The sorceress speaks

The Landcruiser jeep jolts along a barely passable rocky trail on a remote heath high on the rugged east coast of Iceland. We left the main road at the highest point of Fjarðardalsheiði mountain pass and nosedived onto a bumpy track. At times we come to a halt while the driver peers into the fog to see whether the path ahead is still passable. 

Soon we will leave the sanctuary of the jeep and begin an eight-hour hike across a remote mountain landscape.

My cousin Bryndís Fjóla and I have come to visit the place where the remains of a young woman  believed to have been a Viking Sorceress, a Völva, were found twenty ago. Her bones, her jewellery and over five hundred glass beads lay  in a small cave near the source of a river for over a thousand years. To this day, it remains one of the most remarkable finds of its kind in Iceland.

I dry a small circle clear with my glove and press my face against the cold glass.

Outside, the barren heathland stretches as far as the low visibility allows. Fog lies across the rocks and moss like a veil, softening the harshness and making the whole place feel even more eerie and mysterious. I close my eyes and see her in my mind’s eye: a young woman walking across this landscape long before roads, weather apps and rescue services, moving from farmstead to farmstead to perform Seiðr ritual; to listen, bless, warn, and read the threads of fate. Her blue cloak fastened with heavy bronze brooches, flaps open revealing multiple strands of beads that  catch the dim light.  Something is leading her towards a small cave by a river where she will lose her life.

Vestdalsheiði

Why was she there? Had she come to perform útiseta, the ritual of sitting out, or had she chosen the river  deliberately as a place to die? Why was she alone? Why did no one retrieve her? Why were her beads left scattered in earth and water for over a thousand years?

And why do I feel so inexplicably drawn to her?

These questions are part of why I am writing Remembering the Way Home. 

On the surface, the book is about a journey across Iceland, following the traces of this young woman. But that journey does not begin or end on the heath. It moves through a country layered with memory: through Borgarnes and family echoes, through shorelines where ravens circle and seals watch from grey water, through Snæfellsnes where the glacier appears and disappears in cloud, through álagablettir, sacred spots,  and rocks that must not be disturbed, through farms where stories of hidden people are still remembered, through swimming pools and hot pots where news and old knowledge travel in steam, and through another possible Völva place beside a lake, where a broken stone refuses to give up its meaning.

It is a journey through Iceland: beautiful, difficult, practical, mystical, weather-beaten, funny, stubborn, and alive with more than can be easily explained. But, underneath the road journey is something harder to describe. The book is about returning to the Icelandic landscape after many years of feeling fractured from it. It is about grief, water, ancestry, hidden knowledge, nature spirits, old women’s wisdom, and the long, slow work of learning to trust the land again.

I was born in Iceland, and although my life now moves between Iceland and the UK, Iceland has never stopped being the ground beneath my imagination. But home is not always simple. As a young mother in Iceland, I experienced devastating losses that changed my relationship not only with myself, but with the country that had raised me.

When I first learned of the young woman on the heath, something in me stirred. She had been hidden for centuries, discovered only in fragments: bones, brooches and beads embedded in earth and riverbed. She was both present and unknowable. Was she a Völva? Was she simply a woman who died alone in a cruel place? I did not know, but I felt strangely called by her;  like a thread catching somewhere inside me.

The völva belongs to both myth and human history. In the sagas she appears as a woman who can see what others cannot, called upon in times of uncertainty, when ordinary knowledge was no longer enough. What moves me is her way of being: her deep attention, her willingness to stand at thresholds, her ability to listen to land, body, dream, weather, spirit, fear and fate.

We need that kind of listening now.

We live in a time of disconnection. Many of us feel unmoored from nature, from ancestry, from our own bodies, from meaning itself. We are surrounded by information and yet often starved of connection and meaning. And at the  same time, the living world is under pressure everywhere. Glaciers shrink. Rivers are altered. Shorelines are threatened. Sacred places become development opportunities. We speak of nature as resource, scenery, tourism and data, but older cultures knew, and many Indigenous cultures still know, that land is not mute matter. It is alive with relationships.

Iceland carried this old knowledge longer than many other European cultures because it was remote, isolated, and held together by language, story and necessity. Poverty played its part too. People lived close to the land because they had to: reading weather, respecting water, knowing which places to avoid, listening to animals, mountains, rivers and storms. The relationship with land spirits, sacred places and the more-than-human world did not disappear here; it remained part of everyday memory.

The book follows these traces through the landscape: the huldufólk, the hidden people, the nature spirits, the farmers and grandmothers who remembered where not to tread, the rocks that must not be disturbed and the patches of land left untouched.

This is not something made up for the tourists, but the Icelandic way  of living with the land; a form of ecological intelligence carried through kin, memory, stories and respect. 

But the young woman on the mountain, the Völva, is asking for something deeper than knowing. She asks us to listen in a way that allows the land to speak to us again; not as scenery, not as a resource, but as a living presence with its own memory, intelligence and need to be heard.

The message she has carried through the centuries is not only about the past but about how we listen now.