On the grounds of Höfði, the white house on the Reykjavík shore, a tall dark column stands with a strange crown on top, a cluster of carved forms in weathered copper that could be tools, or ships, or the tops of two ancient posts. The last reading is the right one. The work is called Öndvegissúlur, the high seat pillars, and it marks the oldest decision in the city’s history: the decision about where the city would be.
The pillars themselves belong to the settlement story. A high seat pillar was a carved wooden post, one of a pair that flanked the seat of a household’s head, and it was as close to a sacred object as a Norse farmhouse kept. When Ingólfur Arnarson sailed for Iceland around the year 874, the Book of Settlements says he threw his pillars overboard within sight of the new land and vowed to build his farm wherever the gods carried them ashore.
The sea took its time. Ingólfur wintered on the south coast while two of his people walked the shoreline looking for the pillars, and the search is said to have taken three years. They finally found them washed up in a bay full of steam from the hot springs, and so the farm was raised there, and named for the steam: Reykjavík, the bay of smokes. One of the searchers is said to have grumbled that they had walked past good land to settle on this remote spit. He was looking at the future capital of the country.
The monument is the work of Sigurjón Ólafsson, one of the great Icelandic sculptors of the last century. The city commissioned it around 1970 and it was raised beside Höfði in 1971, a tall pedestal carrying the carved crown, cut copper sheets fixed over an iron frame with concrete poured inside. Sigurjón abstracted the two pillar tops into something between driftwood and treasure, which is more or less what the originals were.
There is a small story in the name as well. Sigurjón himself never titled the piece. The art historian Björn Th. Björnsson started calling it Öndvegissúlur, the name fitted, and after the sculptor’s death his widow asked that it be kept. So the monument to a found object ended up with a found name.
The pillars have had one brush with the world’s cameras. In October 1986 Reagan and Gorbachev met inside Höfði, a few steps away, and while the two men talked the world’s broadcasters filmed the white house from the lawn, with a dark copper crown standing in the frame. The spot where a Viking threw furniture into the sea spent two days as the backdrop to the end of the Cold War.
You will find the column on the shore walk along Sæbraut, past the Sun Voyager and Íslandsvarðan, on the Höfði grounds. It is open, free and rarely crowded. Sign a photograph of it for someone deciding where to plant their life, a move, a new city, a fresh start, and the card carries the oldest advice Reykjavík has to give: throw the pillars, and trust where they land.