Darkness came early in Iceland, swallowing the landscape by three in the afternoon. David Thornwell gripped the steering wheel of his rental SUV, his knuckles white as he navigated the final stretch of road toward Búðir out on the remote Snæfellsnes peninsula. The local weather service had promised a brief window between storm systems that should have given him enough time to reach his destination, but it seemed the gap was closing. He could feel the wind picking up, buffeting the vehicle with each gust that swept across the barren, snow-covered lava fields.

If the weather closed in, he might be stranded out here for days. There was still time to turn around, retreat to the warmth and comfort of Reykjavík, but what was there to truly go back for?

David took a deep breath and accelerated into the storm.

Soon after, he crested a rise, and a gust of wind opened the snow like a curtain, revealing the Black Church of Búðir, its tar-blackened walls a stark geometric slash against the pristine white of the landscape.

Behind it, shrouded in low-hanging clouds, the massive Snæfellsjökull glacier dominated the horizon. The glacier had come and gone with every ice age, each time smothering a seven-hundred-thousand-year-old volcano. A span of time incomprehensible to the human mind, and the kind of perspective David desperately sought here at the ends of the earth.

He pulled up next to the church and switched off the engine. He had come for a silent retreat, but there was no silence here. The storm howled and a bitter wind moaned across the Búðahraun lava field. As David stepped out of the vehicle, a blast slammed the car door shut behind him as if the wind wanted to trap him here, freezing his blood to ice.

The air tasted of snow and volcanic earth, clean and harsh, and salt from the bitter sea only a few hundred metres away. The cold burned David’s lungs with each breath as he hurried to grab his gear from the back: a week’s worth of food, a down sleeping bag rated for arctic conditions, lots of warm clothing, and a leather satchel containing his journal and well-worn Bible. He grabbed the bags and carefully picked his way through the snowdrifts to the entrance.

The walls of the church were painted with traditional ship’s pitch to protect against the harsh elements, and the black absorbed what little light remained in the winter sky. White trim around the windows and door provided the only contrast. A simple bell tower crowned the structure, its cross barely visible against the darkening clouds.

Originally established in 1703, the church had fallen into disrepair, but was rebuilt in 1848 to serve the local community. The very act of building it here was testament to Icelandic fortitude, and a faith that stood proud amongst the frozen wilderness.

David approached the heavy wooden door, fishing the key from his pocket with numb fingers. The Anglican Church maintained a reciprocal relationship with various Lutheran parishes in Iceland, and when he had requested a winter silent retreat, they offered him this — a week alone in one of the most isolated churches in Europe.

If he couldn’t hear God’s voice out here — so close to nature, so far from the clamour of the city and the demands of his parish — perhaps there was no voice to hear at all.

As he put the key in the lock, David noticed strange gouge marks on either side of the door, scratches made by what looked like giant claws. Perhaps some local creature tried to get in and shelter from the violence of the winter storms, although he couldn’t recall reading about anything with claws that big roaming the remote peninsula.

The lock clicked, and he hurried inside, shutting out the elements as he looked around at his temporary retreat.

The church interior was warmer than the brutal cold outside, though still far from comfortable. His breath came in visible puffs as he set down his supplies and reached for the light switch.

Electric bulbs flickered to life. White-painted walls rose to a peaked ceiling supported by dark wooden beams. A modest altar faced rows of wooden pews with enough seating for perhaps fifty people, though David suspected the congregation was rarely that large in this remote location. A small organ sat to one side, its keys yellowed with age.

The windows lacked curtains or other adornments, offering an unobstructed view of the snow-covered landscape that had remained essentially unchanged for five thousand years. During the brief hours of daylight, worshippers could see the glacier looming in the distance, a reminder of forces far greater than human concerns. Right now, God seemed just as distant and uncaring.

David set about arranging his temporary living space with the same methodical precision he brought to writing his sermons. He spread his sleeping bag over a camp bed near the altar, positioning it so he could see out the windows while he lay in the warm cocoon. He put his books on the front pew: commentaries on Job and Ecclesiastes, and a well-worn copy of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed.

At the bottom of his satchel, wrapped carefully in a teal silk scarf, was Emma’s gold cross. It was the only jewellery she had ever worn, apart from her wedding ring. As he placed it onto his Bible by his pillow, the scent of antiseptic flooded back to him. Emma’s fingers, bird-thin after months of treatment, clutched the tiny cross as the IV drip marked time in the corner. “We’re not alone in this,” she had whispered, her voice hoarse but certain. “You will never be alone, my love. He will be with you.”

