Snæfellsnes

Snæfellsnes is the western peninsula under the glacier-volcano Snæfell — a dramatic, ice-capped finger of land reaching into the Atlantic, and the Icelandic setting of the saga romance of Viglund the Fair. Here, by Holmkel's River, stands Foss, where Ketilrid grows up beside Viglund, the two lovers fostered together and bound from childhood; and across this peninsula the romance's many reverses play out before, rare among the sagas, its happy end. Snæfellsnes is the corpus's image of the romantic west — the glacier-crowned peninsula whose beauty frames the gentlest of the sagas, the country of faithful love rather than blood-feud, where the corpus's tenderest tale of constancy and reunion unfolds beneath the white cone of Snæfell.