Karl og Kerling

'Old Man and Old Woman' — a married pair of trolls turned to stone mid-argument, still standing near the cave they never made it back to.

Karl og Kerling — literally "Man and Woman," or more idiomatically "Old Man and Old Woman" — are two basalt columns standing near the mouth of a large cave in the Jökulsárgljúfur canyon, part of Vatnajökull National Park in North Iceland, carved over millennia by the glacial river Jökulsá á Fjöllum. The story told of them is domestic in scale, which is part of what has kept it in circulation since the settlement era: a troll couple, walking home together one night, fell into an argument. Trolls in Icelandic folklore are strictly nocturnal, forced underground or into stone by daylight, so the couple's home — the cave near where the pillars now stand — was meant to be reached well before dawn. They were still arguing, according to every version of the story, when the sun came up. Preoccupied with each other rather than the sky, neither noticed the light until it was already too late to reach shelter. It caught them together, mid-dispute, and turned them to stone within sight of the cave they had almost made it back to. The pair remain a fixed stop on the hiking trail through Hljóðaklettar — the Echo Rocks — a short walk south of the main parking area, standing in a landscape of similarly wind- and water-carved basalt that makes it easy to understand how a passing formation might, over centuries of retelling, become a specific husband and wife caught by the sunrise.