Even then, with her hair gone and her skin translucent as parchment, the lines of pain evident on her face, she thought only of her God and her husband. Her faith had been tactile, immediate, something she could hold on to when everything else was slipping away. If only he had the same fortitude.

Exploring the small church further, David found a modest collection of books and journals stacked behind the organ.

He thumbed through the top one. The earliest entries dated back decades, written in a mixture of Icelandic, English, and German by various caretakers and visitors who had spent winter months alone in the church. Notes about the quality of the silence, the shapes and colours of the aurora borealis, and the strange visions that came in the endless dark of the Icelandic winter. Some of the nightmares had claws, and David frowned, glancing back towards the door and its unusual markings.

Beneath the journals, he found two books he recognised: Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness. Both were set in this area and both grappled with the relationship between humanity and the vast timescale of geology. Verne’s scientific optimism and Laxness’s mystical scepticism provided different responses to the humbling reality of deep time that was so tangible in this place.

David looked out the window at the distant glacier; though almost invisible in the storm, its presence was still dominant. How insignificant we humans are on the face of the earth, he thought. Just a flicker of light against the dark expanse of history. Logically, this awareness should put his grief into perspective, and yet, the weight of it still pressed down upon him, crushing his faith to dust and ashes.

Emma’s faith had only become stronger at the end, her frail fingers holding her simple cross as she spoke of God’s plan with a certainty that David both envied and resented. He had prayed for her healing with all the theological sophistication his doctorate could muster. He marshalled every argument for divine intervention he had learned at seminary. But God remained silent, inactive, uncaring, while his beloved wife withered away in a hospital bed.

He was supposed to believe they would see each other again in Heaven, but he had never really accepted that. His faith was more procedural, intellectual, of a kind that offered no solace when all meaning bled out of his life.

But at least here, he could focus on the basics. Eat, sleep, read. Try to pray. Wait out the storm. He could make a choice each day to keep living, or walk out into the storm and lie down on the frozen earth, letting the snow cover him and his bones disintegrate into this ancient place.

For now, it was worth staying alive a little longer for the promise of a hot cup of tea and one of his freeze-dried camping meals. He rifled through his pack. Spaghetti bolognese and chocolate pudding. David smiled. It was enough.

He set up his tiny camping stove, enjoying the heat as it thawed his icy fingers. As the water boiled, the wind outside picked up, rattling the windows and sending snow spiralling past the glass in hypnotic patterns. As he’d guessed in the car, the storm had arrived earlier than predicted, and he might indeed be stranded here. But the thought didn’t frighten him. If anything, it brought a sense of relief. It made life that much simpler.

After eating, he hunkered down in his sleeping bag, watching the storm through the windows. Sleep proved as elusive as it had been for many weeks now, so David lay awake, listening to the wind hammer snow against the walls of the church and the creak of the old timber as the building settled against the cold.

The storm blew over, the skies cleared, and the aurora borealis came in the small hours, spilling green light through the church windows. David sat up in his sleeping bag, his breath misting in the frigid air. The aurora danced across the sky in curtains of emerald and jade, pink and stark white, casting the snow-covered lava field in an otherworldly glow that made the landscape appear fluid, alive.

Despite the brutal temperature, David pulled on his boots and heavy coat, and pushed out into the night, steeling himself against the cold.

The aurora moved across the sky in slow, hypnotic waves, colours shifting from green to purple to a deep, electric blue that seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat. David stood shivering, utterly insignificant beneath the cosmic dance of charged particles and magnetic fields.

This was beauty on a scale that dwarfed human creations, older than scripture, older than faith itself. As he watched, a strange vertigo washed over him, as if he stood outside of time, a witness to the light of creation. The aurora had danced like this for millennia, before humans had words for God or grief or redemption. It had seen the rise and fall of empires, and even the great and powerful humbled by death.

The cold finally drove David back inside, but sleep remained elusive. He took one of the leather journals from the pile and settled back into his sleeping bag to read by the narrow beam of his head torch.

The entries were a mixture of practical observation and personal reflection, written in careful script by pastors and caretakers who had spent winter months in isolation.

