From the Mouth of the Whale

(Autumn Equinox, 1635)

A medium-sized fellow … Beady brown eyes set close to his beak within pale surrounds … The beak itself quite long, thick and powerful, with a slight downward curve at the end, dark in colour but lighter at the top … No neck to speak of; a spry, stocky figure with short, tapering legs, a barrel chest and a big belly … Head a dark grizzled brown, with a ruff extending from nape to mid-crown … Clad in a grey-brown coat of narrow cut, with a faint purple sheen in the twilight; bright stockings, a speckled undershirt … Importunate with his own kind, garrulous with others … So might one describe the purple sandpiper and so men describe me … I can think of many things worse than being likened to you, my feathered Jeremiah, for we have both crawled from the hand of the same craftsman, been carved with the same knife: you quickened to life on the fourth day, I on the sixth … But what if the order had been reversed? If I had entered the stage with those who soar beneath the firmament while you had been appointed lord of the Earth? Would a bird then be sitting here on a rock, thoughtfully watching the insensate man scurrying along the water’s edge, querulous with fear that when the sea recedes from the land it might never return? … Man and bird, man with a bird’s heart, bird with a man’s brain, bird with a man’s heart, man with a bird brain … We are alike in most things … And why should we not be? Lately I held your skua-bitten brother in my hand and probed his corpse with my fingers … Under the breast feathers I felt first sternum, then ribs, then the soft parts that contain kidneys and bowels … And as I examined the bird I ran my free hand over my living body … This was during the Dog Days, when the hot weather paid a visit to Gullbjörn’s Island, and my self-examination was made easier by the fact that I was wearing nothing but my birthday suit … I was free to walk about so, for I was alone with no one there to see me but the Master-smith, who, after all, knows all his works better than they know themselves … There was no mistaking the Creator’s template, for my whole body was cast in the same mould as my feathered friend … Yet, although our vessels are almost identical, our life journeys are like the hands of two scribes who have learnt from a single exemplar and are now copying the same story, one seated under the sheriff’s roof at Ögur, the other at the bishopric of Hólar, both taking care to read the manuscript aright … Yet to an informed reader the ascender appears foreshortened on the ‘d’ of the scribe who works under the tyrants’ patronage, whereas it exhibits an elegantly curved forward slant from the hand of the scribe who is the guest of God’s representative during his flight from those same villains … You, bird, are the letter that was deftly penned during a quiet hour in the Lord’s house, whereas I must endure having my image scored out or scraped off the vellum by those who envy and hate me: ‘Jónas is a rogue, Jónas is a sly, disreputable fellow, Jónas is a braggart, Jónas is a liar, Jónas is a foolish dreamer …’ Yes, thus am I portrayed in the slanderous letters and oral reports that precede me wherever I go … I say this because, according to the old Jerusalemites, the building blocks of the world and its inhabitants were formed of the alphabet at the back of God’s tongue when He pronounced the world, as if it were a tale so tremendous that no one but He Himself would live to hear it all; and wretched man is grateful for every hour that he is permitted the grace of hearing those scraps of the tale that concern him … Little creatures like us two, Jónas and the sandpiper, are scarcely more than a word of the genus of the smallest words, formed from a single syllable: ‘oh’, ‘ah’, ‘ee’, ‘ow’ … Words comprehensible to all, for so Adam’s kin, ‘the tormented ones’, cry their name when sorrow comes upon them or one of them breaks a toe … Now why did I think of the letter ‘d’ and not of some other? What does ‘d’ signify in Abraham Salómonsson’s alphabetical tree? On what branch did that letter flower? Is it Daleth? Did a bird sit there chirping at the morning sun? Did a man hang upside down from a rope slung over the branch? Here I am blind, bereft of books … You trip along at the foot of the glaciers, on the remotest shores, poking your kelp-brown beak into the grey sand, grateful for the strip of land allotted to you by the Lord … Heaven besides, there is nothing more sought-after, and it is the most ardent prayer of well-nigh every human Icelander that exactly thus might they arrange their lives; here you are born, here you seek your sustenance and here you will die … You are a delight to the eyes during your lifetime, sandpiper, and wherever you may be summoned after death, even then you often prove a source of pleasure … Our acquaintance began half a century ago and five years more when a flight feather loosened from your decaying skin blew across the foreshore, in over the marshes, out over the farming district and high up the hillside to settle at the feet of my grandfather, Hákon Thormódsson, son of Thormódur, son of Salómon the boat-builder … He had gone berry-picking with the boy Jónas and, despairing of preventing the child from stuffing the fruit in his mouth, had begun to sing me edifying verses, as was his custom when we were alone together … That day it was Eysteinn’s blessed ‘Lily’, and he had just reached the part where I always started to giggle, the description of Lucifer’s visit to the suffering king on the holy tree … I was six years old and well aware that my laughter was both foolish and sinful … But from the moment he recited the first words of the praise poem I would dread his pronouncing ‘peep at the cross, the devil did then’, and the fear of losing control of myself tightened still further Folly’s grip on my mind … Naturally, the blame lay not with the glorious story of mankind’s redemption nor with the poet’s delightful verses, but with the mask that Grandfather assumed when he intoned the word ‘peep’ … He would lean back with his weight on his left leg so his right shoulder lifted and the other one sank, simultaneously shooting up his eyebrows and pouting his lips to pronounce the word ‘peep’; it was quite inadvertent, he was blithely unaware of the effect … And I would dissolve into laughter … Nothing seemed more absurd to me than the idea that the countenance of the hellish serpent Satan should have appeared as comical and mild to the Son of Man as my grandfather Hákon’s expression did at that moment to me … I hung my head and clamped both hands over my mouth but gouts of laughter spurted out between my fingers, quick as a horde of croaking demons escaping from a bag … Grandfather stopped abruptly and subjected the child to grave scrutiny … But in that instant the sandpiper’s feather settled by the toe of his shoe … He said:

