From Húsavík we drove southwest along the Ring Road toward Akureyri, towards Goðafoss (Waterfall of the Gods) on the Skjálfandafljót river.

The river is one of Iceland’s longest, originating as glacial meltwater from Vatnajökull and running north through ancient lava fields before reaching the coast at Skjálfandi Bay, the same bay we had been on that morning watching whales. The waterfall sits almost exactly halfway between Akureyri and Lake Mývatn.

Goðafoss is not a tall waterfall. It drops only about 12 meters. What it has is width and shape: a broad horseshoe arc roughly 30 meters across, where the river splits and falls in a curved curtain before rejoining below. The surrounding lava field, laid down by the Trölladyngja shield volcano around 7,000 years ago, frames it in black basalt.

The name carries a specific historical weight. In the year 1000 AD, Iceland was close to civil war over religion. The country had been under increasing pressure from Christian Norway, and at the Alþingi, the national parliament at Þingvellir, the two factions arrived armed. Both sides agreed to let the law-speaker, Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, settle the matter. The choice was significant: Þorgeir was himself a pagan priest, not a Christian. He withdrew for a full day and night under a fur cloak to deliberate, then emerged and declared that Iceland would adopt Christianity, but with the compromise that pagans could continue to worship the old gods privately. It was a political solution as much as a religious one, designed to prevent the split from becoming a war.

According to legend, on his way home to his farm in the north, Þorgeir stopped at this waterfall and threw his carved statues of Thor and Odin into the water. The act gave the falls their name, Waterfall of the Gods.

Historians note that this particular detail first appears in written sources from the 1870s and is absent from the earliest accounts, including the Íslendingabók, the Book of the Icelanders, written by Ári Þorgilsson in the early twelfth century, which describes the conversion but not the statue-throwing. Whether it happened or not, the story became inseparable from the waterfall, and the name stuck. A stained-glass window depicting the moment can be seen today inside Akureyrarkirkja, the main church in Akureyri. We will try to visit the church tomorrow.

We camped for the night on the lawn of the local hotel.