Saga Museum

This guide to the Saga Museum in Reykjavik opens with two figures frozen mid-step on a shore: Ingolfur Arnarson, remembered as Iceland's first permanent Norse settler, and his wife Hallveig. It traces how designer Ernst Backman built the museum's unnervingly lifelike figures starting in 1999, and how room by room they stage more than a thousand years of eruptions, earthquakes, and plague that this small country lived through. You can try on reproduction Viking chainmail and weapons as you go, standing exactly where those figures stand.