The Solstice Reflections of Skaftá — The River Shows the Year's Dead

Skaftá River, South Iceland

On midsummer's night in Iceland, the river Skaftá is said to show reflections of people who will die in the coming year. You must not look into it between midnight and sunrise on solstice night — unless you want to see your own face among them.

The Skaftá is a glacial river draining from the Vatnajökull glacier through the volcanic interior of South Iceland, coloured grey-blue by glacial flour and subject to sudden catastrophic floods when subglacial volcanic eruptions melt the ice above. It is a river that emphatically does not behave as rivers should. The midsummer-night tradition attached to the Skaftá belongs to a category of Icelandic folk belief concerned with liminal time — moments when the boundary between the present and what has not yet happened becomes permeable. Solstice night in Iceland is genuinely strange: the sun skims the horizon but does not set, the sky goes pewter-gold, and the light has a quality that flattens distances and makes the familiar uncertain. At this hour, the Skaftá is said to show different reflections than the sky and landscape above it. Those who look into the water during the solstice night — specifically between midnight and the moment the sun begins to clearly rise — may see faces in the current. The faces are recognisable. They are people the viewer knows. Those faces belong to people who will not survive the coming year. The tradition is careful about one detail: if you look and see your own face, the year's deadline applies to you. Looking away immediately is considered ineffective. The seeing cannot be unseen. Icelanders of the southern district therefore developed a strong custom of simply not approaching the river on midsummer's night — and, if proximity was unavoidable, of looking at the sky above it rather than the water below. The tradition has never been satisfactorily connected to any specific historical event. It is simply known, in the way that some knowledge is simply held.