Stand on the grounds of Oddur Golf Club and you can feel it—the quiet breath of history moving beneath the turf. The course rests on the edge of Garðabær, a thriving community today, but one whose story reaches back far beyond its modern streets and rooftops. Step just a little beyond the fairway and you’re at the doorway to Heiðmörk, Reykjavík’s beloved conservation area, a reminder that this landscape has been shelter, pasture, and home long before it became a place to tee up a drive.

Garðabær may have become a municipality in 1878, but people have walked this land since the very beginning of Iceland’s story. More than a millennium ago, Norse settlers arrived on these volcanic shores, and Landnámabók—the medieval Book of Settlements—preserved their footsteps in ink. Its pages tell of two early farms on this very ground: Vífilsstaðir and Skúlastaðir.

Vífilsstaðir carries the name of Vífill, once a slave of Ingólfur Arnarson, the first permanent settler of Iceland. Legend says that Ingólfur freed him, granting him the dignity of his own land. Vífill chose this place—these slopes, these winds, this view toward the sea—as his home. When you walk the course today, you are tracing the same ridgelines he would have known.