THE STORY
Contents
- Selfoss, Iceland: The Suspension-Bridge Town Built on Imported Lava, Cursed Gold, and a Cloned Microbe
- How a Newcastle Bridge Built Tryggvaskáli, Swallowed a Milk Truck Whole, and Sent Selfoss’s First Native Son to Boeing
- Why Ingólfsfjall Shook Loose in 2008 and Why a Twelve-Year-Old Boy Could Not Turn Ingólfur’s Key
- What Swims in the Liquid Lead of the Ölfusá and Who Haunts the Sheep Cave at Hellisskógur
- The Falling Smokestack of 1956, the Cloned Microbe in the Rebuilt Dairy, and Bobby Fischer’s Dawn Grave
Selfoss, Iceland: The Suspension-Bridge Town Built on Imported Lava, Cursed Gold, and a Cloned Microbe
Stand on the pedestrian walkway of Ölfusárbrú when a forty-ton milk tanker rolls onto the span, and the town of Selfoss introduces itself through the soles of your boots. Steel expansion joints clank at the riverbanks. Hanger cables hum in the crosswind, and the eighty-four-meter deck dips and recovers like a sprung floorboard. Through the windshield of a rental car queuing on Route 1 fifty kilometers southeast of Reykjavík, the administrative seat of South Iceland (in the Municipality of Árborg) looks like the most uneventful stop on the Ring Road: a roundabout, a supermarket, a row of neat wooden gables, and a convenient place to buy a tub of skyr before racing east toward the waterfalls and glaciers. Even the name plays a quiet practical joke on visitors who confuse this flat lowland crossing with the horseshoe waterfall of Selfoss five hundred kilometers north in Jökulsárgljúfur.
Down here in the Flói lowlands, no vertical canyon drop exists. Instead, Iceland’s largest river by volume, the Ölfusá, slides past at four hundred twenty-three cubic meters per second while harbor seals swim fifteen kilometers inland from the Atlantic to hunt salmon between the dairy pastures. Beneath the asphalt sits an eight-thousand-six-hundred-year-old sheet of highland lava wrenched sideways by the parallel strike-slip faults of the South Iceland Seismic Zone. Once you step off the highway to read the ledgers, parish chronicles, and photographic archives that the spoken episode had to compress, every ordinary gable at this river crossing turns out to be bolted onto a trapdoor.
How a Newcastle Bridge Built Tryggvaskáli, Swallowed a Milk Truck Whole, and Sent Selfoss’s First Native Son to Boeing
Before the summer of 1891, Selfoss consisted of open riverbanks where travelers waited for wooden ferries across the Ölfusá. When parliamentarian and future Landsbanki director Tryggvi Gunnarsson secured a 66,000-krónur contract with the ironworks of Vaughan and Dymond in Newcastle upon Tyne to span the narrows, workers had to drag the steel twelve kilometers inland from the surf at Eyrarbakki on horse-drawn sledges over winter snow and ice. Beside the eastern masonry pier, master stonemason Sigurður Sveinsson, who had helped build the parliament house in Reykjavík a decade earlier, finished casting the concrete bridge abutments on August 29, 1890, and erected a timber house for the bridge crew, originally called Bróhús and known ever since as Tryggvaskáli. On September 13, 1890, barely a month after the roof went on, Sigurður’s wife María Matthíasdóttir gave birth inside that construction shed to a boy named Óskar Sigurðsson, the first native-born citizen of urban Selfoss.
Óskar grew up watching a settlement assemble itself around his cradle, and in 1911, at twenty years old, he emigrated alone to Winnipeg to study electrical work and sheet-metal fabrication. Six years later, he invented a new electric baking-oven mechanism so effective that General Electric offered him $11,000 on the spot for the patent. Being from Selfoss, Óskar turned the corporation down flat because he planned to manufacture the ovens himself, only to discover that competing with General Electric required more capital than a young immigrant tinsmith could raise. Unfazed, he married Norwegian-Icelandic Hansína Amundsen, moved to Seattle, and joined the Boeing Airplane Company in 1933. Over the next three decades at Boeing, he designed specialized aircraft tooling and workflow machinery, earned a four-year service extension past retirement age, and returned to Selfoss in 1963 to walk through the doorway of the bridge-builders’ shed where he was born.
