The Shepherd Who Walked into Langjökull — The Glacier Keeps Its Dead

Langjökull Glacier, Central Iceland

Each autumn in Iceland, a shepherd or two failed to return from the highland round-up. Those who fell into glacier crevasses were not recovered — the ice preserved them. Their ghosts walk the snowfields, still looking for the missing sheep.

The autumn sheep round-up — réttir — is one of the great collective events of Icelandic rural life: farmers across the highland interior driving their scattered flocks down from the summer pastures to the lowland enclosures before the first hard frost. It is demanding, physical, occasionally dangerous work in terrain where the weather can change from clear to white-out in an hour. The glaciers of Iceland's interior present a specific and particular danger. A crevasse in the snow cover of Langjökull or Hofsjökull is invisible until the crust gives way beneath you. The fall is typically short — five to fifteen metres — but the crevasse walls close above immediately. Recovery is almost impossible without specific equipment, which shepherds on horseback did not carry. Men who fell into glaciers in the old Iceland were left. The ice took them. This was understood. In a good year, the glacier might return them: bodies have emerged from glacier margins decades after disappearance, perfectly preserved by the cold, in the same posture in which they fell. The tradition that grew around this fact is practical in Iceland's way: the preserved dead in the glacier have not moved on. They are held in the moment of their disappearance, still completing the task they were doing when the ice took them. Their ghosts — or their memory, the distinction is not always insisted upon — walk the snowfields at dusk in autumn, still looking for the specific sheep that were unaccounted for at the moment they fell. Farmers who encountered them at that season were advised to call out the name of the farm, not the name of the man. Give him a landmark. Let him reorient. Then he might stop walking.