Potential Viking Age Site Washed Away by Flood in Southern Iceland

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The volcano Hekla as depicted in a 16th century illustration from Olaus Magnus's Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus. From Wikimedia Commons.

An unexcavated archaeological site, potentially from the Viking Age, was washed away by a glacial lake outburst flood in South Iceland earlier this autumn. Iceland Magazine reports:

Uggi Ævarsson, the Cultural Heritage Manager of South Iceland[,] tells RÚV that the ruins had neither been charted nor catalogued, let alone explored by archaeologists.

This is all the more serious because the ruins could have dated back to the Viking Age, he tells RÚV: “This is a great loss. Now we are missing another piece of the puzzle which is the settlement history of Skaftártunga region. These floods come regularly here, and then the nearby volcano Hekla also has her regular eruptions, all of which makes the settlement history of this region extremely interesting.”

Glacial lake outburst floods are highly destructive. Outside of priceless loss to the historic record that the loss of such a site may cause, this particular flood caused significant damage to the region, washing away a road and causing damage to several farms in the region, resulting in losses of "ISK Hundreds of Millions" as reported by Iceland Review Online.

Ásatrúarfélagið Temple at Reykjavík Construction to Begin in February

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Reykjavík, Iceland: The Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (Ríkisútvarpið; RÚV) reports that Iceland's Ásatrúarfélagið, the largest Germanic neopagan organization in Iceland, will begin construction of its first structure for worship, a modern temple (or, less ambiguously, a modern hof), in February in Reykjavík.

Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, allsherjargoði of the Ásatrúarfélagið, says that the erection of such a temple is a historic event because no such temple has been erected in Northern Europe since the Temple at Uppsala in 1070 ("Í Norður-Evrópu hefur ekki staðið hof síðan hofið í Uppsölum í Svíþjóð var byggt 1070, þannig að þetta er heimssögulegur viðburður").