That single timber house absorbed almost every strange footnote in twentieth-century southern Iceland. When King Frederik VIII of Denmark and Prime Minister Hannes Hafstein rode across Ölfusárbrú on August 5, 1907, after a week on horseback through Haukadalur and a livestock show at Þjórsárbrú, Tryggvaskáli’s accounting ledger preserved Voucher No. 139: Reverend Þórhallur Bjarnarson signed for twenty bottles of beer at thirty-five aurar apiece, glass included, for a total of seven krónur, while Frederik’s son King Christian X returned in 1921 to dine upstairs in the blue parlor still called Konungssalurinn. Five summers after Frederik’s beer bill, in 1912, when the footballers of Vestmannaeyjar (KV, now ÍBV) traveled to Reykjavík for the inaugural Icelandic Football Championship, they sailed on the Danish vessel MS Pexvie to Stokkseyri, strapped their boots and kit to their backs, and hiked inland to sleep at Tryggvaskáli, where they dined on fresh Ölfusá salmon before marching to the capital. And after innkeeper Óli J. Ísfeld opened the western door on September 30, 1929, to find a tall, gaunt woman and an eight-to-ten-year-old child who vanished on the threshold on the exact moving-day a pre-paid maid who had died over the summer was contracted to start work, waitstaff for decades reported unseen hands helping clear tables during the dinner rush.
Even the river crossing beside that doorway kept a ledger of its own. Three years after a low-flying German bomber banked over Laugardælaeyja island on Sunday morning, February 9, 1941, and killed British Army cook Martin Hunter at Tryggvaskáli’s kitchen window, the original 1891 suspension bridge gave way in the dark of September 6, 1944. Twenty-year-old Jón Ingibergur Guðmundsson was driving a milk truck back from Reykjavík with a second truck in tow driven by Guðlaugur Magnússon when the eastern suspension cable snapped. Guðlaugur’s truck landed on the river shallows, where crews later winched it out. Jón’s milk truck dropped straight into the deep bedrock chasm in the center of the Ölfusá, and to this day, not a single piece of that truck has ever been found. Jón wrenched himself out of the submerged cab, caught hold of a floating spare tire, drifted three hundred meters downstream to the bank west of Selfoss Church, and went on to serve from 1958 to 1993 as Selfoss’s Chief of Police, standing in uniform at the water’s edge on Leap Day, February 29, 1968, when winter ice jams backed the Ölfusá seven centimeters higher than the 1948 flood mark on Ölfusárbrú and rowboats had to rescue provisions out of Tryggvaskáli’s doors.
Why Ingólfsfjall Shook Loose in 2008 and Why a Twelve-Year-Old Boy Could Not Turn Ingólfur’s Key
Look northwest from the bridge deck, and the flat skyline ends against the 551-meter table mountain of Ingólfsfjall, an Ice Age subglacial volcano (tuya) whose steep brown cliffs are raked with raw grey scars. Those chutes tore loose at 15:45 UTC on May 29, 2008, when the South Iceland Seismic Zone ruptured in a shallow doublet earthquake (Mw 6.3) directly beneath the mountain’s western flank and triggered the parallel Kross fault five kilometers west within one to three seconds. Because the fault planes lay just three kilometers from Selfoss, virtually no warning interval separated the primary compressional wave from the shearing wave: the ground delivered an instantaneous lateral kick of 0.54 g. While reconnaissance engineers documented rigid concrete pillars shearing where window openings prevented flexing and thirty sheep died under collapsed farm outbuildings, a comprehensive post-quake audit of 4,746 low-rise homes revealed a subtler architectural lesson: zero residential houses collapsed, post-1980 homes built under Iceland’s 1976 seismic code suffered less than half the damage of older concrete and pumice-block houses, and up to ninety-one percent of the repair bill went to buckled floors and cracked interior walls.