Most were unremarkable — notes about supply deliveries, the condition of the building, brief theological meditations on the nature of solitude. But as David read deeper into one journal, the tone shifted.

Pastor Erik Magnusson had spent an entire winter here, and his entries grew increasingly strange as the months progressed.

 

The aurora came again last night, stronger than I have ever seen. The light seemed to pool in corners of the church, in places where it should not reach. My prayers have turned to protection. “When I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.” Micah 7:8

 

David turned the page to another entry.

 

The old records speak of this place before the church was built. The stories are troubling. The settlers speak of things beneath the lava that should not be disturbed. Things that long for the age of humans to pass, that they might roam the land once more.

 

David frowned as he found a loose piece of paper tucked between the leaves of the journal.

 

If the aurora comes on consecutive nights, and the earth trembles, and the sea shows patterns that mirror the sky, ring the bell to send what arrives back to the depths beneath.

 

David looked up from the note to find that the green light of the aurora had penetrated the church interior, pooling in corners and casting shadows that moved independently of the light source. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he watched tendrils of luminescence creep along the walls like living things, gathering in the spaces between the wooden beams.

There was no wind now, as if the earth held its breath to watch the celestial display. The silence was so profound that David could hear his own heartbeat, his own breathing, the soft rustle of paper in his hands. But beneath that, almost below the threshold of hearing, was something else. A low, rhythmic sound that might have been waves against the nearby shore — or something vast breathing in the depths of the earth below.

By morning, the wind had returned with renewed fury, driving snow against the windows in crystalline sheets. David brewed coffee on his stove, the familiar ritual an anchor in this place that seemed increasingly unmoored from the ordinary world.

As he sat in the front pew, cradling the warm cup between his palms, David wrestled with a growing urge to pack his things and head back to Reykjavík.

He could drive to the capital, catch the next flight to London, submit his resignation to the bishop, and end his charade of a ministry that had become hollow since Emma’s death. No one would blame him. Grief was acceptable grounds for stepping away from the pulpit.

But even as he considered the thought, another part of him rebelled against it. He had come here for answers, seeking some kind of encounter with the divine that might restore his shattered faith and give him a reason to continue. To leave now would be to admit that God was truly absent from this place — and his heart — and that the silence contained nothing but emptiness.

The theological implications alone troubled him. If God was omnipresent, as scripture taught, then He was here in this stark wilderness as surely as He was in the comfortable parish back home in Somerset. Perhaps even more so.

This landscape had been shaped by forces that operated on a timescale that dwarfed human history. Perhaps he needed to confront not the absence of God, but his own inability to perceive the divine, to see through petty human concerns to the wilder, ancient elements that stood so far above them.

David made his decision. He would stay.

This discomfort, this sense of spiritual vertigo, might be exactly what he needed to find a new perspective.

Around midday, David bundled himself in his heaviest clothes and ventured outside. The brief window of winter daylight revealed a landscape transformed. Snow had turned the tortured shapes of the ancient lava field into something sculptural, highlighting textures and patterns that spoke of unimaginable heat and violence eons ago.

David walked carefully across the uneven ground toward the distant sound of water lapping on the North Atlantic shore.

At the water’s edge, the sea stretched away toward the horizon, dark and restless beneath the winter sky. There were strange patterns in the water, geometric shapes that caught the pale light and reflected it back in configurations that seemed too regular to be natural. Hexagonal forms that reminded him of photographs he had seen of basalt columns, but these moved and shifted with the rhythm of the waves.

For a moment, he forgot the cold entirely, mesmerised by the display. This was beauty of a different order than anything he had experienced in his tidy English parish — wild, alien, indifferent to human presence yet magnificent in its very indifference. If God was present here, He was not the gentle shepherd of pastoral theology, but something far more ancient and awe-inspiring. Something terrible.

The wind began to pick up again, driving ice crystals against his exposed face with stinging force. David retreated to the church, stamping snow from his boots and shedding his outer layers in the relative warmth of the interior.

The patterns in the water lingered in his mind, and he returned to the journals with renewed purpose. He paged through mundane details of parish life, records of births, deaths, marriages, struggles with bills and roof repairs that plagued every church he had ever known. Human lives begun and ended in this remote place, no different in their essential concerns from the congregation he had left behind in Somerset.

