The sea is filled with fish, the air with bird cries, the sky with soft light, and the land with horses. Dinner is just over, and outside the town of Saudarkrokur—never mind the hour—a lone horseman rides by at a gait called the tölt: a gliding, high-stepping walk unique to Icelandic horses. He is leading two horses in training side by side with him along one of the broad horse paths that parallel roads in Iceland.
This rider has reached the end of town where, in America, the bowling alley would be. Instead, there is a new public winter riding hall and public stables adjoining it. Yet Saudarkrokur is a place of only 2,700 persons, edged by the wet smack of the sea, glazed with pale midnight light, mirrored by tidal waters flowing over black sand where the Heradhsvotn River fingers its way into Skaga Fjord. Beyond the docks and the racks hung with staring cod heads, past the eiders coasting on the inshore waves, Drangey Island swims in mid-fjord like a dark iceberg crowned with puffins.
Iceland has two inseparable souls. One is water, the other grass. Freshwater spills down the glaciers. It rises out of the ground in geysers and seeps. On mountain hillsides so steep the scree barely clings to them, you come across places where a traveler on foot would bog down in wet earth and where even Icelandic horses hesitate. In some spots, water turns the mountainsides chartreuse with vivid moss. But sooner or later, in its short run to the sea, freshwater levels out in river valleys and estuaries, and there the grass grows.
To move the water along, farmers trench the fields deeply—deep as a tall man—and at the edge of those trenches great mats of grass hang like the foam on a breaking wave. Everywhere you look, the soil in the field cuts is a different color, and for every color there is a color of Icelandic horse to match, their manes and forelocks as thick as the grass itself.
The world is full of horses, but Iceland is the only place I know where an entire people has given itself over to them. When the Vikings reached the island in the ninth century, they brought a language, Old Norse, that Icelanders still speak, and they brought the small horses that Icelanders still ride. Those horses have mingled with no other outside blood in all these hundreds of years.
Residents of the broad river valley south of Saudarkrokur point visitors to Flugumyri, a nearby breeding farm. The first horse mentioned in Icelandic history lies buried there, a swift mare named Fluga, or “Fly,” who stepped ashore from a Viking ship just a few kilometers north of Flugumyri more than 1,000 years ago. She disappeared in a swamp on that farm after bearing a legendary colt, Eidfaxi, who is said to have killed seven men in a single day. For those sturdy, determined, patient animals, Icelanders found any use that horses could have— packing, riding, farming, or eating. Along the way they became icons of national as well as personal pride. In 1703, Iceland had about 50,000 residents and nearly 27,000 horses. Today, there are still just slightly more than three Icelanders for every horse.
A ride across the Icelandic countryside is inevitably a ride in and out of the past. Afternoon comes, and we have ridden deep into a mountain valley called Kolbeinsdalur, populated only by swans and Icelandic sheep. The valley lies at the foot of an ancient pass leading from Skaga Fjord into the district to the east, the next day’s ride. We stop for the night at a Farmers Association cabin, where Unnur Sveinbjornsdottir, the wife of Ingolfur Helgason—one of the farmers riding with us—is already grilling lamb as we unsaddle. The farmers turn the horses loose in a river meadow.
On both sides of the valley, the land climbs steeper and steeper, shedding its vegetation until only moss and lichen cling to the rocks. Just below that line graze ewes and twin lambs, untended till the roundup in midautumn. The last farming couple to live permanently in Kolbeinsdalur moved away only a generation ago. The terrain seems newly abandoned and yet wild, though horses and sheep and farmers have been moving up and down this same track (as they still do) for centuries. The only sign of the past is a thin, deep groove in the soil where the hooves of sheep and horses have worn it away. The only signs of the present are the cabin and the scent of grilled lamb and the fatigue of a day’s riding.
The next morning, we stop farther up the valley at a rett, a loose stone corral, to change horses. It looks like the rubble foundation of a giant’s keep, and while we wait for the herd to come up, we repair walls that the weather has taken down. The most immeasurable luxury of Icelandic riding is what happens next. As we look down the valley at the river we crossed an hour ago, the Kolbeinsdalsa, a thread of movement breaks the mist in the distance. The motion slowly resolves into some 40 horses taking the high line up the valley.
