Bárður Snæfellsás — The Half-Giant Guardian of Snæfellsnes

Snæfellsjökull Glacier, Snæfellsnes Peninsula

Bárður was half-troll, half-man — a settler of Snæfellsnes who watched his daughter blown to Greenland on an ice floe by his nephews' cruelty. In grief he walked into the glacier and became the mountain itself.

Bárður Snæfellsás is the subject of one of Iceland's older family sagas, the Bárðar Saga Snæfellsáss, recorded in the 14th century but reaching back to the Settlement Age. Bárður was the son of a giant father and a human mother. He settled on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in the 9th century and lived peaceably at the farm of Laugarbrekka with his wife and daughters. He was respected — large, powerful, capable of things ordinary men were not. His troubles came from his nephews. They played a rough game with Bárður's daughter Helga that went too far: they pushed her onto an ice floe in the sea. The current took her, and she drifted helpless toward Greenland. She was never recovered. Bárður killed one nephew in revenge. The other fled to Norway. Having settled the account as far as the law allowed, Bárður did something that no law required: he walked into the glacier of Snæfellsjökull and never came out. He did not die there, or not exactly. He became Snæfellsás — the spirit of Snæfellsnes. Farmers of the peninsula continued to call on him for centuries after his disappearance, and he answered: extinguishing fires, calming storms, guiding lost travellers back to the path. He was still being invoked in living memory. Snæfellsjökull — the glacier Jules Verne placed the entrance to the centre of the Earth — sits on the tip of Snæfellsnes. Standing at its base in winter, with the cloud sitting low on the caldera, is to understand precisely why a man might walk in and not be considered lost.