But beneath the familiar entries, he noticed other things. Notations that seemed distinctly un-Christian, references to old customs and beliefs that predated the church’s construction. Runes sketched in margins, alongside Biblical verses of protection. Mentions of local families who still left offerings at certain stones during the winter solstice. Was the Christianity practiced here just a thin veneer over something older and more primal?

One journal entry caught his eye.

 

The archaeological team from the university arrived yesterday to examine the foundations. They claim they need to assess the structural integrity before the planned renovations, but I suspect they are looking for something. Dr Helgason mentioned pre-Christian artefacts, possible evidence of an ancient temple that once stood on this site and is now buried. I have tried to discourage their work, but they have official permission from Reykjavík.

 

The next entry was dated three weeks later:

 

The excavation has been halted. The workers reported hearing voices in the cave beneath the church, seeing lights where no lights should be. Dr Helgason packed up his equipment yesterday and left without explanation. The dig has been filled in, and the foundation stones replaced. Some buried things are better left undisturbed.

 

David flipped through the remaining pages, looking for more information about the excavation. He found only one additional reference, a brief note added in different handwriting:

 

The church was built here for a reason. The old religion runs deep. The silence is not empty.

 

The aurora returned that night, earlier and more intensely than before. David watched from the windows as green fire danced across the sky, but this time the light seemed to respond to something beneath the earth, pulsing in rhythm with vibrations he felt rather than heard.

There were geometric shapes in the aurora patterns that reminded him of what he had seen in the water earlier. The light moved with purpose, flowing along the walls and gathering near the altar.

David knelt in the front pew, trying to pray, but the words were hollow in his mouth. What if this place was not built to honour the divine, but to contain something that should remain buried? Something far older than his God.

And if the church was built to contain something, what would happen when that containment failed?

David shook his head suddenly, laughing at himself. The solitude was clearly getting to him, the lack of sleep over many weeks now, the tiny amounts of food he managed to stomach. Surely he was just on edge, his mind losing its tether to reality.

But even as the thought formed, David heard another sound.

Beneath the howl of the wind, a low scratching that came from below the altar.

And there, at the edges of his vision, shadows moved outside the windows. Not the chaotic dance of snow and wind, but deliberate shapes that seemed to flow like liquid darkness across the white landscape towards the church.

David paged back to the strange journal entry.

 

If the aurora comes on consecutive nights, and the earth trembles, and the sea shows patterns that mirror the sky, ring the bell to send what arrives back to the depths beneath.

 

As if summoned by the thought, a tremor ran through the ground beneath the church. The wooden pews creaked in protest, and David felt the vibration through his body where he sat. Of course, Iceland was a volcanic region, so earthquakes were common. Nothing to be alarmed by.

But combined with the strange aurora patterns and the shapes moving in the darkness outside, the tremor took on a more ominous significance.

The shapes beyond the windows were becoming more distinct now, and David pressed his face to the cold glass to get a better look.

Moving across the snow-covered lava field were figures that defied simple description. Not quite human in their proportions, not quite animal in their movement. They seemed to be composed of shadow and cold air, substantial enough to leave tracks in the snow but ephemeral enough that they shifted and flowed like smoke. Some looked like they had claws, and David thought of the gouges by the door.

The shapes moved with purpose towards the church.

David glanced back at the altar, which he now realised sat on top of a trapdoor. He could see the edges of it under the heavy table. What was down there? Did the shadows approach to release it from the depths?

More tremors shook the building, stronger now, from deep beneath the church foundations. The altar shifted a little.

David stumbled away from the window, his academic mind struggling to process what he was witnessing.

There had to be a rational explanation. Arctic storm mirages, perhaps, or his own hallucinations brought on by isolation and sleep deprivation.

But the journals. The warnings. The scratches on the door.

With hands that trembled from more than cold, David flipped through the pages of the journal with desperate urgency, looking for anything that might explain what he was experiencing.

Near the back, tucked between pages describing routine parish business, he found a folded letter.

 

To my successor in the sacred vigil—

If you are reading this, then you have begun to understand the true nature of our calling in this place. The church at Búðir was built by those who understood there are forces in this world older than Christ, older than the concept of faith as we understand it.

The missionaries who first came to this region studied the old records and spoke with the last practitioners of the ancient ways. They knew that beneath the Búðahraun lava field lay something that should not be awakened, entities that have slept since before the ice came, before humans walked this earth.

