Leo Parkinson, overfed and emotionally vulnerable, deviates from a trip on a leisure cruise to bask in the radiance of the Briksdal Glacier, an icy monument that stands as a temporary salute to humanity’s vanishing mythology.

The gargantuan cruise ship blots out the pale Norwegian sun, and vomits thousands of passengers onto the port of Hellesylt. Our ancestors are avenged; the Vikings are overrun.

We are dragged along by throngs of waddling holidaymakers as they swarm the Norwegian village. Hellesylt is small; the locals, who are hiding in basements and praying to Óðinn for deliverance from the tourists, number around 300. The buildings are dotted around a hill which is crowned, much to Óðinn’s chagrin, by an austerely beautiful white church. One of the village’s treasures is quickly overtaken by the tourists; our Skechers trainers pummel the narrow bridge as we gawp and thrust our smartphones at the Hellesylt Waterfall.

The waterfall cascades with incredible force, strikingly out of place in a village this size, this peaceful. It sits in the centre of the village and roars at the simple dwellings, at the stony bridges that sit adjacent to it, and at the quiet and friendly people who mill about, going on with their lives, ignoring the monster’s roars. Like Fenrir, the wolf-son of Loki raging against his chains, the waterfall shrieks as the world goes on around it.

The Briksdal Glacier

The Bus Journey to Briksdal Glacier

It’s a remarkably impressive sight in a remarkably charming village – but we have no time to dawdle. A blue bus, which groans at our collective weight, begins the winding journey through steep mountain roads and flat expanses of snowy emptiness. A thousand Christmas postcards pass by in the window as we shudder through the Norwegian autumn.

On the bus’s windshield is a laminated piece of paper with our destination – arguably the finest tourist attraction (of admittedly somewhat few) in this snowy pocket of the world. We are going to see the Briksdal Glacier.

While we still can.

The bus is gratefully relieved of its passengers on a gravel platform at the foot of a forested hill trail. We are in a trough of mountains – they tower over us, their snowy tips disappearing into the whisps of clouds, pillars supporting the canopy of cold grey that hangs over all. Vikings believed the mountains were the bones of the primeval giant Ymir, and it’s easy to see why; we walk between the ridges of his spine.

The path winds through sparse woodlands and impressive waterfalls. An endless trickling stream of pilgrims clad in Gore-Tex trudges up damp stone alongside cascading water. The Kleivafossen waterfall baptizes us with icy spray on the ascent, white foam hurtling down smooth rock like Valkyries charging on winged horses.

The hike, approximately 2.5 Kilometres, will take you through woodlands and riverside trails reminiscent of a Norse tale; dwarves hide behind boulders, elves scamper in the trees, German tourists chortle at the sheep in the small fields. Should you be less inclined to walk, you can book a ‘Troll car’ to speed you from the car park straight to the glacier itself, drifting around gravel paths like a far milder-mannered Vin Diesel.

About halfway through the walk, we find our first one. A wooden sign is staked into the ground, small and unassuming like a wanderers’ grave. On the sign it reads: 1860. At this point in time, the sign marked the beginning of the Briksdal glacier.

The Passage to The Briksdal Glacier

The Sorrowful Retreat of Briksdal Glacier

It’s still nowhere in sight.

We continue to walk. The signs continue appearing.

1880.
1910.
1930.
1960.

Trees. Boulders. Gravel. You dip between giant rocks (Ymir’s knuckles clenched as he was murdered by Óðinn) and cross over streams (the act was not born of cruelty; Óðinn wept) and still the glacier is not seen. The little wooden graves mark the erosion of the glacier. It’s disappearing at an incredible rate; every couple of decades it gains more of a lead on its escape. The trail continues.

Just as you begin to wonder if the damn thing has melted already, the earth dips and turns, and a placid lake is revealed. You can go no further. Beyond the water’s edge, the glacier pours in a perfect frozen arc into the lake.
A glacier’s ice is not just water. It’s soil, rocks, snow, sediment; it’s a slice of the ancient earth, frozen for untold thousands of years, a snapshot of primordial history captured in a painfully crisp stream of not-quite-eternity.

The colour is inimitable in the manmade world. You can taste the sharpness of its ice in the frosty air. The majesty of it is humbling – mythological. The Briksdal Glacier is an incredible and rewarding sight. But despite its still-prodigious size – flanked by the dizzyingly high mountains, the glacier still appears rather small.

