Reputation
In Icelandic Hekla is the word for a short hooded cloak which may relate to the frequent cloud cover on the summit. An early Latin source refers to the mountain as Mons Casule.
After the eruption of 1104, stories (which were probably spread deliberately through Europe by Cistercian monks) told that Hekla was the gateway to Hell. The Cistercian monk Herbert of Clairvaux wrote in his De Miraculis (without naming Hekla):
The renowned fiery cauldron of Sicily, which men call Hell's chimney ... that cauldron is affirmed to be like a small furnace compared to this enormous inferno. —Herbert of Clairvaux, Liber De Miraculis, 1180A poem by the monk Benedeit from circa 1120 about the voyages of Saint Brendan mentions Hekla as the prison of Judas.
The Flatey Book Annal wrote of the 1341 eruption that people saw large and small birds flying in the mountain's fire which were taken to be souls. In the 16th century Caspar Peucer wrote that the Gates of Hell could be found in "the bottomless abyss of Hekla Fell". The belief that Hekla was the gate to Hell persisted until the 1800s. There is still a legend that witches gather on Hekla for Easter.
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Famous quotes containing the word reputation:
“I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“The reputation of a man is like his shadow; it sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.”
—French Proverb. Quoted in Dictionary of Similes, ed. Frank J. Wilstach (1916)
“So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)