Page 37 - 2000 ICELAND

LAXÁ RIVER

Same time. Same breakfast. Same departure.
Today is a tennis shoe day, according to Oskar.

We stopped pretty quickly today at a salmon river
(this one is the Laxá River) to see loons and other

ducks. Oskar laughingly confirmed what we had
already suspected, the Icelanders are not very

imaginative in their place names. For instance, there are many rivers in the

country which are called “salmon” because the fish spawn there. The
wonderful Dettifoss is a word that means “falling waters;” isn’t that really just

another way of saying waterfall?

At this salmon river, we saw a fellow fly-casting very prettily and the light
playing on the waters and his line was quite picturesque. We saw a loon

mother with her chick on her back. Saw many other nameless ducks, as well
as whimbrels and plovers. The whimbrel can be called the Icelandic National

Bird with justification because they are everywhere.

GOÐAFOSS

Next, we drove a long way to see

the magnificent Waterfall of the
Gods (Goðafoss), another powerful

cascade in Iceland’s waterfall
panoply. This one received its

name for an early Parliamentary
compromise that saved the Icelandic republic from religious wars. When

Christianity became the state religion in the very early times of settlement,

many pagan peoples were reluctant to give up their Norse gods and
goddesses. Controversy and confrontation seemed inevitable over this

knotty problem. At the time, a very wise man, Thorgeir Thorkelsson,
happened to be Law-Speaker. After a night’s sleep under his cloak, he

proposed a compromise that was readily accepted and averted that