The Fire Sermon

We slept at the campsite here and I walked out to this before breakfast, mostly because I’d seen the roof from the road the evening before and couldn’t work out what it was.

It’s a chapel. The whole building is a single steep gable that runs all the way down to the ground on both sides, so there are no walls in the usual sense — just a roof, and a low base of pale stone with a cross cut into the end of it. Dark boards on the entrance face, slate on the flanks, and above and behind it the cliff of columnar rock the farm sits under. At half past seven the sun was still low enough to be coming across the front of it, and the cross was throwing its own shadow onto the stone.

It went up in 1974, and it is a memorial. In the summer of 1783 the Laki fissure opened about forty-five kilometres from here and started what is still one of the largest lava eruptions in recorded history — a haze that killed a fifth of Iceland’s population through the famine that followed, and that was noticed as far away as France as a dry fog that summer. The lava came down this valley toward the settlement. The priest at Kirkjubæjarklaustur, Jón Steingrímsson, held a service while it advanced. The lava stopped at the edge of the village.

Whether the sermon did it is not the point. What matters is that somebody stood in a building here and finished the service.

That is what this shape is for. It’s an unusual thing to find on Route 1 among the turf churches and the little white-and-red parish boxes: a piece of confident 1970s modernism, sharp-edged, almost brutal in its simplicity, doing exactly the job a monument is supposed to do — being obviously newer than the thing it commemorates, and obviously permanent.

I looked at it for ten minutes in a cold wind and then went back and made coffee.