RAUFARHOFN, Iceland —

Dwarves…

Norse mythology …

Ancient viking gods…

They’re not the first things that come to mind when most people think of the Arctic.

But before you laugh, the residents of this remote Icelandic village would like you to know one thing: after years of neglect by the South, Odin the God of War, may very well end up doing more for their economy than the Reykjavik political class ever has.

“The herring went away and maybe they forgot about us,” says Jonas Fridrik Gudnason of the current state of Raufarhofn since the fish stocks collapsed in the late 1960s taking the village’s economy with it.

“So of course our project is a little bit crazy. But it has to be. We need something crazy to make people come up here.”

From boom to bust

Raufarhofn is located on the top end of Melrakkasletta, a peninsula stretching up towards the Arctic Circle in northeast Iceland.

During the country’s herring boom in the first half of the 1900s, Raufarhofn was an important port, home to 11 fish processing and salting stations, and up to 2000 residents during some periods. People in the region still speak with pride about those years, describing the village as one of the most valued harbours in the entire country.

But after the herring stocks collapsed, Raufarhofn never recovered.

Now home to less than 200 people, Arctic Henge may be the community’s last big economic hope – as long as they can convince the South to buy in on completing it.

The little project that could…

Arctic Henge, known as Heimskautsgerðið in Icelandic, is a community-driven tourism project inspired by Icelandic folklore and featuring a sprawling, photo-ready landscape reminiscent of England’s Stonehenge.

Based on Völuspá (The Wise Woman), an old Norse poem describing the world’s creation and presenting such characters as a seer, Odin the God of War, and a cast of dwarves so staggering it’s hard to keep track of, Arctic Henge features a series of massive arches made of old volcanic rock set up to catch sunlight at specific angles like a giant sundial.

The project was the brainchild of Erlingur Thoroddsen, a local hotel manager, who thought the big monument was just the thing to put Raufarhofn back on the map – both economically and in the national consciousness. Thoroddsen first had the idea in 1998 and pushed the project through all manner of fits and starts, including the 2008 financial crisis, until his death in 2015.

Gunnar Johannesson, an Arctic Henge board member, describes Thoroddsen as “ahead of his time” in fusing Icelandic culture and history with the Instagram-worthy photo possibilities that have helped drive Iceland’s tourism boom in the South.

“He had such ambition for the community and saw potential where no one else did,” Johannesson says. “We lost a lot when he passed away.”

But the region’s remote location, and lack of transport and tourism infrastructure, means Arctic Henge struggles to rally consistent financing from the government and funding bodies in the South.

It’s a situation that clearly baffles Johannesson, who says he supports the project even through he lives in an entirely different town, because he believes Arctic Henge will benefit the entire region.

“There’s a tendency for the South to look, not just at our project, but any project in the North, as not worth it, as serving too few people,” says Johannesson, who’s based in Husavik, a town of approximately 2000 people, 140km southwest of Raufarhofn, where he manages the Travel North agency.

“But we should be turning those conversations around. Communities like Raufarhofn are starting to fade but they deserve to be built up after what they contributed to Iceland during the herring years. That’s why the nation should give this idea, and others like it, support.”

Though Arctic Henge is open to the public — even on the coldest, greyest days one or two photographers can usually be found prowling the grounds searching for the perfect image — the project is technically unfinished.

Around 40 million Icelandic kronur — ISK, ($520,000 CDN), has come through this year so the parking lot, a path and a bridge can be completed this summer. But another 110 million ISK ($1.4 million CDN) is still needed to finish the monuments and landscaping, get electricity and running water to the site, and finish off things like the all-important dwarf sculptures.

The uncertainty is palpably frustrating to board members — some who’ve been volunteering their time, energy, and paying things like project-related travel expenses out of pocket, for up to 15 years.

“In Iceland everything is very complicated, very long, very expensive and requires endless, endless, endless, endless, endless paperwork,” says Gudnason. “But we keep at it like a bad habit.”

The North & the ‘everything-outside-of-Reykjavik’ divide

But the challenges faced in developing a tourism project like Arctic Henge aren’t unique to Raufarhofn. They’re shared by many small Arctic communities no matter what country they’re in.

How do you exploit spectacular nature, when the only roads to get there are underdeveloped, seasonal or even non-existent?