They could not destroy what lay beneath. Such beings are not subject to exorcism or holy water or the reading of scripture. But they could contain them, using the power of faith as a binding force. The church was built not to celebrate God’s presence but to maintain His vigil against what sleeps beneath. The peal of the bell is not a call to prayer. It is a binding spell, maintaining the containment our predecessors established.

Each winter brings the test. The aurora calls to them, and they stir in their slumber. The bell must be rung, the vigil maintained. Not as an act of faith, but as an act of duty to all who would live in ignorance of what waits in the darkness, of what will roam the earth once more when we are gone.

Pray if you can. But ring the bell whether you believe or not.

—Pastor Bardur Einarsson, December 1834

 

David’s hands shook as he scanned the letter. The temperature in the church had dropped even further now. Ice crystals formed on the windows, and his breath hung in the air like fog.

Another tremor shook the building, stronger than before, and David heard the sound of stone grinding against stone, as if massive blocks shifted beneath the church floor.

Cracks appeared on the stone floor, hairline fractures that spread outward from beneath the altar like a spider’s web.

The shapes outside the windows multiplied now, flowing across the snow like an advancing tide of living shadow, moving with purpose toward the church. David could hear them calling with a sound like wind through hollow bones lying deep in ancient caverns.

Perhaps these creatures were here when the first humans crossed the land bridge into Iceland. When the Vikings arrived, and when Christianity stole the beliefs of the pagans. Perhaps they had endured the construction of the church above their land, but human civilisation, human existence itself, all of it was only a brief candle flickering against the vast darkness of deep time.

What was one man’s grief over his wife’s death compared to such immensity? What was one crisis of faith against the backdrop of geological epochs? Emma’s cancer, his own spiritual struggles, the comfortable concerns of parish life, all of it shrank to insignificance in the face of beings that measured time in millennia.

The sound of stone cracking grew louder, and the altar began to tilt as the floor beneath it subsided. The ancient bindings were clearly failing, worn thin by time and starved of the faith needed to maintain them.

Ring the bell to send what arrives back to the depths beneath.

David stood frozen with doubt. How could one man, stripped of faith and certainty, stand against forces that had waited longer than human memory? How could the ringing of a simple bell banish entities that predated the very concept of worship?

He looked at the bell rope hanging near the altar, then at the cracks spreading across the floor, then at the shapes pressing against the windows with increasing urgency. The aurora blazed overhead in patterns that hurt to look at directly, and the temperature continued to drop toward levels that would soon make survival impossible.

David hesitated. What if he just let them come, let them reclaim what had always been theirs? They had waited beneath the ice and stone for eons before humans ever walked this frozen peninsula, and part of him yearned to surrender to that vast indifference, to let the darkness wash over him and end the grinding weight of grief that had followed him across continents.

It would provide the silence that had eluded him since his wife’s death, and he could rest at last.

A sudden shaft of aurora light pierced the church windows, falling across Emma’s gold cross where it lay beside his pillow.

She would not want him to yield. He knew it with every bone in his body. It would be a betrayal to give up the church while her spirit was still with him.

Perhaps faith didn’t need to be about believing in God’s love or providence or a divine plan. Perhaps it was about acting with purpose despite God’s silence, and maintaining the vigil even when meaning had been stripped away.

David reached for Emma’s cross, his fingers closing around the familiar weight of gold against his palm. Her faith, if not his own, gave him strength.

He took hold of the bell rope.

 He might no longer believe in God’s love, and no longer find comfort in prayer or scripture, but he could still choose to act. He could ring the bell, not as an act of faith, but in the refusal to yield to ancient forces. Humanity still walked this earth and despite so much darkness in the world, it was worth saving for another dawn.

The rope was cold as iron in David’s grip, and as he tugged it down, the bronze bell above pealed out across the ancient lava field, clear and defiant against the aurora-lit sky. The sound seemed impossibly loud in the frigid air, echoing off the glacier and rolling across the snow-covered stones like a challenge thrown at the feet of gods older than memory.

David clutched Emma’s cross, holding onto what faith he had through her as he rang on.

The shadows drew back from the windows. Tentatively at first, but then faster, their forms dissipated into the snow, becoming one with the elements once more. The sound beneath the church quietened. The tremors stopped.

