sagas. Pony is such a ridiculous word.
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