Borgarnes

Where it sits. Borgarnes occupies a narrow peninsula reaching into Borgarfjörður in western Iceland, 74 kilometres north of Reykjavík by the Ring Road and the Hvalfjörður tunnel. The town has around 2,000 residents and is the administrative centre of Borgarbyggð municipality. Its position is unmistakable from the road: traffic crosses the Borgarfjarðarbrú, a 520-metre causeway bridge opened in 1981, and the town rises immediately on the far side with the fjord on both flanks. Behind it the Borgarfjörður valley system opens inland toward Reykholt, Húsafell and the Langjökull ice cap, and the Hafnarfjall massif stands across the water to the south.

The saga that begins here. Borgarnes is the ground of Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, one of the earliest and best of the Icelandic family sagas, probably written in the thirteenth century and attributed by many scholars to Snorri Sturluson. Skalla-Grímr Kveldúlfsson settled this district around 890, having left Norway after his family fell out with King Harald Fairhair, and established his farm at Borg á Mýrum, three kilometres from the modern town, named for the rock outcrop that still stands there. His son Egill — poet, mercenary, killer and one of the most vivid characters in medieval European literature — inherited it. Two centuries later Snorri Sturluson held Borg before moving to Reykholt. The saga is not a chronicle; it is a literary work composed long after the events, with a poet's interest in character. But its geography is exact, and you can follow it on the ground here in a way that is rare anywhere in Europe.

Where the story is written into the town. Skallagrímsgarður, a public park in the middle of Borgarnes among ordinary houses, contains a low stone-set mound identified by tradition as the grave of Skalla-Grímr, and of Egill's son Böðvar, who drowned in the fjord — the loss that produced Sonatorrek, the lament that is the emotional centre of the saga. Brákarsund, the narrow sound between the town and the small island of Brákarey, is named for Þorgerður brák, the woman described in the saga as Skalla-Grímr's slave and Egill's foster-mother, who leapt into the water to escape his rage and was killed by a stone thrown after her. At Borg á Mýrum, still a working farm with a church, stands Ásmundur Sveinsson's sculpture Sonatorrek, installed in 1985, an abstract bronze answering the poem.

The Settlement Centre. Landnámssetur Íslands, the Settlement Centre, opened in 2006 in two restored nineteenth-century warehouses beside the old harbour — the oldest buildings in Borgarnes, dating from the 1860s and 1870s and once used to store goods landed by boat. It holds two audio-guided exhibitions, available in more than a dozen languages and each taking about half an hour. The first covers the settlement of Iceland: the ninth-century voyages, the land-taking, the founding of the Alþingi around 930, and how a society without a king organised itself. The second retells Egils saga through a sequence of sculptural sets. The building also houses a restaurant in the old timber hall. The centre was founded by the theatre director Kjartan Ragnarsson and Sigríður Margrét Guðmundsdóttir, and its approach is deliberately narrative rather than object-based — there are almost no artefacts, because the artefacts of settlement-era Iceland are few and mostly elsewhere.

Documents, not film sets. This is the useful thing about Borgarnes for anyone approaching the Viking Age through screen drama. What survives from Norse Iceland is overwhelmingly textual: sagas, law codes, genealogies and poetry, written in Icelandic on vellum in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, plus the excavated foundations of turf farms. It is not architectural, and there are no standing Viking halls in Iceland. The television series that gave the period its current visual vocabulary — Vikings and its sequel — were filmed in Ireland, principally at Ashford Studios in County Wicklow and around the Wicklow Mountains, with sets built to a production designer's specification. Borgarnes offers the opposite trade: no reconstructed hall to walk through, but the actual valley in which a real family's story was set down in writing eight hundred years ago.

Around the district. Reykholt, 35 kilometres inland, was Snorri Sturluson's estate and preserves Snorralaug, a circular stone-lined hot pool fed by a channel from a nearby spring and among the oldest identifiable structures in Iceland. Deildartunguhver, Europe's highest-flowing hot spring at around 180 litres per second, is nearby and supplies hot water to Borgarnes and Akranes through a pipeline. Hraunfossar and Barnafoss, where meltwater emerges directly out of a lava field into the Hvítá, lie further up the same valley.

Getting there. Route 1 passes the edge of town; buses from Reykjavík take about an hour and a quarter. The Hvalfjörður tunnel, 5.8 kilometres long and opened in 1998, has been toll-free since 2018, which cut the drive from the capital considerably. Borgarnes is a natural first or last stop on a Ring Road circuit and works well as a base for the whole Borgarfjörður valley.