Long before modern seismometers mapped those rotating "bookshelf" fault blocks, travelers riding the horse track under Ingólfsfjall treated the mountain as a place of physical and supernatural reckoning. According to the Sturlubók redaction of Landnámabók, Iceland's first permanent settler, Ingólfur Arnarson, spent the winter of 873–874 at the southern foot of the mountain at Fjall (Fjallstún), while his enslaved men Vífill and Karli walked the beaches to find his high-seat pillars. Centuries later, repeated rockslides pouring out of Branddalsgil slowly buried Fjall's hayfields, its medieval prayer-house, and its five farm buildings until a final landslide forced the homestead's abandonment in the eighteenth century. On the horse trail just below those scree slopes in the sixteenth century, Catholic Bishop Ögmundur Pálsson of Skálholt, who had owned half of the Fjall estate until selling his share in 1524, was riding past Ingólfsfjall on an episcopal visitation when the last of his eyesight vanished completely; halting his horse, he spoke the farewell still quoted across Iceland: "Farewell now, world! Long have you served me well." A hundred years later, in 1641–1642, Lutheran Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson rode up the mountain's northern crest to measure Inghóll, the oval rocky mound where oral tradition insisted a blind, aging Ingólfur Arnarson had been buried with his dog beside him so he could face out over his entire Ölfus land claim. While the bishop's servants stacked a stone cairn atop the mound, poet Stefán Ólafsson composed an ex tempore verse warning that a dark, gaunt draugur was rumbling beneath the boulders under their boots.
Local farmers who tried to profit from Ingólfur’s grave found that the mountain enforced a strict contract of its own. Everyone in Árnesþing knew the story of the Ölfus and Grafningur diggers who levered Ingólfur’s gold chest halfway out of Inghóll until one man shouted that they would succeed whether God willed it or not, sending the chest plunging back into the stone while the excavated gravel whirled back into the pit by itself. Fewer outsiders hear the second treasure protocol preserved in Jón Árnason’s folklore archives: Ingólfur’s ghost visited a pregnant farmwoman in her sleep and promised her unborn son every coin in the mound on the condition that she name the boy Ingólfur and feed him until his twelfth winter exclusively on mutton and fresh milk drawn from ewes, cows, and above all mares. She kept the bargain to the letter. At twelve years old, the boy hiked up to Inghóll and found the great chest sitting in the open air with the iron key waiting in the lock, except a twelve-year-old’s wrists were only strong enough to turn the heavy key halfway. By the time he grew into his full adult strength and climbed back up the mountain, the stone had closed over the chest for good.
What Swims in the Liquid Lead of the Ölfusá and Who Haunts the Sheep Cave at Hellisskógur
The flat plain stretching away from Ingólfsfjall is imported highland rock. Eight thousand six hundred years ago, a fissure in the Bárðarbunga volcanic system opened more than one hundred thirty kilometers northeast in the interior highlands and poured twenty-six cubic kilometers of molten basalt down the river valleys to the Atlantic. If you want to see how a lava sheet travels that far without freezing solid, drive fifteen minutes west of Selfoss into Raufarhólshellir, a 1,360-meter-long lava tube formed 5,200 years ago where an insulating roof crusted over a draining river of fire and left subterranean walls stained rust-red by ferric iron oxide (Fe2O3), white by leached silica (SiO2), and pale gold by extremophile bacteria. Under Selfoss, the Great Þjórsá Lava cooled into dark tholeiitic basalt speckled with large white crystals of calcium-rich plagioclase feldspar: ancient crystal fragments plucked from a deep gabbroic mush chamber at least nine kilometers down in the crust.
Just north of town, two rivers collide on top of that highland stone: the milky glacial Hvítá from Langjökull and the crystal-clear, spring-fed Sog from Lake Þingvallavatn. Where the glacial rock flour swallows the clear water, the Ölfusá turns the matte grey of liquid lead. For migrating Atlantic salmon, including the thirty-nine-pound South Iceland record fish landed here in 1910, that zero-visibility silt acts as an optical shield against predators as they nose upstream toward clear spawning gravels, pursued fifteen kilometers inland by harbor seals that haul out on the Kaldaðarnes islands. For generations of river folk, however, that opaque current hid more than salmon and seals. Between 1636 and the twentieth century, dozens of witnesses logged a black, humped river monster (skrímsli) patrolling the channel; in 1907, four men watched a four-to-six-meter creature wallowing above Laugardælir for half an hour, and years later a dog accompanying salmon anglers near Gíslastaðir barked itself hoarse at the same dark back in the current. Even stranger was the river’s white water-horse, the Nykur: instead of luring waders to their doom like every other water-steed in Icelandic folklore, the white Nykur spotted by farmer Hannes Gíslason of Kotferja in the summer of 1905 swam with its head and mane held high above the rapids and later carried two capsized boatmen from Stóra-Sandvík safely back to shore.
