Reykjavík (Reykjavik)

Reykjavík — 'Smoky Bay' — is the place where Iceland's first settler made his home, and the root of the whole settlement. When Ingólf Arnarson neared the new land he cast the high-seat pillars of his hall into the sea, vowing to settle wherever the gods let them drift ashore; after three years his thralls found them in this bay of steaming hot springs, and there Ingólf made his home and gave the place its name. Reykjavík is the corpus's image of the founding hearth — the bay where the first permanent Norse settler trusted the drift of sacred wood to choose his home, the devout, fateful beginning of the kingless island's whole history, the spot where the settlement of Iceland, and so the entire world of the sagas, took root.