How do you encourage people to visit your region when there are no hotels, restaurants or other tourism infrastructure to accommodate them?

And maybe most importantly, how do you even get people to the North in the first place when it’s often cheaper to fly to places like London or Paris than it is to fly to the Arctic, even when it’s in your own country?

Marketing the North

The problem isn’t that Iceland’s North is without sites.

Statistics from Visit North Iceland, the marketing arm for this region, show half the people that visit Iceland during the summer come North to visit Akureyri, the biggest city in Iceland’s North, and Lake Myvatn, one of Iceland’s top attractions.

But in the winter that number plunges to around 11 per cent.

And in 2017, only 35,000 of Iceland’s 2 million visitors made their way up to the Melrakkasletta peninsula, where villages like Raufarhofn are located.

“If you look up what’s talked about in the media, it’s always how Iceland is full and overcrowded,” says Arnheidur Johannsdottir, managing director of Visit North Iceland. “But that only affects about 5 per cent of the destinations. The rest of the country is happy to welcome more people.

“Tourists only want Reykjavik because they think there’s nothing interesting to see in the North, but that is so, so wrong. We have the beautiful scenery, just like the South, but we also have what I’d call ‘the Arctic way of life,’ being close to nature and community.”

To help promote the region, Visit North Iceland is launching a major project called the Arctic Coast Way in 2019. The 800km route will stretch across north Iceland and is being marketed as an off-the-beaten-track route that will take visitors through 21 of some of the country’s most remote villages.

All that needs to be done now is to make it easier, and more reasonable, for people to get up to the North in the first place.

Iceland, a country? Or just a city called Reykjavik?

One of the key challenges this region faces is shared by many places in the circumpolar world whether in Canada, Alaska or Europe: trying to convince remote southern capitals that investment in the North is worth it.

“We’re always working on these issues,” says Johannsdottir. “We have so much to offer, but if people can’t afford to even get up here, that’s a hurdle. We need to lobby politicians for better roads and transport, reasonable flights, and to make sure that people understand these things are important not just for northern communities , but for everyone.

“It’s all part of a bigger national discussion that we’ll have to have at some point: do we want Iceland to be an actual country or just a city called Reykjavik? Because if we don’t invest in our smaller communities, that’s what will happen.”

It’s not like there’s no precedent in Iceland for the transformative power of new infrastructure in the North.

The village of Siglufjordur, located on Iceland’s north coast, was also economically decimated by the end of the herring industry and lack of an all-weather road. But that all changed when the 12 billion ISK ($155 million CDN) Hedinsfjardargong mountain tunnel project opened in 2010, finally connecting the village to Iceland’s main transportation networks.

The tunnel project also prompted local businessman Robert Gudfinnsson, head of the board of directors of biotech company Genis, to invest 4 billion ISK ($52 million CDN), mostly from his own personal fortune, into developing Siglufjordur, turning the dying village into a prosperous community with a thriving tourism industry and diversified economy – all because people could finally get to it.

Getting the North on the tourism radar

Gudrun Thora Gunnarsdottir, director of the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre and based in Akureyri, says the North needs to be integrated into a wider tourism strategy, something she says would help distribute travellers more evenly throughout the country and ease tourism bottlenecks in the South.

“Tourism is a very complicated phenomenon, you have issues related to environment, to culture, to education to infrastructure– it touches everything in society and needs a holistic approach,” Gunnarsdottir says. “But Icelandic political and decision-making structures were set up to govern a fishing and agricultural society that doesn’t exist anymore – not something like mass tourism bringing 2 million people a year into a country of 330,000.

“We’re gradually seeing changes but investing in a road in the North is still seen in old terms: as building a road for a small village no one goes to, not as investing in a road that will help develop tourism and diversify the economy in our northern communities.”

As for the folks back in Raufarhofn, they hope any integrated tourism strategy will take their village, and others like it, into consideration, but while the politicians are at it, can someone, somewhere, just help them get Arctic Henge finished once and for all?

“I thought we’d be long done with this, but I’m an old, grumpy, retired man and still at it,” says Raufarhofn’s Jonas Fridrik Gudnason. “We may seem like just a few silly people way up here, but we can’t stop now. We have to finish what Erlingur started.”