Unlike the waterfalls, the glacier does not descend from the mountain in a flowing crescendo. Instead, it clings to the rocks as though attempting to reverse natural law and flow back up. To join with the greater bulk that breaches the lip of the mountain, and disappear from sight and smartphone and go back to the places still untouched by humanity.

We know from passing the signs that the glacier is disappearing. You can compare the picture we took above (June 2024) to the one featured on the Briksdal Glacier’s website; you can already see some difference. If you do not come to see this Glacier soon, you will miss the chance forever.

Although the viewing area of the glacier is only an unassuming lake shore, and the frosty creature itself is increasingly diminished, the energy of the place is inescapable. The primeval ice carries history beyond reckoning, and the heaviness of the past sits heavily in the cool, crisp air. If you make the trip, I encourage you to crouch beside the lake and sip the glacier’s water from your cupped hand; you will be imbibing the long-forgotten whispers of the world’s past. (And probably some rare bacteria).

‘There is no going back’

Urgency is an undeniable aspect of the appeal here. I cannot deny that part of the satisfaction on our ruddy wind-scorched faces came from the knowledge that we are seeing something future generations will not; we got here and saw it before it was gone forever. And of course, we’re seeing something that has already gone; past generations saw it in its full splendour. The lakeside waits for another wooden grave.

The glacier isn’t melting. It’s retreating – hauling itself away to make a desperate escape into the impassable Jostedal mountains. Terrified of our minds and what we’ve done to the trolls, elves, and Norse Gods, its abandoning us to the world we’ve created and vanishing back to the place we can no longer remember. Where in the world can we still see things that are completely true? What could be more honest than the complete, captured stillness of the glacier? When was the last time you stood in a place and felt the weight of nature’s sheer continuity?

Here is the true beauty of the Briksdal glacier. It is the mournful beauty of the cemetery. The creatures of folklore are long gone. There are no dwarves beneath the stone. There are no elves within the trees. Jormungandr has long departed our overfished waters, probably chopped into sashimi. Fairytale folk had their homes eradicated by the expansion of industry; their faces and bodies were mutilated by our growing rationality.

Our mischievous woodland companions were reduced to cereal box caricatures and mostly-forgotten stories told to bored children. Even Óðinn has only survived by becoming a crowd-pleasing Hollywood superhero. No longer the cloaked and sinister Bölverkr; now just the gruff, muscular and audience-friendly patriarch of a marketable
pantheon of posable action figures.

Our heroes of mythology, particularly Norse mythology, are dead and buried; Ragnarok came and went with surprisingly little fanfare. But in places like the Briksdal Glacier, you can see for just another moment why worship was borne from the earth; why we made giants out of mountains and monsters out of snakes. The new world did not take long to stamp out the old, and progress will erode the foundations of our old stories just as quickly as the glacier; new perspectives and new circumstances are coming and they’re coming soon. Think kindly of the near-extinct runaway glacier; you’re going to be just as old and frightened soon. Please don’t miss your chance to linger for one more moment in the old world, and see for yourself one final glimpse through the window of near-forgotten time.

If you would like to eat, benches and rain shelters are dotted along the trail, populated by friendly pilgrims with sandwiches nicked from the breakfast buffet on the cruise ship. We shelter in these, and after another soaking from Kleivafossen, we enjoy some surprisingly-not-that-much-of-a-rip-off coffee from the cozy restaurant at the top of the trail. Before long we pack ourselves back into the bus to return to Hellesylt, clamber back onto the cruise ship and heave away to invade another Norwegian port.

We feel extremely glad to have made the trip to see the glacier, and enjoy the sights from the bus window as we wind back down through the sprawling and picturesque Norwegian hills. Leaning against the window and gazing up into Ymir’s overcast brains, now completely blank and devoid of thought, I wonder what the ancient giant would think of my Skechers trainers and the cruise ship filled with thousands of drunken Brits, what Óðinn would think of the next film in his franchise, what it might have been like to walk these hills and dream of the elves and fey-folk and the secrets trapped within the
glacier.

Sitting in front of us are two excited Dutch students who chatter animatedly about the impressiveness of Briksdal and the death-defying hikes promised by the surrounding mountains. Beneath their sunny-blonde hair they wear backpacks, and one has a badge which reads ‘THERE IS NO GOING BACK’.