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Asmund entrusted his son to the keeping of a man called Haflidi, the captain of a ship that was sailing for Norway; father and son parted with but little sorrow between them, but Asdis accompanied the boy part of the way, and gave him a sword which had been owned by Jokul, her grandfather; for which Grettir thanked her well, saying he deemed it better than things of more worth, so he came to the ship.
So Grettir went on till he found a dale in the jokul, long and somewhat narrow, locked up by jokuls all about, in such wise that they overhung the dale. He came down somehow, and then he saw fair hill-sides grass-grown and set with bushes. Hot springs there were therein, and it seemed to him that it was by reason of earth-fires that the ice-cliffs did not close up over the vale.
At last Grettir found it so dreary there, that he might abide there no longer: then he gat him gone from the valley, and went south across the jokul, and came from the north, right against the midst of Shieldbroadfell.
I was the more surprised, as I had read detailed accounts of it in several descriptions of travel. I traversed the whole summit of the mountain and climbed to the adjoining jokul, but did not perceive an opening, a fissure, a depressed space, nor any sign of a crater.
The Jökul does not possess many large glaciers, but one of them has, in past years, been a great source of trouble to the people who live near it. This is the Rembesdal glacier, at the far end of the Simodal Valley, near Eidfjord. The Simodal is a beautiful and fertile valley, with farms on either bank of the river, which rushes through it to the fjord.
Now at Thorkel's was a woman brought up, Asdis by name, who was the daughter of Bard, the son of Jokul, the son of Ingimund the Old, the son of Thorstein, the son of Ketil the Huge: the mother of Asdis was Aldis the daughter of Ufeigh Grettir, as is aforesaid; Asdis was as yet unwedded, and was deemed the best match among women, both for her kin and her possessions; Asmund was grown weary of seafaring, and was fain to take up his abode in Iceland; so he took up the word, and wooed this woman.
In the autumn Grettir went to Goatland, and waited there till bright weather came on; then he went up to Goatland Jokul, and made for the south-east, and had with him a kettle, and tools to strike fire withal. But men deem that he went there by the counsel of Hallmund, for far and wide was the land known of him.
To every other part of the island the engineer has succeeded in penetrating; one vast space alone of about four hundred square miles has defied his investigation. Over the area occupied by the Skapta Jokul, amid its mountain-cradled fields of snow and icy ridges, no human foot has ever wandered.
"You see this volcanic island," said the Professor; "observe that all the volcanoes are called jokuls, a word which means glacier in Icelandic, and under the high latitude of Iceland nearly all the active volcanoes discharge through beds of ice. Hence this term of jokul is applied to all the eruptive mountains in Iceland." "Very good," said I; "but what of Sneffels?"
How was it possible, I asked, that millions and billions of tons of lava could be vomited forth from the crater of any mountain within sight? Here was a solid bed of lava spread over the valley, and many miles beyond, which, if piled up, shrunken and dried as it was, would of itself make a mountain larger than the Skjaldbraid Jokul, from which it is supposed to have been ejected.
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