image of the beautifel, place

Iceland is a small place with a big soul. It is designed to startle you all the time. Driving out of Keflavik airport you pass a barren lava field that looks like a lunar landscape. Steam hisses out from geothermal springs underground reminding you that this is a land forged literally out of fire and ice. It is also frightfully expensive and can suck up your devalued dollars out of your wallet like an industrial vacuum cleaner. A 20 minute cab ride from the airport to the center of Reykjavik the capital will set you back $150. Dotted by steaming lava fields, icecaps, glaciers, hot pools, and geysers, the Icelandic landscape has an elemental rawness that makes you aware of the awesome creative power of the earth. Reykjavik, the northernmost capital in the world, has a raging nightlife earning it the title of the coolest capital of Europe

Iceland has always held a fascination for me. Tom Clynes had written in the National Geographic about a dramatically lit, ghost-brown place, peppered with lava flows and geysers, populated by farmer-poets and fair beauties. He called it the last great wilderness in Europe with no castles or palaces.

But Icelanders have a strong sense of history and myth woven through the Icelandic sagas. Written by anonymous authors between 1200 and 1400AD, these stories are a mix of real life incidents and glorious exaggerations, that Icelanders use as a key to comprehending their extraordinary environment, their countrymen, and themselves. The sagas are all wild-eyed tales of Viking valor and treachery, love and destroyed hopes, soaring heroes and brutal violence. Romantic, fairy tales they are not. Impossible epics of gore, grit, and greatness they are. The Grettis Saga, for example, is the tale of a superhuman outlaw, Grettir the strong, who was on the run for 20 years. Armed with a sword and reciting poetry, he roamed the land, plundering travelers, helping widows, and had an occasional tryst with saucy farm girls and the daughters of a giant. In one episode, he has an argument with a farmhand named Skeggi, which ends when Grettir strikes Skeggi with Skeggi's own axe through to his brain. He finally holes up on the tallest peak on Dragney Island and lives there for several years. The saga ends, when local farmers who wanted him to leave, storm his hut and with Grettir's own sword cut off his head