One winterday, Blóðughadda returned from school soaking wet. Some strange voice inside her had forced her to play truant and take a deep dive into the ocean. From the moment she submerged herself in her father’s embrace the sea-girl became aware of her innate abilities. Without ever having received any form of training, she found herself to be able to outstrip sailfish in speed and withstood deep-sea pressures that would squeeze the life out of the most experienced diver. Instinctively, she uttered ultrasonic screams that convinced marine predators to leave her unharmed. Like a cod in the cold waters of the north she felt. Here, in the reign of her father Ægir, she discovered her true self. She would soon find out that the icy marine water had triggered the second stage of her development.
Her growth accellerated and her need for salt augmented. She experienced an almost unbearable hunger for sea-foods and started to devour huge amount of stockfish. As for delicacies, nothing seemed to excite her more than the sharp ammonia smell of rotten shark and the rancid taste of crude cod-liver oil. Only for leaves of dulse she had a sweet tooth. Soon the girl physically raised head and shoulders above her class-mates, parents and ultimately above almost all other Icelanders. A marine giantess of unmatched beauty she had become.
Jökullind had a different affinity for water. She liked it solid, preferably in the form of lustrous transparent rocks or fine white crystalline dust.As soon as she had reached the age of fertility, her already very low body temperature started to drop sharply and she slid away into a deep death-like dormancy. At first it was thought to be the end of her, but she kept on breathing normally. Witcraftsmen were clueless. Maybe her conscience needed to be suspended in order to go undergo some kind of transformation, comparable that of a pupa. Her temperature kept on dropping until it stabilized around the freezing point. Soon after that, her vital functions went back to normal. She quickly returned to the land of the living and felt as if nothing had happened. The event, however, had triggered the release of a massive dose of growth hormone. In the next eight years, she would horizontally gain no less than 3 feet. At the age of 18, Jökulind stood seven feet seven tall. The pale-skinned and green-eyed frost-giantess had reached the age of maturity.
When the light of day was running scarce and the tempestuous temper of warlords of weather kept men indoors, she ran barefooted through the barren waste. Sharp edges of ravenflint (obsidian), the most precious and darkest gift of earth’s fires left her feet unharmed. A velvet cloth of razor-sharp blizzards caressed her bluish-white skin while she replied to the howlings of the frost-giants. They understood their semihuman sister, an arctic princess built to be at peace with the extremities of the North like an unfreezable incarnation of frost.
In summertime, however, Jökullinds heart thawed and the sunlight wiped the cold harshness from her face. Part of her body began to flow like rivers and brooks through the Icelandic landscape, where she enjoyed the flowering spectacle.
The third girl, Hraungló definitely was the most eccentric of them all. Notwithstanding her frightening seven feet seven she was generally regarded as a very attractive young girl. She always wore a typically Icelandic skotthúfa with a black tassel, a red latex body and miniskirt and both her upper arms were adorned with an impressive viking-style tattoo. Sharp and shining black like Ravenflint were her claw-like fingernails, consisting of a substance related to the horny harness of beetles, only many times as hard.
One christmas, when she was eight, she had used them to mutilate the face of Grýla, who had entered her room. A fiery-red glow beamed from her irises like a stroke from Surtr sword. Everything that stood ablaze like Múspelheim’s fire, corroded like acid or smelled sharp like a knife in the nostril attracked her attention.
You'd better watch out before you messwith an Icelandic fire-giantess!
Many times she had troubles controlling her infernal instincts and had to inject herself daily with a drug that kept her from becoming pyrokinetic. A hot-tempered spitfire in every sense of the word. One time she knocked down nine strong motorcycle blokes because one of them had made a remark on her physical peculiarity. From that event onward, she was ill-reputed and no masculine soul would ever dare to harass the fire-giant’s daughter again. Her disfavour damaged.
Á hvað ertu að glápa?!!Only once she had a boyfriend, an athletic stunner, tall and heavily muscled. They had a very close relationship and enjoyed many moments of tenderness. But one night, Hraungló for a moment forgot about the magnitude of her physical strenght and almost strangled him during a passionate hug. The boy survived but his love for her had vanished. This saddening event only increased her frustration and she grew even more violent. Why did she have to be so different from anyone else?
