As a young scholar sets out on a research project to find the stones where the settlers of Iceland made human sacrifices, a long dormant volcano rouses…and other, long-sleeping horrors might also be stirring.
Short story | 3,400 words
June 16th
Dear diary,
No. That was a bad joke. And a terrible way to start what is supposed to be an appendix to a serious, scientific project. What a way to ruin a beautiful, pristine notebook! I really should try thinking about the words before writing them down. Anyway. What I meant to write is that I am doing a research project and these are supposed to be my personal notes about it.
First, a little background: When I was small I used to read about the Aztecs and their horrific human sacrifices. And later I learned about how some countries hide the dark and bloodier parts of their past, by writing it out of their history books or not teaching it in schools. I thought them equally barbaric.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that the settlers of Iceland were actually pretty big on human sacrifice too, and no, I don´t remember ever hearing about it in school. But there are plenty of tales about it in the old Sagas.
In Eyrbyggja it says: “Í þeim hring stendur Þórs steinn er þeir menn voru brotnir um er til blóta voru hafðir og sér enn blóðslitinn á steininum.” That would translate to something like: “In that circle stands the stone of Thor where they broke the men that were sacrificed and the color of blood can still be seen on the stone.” (There is probably an official translation, by someone whose English is a lot better than mine, but I don’t have it at hand so mine will have to do). So the settlers of Iceland slaughtered men and broke their backs on stones.
And that is my research project. I am going to spend my summer trying to find those stones.
We have a pretty good idea of where the stone mentioned in Eyrbyggja is, so that is where I will start. It is supposed to be in Þingvellir, an old gathering place for chieftains, where they met to settle matters. This Þingvellir is in the Snæfellsnes peninsula and is not to be confused with the other, more famous Þingvellir. (Sorry, it’s complicated.) The Þingvellir that interests me is located in Þórsnes, or Thor’s peninsula. But the problem is, there are a lot of stones there. So here I am, in a guesthouse in Stykkishólmur, the nearest village, and tomorrow I will head out to examine them all. I don’t really know what I am looking for—will the moss on the one stone be thicker than on the others? Will the earth around it be more fertile, enriched by all the blood that was spilled? Or will the color of blood still be on that stone?—but I believe I will know it when I see it.
June 17th
Iceland was settled by Norwegians. They brought slaves that were probably taken from what is now Ireland, Scotland, and England. Genetic research shows this, and so does my red hair.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to write about my ancestors, the raping Norwegians, but their neighbors the Swedes. There is an account I read about them and what they were doing in the first century that has stayed with me because I think they were really onto something. In Uppsala, in around 380, the weather had been pretty bad for a few seasons, which led to failing crops and bad times all around. There was a tradition of human sacrifice to the Æsir, the old Norse gods, there too. They mostly sacrificed animals and slaves, but things had gotten so bad that they apparently decided that some more drastic measures had to be taken. So they sacrificed their king, Dómaldi, and let his blood soak the ground.
I am not saying that we should start killing our politicians. I don’t know what I am saying, exactly. I am in a really foul mood. I spent all day mapping stones. It was a long day and the results of it are that there are exactly fourteen stones that are big enough to be the one I am looking for, and thirty-seven that are too small.
June 21st
I have devised a methodology to examine the stones. But it is quite tedious, and well documented in my scientific notes, so I will not bore these pages with the details, other than to say that it involves a lot scraping off moss and gently lifting it from the rock, just to put it down again, hoping it will keep growing, and so far it has not been fruitful. The farmer who owns the land is nice. She came up on her tractor and brought me coffee and kleinur, and after chatting for a bit we discovered that she went to school with my cousin Ástrós. It is always like this here, you always find a connection. You can’t escape being known. I often wonder what it must be like to live in a big city and be able to disappear into a faceless crowd. Here, the danger of running into someone you have slept with, or worse—their parents—is ever looming. It must be nice to live somewhere where you can have a meltdown in a public place without word of it reaching both your ex and your boss, and probably along with it the reason why you were having a meltdown in the first place.
The owner of this guesthouse I am staying at, for example, is my uncle’s wife’s cousin. If I were to have a tantrum here and break some furniture, word of it would surely reach my parents.
June 22nd
The stones stand in a field close to the sea. It overlooks the Breiðafjörður bay, and the view is beautiful. They say that the islands here cannot be counted, and as I understand it, that is mostly because people cannot agree on what counts as an island. Like the small skerries that are sometimes visible and sometimes underwater, depending on the tides. There are so many birds here. And today I saw seals, their black heads bobbing in the water.
