From the Mouth of the Whale (21 page)

‘It is a metaphor to call the sword a serpent and name it rightly, so that the sheath is its path and the baldric and fittings its skin. That is to stay true to the nature of the serpent, for it slides out of its skin and also to water. Here the metaphor is so contrived that the serpent goes in search of the river of blood when it slides down the path of thought, that is, into the breasts of men. A metaphor is thought to be well conceived if the notion that has been adopted is maintained throughout the verse. But if a sword is called a serpent, and later a fish or a wand, or changed another way, people call it monstrous and regard it as spoiling the verse.’

Balderdash, I say, let the sword turn into an adder and the adder a salmon and the salmon a birch twig and the birch twig a sword and the sword a tongue … Let it all run together so swiftly that it cannot be separated again … The twilight portents have toppled the world from its foundations … It is slipping out of joint … It has been turned upside down … The heavens are used to walk upon … While the common populace crouch on their upturned roof beams, hanging from their fingertips, or fall off weeping, the libertine armies rebel against the Creator, using sorcery to turn themselves upside down in the air, dancing their loathsome war dance on the roofs of His celestial abode … The din of the portents reverberates through the gloom … God’s houses are trampled and kicked to pieces by stamping, bounding, newly rich magnates and their trinket-greedy wives … Squealing like a sow in season, grunting like the boar when he clambers on her back, they hammer their iron-heeled shoes and lethal spurs on the cloudless, night-blue, star-studded outer walls of Heaven as if they were the beaten-earth floors of brothels strewn with sawdust, or the grey floorboards in the smoke-filled backrooms of the merchants’ halls … The laughter of the dancers mingles with the starving cries of their humblest brothers and sisters … Yes, old Snorri’s teachings are a thing of the past, even reason is at a loss when it comes to describing the libertine world … While the colony on Greenland still endured, useful wares made by the Eskimos were brought to Iceland, the most important among them being protective clothing made of sealskin and polar-bear pelts – the Eskimo women must have been skilful with their needles … Yet among them were objects that no Christian should possess, such as the pagan caricatures called
tupilaks
… Grandpa Hákon had an ugly little demon like that, carved from wood and decorated with small bones and a patch of human skin with the hairs still attached … He kept quiet about this possession, hiding it under the floorboards in his study … The creature had the body of a dog, flayed from its snout to the tip of its tail, protruding ribs and vertebrae like the teeth of a saw, but instead of a dog’s head it had the skull of a child, which faced over its shoulder as if its neck had been wrung and it had frozen back to front; its belly, on the other hand, was the face of an imp, grimacing with enormous teeth and eyes on stalks, while between its hind legs the beak of a whimbrel took the place of a prick and beneath its tail a seal’s head could be glimpsed, forcing its way out of its arse … The story went that this bizarre object had been carved for the purposes of witchcraft … It was said that the sorcerer had with his magic gifts seen the demon inside a piece of driftwood and whittled off its bonds, and as a reward he was permitted to send it through the air to assail his enemies … Oh, there would be no question what was happening if one met a familiar like this … Indeed, I think one would resort to defending oneself by sending it home again … The story goes that the one who originally raised it should point at the
tupilak
, saying angrily: ‘It was I who freed you from the wood’ … At which the demon will be disempowered, for of course it knows its own foolish form … And the sorcerer is saved for now … Though he will not be so fortunate on the Day of Judgement … But not all evil spirits are as misshapen as this, not all are as easily recognisable …

LAVER:
laver grows on rocks by the sea, and is known by some as Mary’s weed or slake. It is often baked between hot stones to make cakes like cheese. Eaten in hot milk, laver gives a good night’s sleep. It can also be dried like dulse.

If my daughter Berglind had been allowed to live, I would have asked her to find me one … And if Sigrídur and I had been as fortunate in our home as we deserved, I would have told the girl to meet me in the smithy … There I would have told her to look in the woodpile for a piece of wood for us to carve … Whereupon she would have asked me:

‘What should it be like, Papa?’

And I would have answered:

‘The knottier the branch, the more twisted and misshapen, the more bent people call it, the harder it is to find it a place among the smooth planks, the more people agree that it should be thrown on the fire, the more useless it is, the more unsuitable for anything except letting one’s imagination run riot, the more I covet it, the more I yearn to weigh it in my hand, the more I long to let my whittling knife be guided by its knots and veins … Yes, bring that piece to me …’

And while we, father and daughter, each whittled away at our crooked branch, I would have spoken to her like this:

