The Story of Jón Rögnvaldsson

The wind in Iceland does not care for justice. It sweeps across the hills, through the fjords, and over the farms, carrying whispers and lies as easily as it does truth. In 1625, in the northern reaches of Eyjafjörður, those whispers found a name: Jón Rögnvaldsson.

Jón was no one important. A farmhand, a man of hard labor and little luxury, he had no wealth, no power, and no enemies—until the day he did. It began with small misfortunes: a boy falling ill, a handful of horses collapsing without explanation. In a land as stark as Iceland, where survival balanced on the edge of the knife, such things were not mere bad luck. No, they demanded explanation.

Magnús Björnsson, a Danish-educated bailiff, had brought home the fire of European witch hunts. He’d read the books, learned the signs, and he saw witches where others saw only shadows. It was Magnús who pointed the finger at Jón when the whispers grew too loud to ignore.

When they came to search Jón’s home, they found runes—carved and written, intricate and strange. Jón admitted to writing them, though what purpose they served, he wouldn’t say. His brother, Þorvaldur, a poet with words sharp enough to draw blood, tried to defend him. “Runes,” Þorvaldur said, “are nothing more than words carved into wood. Jón could no more cast spells than a stone could fly.”

But Magnús wasn’t swayed. Words, he knew, held power. And if Jón had scratched them into wood, surely he had the power to summon spirits, to curse children, to command the winds themselves.

The trial was swift. They said Jón had raised a ghost to harm the boy, that his runes called forth sickness like a storm. The people watched as he was sentenced, their silence heavy with complicity. Some believed, others didn’t, but belief was irrelevant when fear was stronger.

And so Jón Rögnvaldsson was taken to the stake. The fire burned bright against the dark sky, the smoke curling up as if carrying his story to the gods themselves. His screams were said to echo in the hills long after his body had turned to ash.

In the years that followed, Jón became a symbol of the witch hunts that swept through Iceland, though they burned hotter and crueler elsewhere in Europe. Here, they claimed mostly men—men like Jón, who lived on the edges of society, who were too strange or too quiet to blend in.

Jón’s runes are long gone now, scattered to the wind. But the wind remembers. It carries his name, whispers it in corners and crevices, a reminder of how quickly fear can turn the ordinary into the monstrous.

Because in Iceland, as elsewhere, it was never the witches who held the power—it was those who hunted them.