Icelandic Highlands

The geothermal Highland mountains named after a troll woman called Kerling — 'the old hag' — who was petrified at dawn while crossing the interior with her troll followers.

Kerlingarfjöll — 'The Mountains of the Troll Woman' — take their name directly from a figure in Highland folklore. According to the legend, a large troll woman called Kerling (simply 'the hag' or 'the crone') led a group of trolls across the volcanic interior of Iceland by night. Trolls, as all Icelanders know, cannot survive exposure to sunlight — when daylight touches them, they solidify instantly into stone.

Kerling and her followers were moving through the highlands, believed to be heading west toward the coast, when dawn broke faster than expected. The mountains caught them all mid-stride. The strange, towering peaks of the Kerlingarfjöll range — with their steaming fumaroles and shades of orange and red — are said to be the remains of Kerling and her companions, frozen in the moment of their petrification.

The landscape itself seems to support the myth. Steam vents rise continuously from the valley floors. The mountain ridges take on strange, anthropomorphic shapes in certain light. And the sheer remoteness of the area — accessible only in summer by 4x4 on the Kjölur highland road — gives it the feeling of a place that belongs to older forces than humans.

For centuries the Highlands served as refuge for outlaws banished from Icelandic society — real men whose desperate lives became woven into folklore.

The Icelandic legal term was útlegðarmaður — outlaw. A person declared an outlaw under the old Alþingi parliament was cast from all protection of law and society. Anyone could kill them without legal consequence. The only place to survive was the interior — the Highlands, which had no farms, no villages, and only minimal patrol. It was a death sentence dressed as exile.

The most famous outlaw of the Highlands was Fjalla-Eyvindur — Eyvindur of the Mountains — who lived as a fugitive in the Highland interior for over twenty years in the 18th century. He and his wife Halla survived winters that would have killed most people, sheltering in caves and natural overhangs, hunting and living on the land. Their shelter near Hveravellir on the Kjölur route is still pointed out to visitors: a low stone enclosure tucked into a geothermal area where the ground stayed above freezing even in the depths of winter.

Fjalla-Eyvindur became a folk hero — a symbol of endurance, defiance and Highland survival. His story has been told in plays, films and novels. The shelter at Hveravellir is one of the oldest surviving man-made structures in the Highlands.

The legend of Katla the cook, whose stolen stockings unleashed Iceland's most feared glacier volcano — a myth so embedded in culture that eruptions are still called 'Katla is waking'.

The Katla volcano lies beneath the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap in southern Iceland. It has erupted regularly throughout recorded Icelandic history — roughly every 40 to 80 years — and each eruption triggers catastrophic glacial floods (jökulhlaup) that have swept away farms, reshaped coastlines, and in one case transported icebergs bigger than houses out to sea.

The name 'Katla' comes from a legend set at the medieval farm of Þykkvabæjarklaustur monastery. Katla was a cook there — a bad-tempered woman with a pair of magical stockings that gave the wearer superhuman speed and endurance. When a young shepherd called Barði discovered and stole the stockings, Katla was furious. She threw herself into the volcano in rage, and the volcano erupted with so much power it swept Barði and everything around him away in a torrent of meltwater and ice.

Katla has not had a major eruption since 1918. Volcanologists consider it one of the most dangerous volcanoes in Iceland and monitor it closely. When Icelanders speak of Katla 'waking up,' there is a cultural weight in the phrase that goes far beyond seismology — it reaches back to the old story of a furious cook throwing herself into the fire.