Where the man who basically invented Norse mythology as we know it was murdered by 70 men in his own basement
1206
Snorri settled here
1241
Assassinated here
70
Men sent to kill him
~1220
Wrote the Prose Edda
The Story
Here's the thing almost nobody realizes: most of what the modern world "knows" about Norse mythology — Odin, Thor, Valhalla, Ragnarök, the whole pantheon — survives largely because one 13th-century Icelandic farmer-politician sat down at this exact spot and wrote it all down. That man was Snorri Sturluson, and Reykholt was his home for 35 years, from 1206 until his death here in 1241.
Snorri wasn't a monk in a quiet scriptorium. He was staggeringly ambitious — twice elected lawspeaker at the Althing (medieval Iceland's parliament, the closest thing the country had to a head of state), a shrewd operator who built his wealth through marriage and land deals, and a man who spent his final years tangled in a lethal family feud so bloody it gave an entire era of Icelandic history its name: the Sturlung Age. He defied the King of Norway, who wanted him kept out of Iceland. That decision killed him.
"Eigi skal höggva!" — "Do not strike!" — Snorri's last words, according to the Sturlunga Saga.
On the night of September 23, 1241, roughly 70 armed men — sent on the Norwegian king's orders, led by Snorri's own former son-in-law — broke into his home and killed him in his cellar. It's a wildly disproportionate number of assassins for one aging scholar, and it tells you exactly how much his enemies feared him. Despite the violence of his death, what actually survived him were the books: the Prose Edda, the single most important source for Norse mythology as it's understood today, and Heimskringla, his sweeping history of the kings of Norway. Some scholars believe he wrote Egil's Saga too.
As You Walk Around
Easy to miss if you're not looking
Snorralaug, the small stone pool beside the church, is where Snorri actually bathed. The Sturlunga Saga describes him sitting in this exact pool in 1228, chatting with friends — a genuinely ordinary, human detail from someone who otherwise reads like a legend. It's one of the oldest protected archaeological sites in Iceland, first listed in 1817.
Look for the covered passage near the pool. A tunnel once ran underground from Snorri's farmhouse directly to the bath — part of it is still there, covered by a small lodge, letting you connect the murder scene and the hot tub as the same short walk apart that they actually were.
The small museum (Snorrastofa) is worth the few minutes it takes. It's not a big stop, but it gives real texture to what you're standing in the middle of.
Fun Trivia
Things most visitors don't know
He reportedly used 200 calfskins to write one book. Everything was written on vellum, by hand — a staggering material cost for a single work, and a reminder of just how labor-intensive medieval writing actually was.
The dispute that shaped his whole career started next door. A property fight over the farm Deildartunga — the exact land your last stop, Deildartunguhver, sits on — set off the chain of events that led Snorri to be fostered out as a child, which shaped the rest of his political rise.
He's sometimes called "the Homer of the North." Without his writing, huge parts of Norse mythology as pop culture knows it today — including most of what inspired modern Marvel-style Thor and Odin — simply wouldn't have survived in any coherent form.