Goðafoss

Twelve metres of drop across thirty metres of width on the Skjálfandafljót, at the junction of the ring road and the Sprengisandur highland route. The name can be read as waterfall of the gods or of the chieftain, and the popular story, that the lawspeaker Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði threw his statues of the Norse gods in after making Christianity the official religion in 999 or 1000, appears to be a nineteenth-century invention, first published in Denmark in 1879–82 and absent from Íslendingabók. A window in Akureyrarkirkja illustrates it anyway. A placename scholar suggests two crags resembling idols gave the falls their name.