Atlas
A name born of steam
At Gunnuhver, the ground smokes, the mud boils, and the boundary between earth and air always seems unstable. Yet the name does not arise from the geothermal landscape: rather, the landscape has been understood through a story. Tradition places Gunna here, a diminutive of Guðrún, a woman who after death was said to have returned as a draugur, a revenant able to trouble the living until she was led, or forced, into the steam crater that now bears her name.
This is the heart of the tale: a debt, an apparently minor material slight, a death followed by disorder, and finally the intervention of séra Eiríkur í Vogsósum, the priest-magician who, in Icelandic tradition, knows how to govern what can no longer be contained by any ordinary authority.
Gunna, the debt, and the return of the dead
In the most widespread version, Gunna lived in great poverty. She rented a small house or an outlying farm in south-west Iceland and was unable to settle what she owed her landlord, Vilhjálmur Jónsson. When he took her cooking pot, the most valuable object she possessed, humiliation became the centre of the story: this is not just any domestic quarrel, but the fracture between destitution and power, between one who can confiscate and one who loses even the little she has.
After Gunna’s death, tradition relates that her spirit did not remain at rest. The house, the grave, and the roads around the place filled with unsettling signs: the dead woman on one side, the landlord on the other, and between them a community interpreting events as the work of a hostile presence. In some versions Vilhjálmur dies soon afterwards; in others, the revenant wanders nearby and disorients those who pass through the area. The narrative point does not change: everyday violence returns in supernatural form.
This is precisely where the legend draws its strength. It did not arise to ennoble a monster, but to give shape to a very concrete social conflict. The confiscated cooking pot, poverty, the body that does not rest: these are small details, and for that very reason memorable. The tale turns injustice into a presence that can no longer be ignored.
Séra Eiríkur and the trick of the thread
At this point, séra Eiríkur Magnússon í Vogsósum enters the story, a real historical figure of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who later became one of the great protagonists of Icelandic folklore. In tradition, he does not act as a saintly exorcist in the strict sense, but as a man able to employ cunning, authority, and a certain familiarity with the borderland between Christianity and magic.
The recorded versions do not agree in every detail. In one, Eiríkur sends a man with a white cloth or an exceedingly long handkerchief; in another, a ball or bundle of thread appears. Gunna is persuaded to take hold of one end, and from that moment the trick is done: the presence is drawn towards the point where the heat beneath the ground and the story of the place overlap. In one variant the ghost plunges into the jet; in another, she remains circling the edge, unable to part entirely from either the thread or the crater.
These differences matter. They do not alter the general meaning, but show how the tale travelled by word of mouth and adapted to different places on the peninsula: Kirkjuból, Höfn, Grænutóft, Reykjanes. The legend is not a single, fixed text; it is a family of tales sharing the same symbolic conclusion: the confinement of the ghost in a mouth of the earth.
The variants that hold the tale together
Jón Árnason’s collection contains several versions of the same narrative core, and this plurality is part of its value. One tradition calls her simply Gunna; another develops her as Reykjanes-Gunna or Önundar-Gunna. The full name Guðrún Önundardóttir appears as a possible identity for the woman behind the folkloric figure, but it should not be mistaken for a biography verified in the modern sense: the legend preserves a possible personal memory, later shaped by oral transmission.
The bond with the place also becomes clear in this way. Gunnuhver is not a case in which the landscape explains the myth; rather, it is a case in which the myth has fixed the landscape in collective memory. The geothermal field of Reykjanes, with its breathing steam and boiling mud, offers tradition a visible body. The story, in turn, gives the place a name that is not neutral: it recalls a debt, a death, a threat held beneath the earth.
How to read Gunnuhver today
Today, Gunnuhver lies at the heart of Reykjanes’s geothermal landscape, not far from Reykjanesviti and within an area that contemporary interpretation also presents through information panels and marked paths. Yet its cultural power does not depend on tourist infrastructure. It depends on the fact that here a relatively recent and well-attested tradition has given narrative form to a place in constant motion.
For this reason, Gunnuhver should be read as a threshold tale: between poverty and violence, between life and revenant, between the popular voice and the place-name. The steam is not proof of the legend; it is the reason the legend found here a credible and enduring home.
