Directly ahead stands a dark bronze figure of a bearded man on a tall stone pedestal, with one hand resting on a carved pillar topped by a dragon head.
This is Ingólfur Arnarson, the settler many Icelanders count as the first to make a permanent home in Iceland, around the year eight hundred seventy. And he is not standing here by accident. This hill, Arnarhóll, points straight to one of Reykjavík’s founding stories. According to the old saga tradition, Ingólfur threw his öndvegissúlur into the sea when he first sighted land. Those were his high-seat pillars, the carved posts that framed the honored seat in a Viking hall. He vowed to settle wherever they washed ashore. His enslaved servants, Karli and Vífill, searched for them for three years and finally found them here.
So Einar Jónsson, Iceland’s first major sculptor, gave Ingólfur exactly that pose: standing with his pillar, looking out over the land he claimed. It is a simple idea, but a strong one. Not a man charging into battle... a man choosing a place.
If you look closely at the pillar, Einar sneaks in more than one story. Along with the dragon head, he carved images from Norse myth: Odin with his ravens Huginn and Muninn, the world tree Yggdrasil, the Midgard Serpent, and Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse. Einar loved symbolism, which means art that carries meaning through signs and images rather than plain explanation. He did not want to copy old classical sculpture like a dutiful student. He wanted Icelandic art to speak in its own accent.
The funny part is that this monument took ages to happen. People started talking about honoring Ingólfur in the mid-nineteenth century, when national pride was running high and Icelanders were debating how to mark one thousand years of settlement. In eighteen sixty-three, the folklorist Jón Árnason urged Reykjavík’s thinkers to decide how the first settler should be remembered. A year later, Sigurður Guðmundsson, known as Sigurður the Painter, argued that the only proper place for a memorial was this very hill, where fate supposedly delivered the pillars.
But talk is cheap, as we say back home. The Reykjavík Craftsmen’s Association finally pushed the project forward in nineteen oh six. Einar had already modeled the statue in the early nineteen hundreds and showed it publicly in Copenhagen in nineteen oh six, but arguments slowed everything down. He wanted relief panels around the base with scenes like Ragnarök, the Norse end of the world, and the Norns, the mythic beings who shape fate. The committee thought that was too complicated, and Einar had to give up the idea. That is why the pedestal stays plain while the pillar carries the poetry.
The association unveiled the statue here on the twenty-fourth of February, nineteen twenty-four, at three o’clock in the afternoon, before one of the largest crowds Reykjavík had seen. They then presented it to the state as a gift. Casting the bronze abroad cost forty thousand krónur, a huge sum at the time, worth well over ten million krónur in today’s money. Not bad for a man who arrived with no real estate office, just a promise and two missing pillars.
This monument is always open, so you are welcome to linger here as long as you like.
Ingólfur still stands here as Reykjavík’s long first glance at itself.
When you are ready, continue on and let the city show you how legends turned into government.