There was no logical reason the sound of the bell should drive these beings away, but perhaps it was just evidence that humanity still walked the earth, and that if a solitary human would still ring on the edge of the glacier, it meant the world was not yet ready for the end of time. And David rang on into the night.

 

***

 

The next day, when winter light finally dawned, David stood in the doorway of the Black Church of Búðir, one hand resting against the heavy frame. There were fresh claw marks next to the old, slashed deep into the wood, but whatever had made them was gone now, banished for who knows how long.

The ancient lava field stretched before him. Snow still covered the twisted basalt formations, but the shapes beneath appeared different now — not random geological accidents, but deliberate configurations. A story written in fire and pressure, in the slow dance of tectonic plates and the patient accumulation of geological time.

In the distance, Snæfellsjökull glacier loomed against the morning sky, its ice-crowned peak catching the pale sunlight and throwing it back in crystalline fragments.

David hefted the pickaxe he had found in a store cupboard and walked out behind the church. The small graveyard lay enclosed by a low stone wall that was barely visible beneath the snow. The headstones were simple, made of weathered granite and basalt, carved with names and dates that marked the passage of human lives in this remote place. Names in Icelandic and Danish, dates spanning centuries, brief inscriptions in languages David couldn’t read but whose meaning he could guess. Beloved husband. Cherished daughter. Gone to God’s rest. Simple monuments to human love and loss, standing sentinel over graves dug into ground that was frozen solid for most of the year.

Near the centre of the graveyard, David found a space between older graves where the snow was shallow, where the ground might yield more easily to his efforts. He only needed a little patch.

He hacked at the ice-hardened soil.

As he dug, David felt something shift inside him. Not the return of faith as he had once understood it, but something deeper and more fundamental. The physical labour, the bite of cold air, the resistance of the ancient earth beneath his hands. It grounded him in a way that theological study never had. This was not about doctrine or scripture or the comfortable certainties of seminary education. This was a connection to something vast and enduring, something that would continue long after his own fleeting existence had ended.

When the hole was perhaps eight inches deep — as far as the frozen ground would reasonably allow — David stopped digging and reached into his inner pocket. Emma’s cross lay warm against his palm, the simple gold chain catching what little sunlight filtered through the overcast sky. She had worn it every day for thirty years, through their courtship and marriage, through illness and health, until the very end.

David held the cross for a long moment, sensing its weight. Not just the physical mass of metal and chain, but the accumulated weight of a lifetime of belief. Emma’s faith had been simpler than his, certainly stronger.

He placed the cross gently in the shallow hole and covered it with the frozen earth he had excavated. At Emma’s funeral, he had stood numb and hollow while others spoke of God’s plan and eternal rest. Here, alone with the glacier and the sleeping things beneath, he felt something like peace settling into the spaces grief had carved out of him.

He was not burying Emma’s faith. He was planting it here, adding her strength to the accumulated spiritual energy of generations who had worshipped in this place, who maintained the vigil, who held the line against forces that sought to reduce human existence to cosmic insignificance.

When he finished, David stood over the unmarked spot and looked out towards the vast glacier.

It watched from the distance, patient, eternal. The lava field stretched away in all directions, thousands of years of frozen fire bearing witness to one more day.

 

Author’s Note

 

The Black Church at Búðir is a real place on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in Iceland, a few hours’ drive northwest of Reykjavík. A church was established there in 1703 and the current church was built in 1848. There is a small graveyard next to it towards the sea, and it is still used for local worship and events. Any supernatural elements are, of course, fictionalised.

You cannot stay in the Black Church, but the wonderful Hotel Búðir is right next to it. We stayed there the night before my fiftieth birthday in March 2025 and visited the church on the day of my birthday. It is a truly special place in a starkly beautiful, remote area of Iceland, and as we drove away, the first inklings of this story came to me.

Snæfellsnes and the Snæfellsjökull volcano were the inspiration for Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and also for Icelandic Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness’s novel Under the Glacier. Both wrote of the stark beauty and the sense of deep time you can feel on the peninsula. On this theme, I also recommend Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, which provides a similar perspective on the insignificance of human life against the backdrop of geological time.

 

You can find Hotel Búðir at www.hotelbudir.is and more on the Black Church at www.budakirkja.is

You can read my trip notes and see my photos from five days in Iceland, including the Black Church and the aurora borealis at:
www.booksandtravel.page/Reykjavík-northern-lights-iceland