A psychiatrist and friend of her parents told her she had no choice but to accept her constitution. From the knowledge that she might be genetically burdened with her father’s malevolence she should be morally obliged to let her stable human half take control of her destiny. He adviced her to to canalize her aggression by practicing extreme sports, because society wouldn’t keep on tolerating her psychotic behaviour. Especially for her, a titanium steel bar was constructed, one that could hold up to three tons at each side, because the weights in the Reykjavik gyms were insufficient for her.
Her obsession for saga literature awoke her interest for medieval martial arts and she decided to develop swordmanship skills. But even the most experienced master around didn’t dare to train her so she was forced to practice in a virtual room with a fencing simulator. A very boring experience. No computer program ever managed to beat her. Hraungló was neither fond of ice nor water, except in the form of a refreshing geyser-shower. But as a true fire maiden, she prefered heat that truly glows. She liked watching the new year’s fire-works with her step-parents, but in her view, nothing matched the infernal spectacle of her cradle, Mount Hekla erupting or the sweet perfume rising up from the solfatares, where her father’s gold is abundant.
Eldskýbrettabrun (Surfing on a pyroclastic flow) She was endowed with a sixth sense in that she was able to forsee with an unnatural accuracy the shiverings and fiery outbursts of the earth-mother months before they actually happened. She analysed fumarole samples with the precision of nano-age equipment just by making use of her sharp senses of smell and taste. The fire-mountain men were very much interested in her talent and took her with them every time they had to perform some field work. But she refused to wear the protective suit because it obstructed the subtle workings of her senses. Why would she?. Fire-mud couldn’t burn her and the highly venomous air it brought along was only perfume to her smell.
Sometimes Hraungló calmed down like a volcano going back to sleep. Then the gentle part of her human half came to play. Her eyes became less fiery, her fingernails less sharp and an almost angelic smile dispelled the sardonic grimace from her face. This was her way of representing the extreme opposites of Icelandic nature, the Mountain Lady's body.
In the year 2047, a national poetry contest was held for the quarter of a millenium celebration of the birth of humanity’s all times greatest poet, Jónas Hallgrímsson. The three best poems would be recited by its authors at Lögberg, the natural amphitheatre at Thingvellir, renowned for its fabulous acoustics. The whole literate part of the nation gladly engaged in this activity and all were determined to go to the utmost of their abilities. So did the Frónþrenning. They found inspiration in Icelandic nature where spirits of deceased skalds still wandered around whispering their unwritten poetry in þulur. These codes could only be deciphered by those whose blood was so intensely kvasir-positive, so finely tuned to the force of poetry that they were able to access the Icelandic spiritual world.And each of the three girls had her inborn way of deciphering these secrets.Hraungló unraveled them from the sulphurous smell of solfatares, Jökullind heard them in the gushing of glacier brooks and Blóðughadda saw them in the diverting drops of water from waves lashing against the coastal rocks.No one proved to be match for the literary powers of the Frónþrenning and the quality of their poems stood out far above the rest. Hraungló, Blóðughadda and Jökullind were selected. The norns had finally started to intertwine the fate of the three young girls and their coming union was soon to trigger an event unseen in human history. On November, 16 2057 the three young women found themselves at Thingvellir in front of the largest crowd ever present in the country’s history. They were dressed in the mountain lady’s outfit, the skautbúningur, Hraungló in lava-red, Jökullind in snowy white and Blóðughadda in marine blue.As the applause silenced, so did the winds, the birds, even the water of the Öxará stopped at the edge of the waterfall, disobeying the laws of physics. It was a never-heard silence, the absolute zero of sound, only to be broken by the voices of the ultimate trinity of fire, ice and water. Destiny was about to reach critical mass.Hraungló had just finished reciting the last poem when the thunderhammer struck the clouds. Storm-giants immediately answered the call and began to scourge the land. The earth mother shivered and the lackeys of Ægir lashed the Icelandic seashore like never before. Nature had returned to life with a vengeace. The frightened crowd, heavily