Paradise Reclaimed (26 page)
“Someone else was hinting something of the sort,” said the Mormon. “I could not bring myself to ask, for whatever the All-Wisdom has allowed to take place, that and that alone is right. Perhaps I have yet to covenant you to the eternal abode of the saints if we happen to come across a clear stream.”
The blind man replied, “Oh, it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you immerse this old corpse or let it stay dry: from now on we both have the same homeland. And if Sheriff Benediktsson had not made me a pauper with his persuasive powers, I would perhaps be in Utah by now to die, instead of sitting in Reykjavík plaiting hobbles for horse-copers to keep myself alive in my old age. They have started hobbling horses now, you see. New masters, new customs.”
The Mormon replied, “Perhaps, in that case, I should not delay any more in passing on the regards I was asked to give you from the British-Icelandic Company in Edinburgh. I met our good sheriff in his new fur coat in Princes Street. He took me to a vast salon and bought me coffee and gave me a farm, heeheehee. It was rather like old Kristian Wilhelmsson’s little joke when he came over from Denmark some years back and gave Icelanders permission to stand upright in their own homes. But when will Icelanders progress so far that their society will be governed by the All-Wisdom according to the Golden Book?”
“Yes, my friend, you can speak piously, for the Almighty gave you a riding-horse that was better than all my horses, even though I was the best-mounted man in Iceland,” said Björn of Leirur. “I shall never forget the time when Sheriff Benediktsson, the most brilliant persuader in the country, was putting out his feelers to get hold of the horse—not to mention the stupid coper from Leirur. Well, at last you’ve sold the beast for what he was worth. But of Björn of Leirur? A Króna per hobble, that’s all this old horse-tamer gets; and even so, his sprig is rooted just as firmly in Paradise as you. The All-Wisdom knows what it is up to.”
It had all been very different in the days when sheriffs and arch-deacons made it known throughout their districts that whoever gave shelter to a Mormon for the night, or offered him so much as a drink of water, ought to be broken on the wheel. In those days fugitive saints crept along the sheep-paths late at night like outlaws, or curled up to sleep in outlying sheep-cots, where cud-chewing animals kept them company in winter and toadstools in summer.
But now when this Mormon was nudging his way east through the southern lowlands, and knocking on people’s doors, he always introduced himself as a bricklayer and Mormon from the Territory of Utah, quite so, and then waited to see if anyone was going to beat him up. But instead of wrangling with him about correct thinking and then beating him up because of the Prophet’s Golden Book, every farmer all the way east to the Rangárvellir said, “Oh, are you a Mormon? Well, good day to you. I’ve always wanted to meet a Mormon. Won’t you come in?”
Or: “Did you say Utah? Yes, it’s a fine place, they say, and grand people, too. I once had a kinsman who went there with his sweetheart and a hand-cart. And the women are said to be not so bad, if they’re not turned into housewives before they’ve grown up properly.”
Others said: “Hey, come on in quick, lad, I’ve got plenty of
brennivín.
Tell me how many wives you have.”
The bricklayer answered all these questions courteously, but when he came to the last one he used to give a titter and reply with this riddle: “I am covenanted to three wives, my good man: one dead, two living. The first one I sealed to myself while she lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. . . . Of the other two, the one is my mother-in-law, the other is my step-daughter. The day after I sealed them all to me formally and to all eternity I set off for Iceland to teach you to embrace the Gospel. Work it out for yourself now, good brother: how many wives has a bricklayer who is and will always be the most wretched bricklayer of all until the end of time?”
People racked their brains over this riddle, but no one could solve the problem of who could be the real wife of a man who, at one and the same time, married his mother-in-law and step-daughter, as well as the woman who lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. For that reason he was a welcome visitor everywhere.
One Sunday in summer he began to find his surroundings familiar, as if he had been there before. He went up a path to a church which stood close to a grassy hillock. Ponies stood there, drowsing in the paddock, with their tails tied together; there were dogs brawling at the lich-gate or howling at the Vestmannaeyjar where saints are said to live; indeed, the islands had floated more than half-way up to heaven in the mirage. There were no people in sight. From all this he deduced that divine service was at its height, and the glad sound of singing could be heard from inside the church. In the home-field there were three tethering-blocks, half-sunk in the turf; they had been used in former times when the farm and church lay differently in relation to one another, but at this stage they had long been abandoned by God and men as well as by ponies. Stanford the Mormon waited until the service was over, and when the congregation came straggling out he stepped up on to the middle block and began to read from a work by John Pritt. He was half-expecting that some well-to-do farmers and other notables would come over and give a good thrashing to this uncouth fellow who claimed to be preaching correct social principles according to a document that the All-Wisdom dispensed on Cumorah Hill. But as he stood there on the block, reading aloud with John Pritt’s voice of truth, and some people had started to listen, who should come out into the field but the pastor himself in cassock and gown. He raised his hat to the speaker, went up to him, reached out his hand, and said, “Would the Mormon gentleman not prefer to come into the church and deliver his intimation from the pulpit, rather than perch on this unworthy stone? The congregation’s organist is prepared to play for you whatever hymns you wish to have, and which we can join in and hum.”
