Even in our time, most of Iceland is deserted and seemingly completely untouched by man. And at the sight of her desert and cold landscapes, images from ancient sagas and legends arise in my head.
A few hours' drive from the capital, Reykjavik, is a vast field of long-frozen lava called Hallmundarhraun. These fields stretch over 90 square kilometers, representing a deserted rocky wasteland, under which winding caverns, which are lava tubes, stretch.
Both from above and inside it all looks like the surface of an alien planet from a science fiction movie. It is not surprising that when the Vikings began to swim here from the 8th century, much that they saw formed the basis of their legends and myths.
Surheadlir Lava Cave is more than a kilometer long and is the longest cave in Iceland. It is riddled with tunnels that can reach a height of 2 to 10 meters, the floor of which is covered with ice and volcanic rocks with sharp edges. And many legends and secrets are associated with this cave.
The inhabitants of the region of Norway, many centuries ago, considered these lands to be the residence of the ice giants Jotnars or Jotuns. Evil spirits and ghosts also lived here, and if someone entered the cave and disappeared, they said that the spirits had eaten him.
According to some legends, the fire giant Surt lived in this particular cave. The giant possessed a destructive sword and the power to destroy everything that he saw with his eyes.
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True, even these legends did not scare off the robbers who hid in these caves in the 10th century. The robbers, which consisted of outcasts and escaped criminals, left in the cave a lot of evidence of their presence, including the bones of animals they ate.
It is curious that in their diet of meat there were only domestic animals, no fish or game, and each bone was broken to extract bone marrow from it. At the same time, the bones did not bear any traces of heat treatment, as if the inhabitants of the cave ate exclusively raw meat.
In addition to bones, they found doorways in the passages created by them and other signs of arrangement. But the most grandiose object, probably created by robbers, or maybe not by them, is a high stone wall made of huge boulders, each weighing about 4 tons. In a cold and dark cave, this was certainly not the easiest construction.
The cave has other stunning places - a huge stone structure that looks like another artificial wall and an oval-shaped niche in the side cave. In it, among the huge stone blocks that fell from a height, many animal bones were found, which were broken and manually chopped to pieces by someone.
According to some versions, in this part of the cave there could be a hall for meetings and rituals.
Another mystery of the cave is the Viking Age colored beads - green, blue and yellow. The yellow ones were coated with a very rare and expensive arsenic-based pigment, but there were no black beads at all. By the way, yellow beads have not been found anywhere else in Iceland, except for this cave.
Among other unusual items found here by archaeologists were lead scales with weights and an image of a cross - very early evidence of the penetration of Christianity here. At the same time, the scales and weights were removed from a huge pile of animal bones, which accumulated in this place for about a hundred years.
Another interesting detail was that, despite the evidence of the presence of robbers here, they almost did not live in the cave. There are no signs of the creation of containers for collecting water, fireplaces and many household items common to the presence of a person, such as water buckets.
According to archaeologists, the robbers most likely visited here only for very short periods. If so, then what forbade them to live here?
All these secrets allowed us to put forward another theory. according to which the cave was mainly used for performing pagan rituals with strange rules and the sacrifice of animals.
It is possible that mysterious beads also played a role in these rituals, and a stone wall was erected so that none of the strangers could get here. And maybe the rituals concerned the connection between the giant Surt and the end of the world - Ragnarok. Maybe people tried to keep Surt in the cave or calm him down to delay the end of the world.