The Whale Fjord

While going around Hvalfjörður, I skipped the modern tunnel to see the beautiful fjord. The name Hvalfjörður means "whale fjord" and modern books say this is because there were once so many whales here. There was actually a big whaling industry here around 1900 (I saw some pictures at the petrol station, not particularly nice to look at). But Konrad in his book narrated a different story of where the name came from, an old Icelandic folk tale in which a fisherman was turned into a giant whale for punishment (by elves, if I remember correctly) and then he followed a blind man all the way through the fjord until the point where a river flows into the fjord, named Botnsá. There, the whale jumped up and followed the creek upstream until he came to where a waterfall is. The whale -- according to the tale -- did not stop there but jumped up that enormous waterfall, which made a deafening roar, and this is why this waterfall is called Glymur today, which means "roar" (Getöse).

The whale's unusual journey ended in the mountain lake that feeds the river, and this lake is called Hvalvatn, which means "whale lake".

The old people said that many years or centuries later, whale bones of unusual size were found in that mountain lake.