Exploring Reykjavik in Winter

As we sailed out into the bay, there was a hush. Then, in what felt like a heartbeat the sky was full with a rush of primary colours that seemed to be jostling for room. It was like black magic. Onboard, the feeling was of continual surprise. Yet the greatest surprise of Reykjavik is how easy — how close — everyday micro-adventures like this are.

‌I’d arrived in Iceland the previous night and was first struck by the sheer wildness of the land encircling the capital. On the road from Keflavik International Airport, we passed a succession of murky black volcanic beaches, then the white-splattered shoulders of the Esjan mountain plateau, stretching away across Faxaflói Bay. It was a monochrome palette only broken by the evening sky turning pink, and people wrapped in bright, primary-coloured parkas.

‌I took the road from Kex Hostel, a hipster hotel in a former biscuit factory, and walked past Solfar, a Viking longship skeleton, with a frame of smooth steel ribs running from its bow to the stern. I decided not to stop at the Icelandic Phallological Museum (which houses “the world’s largest collection of penile parts”) and instead headed straight to Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavik’s cathedral. While the former is a reminder of how Icelanders have sought to benefit economically – often in bizarre ways – from the tourist surge of recent years, the country’s rocket-shaped Lutheran church offers a reminder of this northern nation’s more ancient traditions.

Among these are a belief in the huldufólk, or hidden people, a race of supernatural elves chronicled in Icelandic folklore. Cynics might head-scratch, but Icelandic culture is rich in myth, and stories of horse-headed sea monsters, trolls, and elvish kings are as tangible to Icelanders as the country’s geysers, glaciers and thermal lagoons.

Initially, I found the world of the huldufólk more than a little abstract. But a visit to the Elf School, located west of downtown, helped. Here, Magnus Skarphedinsson, folklorist and anthropological academic, leads classes on where the huldufólk live, what they look like, and their relationship with humans. Part of the afternoon was spent listening to Skarphedinsson recount stories from Icelanders who have had personal contact with the elves themselves. Or as he said: “Men can never see the elves, unless they themselves wish it, for they can both see men and let themselves be seen by them.”

‌I ducked into Skúli Craft Bar, named after the founding father of the city Skúli Magnússon, where the owner Björn Árnason, told me Icelanders had got used to enduring every form of beer substitute in the absence of the real thing. “Shots of substandard vodka poured into cheap malt drinks were the norm,” he said. “We learnt not to be fussy.”

Nowadays, the bar’s experimental beer menu reads like a shopping list of ingredients knocked up by a five-year-old: hazelnut milk, sweet coconut balls, strawberry milkshake, orange cream, pecans, maple syrup and cinnamon. Truth be told, the three pints I exhausted were all excellent and it was the same story nearby in Kaldi Bar and Barion Bryggjan Brugghús.

Blurry-eyed in the near dark at 4 pm, a bracing walk took me back to the quayside, where whale-watching tours were returning from forays out into the bay busy with minke, humpback and porpoise. I stayed watching until the horizon began to softly glow once more, the aurora’s hazy gauze of lights appearing as a stark contradiction to everything I knew about the world.