Ásbyrgi — The Hoofprint of Sleipnir and the Elf Capital

Ásbyrgi Canyon, Jökulsárgljúfur, North Iceland

The horseshoe-shaped canyon of Ásbyrgi in North Iceland is the hoofprint of Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir, which touched the earth once and left this mark. Within its cliff walls, the hidden people have their grandest settlement — a city underground that mirrors the canyon's shape.

Ásbyrgi canyon is one of the most dramatic landforms in Iceland: a horseshoe-shaped gorge two kilometres wide and three kilometres deep, its near-vertical walls rising over a hundred metres, its flat floor forested with birch and willow in a country where trees are rare. It sits at the northern end of Jökulsárgljúfur, the canyon carved by the Jökulsá á Fjöllum river over millennia of glacial flooding. The geological explanation — a catastrophic glacial outburst flood carved the canyon in hours, possibly within the last ten thousand years — does nothing to diminish the visual impact. The canyon looks like a place where something enormous once stood. The Norse explanation is that something did: Sleipnir, Odin's eight-legged horse, touched the earth here once during a celestial journey and left the impression of a single hoof. The Huldufólk tradition takes the canyon's shape as its organizing principle. The cliff walls are full of doors — not metaphorical, but actual, specific doors known to individual seers in the district. The largest hidden-people settlement in Iceland is located within the Ásbyrgi cliff-face itself, the tradition holds, using the canyon's bowl as its meeting place in the same way the Althing used Þingvellir's rift. Elf-seers from the Þórshöfn district have, for two centuries, reported interactions with the residents of Ásbyrgi at midsummer, when the hidden-people court convenes for its own version of the annual assembly. They are described as taller than the usual Huldufólk account, dressed in older clothing, and speaking a form of Icelandic that is recognisably archaic. National Park rangers at Ásbyrgi report that certain sections of the cliff face, near specific rock formations, are never approached by nesting birds.