Eyjafjord
Icelandic fjord where a monstrous bird repelled Harald's shape-shifting warlock, per the Heimskringla.
Eyjafjord is a fjord in northern Iceland that appears in the Heimskringla's account of King Harald's attempt to reconnoiter Iceland by sending a warlock in spirit form. At Eyjafjord, the warlock encountered "a bird so enormous its wings stretched over the mountains on either side" of the fjord, accompanied by many other birds both great and small, which attacked him and drove him off (Heimskringla, Ch. 37).
The Heimskringla's single attestation places Eyjafjord within a sequence of supernatural encounters: Harald's warlock visited each quarter of Iceland in animal form and was repelled by guardian spirits at each. The enormous bird at Eyjafjord represents the landvaettir -- protective spirits of the Icelandic landscape -- a motif that later appeared on the Icelandic coat of arms. The passage functions as both geography and cosmology, mapping Iceland's spiritual defenses onto its physical fjords.
Appears in: Cross-Source Entities, Places, Norse Tradition