The Saga Stone of Reykholt

Reykholt, West Iceland

Reykholt was the farm of Snorri Sturluson — the 13th century historian who wrote down Norse mythology. He was murdered in his cellar by his son-in-law's agents in 1241, and his presence has been reported in the farm's stone passage ever since.

Snorri Sturluson — poet, historian, and politician — is the most important single figure in Norse literary history. Without his Prose Edda and the Heimskringla, the mythology of Odin, Thor, and the Norse world would be fragmentary at best. He compiled and systematised a tradition that was rapidly being lost under Christian pressure in the 13th century. He lived and worked at Reykholt farm in West Iceland, which he made into the most significant intellectual centre in medieval Scandinavia. He was murdered there on the night of the 22nd of September 1241, killed in his cellar by men sent by the Norwegian king Haakon and his son-in-law Gissur Þorvaldsson, who had political reasons to eliminate him. The cellar where he was killed — a stone-vaulted underground passage — still exists at Reykholt. It is incorporated into the modern Snorrastofa research centre. The ghost tradition: a heavyset man in 13th century clothing is seen in the stone passage, moving toward the steps that lead up to the farm, and pausing at the point where the killing took place. He is not seen to ascend the steps. He is always moving toward them. Snorri wrote down the mythology of the gods he did not believe in because he understood that beauty requires preservation. The tradition says he is still there, still moving toward the stair he never climbed again, still somehow in the process of the event that ended his ability to write.