We are lucky that the stones have not been dragged away and the field ploughed. The farmer who brought me coffee said that the people who lived there knew not to touch the stones. They were probably familiar with the history of their land and the sagas. We have long taken great pride in them because those manuscripts are the only thing we have left to be proud of. The traditional Icelandic house was a turf house, made from rock and dirt. Most of them have just rained away. We have no old cathedrals, no roads, no bridges, no marble statues. Those words scribbled on vellum are the only thing we have from our past.
Today, as I was about to go home, I found something. I don´t know what it is, maybe it is nothing, but I will investigate further tomorrow. I am excited. Hopefully I will sleep.
June 24th
I think I’ve found it! The stone, I mean, THE stone. It stands in the middle of the field, and I guess you could, with some help from your imagination, say that the other stones form a kind of circle around it. It is not a neat or a perfect circle, maybe more of an oval, and a lopsided one at that, but still, the shape is there. And there is no way of knowing if it is like that naturally or if the stones were put there by people. Anyway, the stone that stands in the middle is the one that I thought most likely to be the one I was looking for. But I did not start with that one, because I wanted to methodical about it, as per my method that I devised and did not explain here. Shit, I am rambling. So much for thinking about the words before writing them down.
This stone in the middle is the perfect height to bend a person over. By that I mean that it comes up roughly to the small of my back, if I am standing facing away from the stone. And if someone were to push me over it, and maybe then pull down my hands from the other side, I can imagine my back breaking quite easily. The stone is . . . thin? I do not think that is the right word for it, but I mean that it is not round, but rather shaped like a leaf, and on top there is an edge that is quite sharp. Writing this, I have now realized that I have a very limited vocabulary in English to describe the shape of stones. Perhaps that is not something my English teachers imagined I would ever have a need for.
Anyway, if somebody were to push me over that stone, then pull on my hands, or maybe push my shoulders down, my back would undoubtedly break and my neck would be exposed. It would only take a stroke of a sharp blade to let out my blood so it would flow freely. And that is how you please a god.
I spent my day very carefully removing the moss and lichen that grows on the stone. What I am hoping to find are some markings. It took me all day to remove the lichen just from the top, and I am pretty sure that the stone there has been chipped away, making the edge even sharper. It might be weathering, of course, but then again it might not be.
June 26th
It has been two days, I know. But I have been really busy. My work is time-consuming. The moss comes off pretty easily, but it is harder to remove the lichen without scraping the stone. When I drove home yesterday evening I stopped at the farm and asked the farmer if she would be okay with me pitching a tent in the field by the stones. She looked at me a bit funny, but then she said yes, so I did, which means I can now work through the evening and into the night. The summer nights are so bright here in the west. The sun doesn´t really set, it just dips down beneath the horizon for a moment and then it rises again. We sleep a lot less in the summertime. There have been studies on this, and to be honest I barely feel the need to sleep at all.
The soundscape here is out of this world. The birds screech and sing and trill and tweet in a cacophony that has its own kind of harmony, and underneath is the constant rhythm of the waves breaking on the beach. The farmer told me that there is an eagles’ nest close by, but she also told me not to tell anyone about it. The eagles are endangered and their nesting places are meant to be kept a secret, so maybe I shouldn´t even write this down in my notes.
June 27th
I had a weird dream tonight. I dreamt I was lying in my tent and that I heard deep voices outside. The pitch and the rhythm of their language was familiar, but I could not make sense of their words. In my dream I decided to go out and greet them. And I must have risen, because I woke up halfway out of my sleeping bag with my hand on the tent zipper. It took me a long time to go to sleep again.
June 28th
There was an eruption in the Reykjanes Peninsula in the night. That is the next peninsula to the south from the one that I am on. If I were on the other side of this one I could probably see it. It’s not a very big one, as far as eruptions go, and no one is in danger. I was listening to a geologist from the Met Office on the news earlier. He said that this volcanic system in Reykjanes has been dormant since the nine hundreds, but is now active again, and will presumably stay so for some years, possibly even decades. He talked about the volcano as if it were a living thing, a beast that had been woken from its slumber and we would now feel its wrath. It struck me that the last time this volcanic system was active was around the same time that they sacrificed people on the stone right outside my tent. And now I can’t stop wondering whether something might lie dormant in this ground too, and what would happen if it should wake.
We have tales of beasts, the landvættir. I don´t know the best translation for that, but it is a beautiful word that means a being that protects the land. Supposedly Úlfljótslög, the oldest Icelandic law, thought to date back to 930, stated that ships with mastheads that had gaping maws had to take them down before land was sighted, so they wouldn’t rouse the landvættir. And ships don’t have mastheads anymore to wake them.
If they are still here, they have been sleeping for a long time.