When they ford the river, they fan out across the stony plain, driven by three men on horseback—Ingoll, as everyone calls him, and two of his friends. They make directly toward those of us waiting at the rett, six riders and Jon Petur Olafsson, a farmer, horse trainer, and guide. The horses spill into the breast-high stoneworks and immediately graze. In another few hours, on these fresh horses, we will be at the top of the pass, surrounded by snowfields that obscure the volcanic track, looking far down the green sliver of the next valley, Svarfadardalur, where the long afternoon will take us.
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.
Twenty minutes and a free movie rental was all it took to cure me of a disorder that had kept me on shore for 30 years.
In Nassau, our little cupcake of a boat is docked between two hulking Hyatt Regency-esque boats. They are huge, glass-topped megaworlds with disco lights and casino bells. “Once people sail with us they never go back,” one of our crew members says while we lean over the railing and stare. It seems to be true. All the passengers have cruised on the big guns but swear that the SeaDream has changed them forever. I have become so attached to the boat that I can barely make myself do the most perfunctory loop around Nassau, where the worst of New Orleans meets the worst of Disneyland. The point of cruising is not where you’re going anyway. The point is simply the ride, the sun setting at the end of every hallway.
After dinner that night, a truly perfect Dover sole meunière, the people we’ve gotten to know head off to the bar to drink and dance. I realize that’s where they’ve been going night after night. It occurs to me that there are two kinds of people in this world; those who follow dinner with tropical drinks and the conversation of strangers, and those who rush back to their stateroom to see what animal their bath towel has been folded into. I know for certain that I am among the latter, for it is with real joy that I discover the folded-up rabbit on my bed.
An Iceland Itinerary
Where to Stay
Reykjavik’s Hotel Holt, just minutes from the town center, is also home to Iceland’s largest private art collection, with paintings by Johannes S. Kjarval, one of the country’s best known artists. Its Gallery restaurant serves excellent seafood. (Bergstadastraeti 37; 011-354-552-5700; holt.is; from $300) Rooms at the Nordica Hotel have panoramas of beautiful Faxafloi Bay. (Sudurlandsbraut 2; 011-354-505-0910; icehotel.is; from $219) The modern Radisson SAS Saga Hotel is owned by the Icelandic Farmers Association. Its top-floor Grill restaurant, which has a wonderful view of the city, serves great locally grown food. (Vid Hagatorg; 011-354-525-9900; radissonsas.com; from $295)
Where to Eat
Like New York, Reykjavik is a city that believes a restaurant can change your life. The chefs here are young and energetic, and they make the most of the island’s incomparable produce. Try the salt cod with butter-glazed onions at Siggi Hall, a sleek spot in a venerable inn (Hotel Odinsve, Thorsgata 1; 511-6677); traditional Icelandic dishes in an elegant setting at Einar Ben (Veltusund 1; 511-5090); or a lunch of open-face sandwiches with traditional cheeses, smoked meats, and fish at Jomfruin (Laekjargata 4; 551-0100). Humarhusid (“Lobster House”) serves Icelandic lamb; sashimi, including whale; small, sweet Iceland lobsters; and great cream of lobster soup. (Atmannstigur 1; 561-3303) For a lamb dinner—baked or grilled—at Fjallakrain, a guesthouse and pub across the valley from Saudarkrokur (Road 76; 453-6956), call ahead and ask them to prepare a meal for a particular day and time. In the south coast fishing village of Stokkseyri, don’t miss Vid Fjorubordid (Eyrarbraut 3a; 483-1550), a restaurant serving only lamb and lobster. Ask for directions when you call.
Riding, Reading, Relaxing
For information on how to take an Icelandic horse-riding trek, contact Holly Nelson or Brad Vogel at Horses North/Iceland Adventure (888-686-6784; icelandadventure.com; horsesnorth.com). For essential background, read The Sagas of Icelanders; Njal’s Saga; Independent People, by Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness; and Letters from Iceland, by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. And for a spot of sybaritic bathing, try Reykjavik’s largest natural hot springs pool at Laugardal (Sundlaugavegur; 553-4039); Hveravellir, in a beautiful wilderness area (Kjalvegur; hveravellir.is); or Blue Lagoon, just 15 kilometers from the airport (240 Grindavik; 420-8800).