This volume is jointly published by the National Museum of Iceland and the culture and medieval centre Snorrastofa. It is written by Dr. Guðrún Sveinbjarnardóttir.
Reykholt in Borgarfjörður is among the most important historical sites in Iceland. A church building was probaby erected there in the 11th century and a church centre was established there in the 12th century as the siteazsz had been wealthy in terms of property and easements for a long time. One of the first, staðir, or church centres, established in the early twelfth century, Reykholt remained a major ecclesiastical and political centre throughout the medieval period and beyond. The site is probably best known for its thirteenth-century occupant, the writer and chieftain Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda and Heimskringla among other works. Reykholt was his main residence from the early thirteenth century until his assassination there by the emissaries of the Norwegian King in 1241, and it features prominently in the contemporary Sturlunga saga.
The first systematic excavations at the site, which are presented in this volume, took place between 1987 and 1989, and 1997 and 2003. The farm seems to have been continuously occupied from around AD 1000 until the first half of the twentieth century. The first dwelling was a traditional turf-built longhouse, but in the twelfth or thirteenth century it developed with individual wooden buildings of types which have not been encountered elsewhere in Iceland, but have parallels in Norway.
Descriptions in contemporary written sources corroborate the physical evidence that the buildings at Reykholt were special and different to those at other sides at the time. Although there is some indication of the high status of the site in its material culture, such as the cultivation of cereal and foreign trade, the status in the medieval period was largely expressed through its impressive structures, including some that offer clear evidence for the use of the geothermal energy at the site in the medieval period. This is the first site in Iceland to yield such remains.
Þjóðminjasafnið gaf út árið 2012.
