Iceland in Photos and Words

Volcanoes, geothermal fields, lava plateaus, geysers and hot springs.
Glaciers, glacial lagoons, fjords and waterfalls.
Iceland, straddling a plate boundary, still being pulled apart.

One breathtaking view after another, born of an Earth in motion.

Icelandic place names were unfamiliar to me, and there are a lot of them in these pages. In the Japanese text, all those names in katakana can make the writing rather hard to get into. But calling everything “this mountain” or “this lake” would hardly help identify the places. After trying a few approaches, I settled on some basic conventions.

In Japanese, I generally write place names in katakana, adding words such as “mountain,” “lake,” or “waterfall” where helpful. In this English version, I use the Icelandic spellings, with the same kinds of additions. A name alone often gives little clue to what sort of place it is. This may not always be standard usage, and it can mean repeating part of the name: foss, for example, already means “waterfall,” so “Svartifoss waterfall” says it twice. I am aware of that. It is partly for my own benefit, too—I often find myself wondering, “Now, what was that again?”

In the Japanese text, I also give the Icelandic spelling in parentheses when a place first appears. Sometimes the Icelandic name brings the place to mind more readily than the katakana does, which I find interesting. For very well-known places, I sometimes use the familiar names found in guidebooks.