Free Sea of Stone by Michael Ridpath

while his widowed mother and sisters had moved into Stykkishólmur, where his mother had bought a dress shop.
    He looked down to the lava field and across to the imposing snow-streaked lower slopes of the fell of Bjarnarhöfn.
    Jóhannes knew the history of this place too. His favourite text at school was
The Saga of the People of Eyri
, which described the life and times of the first settlers in this area over a thousand years before. Some time in the ninth century, Björn the Easterner, the son of Ketill Flat Nose and the brother of Audurthe Deep-Minded, had been the first, pitching his sacred wooden pillars into the sea to let the gods determine where he should make landfall. The gods had chosen Bjarnarhöfn.
    Jóhannes knew the stories of Björn, his followers and their successors intimately. Most of their farms were still standing a millennium later, including Hraun, which had been the home of Björn’s great-grandson Styr.
    Between Bjarnarhöfn and Hraun lay the tossing sea of stone that was the Berserkjahraun. It was this that had given the farm its name: ‘hraun’ meant ‘lava’. Jóhannes was drawn to it. It was the backdrop to a couple of chapters in the saga, which were the favourites of every Seventh Form class he read them to.
    He drove on a couple of hundred metres, parked the car and strode off to the edge of the broad channel of ancient lava, which was raised several metres above the ground. The rain had stopped but a thick layer of leaden cloud hung low above the shoreline. There was a breeze, there was always a breeze, but it was relatively gentle, and felt refreshing after the fug of the car.
    He found the beginning of the Berserkjagata, the narrow path that the berserkers had cut through the lava between the farms of Hraun and Bjarnarhöfn. He followed it as it twisted through the congealed lava, spattered with grey, green and yellow moss. The path dipped and dived and turned. Strange shapes pirouetted: fists, fingers, arms, beards, tresses of hair, horses, pigs, trolls all caught in mid-movement. Although the lava had frozen three thousand years before, it seemed to be alive, like a still from an action film, just waiting for someone to press ‘play’. There was no sound apart from the wind, and a cormorant calling in the small bay to his right.
    The path led upwards for a few metres and then plunged down into a shallow amphitheatre in the middle of which was a noticeably man-made block of stone perhaps four metres by three. This was what Jóhannes was looking for. It was here that the two berserkers had been buried.
    He stood still, letting the cool air touch his cheeks and the damp silence settle upon him. He felt at peace.
    Berserker
was the term the Vikings used for especially fierce warriors who could whip themselves up into a frenzy of violence in battle where they were no match for any normal man. Vermundur the Lean, who was the farmer at Bjarnarhöfn, had visited Norway and been given two Swedish berserker servants by the king there. He had brought them back to Iceland, but they had proven difficult to handle, so he had passed them on to his brother Styr, the farmer of Hraun on the other side of the lava field, who was famous for his bad temper.
    Styr didn’t have much more luck. But he did have a beautiful daughter, Ásdís, to which one of the berserkers took a fancy. The berserker demanded that Styr give Ásdís to be his wife. Styr was unhappy with this idea and, together with his friend Snorri from Helgafell, concocted a plan. He told the berserker that he could marry his daughter if the berserker and his fellow Swede cut a path across the lava field from Hraun to Bjarnarhöfn. The berserkers worked themselves up into a frenzy and did just that.
    Afterwards, they were exhausted, and Styr let them bathe in his new bathhouse. While they were in there he closed it up with wet ox hides. The heat became unbearable and the berserkers rushed out, whereupon Styr ran them both through with a