Follow the eastern riverbank two kilometers north of the bridge into Hellisskógur, where townspeople planted birch, rowan, and Sitka spruce to break the lowland wind, and the landscape reveals an older marine shoreline. Tucked among the trees sits Stóri-Hellir (Einholtshellir), a cavern hollowed out of Plio-Pleistocene basalt by crashing ocean surf at the end of the last Ice Age, when the weight of retreating glaciers still pressed the southern lowlands beneath a higher sea. For centuries, farmers at Einholt penned nearly a hundred sheep inside this wave-carved rock chamber, stacked winter hay in its back recess, and wedged sheep bones into small holes in the basalt walls. Then a young local man, rejected in love, walked into the dark mouth of the sheep cave with a long blue scarf and never walked out; walkers among the birches at dusk still speak of glimpsing a quiet figure in a blue scarf beneath the former sea cliff.
The Falling Smokestack of 1956, the Cloned Microbe in the Rebuilt Dairy, and Bobby Fischer’s Dawn Grave
Walk back into the center of Selfoss opposite the bridge, and you step into a twenty-first-century architectural loop. In 1929, southern dairy farmers founded the Mjólkurbú Flóamanna cooperative to break merchant monopolies and hired State Architect Guðjón Samúelsson to design a stately functionalist dairy hall. Twenty-seven years later, on March 1, 1956, the cooperative tore Samúelsson’s building down to expand industrial milk production: an occasion remembered in the county photo archives because when demolition crews felled the dairy’s twenty-five-meter smokestack, the chimney crashed off-target and took the corner off an adjacent building while master carpenter Kristinn Vigfússon climbed onto the fallen brickwork in his flat cap to inspect the damage. Then, in 2021, developers rebuilt Samúelsson’s demolished 1929 dairy from original blueprints as the centerpiece of thirty-five reconstructed historic buildings from across Iceland.
Down in the basement of this brand-new old dairy sits the Skyrland exhibition, where architecture and microbiology tell the exact same story. As University of Iceland researchers Valdimar Tr. Hafstein and Jón Þór Pétursson document in their Cambridge heritage study, traditional Icelandic skyr, technically a strained skim-milk cheese that preserved the ninety percent of milk left over after churning butter, was tended exclusively by women on individual farms and summer shielings for a thousand years; every household maintained its own multi-species starter (þétti) of Streptococcus, Lactobacillus, and wild yeasts in wooden barrels. After the 1934 dairy monopoly law handed distribution to regional cooperatives, male dairy managers and male dairy scientists (mjólkurfræðingar) replaced the farmwomen and systematically engineered the wild variation out of the vat: Mjólkurbú Flóamanna introduced centrifugal straining in 1942, invented year-round skyr from skimmed milk powder in 1956, and in 1968 teamed up with MS Dairies to pasteurize the curd, separate the whey by machine, and pack “the new skyr” into 500-gram plastic tubs instead of slicing it from wooden barrels into parchment paper. Even though Mjólkurbú Flóamanna’s manager Grétar Símonarson admitted in a 1969 newspaper interview that the bacterial content was “certainly very different and far smaller” while cooperative veterinarian Guðbrandur Hlíðar complained that old farmstead skyr contained “innumerable bacteria that are hard to research and account for,” that diverse household microbiome was ultimately reduced to a single cloned strain of one microbial species, mass-produced in a multinational biochemical factory and trademarked abroad as “Heirloom Icelandic Skyr Cultures.” Selfoss knocked down its 1929 dairy and cloned its ancient microbe, then rebuilt the building from scratch to celebrate the heirloom.