‘If a virgin meets a stray horse on a moorland path she sees only a horse. It stands there on the moors, whole and undivided. Yet her youthful eyes have already jumped from one end of the beast to the other, and her mind has added up the body parts, checking that everything is in place: legs, head, body, hooves, tail, mane and muzzle. “There’s a horse,” the virgin’s mind says to itself with such lightning speed that the girl does not even hear it. She thinks no more of it and continues on her way, unconcerned. Yet it is often a near thing, for the girl must not only keep in mind the horse’s legs, head, body, hooves, tail, mane and muzzle; it is not enough that every part is in its place; she must also pay heed to which way round the parts turn. For if the horse’s hooves face backwards, it is a
nykur
, a kelpie or water-horse, and will want to kidnap the girl, lure her on to its back and gallop away with her to its dwelling place deep in the cold moorland tarn … Remember what I say, Berglind: if you meet a horse in the countryside, look at its hooves. If the horse is standing knee-deep in grass, hiding its feet, walk steadfastly away. If there is a pond gleaming behind the figure of the horse, you must take to your heels. And should the
nykur
lure you on to its back with the intention of carrying you down into its wet lair, you are to shout its secret name: “Nennir”. And it will throw you off. For in common with the other instruments of darkness it cannot bear to hear its name, unlike good spirits which grow and gain strength if one names them aloud and sings their praises. Remember my words, Berglind’ … That is how I would have talked to her, administering a fatherly warning … For the
nykur
is like man in that it is hard to tell the bad from the good … Though man has one advantage … If you meet a man on a moorland path it does not matter whether he is standing in deep grass or on hard-packed snow … Hmm, I wonder which part of Ari of Ögur faces backwards? My thoughts drove me out of the hut … I wandered along like a sleepwalker and came to my senses here at the tip of the rocky bank which forms the island’s northern harbour … Baaa … One more step and I would have walked off the end … Fallen into the sea, sunk like a stone, drowned … But the black sheep bleated loudly and woke me from my reverie … Now we are quits … Baaa … When I looked at the sky I saw the grotesques in the evening clouds spreading and stretching beyond the limits of reason and understanding … They are like bladderwrack spread out to dry on the rocks … And as the eye travels from one strange beast to the next in search of the boundaries between them, it moves from one joint to another … Wanders among countless joints … There is no beginning or end except in the whole undivided picture, in all its parts … One can never say for certain which limb or body belongs to which entity, for the branches and shoots are all equally valid … The thought has crossed my mind that it is the joints themselves, the places where the parts meet that are the eternal and absolute in this world, for they exist and at the same time do not exist except as the gaps that connect the most unrelated phenomena … And the gaps between the limbs that the joint connects can be incredibly small, as small as the gaps between the tiny legs and feet of a bluebottle … Or they can be vast, the distance so immense that the human eye cannot comprehend it, cannot see the poles even though one is standing midway between them, or is aware of only one limb and knows nothing of the other … It is in these invisible halls that I believe God dwells … As was proved long ago when the Roman general Placidus rode out on the stag hunt in the forest by Tivoli … When the hunter drew back his bow, intending to fell his quarry which at first sight appeared to be what he called to himself ‘a fleet-footed stag’ – but the dawn sun rephrased, calling it ‘a dew-bedecked deer calf, lord of all beasts, his antlers glowing against the sky’ – he had a vision of the glorious Christ … Yet the divinity does not luxuriate in a labyrinth of blazing gold antlers, or pride himself on the light-bordered tines: no, he exists in the cool morning air between the branches of the beast’s intricate crown … It seemed to General Placidus that he saw the boy Jesus standing on the young stag’s forehead, resting on one toe and holding out his arms to bid him, a pagan, welcome into his Father’s kingdom … Love flew into his breast … The quarry felled the hunter … Placidus took the name Eustace and entered into the service of love … And was scorned … Robbed of all his goods … Tortured … Forced to flee … His sons were devoured by wolves and lions … His wife was ravished by pirates … Yet he continued to sing the praises of goodness … He regained his wealth … Had more children … Refused to take part in the Emperor Hadrian’s burnt offerings … Was imprisoned … And with his wife and young children was put on a grid and roasted alive in his persecutors’ oven, burnt to ash in the bowels of the idol, a giant bronze ox … The martyr became Saint Eustace … Good to call on in times of terror if one’s family is in peril … The antlers of a hart, coral, spread fingers, birch twigs, a loosely knotted fishing net, crystals, river deltas, ivy, mackerel clouds, women’s hair … diverse as these phenomena are and formed from opposing elements, nevertheless they all revolve around the invisible joints, their opposite forms touch even though they are far apart … and if I imitate their form, reaching my arms to the sky – moving them together and apart in turn, waving them to and fro – then Jónas Pálmason the Learned is no longer alone … I am the brother of all that divides, all that curls, all that intertwines, all that waves … after the day’s rain showers the web of the world becomes visible … the moment night falls, the beads of moisture glitter on its silver strings … nature is whole in its harmony … twit-tweet … as can clearly be seen if one treads a dance here on the harbour bar … twit-tweet … but it all gets into a tangle if one tries to classify it according to reason … the strings refresh the eyes and mind … it is difficult to grasp them … twit-tweet … welcome back from the sea, brother sandpiper … twit-tweet … it is high tide on the island of Patmos … the strings run through me … twit-tweet … I thrum them … alas, now I miss my picture books … twit-tweet … geyser-birds …

And so we leave Jónas Pálmason the Learned in that happy hour, a frail old man dancing with the universe. We will not join in with his cries of joy when his exile on Gullbjörn’s Island is revoked without warning in the summer of 1639. We will not follow him to Hjaltastadur, where Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur will give him a roof over his head for the fifteen years that remain to him. We will not sit with him at his writing desk when he is finally at liberty to tap from the barrel of his brain all the learning that he has accumulated during his long life, which he now sets down on paper for his patron, Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson: his biographical poem ‘Sandpiper’, his writings on natural history, his little book of herbs, his commentary on the Edda, the legends, outlaw ballads, genealogies and pictures of whales – and the many other texts that made this book possible. We will not be present when a seventy-year-old Jónas secretly has a child with a maid, a boy, named after his father, who inherits half his nickname, becoming Jónas ‘the Little Learned’. We will be absent but we will send our respects when he dies in 1658 and at his own wish is buried crosswise before the church doors.