But when the Mormon began to preach it was received with the kind of amiable indifference that was in fashion among our compatriots in the sagas when they accepted an unknown faith in the year 1000,* and yet did not accept, because they could not be bothered to argue; or when they sat down and tied their shoelaces because they could not be bothered to flee when they were overcome in battle. Icelanders had now completely lost that spark of religious conviction which had shown itself a few years previously when they tied Mormons to boulders. Progress or retrogression? That was the question asked by the finest bishop to travel round Iceland in recent centuries: it is no fun at all to wrestle with a lot of wool when it is not even in sacks.
And before the Mormon realised it he had reached Steinahlíðar. When he came to Hlíðar late one afternoon during the hay-making, he was staggered to find that there was no farm there. And yet he felt that it was only yesterday that he had got up early one morning and taken leave of his children in their sleep, while his wife stood tearfully on the paving and stared after the wisest man in the world as he disappeared round the shoulder of the mountain. Nothing would have seemed more natural to him than to find everything there the same as he had left it, and to be able to go in to his sleeping children and wake them with a kiss. What surprised him most now was that the home-field had become pasturage for alien sheep. That the farmhouse should have disappeared would have been bearable had not the paving on which the woman had stood also sunk into the ground. Who were these two silent little birds that flew out of the banks of dock and angelica where the farm had once stood, and vanished into the blue? Had he not put his hand into his pocket and found the letter from a man in Edinburgh that this was his farm, he would scarcely have believed it.
But it was not until he had a look at the boundary-walls that the enormity of it all really struck him. Was it any wonder that it should hurt him so much to see how these masterpieces by his great-grandfather, the model and example for many a district, had gone in a flash while he slipped away for a moment? And the rubble off the mountain scattered all over the hayfield! Then he happened to look up at the steep mountain above the farm, at the fulmar, that faithful bird, sweeping with smooth and powerful and deathless wingbeats high up along the cliff-ledges overgrown with ferns and moonwort, where it had had his nest for twenty thousand years.
He laid down his knapsack with the pamphlets by John Pritt, slipped off his jacket and took off his hat; then he began to gather stones to make a few repairs to the wall. There was a lot of work waiting for one man here; walls like these, in fact, take the man with them if they are to stand.
A passer-by saw that a stranger had started to potter with the dykes of this derelict croft.
“Who are you?” asked the traveller.
The other replied, “I am the man who reclaimed Paradise after it had been lost, and gave it to his children.”
“What is such a man doing here?” asked the passer-by.
“I have found the truth, and the land in which it lives,” said the wall-builder, correcting himself. “And that is assuredly very important. But now the most important thing is to build up this wall again.”
And with that, Steinar of Hlíðar went on just as if nothing had happened, laying stone against stone in these ancient walls, until the sun went down on Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar.
Notes
the third last foreign king to wield power here in Iceland:
Kristian IX, King of Denmark 1863–1906; he was the son of Wilhelm, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.
viking who always went to bed with the axe Battle-Troll
under his pillow:
Battle-Troll (
rymmaugýgr
): the mighty battle-axe owned by Skarpheðinn Njálsson in
Njáll’s Saga.
entrance to Gnípahellir:
Gnípahellir, in Norse mythology, is the place where the great Wolf Fenrir would break free from his fetters before Raganarök (Destruction of the Gods).
In charge of this company was Sheriff Benediktsson:
Einar Benediktsson (1864–1940) became one of Iceland’s major poets. He was also a cosmopolite and entrepreneur (see chapter 30). In his younger days, he was appointed a country magistrate (Sheriff).
