The Lighthouse at Dyrhólaey

The old lighthouse at Myrdal,
hard by Vik, is still a lighthouse,
though not a lighthouse anymore.
Its scorching eye that bored into the darkness
from the height in brawling storms
and prowling fog is turned outward
from the shores but does not see the sea.
The ashes of its searing light are cold,
gray as North Atlantic swells
that wrestle with the cliffs.
Its guttural voice no longer sounds
a baleful warning that Charybdis
lurks with gaping maw, and Scylla
beckons near the rocks.

And so it sits alone upon its stanchion
on the headland at Dyrhólaey,
looks down the avenue of continents
into the shifting valleys of the sea.

No one goes there but the wind,
bullying and boisterous like a hooligan
seeking easy pickings from tourists
who mill around and look
out on the dangers of the deep.
The door is locked.
The windows battened down.
Inside, ghosts of mariners
gather in reunion, living in the past
since they were lost in scowling seas.
Their wives, forlorn and all alone,
moaned anguished sobs
that echoed in the silent viks
and stilled the squawking of the gulls.

D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah
July 19, 2008

The Huldufólk

Eve is the mother of us all,
those close at hand that we can see,
those hidden in obscurity,
fruit of the tree and of the fall.

Once God announced that he would come
to visit her and all her brood.
“Now, children,” she said, “don’t be rude
when God is here. Spit out your gum.

“I want you looking clean and neat
so you will be presentable.
It sure would be lamentable
if we aren’t ready when we meet.”

The time was short. She did her best,
but couldn’t get them all prepared.
When time had come, then she got scared.
God’s surely an important guest.

Some kids were ready. Some were not.
And God was coming up the road.
That’s what I’d call a “mother load,”
for she was really on the spot.

What, then, to do with all the rest,
the one’s who weren’t ready yet.
They’d never make it on a bet.
She wanted God to be impressed.

So, lest the meeting be a flop,
she hid the unwashed kids away.
They’d be prepared another day.
They’re hair all combed--not like a mop.

The children stood all in a row
and God inspected them that day.
“My goodness,” he said, “what a way.
This really has been quite a show.”

“Do you have any other kids?”
he asked, and fearful, she said, ”No.”
You wonder why she answered so.
That’s one way to put on the skids.

God left. You’d think he had to know
how many children should be there,
how many given to her care,
how many kids were a no-show.

And all of them God didn’t see
that day, the ones of which he spoke,
can not be seen--their Huldufólk,
and will be for eternity.

So, hidden folk they’ll always be,
and always, unseen, be with us,
yet seldom ever make a fuss.
They’re well behaved, you must agree.

The Huldufólk aren’t really bad.
They are the most like human kind
of all the others you will find,
each Hulda-maiden, Huldu-lad.

So do not fear the Hidden Folk.
They’re not like trolls that lurk at night
out in the summer’s pale moonlight
as sinister as evil Lok.

D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah
June 5, 2007

The Fairy Maiden

An Icelander and his grandson
are by the sea one day,
talking as they go along,
telling stories on the way.

“Grandpa,” the boy said earnestly,
“tell me about the fairy maid,
and how she lit her light for you
at Black Rock on Cliff’s Isle, to aid.”

“Ah, yes, my son, I rowed my boat
far out to sea when it was calm,
out to the cleft where there were fish
and earned a blister on each palm.

“Out where the yellow cod swim by,
the halibut slide far below.
It was food waiting to be had,
but soon the wind began to blow.

“The day grew dark. The sky went black.
and rain clouds piled in the sky.
It was a whirlpool of doubt.
I thought that I was going to die.

“I saw a light shine in the dark
and rowed to it with all my might.
The boat was carried on the crests.
Black Rock was darker than the night.

“Yet I could see where Black Rock was.
I saw a light upon the shore.
There was a maiden holding it,
where nobody had been before.


“The torrent failed. The sea grew calm.
I passed the skerries to the bay
and pulled my boat upon the shore,
then sought the light without delay,

“but it was gone. The maiden, too–
the Fairy Maiden of the sea,
who steered me from the raging depths
and bore me through eternity.”


D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah
June 13, 2007

Thorbjorn in the Mist

Morning rouses in the mist
that presses on the frozen ground.
The wind that traipsed across the snow-clogged lava
left footprints where it wandered.
Peering over the settled fog,
Mt. Thorbjorn idles in the stillness
when the sun is awake but
has not risen from its slumber.

Winter takes its respite
from storms waged upon the fells
like raiders who blew out
of the purple north
and returned in long black ships
with finery and riches that Viking swords
and their strong arms had taken at Seville.

The beauty of the north
has made Iceland a land of riches,
not in Viking gold and silver,
but in the smiles of its maidens
and the setting of the winter sun
that looks down quiet streets
of Old Town Reykjavik.


D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah
October 5, 2009

Ancestral Home

It is light already
when dawn comes to the day.
Wind blows across the Denmark Strait,
sweeps spray onto the shore
at Keflavik where planes assemble
and depart in Arctic mist and rain.

We come in clouds,
stained by the morning sun,
descend to the sea,
to visit our ancestral home,
to see the church at Kross
where Grandpa Christian
got a blessing and a name.
When he was a man,
he went to the Westlands,
got a another name
that few in Iceland knew.

