So much of the traditional food in Iceland sounds like it was invented for an episode of Fear Factor. Fried sheep hearts and kidneys are the least of it. Fermented shark. (Recipe: bury shark in a hole and come back in a few weeks or a few months.) Singed sheep heads (Recipe: use a flaming torch to burn the wool off, then boil in water.) Soured ram testicles. (Recipe: I didn’t ask.)

So deciding what to have for dinner my last night in Reykjavik was not easy. I wanted to have a genuine Viking meal, not the innocuous “international cuisine” I’d had the previous nights. But not even the thought of a shot of brennivín, Icelandic schnapps, could make those entrees appealing.

Despite its Viking past, Reykjavik, located on a bay in southwest Iceland, is a friendly city. The largest city in a small country, nearly two-thirds of all Icelanders live there, but it retains a small-town feel, with the church steeple of Hallgrímskirkja dominating the view. Reykjavik City Hall rises from a duck pond, and a grassy plaza faces the Parliament Building. But unlike most small towns, Reykjavik also has many art and history museums.

Sturdy Icelandic horses wait to be assigned their riders.

I visited three museums, each of them focusing on a different aspect of Iceland’s Viking past. I walked past corrugated metal houses with brightly colored roofs in energetic contrast to the gray sky, past the duck pond and city hall, and past grassy lawns with enigmatic sculptures on my way to The Culture House, with its fragile copies of the epic Icelandic sagas.

Dimly lit rooms tell the story behind those stories blending myth and history, from rock paintings to treasured medieval manuscripts to modern Thor comic books. The Icelandic language is unchanged enough that people today can still read the sagas easily. Some people can even use them to trace their family history.

The Saga Museum, housed on a hill overlooking the city in a silvery building that also houses the city’s water towers, presents life-size figures re-enacting dramatic moments from Iceland’s history, including witch burnings, beheadings and a bare-breasted warrior woman. The building’s observation deck offers views of the “smoky bay” that gave the city its name.

The National Museum provides a more thoughtful look at Icelandic history, with artifacts from the earliest days of settlement to modern times. Those modern times in Iceland came recently; television first aired in the 1960s.

That was all the time I spent indoors in Iceland, except for sleeping. Despite the country’s changeable weather, it’s a place that calls for outdoor exploration, and I spent the next few days roaming the surrounding countryside.

Iceland used to be forested, but a combination of harsh weather, overgrazing by sheep and human settlement removed almost all the trees. Most drives take you through fields of lumpy black lava covered with bright-green moss where steam rises, occasionally smelling of sulfur (“Icelandic perfume,” our guide called it). Many of the lava fields date to historic times, such as the “lava of Christianity,” so-called because it dates to the year Icelanders converted en masse by decree of parliament.

Where the lava fields end, green meadows appear, full of non-native purple lupine, planted to try to hold onto the soil. Simple white churches with red roofs stand out against the rolling green hills. Horses and sheep are everywhere, the only large mammals on the continent except for the occasional polar bear drifting over on an ice floe from Greenland.

The dramatic power of nature to remake the land is visible everywhere. At the shore, the pounding ocean created black-sand beaches where tiny white flowers struggle against the wind to stay rooted. Waterfalls are everywhere, including Skógafoss, a popular site for camping and hiking on the southern coast, and raging Gullfoss, a dramatic two-tiered drop into a canyon east of Reykjavik.

Geysir, the namesake of geysers worldwide, no longer explodes regularly, but its neighbor Strokkur does, swelling slowly to a cap amid clouds of steam, then bursting into the air. At the site’s museum, an earthquake simulator lets you experience a different kind of natural explosion.