The other visitor was the agent Björn of Leirur:
Björn of Leirur is loosely based on a historical character named Porvaldur Björnsson (1833–1922), a farming magnate who lived at Porvaldseyvi at the roots of Eyiafjallajökull. He, too, became an entrepreneur, investing all his money in trawlers, but went bankrupt. He had no children by his wife, but had two children by Ingvald, the daughter of Eiríkur of Brúnar (the original of “Steinar of Hlíðar”).
there was seldom much brennivín . . . :
brennivín (literally “burnt wine”) is a strong spirit, like schnapps, flavored with caraway seeds or angelica roots and familiarly know as “Black Death.”
like old Thorvaldsen:
“Old Thorvaldsen”: The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), the son of an Icelandic woodcarver. He was Denmark’s most celebrated sculptor of his time, and a leader of the neoclassical movement.
It is of no little importance to arrive at Þingvellir:
Þingvellir (Parliament Plains) is the great natural open-air arena where Iceland’s Parliament (the Alþingi) was established in 930. Although the Alþingi had been moved to Reykjavík in 1845, it was still considered the center of the land, and all national festivities were celebrated there—and are, to this day.
Hrafnkell himself, should forfeit nothing but his life:
Hrafnkell Freyr’s-goði is the anonymous hero of
Hrafnkell’s Saga.
He revered his horse so much that he swore that he would kill anyone who rode him without permission. The saga talks of the dire consequences that ensued when his shepherd rode him, and Hrafnkell killed him without compunction.
nor am I accustomed to forget Sleipnir:
Sleipnir was the eight-legged horse belonging to Óðinn, the chief god of the Norse pantheon.
the thousandth anniversary of the settlement of Iceland:
The traditional date for the first settlement of Iceland is 874.
Norse warriors who served in the Varangian Guard
under the emperor in Constantinople: The Varangians (Væringjar) were an elite unit of highly paid Scandinavian mercenaries serving as part of the Byzantine emperor’s imperial guard, founded in the late tenth century.
No farmer was considered worth his salt if he could not
trace his genealogy back to Harald hárfagvi (Fine-Hair):
Harald hárfagvi (Fine-Hair) was the first Norwegian ruler to unify all Norway under a simple crown, late in the ninth century.
or his namesake Harald hilditönn (War-Tooth):
Harald hilditönn (War-Tooth), a semilegendary Danish king, is said to have been defeated at the Battle of Brávellir, in Sweden, after being betrayed by Óðinn.
All Icelandic genealogies can be traced back to the
Ynglings and the Scyldings:
The Ynglings were a semilegendary dynasty of kings who ruled Sweden from the end of the third to the middle of the ninth century and were descended from Yngvi_Freyr, the god of fertility. The Scyldings (Skjöldungar) were an equally legendary dynasty of Danish kings descended from Skjöldur, the son of Óðinn.
King Gautrekur of Gotaland:
King Gautrekur Örvi (the Generous) is the eponymous hero of one of the many Legendary Sagas within Iceland. He appears in genealogies Landnámabók (Book of Settlements), and is said to have been a king in Sweden.
Ganger-Hrolf:
Ganger-Hrolf (Göngu-Hrólfur) is better known as Rollo, the viking leader who founded the duchy of Normandy in France.
Gormur gamlí (the Old):
Gormur gamlí (the Old) was a tenth-century king of Denmark; he died in 958 and was interred in one of the great burial mounts at Jelling, in Jutland.
who fought the battle of Brávellir:
Brávellir was a celebrated battle, said to have been fought between the Danish King Harald War-Tooth and his nephew Hríngur, after Óðinn had sowed dissension between them.
one from an old ballad involving the hero Þórður hreða
(Menace):
Þórður hreða (Menace) was a Norwegian warrior who fled to Iceland in the tenth century. He is the hero of a fourteenth-century saga called
Þórður saga hreða.
Like Steinar, he was noted for his craftsmanship.
“Or at least the old ogress Grýla.”:
Grýla was the quintessential bugbear of early Icelandic folklore; she was an elemental troll, with fifteen tails (with a hundred bags on each tail for holding captured children). Her name was much used to frighten recalcitrant children.
a berserk fit no less frenzied than when Einarr
Skálaglamm fastened the shield:
Einarr Skálaglamm Helgason was Egill Skallagrímsson’s poetic protégé in
Egill’s Saga.
His nickname means “scale-tinkler.” He presents Egill with an ornate shield he had been given by the ruler of Norway. When Egill saw it hanging in his bed-closet he was curious—he thought that Einarr expected him to write about it!
started to hunt for minnows in the Tjörn:
Tjörn is the name of the small lake in the city-center of Reykjavík. The name is related to the word “tarn.”
when they accepted an unknown faith in the year 1000:
In the year 1000 (or 999, as scholars now suggest), Iceland was converted from paganism to Christianity by parliamentary decree.
