Face to Face
Since the beginning of Iceland´s settlement, the ties between man and nature in the country have been unbroken. The Icelandic landscape, raging weather and maddening quiet of the wilderness have induced the spinning of terrifying tales and stories about the country´s supernatural beings: Trolls and elves. For centuries, these narratives have been nurtured and have flourished in the poetic embers of the story-naton of the North with nagging winds, spooky fog on the fells and the fantastic shapes clearly seen in the country´s badlands. In this beautiful book, Magnús Magnússon takes readers on a journey to the mysteriously magical sites of Icelandic nature, with unique photographs of the landscape´s fantastic shapes and nuances, where enormous visages and mythological beings loom, Face to Face, everywhere. Magnús Magnússon was born in Hafnarfjörður in 1945 but has lived and worked in Norway since 1978. The pictures in the book were taken in the summers of 1999 and 2000 on his trips all over Iceland. Author Vilborg Davíðsdóttir based the photo captions on Snorra-Edda, through them tracing the mythological story of creation and the stories of dealings between the gods and the giants. Dr. Ólína Thorvardardóttir wrote the preface to the book, and there is a short summary of the history of Iceland´s geology by Hjálmar R. Bárdarson.