The Black Death Reaches Iceland — The Luminous Graves of 1402

Hvalfjörður District, West Iceland

The Black Death arrived in Iceland in 1402 and killed over half the population. Mass graves in the south were said to give off a cold luminescence on winter nights — the ground itself marked by the density of the dead beneath it.

The Black Death reached Iceland in 1402, nearly sixty years after it had first swept through Europe, carried on trading ships from England. The Icelandic population at the time was perhaps 60,000 to 70,000 people. By 1404, when the epidemic subsided, estimates suggest that between a third and a half of that population had died — in some districts, more. The social effect was catastrophic in ways specific to Iceland's landscape. Isolated farms — the basic unit of Icelandic settlement — were entirely depopulated in weeks, the dead having no neighbours close enough to know, let alone help. In some valleys, all the occupants of every farm died in the same season, and the farms simply ceased to exist. The land reverted to rough grazing and was re-settled, in some cases, only decades later. The burial of the dead in this circumstance was impossible according to the usual rites. There were not enough living people in some areas to perform individual burials. The dead of entire farms were placed together in hastily dug pits, and the pits were sealed with the resources available. The tradition from the southern lowlands, where several such mass burials were made, holds that the burial sites could be identified by sight at night — not by any marker but by a pale luminescence at ground level that persisted in winter, most visible in the weeks around the solstice. This light was described as cold, white, and approximately constant, unlike the variable light of phosphorescence or ice. Nineteenth-century accounts from the district mention specific fields and hillocks that the local population avoided at night. Some of these locations have been archaeologically confirmed as sites of unusual burial density from the early 15th century.