The Nordic country of Iceland have just become the world’s smallest nation to have ever qualified for a final FIFA tournament. After astonishing the entire football universe by acceding to the group stage of UEFA EURO 2016 and subsequently managing to kick out England in the Round of 16, the Icelanders have proved once again…
The Icelandic sagas, written during the High Middle Ages, constitute a significant body of work of the medieval Icelandic literature, alongside the eddas and the skaldic poems. These manuscripts were mostly penned by anonymous authors, whose identities were either not revealed or remained very much obscure in the passing of time. However, these medieval literary…
The large troll sculpture at Arnarstapi, a small village located on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland, was designed by the Icelandic sculptor Ragnar Kjartansson, co-founder of the Icelandic Sculptors Society in 1972. The large monolith built in stone is the embodiment of a legendary figure recounted in the Icelandic sagas as Bárður Snæfellsás, a…
Seltjarnarnes is a little town located in southwestern Iceland, quite close to the country’s capital Reykjavík. On the namesake peninsula there lies a series of rather peculiar ring-shaped formations which could ultimately be the remains of several Viking Age constructions built by Irish settlers during the 9th century. These formations were discovered during the 1980s…
The small Nordic nation of Iceland is doubtlessly full of spectacular landscapes and natural wonders worth visiting. In this respect, the Vatnajökull National Park (one of the three national parks in Iceland) offers a variety of astonishing sceneries which feature the crystal clear beauty of meadows, rivers, and ice alongside the hectic and powerful volcanic/geothermal…