Perhaps that is why the people who live here work so hard to leave a mark of their own on the grid: come in June for Kótilettan when grilled lamb smoke mixes with the sweet-sour lactic tang of the dairy plant, or in August during Sumar á Selfossi, when residents divide the commuter streets into four fiercely defended color zones, green, red, pink, and blue, wrapping lampposts in ribbons and painting garden rocks to stake out their neighborhoods. Yet the town's sharpest reminder of how little nature cares for human boundaries waits both in the river current and two kilometers upstream. Unprepared visitors regularly pay the local Stupid Tax by treating Selfoss like a harmless suburban park: they step off the raised paths in the Flói Bird Reserve into knee-deep tidal peat trenches, crush fragile mats of rootless Racomitrium moss on ancient lava that take decades to heal from a single bootprint, or scramble onto slick, algae-coated basalt ledges beside the two-to-six-degree Ölfusá without realizing that 423 cubic meters per second of silt-blind water can trigger instant cold-water gasp reflex and sweep a swimmer into the same dark chasm that still holds Jón Guðmundsson's 1944 milk truck.
Walk two kilometers upriver from those rapids to the old pre-1891 ferry landing at Laugardælir, and the hum of Route 1 drops away behind a small white church. Here, in January 2008, just four months before the May earthquake kicked the plain sideways, Bobby Fischer was buried at dawn in the wet Flói grass. Thirty-six years after his 1972 victory over Boris Spassky in Reykjavík turned sixty-four squares into the nerve center of the Cold War, and three years after Iceland’s parliament rescued him from stateless exile with a passport, the eleventh World Chess Champion rests beneath a plain dark stone within earshot of the golden plovers and the river. Walk back to the narrows at Ölfusárbrú as the next milk tanker rolls onto the span, and feel the steel deck dip and recover under your boots. On a strike-slip fault between a glacial river and a crumbling mountain, rigid structures crack and old buildings get torn down and redrawn; what endures is what knows how to give.
Quick Facts: Selfoss & the Ölfusá Crossing
| Feature | Verified Field Detail |
|---|---|
| Location | Selfoss is a town in the Municipality of Árborg in South Iceland. |
| River | The town stands beside the Ölfusá river. |
| Bridge history | The first Ölfusárbrú opened in 1891, collapsed in 1944, and was replaced in 1945. |
| Bobby Fischer | Bobby Fischer is buried at Laugardælir Church near Selfoss. |
A STORY. NOT A GUIDE.
ICELAND. TOLD.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Is there a waterfall in the town of Selfoss, South Iceland?
No; the southern town of Selfoss (in the Municipality of Árborg, 50 km southeast of Reykjavík) takes its name from low basalt rapids on the Ölfusá river where harbor seals swim inland, whereas the famous horseshoe waterfall named Selfoss is located nearly 500 km north in Jökulsárgljúfur canyon.
Why is the Ölfusárbrú bridge in Selfoss historically significant?
First opened on September 8, 1891, using Newcastle steel dragged 12 km over snow from Eyrarbakki and hand-welded suspension rods, Ölfusárbrú created the urban settlement of Selfoss around the 1890 bridge-workers’ house Tryggvaskáli, collapsed under two milk trucks on September 6, 1944 (leaving driver Jón I. Guðmundsson’s truck permanently in the riverbed chasm while he survived on a spare tire), and was replaced by the current 84-meter suspension span in December 1945.
What geological features underlie Selfoss and caused the May 29, 2008 earthquake?
Selfoss rests on the 8,600-year-old Great Þjórsá Lava (25–26 km³ of plagioclase-porphyritic basalt from the Bárðarbunga volcanic system) inside the South Iceland Seismic Zone, where two parallel north-south strike-slip faults ruptured within 1 to 3 seconds on May 29, 2008 (teleseismic Mw 6.3, geodetic Mw 6.1) and hit the town with 0.54 g of horizontal peak ground acceleration.
Where is Bobby Fischer buried in Selfoss?
Former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer (1943–2008), who won the 1972 “Match of the Century” against Boris Spassky in Reykjavík and received Icelandic citizenship in March 2005, is buried in the small cemetery of Laugardælir Church (63.9466, -20.9672), two kilometers upriver from the Selfoss bridge.