shocked by the apocalyptic spectacle beheld a large cloud looming up over the great poets’ graveyard. It slowly moved towards Logberg, where it descended, growing thicker and and thicker until it formed the clear silhouet of a man. From all sides, people tried to gather around him in order to get a clear view. It was a man they all knew, Iceland’s most beloved son, Midgards god of poetry, Jónas Hallgrímsson. Nature calmed down again and the crowd silenced. Then Jónas addressed the nation. First he thanked all for gathering and for having attached such a great value to his writs and his role in the awakening of the national awareness. He told that it was almost impossible for a spirit to contact the living world this way and thanked the Frónþrenning for his awakening. From a world beyond he had witnessed the tremendous progress the world had been undergoing since his demise. Overwhelmed by sadness he was through the recent death of so many languages. In this respect, he couldn’t express enough gratitude to all those who had been taking care of the mother-tongue to the best of their abilities. “The norns of a language are its speakers”, he stated We and only we can decide whether or not we keep a firm grip on the thread back to the mother-tongue of our medieval ancestors. Only we can mend the bursts in the vital egg of our culture.In his hand Jónas held a book containing billions of words of poetic brilliance. The thickness of the pages was well within the reign of dwarfwidth (nanosized thickness) and the size of the characters could barely be spotted by the naked eye. They were printed with golden ink, originating from the same ore from which the ring Draupnir was made. Jónas told the crowd to close their eyes and form a living chain by putting a hand on each others shoulders. This chain lead to the Frónþrenning who had laid their hands on the book. Instantly the knowlegde it contained spead through the minds of people, like Draupnir gives birth to other rings of gold. The activity of the kvasir-positive factor in the blood of all Icelanders peaked and everyone had instantly a boundless knowlegde of his language and how to keep it unharmed. When the people opened their eyes, the great poet was gone.
From this event onward, the three girls become inseparable. They were celebrated as heroines but also very often considered a serious nuisance. In winter-times for instance, Jökullind’s sexual hormones peaked and she turned into a warhead of a nymphomaniac. Some serious incidents happened when she attacked men on the streets for immediate intercourse. A road block had to be set up and an army of cops was needed to get the better of her.
Her doctors injected her with lead-heavy lust-blockers in a dose large enough to send the whole of the Icelandic live-stock to the happy grazing grounds. This finally brought her hormone levels back to normal (to the relief of the masculine half of the Icelandic nation).
Jökullind, hin lostabrjálaða jötunstelpa leitar að reykvísku körlunum, sem hafa flúið til annars hluta borgarinnar. Löggæsla lokar veginum við gistihúsið Klöpp. "Táraþoka ykkar er ekki laukagnar verð,
ykkar kúlur ekki stungu nálar
og togleðurkylfur nota ég sem tannstöngla!
Víkið eða ég kýli ykkur út í hafsauga!
Hraungló’s temperament was completely unpredictable and depended on seismic activity. She became the most famous of the three when she stole the fire-beaming sword of her father Surtur in order to save the earth from an asteroid impact. On the top of Herðubreið, she held the sword above her. She whispered the secret Heimslitaþulur Múspellsheims (Muspellheim’s doomsday formula), which her father was planning to use on Ragnarökkur. The sword immediately stood ablaze and a blinding ray beamed from its point into space where it pulverized the giant boulder.
But one night, some 20 years after the event at Thingvellir, the threesome suddenly disappeared. Search operations were undertaken but every effort turned out to be vainless. A week later, a series of strange events unraveled the mystery: The Icelandic coast was coloured red when enormous amounts of dulse washed ashore. The Vatnajökull glacier, a shadow of itself as a result of global warming grew back to the size it had at the Landnáma and a submarine volcano opened near Surtsey and formed and new island. The threesome had thrown off their human half and continued their existance as parts of the Icelandic nature. From that moment onward Europe’s largest glacier was nick-named “vagg Jökullindar” (Jökulinds cradle). Dulse leaves came to be called “reifar Blóðughöddu” (swaddling clothes of Blöðughadda) and the new volcanic island, of course, was christened Hraungló. And thus ends the story of Icelands weirdest threesome. They lived on as a common feature in Icelandic poetry.