The old house, patriarchal in its mien,
stands stalwart in the grass
at Arnarholl. It is the house
where Groa lives. She knows
it only as the home
that always has been hers,
and wonders if, somehow, we are related
since my folk lived here before,
but cannot see a likeness in my face.

She does not know
that once the house
on Eagle Hill bulged with love,
echoed with laughter,
that children ran
through summer sunlight,
shouting at the terns
that mocked them.

The gulls are there still,
but none know where
the children went,
except for two, one folded
in the cheerless turf at Reykjavik,
the other, Grandpa Christian
on the lonely plains
where Blackfeet ruled
and buffalo once roamed.

Wind takes the measure
of its province--the weathered
heights of Iceland’s snow,
the willows on Milk River.
But it, too, goes away,
and like the breath of life
becomes the breathing of the past.


D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah
June 2, 2005

God of Eloquence

God of Eloquence

Runes are graven on the sun and on the tongue of Bragi.
He utters shining words forged in the smithy of his silver throat.

He is patron of the skalds who tell the sagas in royal courts,
preserved in Iceland by chieftains of the Viking realm,
inspires poetry in men and offers drink from Bragi’s Cup
that all the earth might be awash in tales of gods, and
and how the world began.

Oaths are sworn on Bragarfull to bear the sacred truth.
Before a king can be the king, he drinks the mead of poetry
from the Promise Cup and is endowed with eloquence
to speak with words that bend the will of those who can not understand.

With his wife and with his words, Bragi stays forever young,
for thought does not degrade, nor wisdom falter
when eternity wears away.

Let us drink a toast with Bragi’s mead, to be endowed with fluency of speech
and skill with words that clothe our images of thought
in inspiration and emotion, that men may hear, and laugh, and weep,
moved by a longing for truth in the everlasting soul.



D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah
May 24, 2007

L’Anse aux Meadows

From Iceland’s wind-blown heights,
Viking mothers look out on the sea
where heaving waters
surge and fall and
swallow stalwart sons
who plow the depths
to harvest sustenance.

At heaven’s rim an ancient god
in eagle form sits silently
and stares; stirring into flight,
his wings send winds
that blow on men
and cover all the earth.

From a hollow vik, Bjarni
sailed for Greenland’s shore
to visit with his father.
The eagle’s wings
pushed his long boat far away
to a place unknown by Norsemen. From his bobbing craft
he looked upon the treeless
shores of Helluland.

But a new land
was not Bjarni’s quest.
He sought Greenland,
found his father,
never went viking
while his parent lived.
Leifur heard the wondrous tale
and searched the sea
with thirty men to find the land
that Bjarni saw.
When he found the place
he went ashore. Skraelings,
dark and naked, came to see
men tall as trees with
hair as yellow as buttercups.

There were fruits
where white man never
yet had gone, nor
tasted of its bounties.
He called it Wineland
for grapes voluptuous on the vines.
With fruit and timber
Leifur started for his home,
to tell of strange places,
and people stranger still.

Iceland was astir
with Leifur’s saga.
Thorfinn goaded to adventure
took his wife, and
an expedition to settle
in the new found land.

At L’Anse aux Meadows,
amid wilderness and wild men,
Snorri came to Thorfinn
and to Gudrid, the
first Caucasian born
in Iceland’s colony.
Five hundred years
would pass before
Columbus came for Ferdinand
and Isabella to claim for Spain
the world that Leifur found.


D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah February 16, 1999

Leifur and the Westlands

Leifur was a rowdy man.
He knew the perils of the sea,
and war that culls the herds of men.
When he heard Bjarni sailed
to Eirik’sfjord from Eyrarbakki
and saw an unknown land with forests
taller than the heights of Hekla,
imagination tugged at his desire.
He sought adventure and
the riches of respect,
the wealth of what the unknown,
far away had hidden in the silence
of its cryptic promise.

He purchased Bjarni’s boat,
sailed toward the western sky
where clouds are made.
They searched the sea. Bjarni
left no trail upon the waves.
His reckoning was sunless days
and how the ocean tasted.

The shore at Helluland was bare and broken.
At Markland, the sea drank rivers
spurting from the ice and snow.
Trees gathered at the water’s edge
like giants making muster when the Giallar horn
calls gods to Ragnarok. Skraelings,
dark and glowering, skulked
among the ferns and in the ivy.

Vinland was a buxom land,
voluptuous and sweeter
than an Icelandic maiden’s lips.
It sagged with nature’s goodness
rich upon the branches of the trees
and ripe upon the drooping vines.

They wintered on the windy plain
of L’Anse aux Meadows. When the sun
had driven frost to where the daylight ends,
they gathered grapes and timber,
took them as their bona fides
for the stories of adventure
that their brothers might believe.

When Leifur and his men
returned to Iceland,
he was called “The Lucky,”
for whim of fortune
had attended to his need.
It crowned him with a greater fame
than even Eirik knew.
And so, to Saints, not ruffian gods,
he offered recompense in prayer
on bended knee as he
fingered sacred beads at Kross.



D. Gary Christian
Santa Clara, Utah
February 22, 2008