Geysir and the Screaming Earth

Geysir, Haukadalur, Iceland

The Great Geysir — origin of the word geyser — was understood by medieval Icelanders not as a geological feature but as a breathing mouth: one of the places where the earth below breathes out, and where what lives beneath occasionally makes itself heard.

Geysir — whose name gave the world the word 'geyser' — has been erupting in the Haukadalur valley for at least 10,000 years. Its behaviour has been inconsistent: it has been dormant for decades at a time, and was last reliably triggered by earthquake activity in 2000. The nearby Strokkur geyser now erupts every few minutes and is the primary tourist draw. The medieval Icelandic understanding of Geysir had no geological framework to reference. The boiling water that periodically shot from the earth was understood through the cosmological framework available: below the earth was Hel, and below Hel was the primal fire of Norse creation. Geysir was one of the places where these layers became thin. The sound before an eruption — the rumbling, the shaking of the ground, the smell of sulphur — was understood as breath: the thing below breathing out. The eruption itself was the shout. The tradition specific to Geysir: before major eruptions, a sound was heard from the earth that was distinct from the normal pre-eruption sounds — a sound in a lower register, regular as breathing, not mechanical. This was called the Scream of the Earth in later Icelandic accounts, though it was reported as below the threshold of screaming — more like a sustained note. The tradition is now entirely overlaid by tourist infrastructure. The geological explanation is entirely satisfactory. But the sound, when described by early 20th century Icelandic accounts, does not sound like geology.