I am making progress on the stone. Just now after dinner, I found a peculiar indentation just above what could be described as the center of it. It looks like a ring has been hollowed out. And up from it there seems be a trace of a line, a groove, up to the sharp edge of the stone. It might just be how the stone is shaped naturally, but then again, it might not.
June 29th
I think I know why that line is there. Maybe I should not write this down, but it actually came to me in a dream. I know dreams are not a way to divine the future. I don’t believe in any of that. But that is not to say that they are meaningless. Dreams are just another interpretation of our reality, from a different part of the mind. I don’t know if a “subconscious” is actually an accurate term, but what I am trying to say is that perhaps my brain had already made this connection but I just didn´t realize it. Because obviously the blood is supposed to flow down the groove and into the ring.
I will not describe the dream that made that clear to me here. It is not fit for an appendix accompanying a scientific paper. But let’s just say that I think I now have a better understanding of what it might have felt like to lose your life on that stone.
June 30th
I found carvings! Definitely, DEFINITELY carvings! Made by human hands. They are weathered and eroded, but they are fuþark runes and they spell Þór. And this is Þórsnes! It all makes sense.
The runes were quite hidden, down at the base of the stone, and nearly covered with grass and soil. I had to be very careful removing it. And under the runes I found a serpent carved into the rock. It is long and its tail disappears down into the ground. I had to take a break after I found it—I was quite overcome with emotion—and I also had to decide if I should call my supervisor or not. Because this is a big find, a huge one. But my supervisor is . . . Well, I just know that if I called her now she would swoop in and she would take all the glory. And I don’t want her to get the credit for all my hard work.
In the end I decided to excavate the base of the stone myself. And then I will call my supervisor. There is no need to get her all excited before I know what it is exactly that I have found.
I had another dream last night. It was the same one as the night before, but the roles were reversed. I guess I could say that now I also have a better understanding of what it might have felt like to sacrifice someone on that stone. It felt surprisingly exhilarating. When I woke up my heart was hammering in my chest and I felt a kind of joy coursing through my veins. But maybe joy is not the right word for it. It was a feeling of a job well done, and the certainty that I would soon be rewarded for it.
Writing this all down I realize that is probably a very wrong and twisted feeling to have in that context.
I did not like that dream.
July 1st
A weird thing happened. As I was excavating the base of the stone, I was surprised to find that it is actually a lot bigger than I thought. It seems to be rooted deep in the earth, almost as if it is growing from the bedrock underneath. I thought it was shaped like a leaf, but I seem to have been mistaken. It is more like a tooth, or a fang. I have dug away quite a lot of soil from the base, but the carving of the snake just keeps on going down, down, down.
The earth around the stone is very red. I know it is probably not from all the blood that has been spilled here, that was so long ago. Most likely this field was once a bog. They used to mine bog iron here. Supposedly it was backbreaking work.
But the weird thing happened this afternoon. I was on my knees, digging at the base of stone, and then the earth started shaking. It came in big heaves.
I know that it was an earthquake, and probably connected to the eruption. The land here is constantly moving and changing. But it didn’t feel like an earthquake. I have experienced many in my lifetime, but none like this one. This didn’t feel like tectonic plates grinding together, or like magma pushing its way to the surface somewhere far away. This felt localized. It was like the earth directly underneath me was shifting, as if a great, sleeping beast was suddenly stirring. And for a moment it even felt like the stones around me were its teeth and I was standing in the middle of a giant maw that would now close and devour me whole.
But then the earthquake passed.
A little while later the farmer came on her tractor to see if I was all right. She had felt the earthquake too. She became very angry when she saw what I was doing. She said that her people had known better than to touch the stones and that I should too. She said that I had no right to desecrate the stones. But I told her that this was a great find for science. This is our history, our only legacy, and we deserve to know its secret. She just stared at me for a long moment, then she shook her head, stomped back to her tractor, and drove off without a word.
I had another dream. It was the same dream, but now I was the stone, and I was so thirsty.
I have still not found the tail of the serpent. It lies much deeper than I thought possible. Tomorrow, when I wake, I will keep digging.
July 2nd
There was another earthquake in the night. When it woke me I was already outside of the tent, standing in the hollow that I have dug out at the base of the stone. It felt as if it was coming from directly beneath my feet. When it was over I saw that the earth had shifted. I can see the tail of the serpent now. But that is not the end. For underneath it is another carving. I am not sure of what exactly, but I have my suspicions, and I will write them down once I have them confirmed.
I am going out now to dig. I don´t know what long-hidden secret I will uncover but I am convinced that it will change my life forever. Something great awaits me at the base of that stone, underneath that dark, rich, red soil.
Tonight I will write it all down on these pages.
“The Shape of Stones” copyright © 2025 by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Art copyright © 2025 by Deena So’Oteh
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