‘I think you’re going to have a good memory, Jónas …’

Grandfather squatted on his heels, levelling out the difference between us and, reaching for the feather, held it for a moment between his fingers before poking it into the hair above my right ear:

‘And now we must teach you to read …’

I used this purple-grey feather of yours as a pointer all the time it took him to teach me to read … And this happy meeting between child’s hand and quill also served to define the difference between boy and bird … For although the tip of the quill touched the parchment as I stumbled from word to word, none of the wisdom found its way into you, sandpiper, but engraved itself entirely on my childish mind … Though until the moment when I bent to my books our understanding had begun and ended in the domain of the flesh; in how our two minds interpreted the wind and the rain … Oh, that I had never learnt to read! There old Jónas began his long march of torment over the libertine earth, scorched by the twilight portents of the Reformation, by the burning of holy crucifixes and the destruction of old books, while the little sea mouse lives on in innocence and blessed ignorance … I do not doubt, feathered earth apple, that God’s mother will look kindly on you, whether the Blessed Orb splinters into a thousand suns in the Easter dew on the wing that hides your simple head or the moon whitens your snowy breast during the vigil on Christmas night: remember this in the wild joy of the high tide and the despair of the spring ebb …

‘Twit-tweet …’ comes my answer from the beach and the sandpiper flies off the rock … It flaps its stubby wings rapidly, heading out to sea, then veers abruptly and returns to shore, and in the brief instant that my eye follows its flight I catch sight of the blue rim of the mainland … Otherwise one cannot see it from my seat here on top of the Gold Mound … No, I prefer not to point so much as my cold nose in that direction … How the sight perturbs my mind! It is too painful to smell the mingled perfume and putrid stench that emanate from that quarter … I was ordered to clear off to this rock and from here there is no going back … It is my home now … On the blue horizon nothing but torture and thumbscrews await me; cudgels and slander, poisonous powder and serpents split to the groin so that they appear to walk on two legs …

SEA-SPECKLE: the smallest species of bird, known as the sea-speckle, scarcely measures a third of a sandpiper in size. It is spotted white and black, and thus we speak of speckled earth when the snow lies patchily on the ground. Men have at times hauled up a kind of seaweed, four or five fathoms long without its root, from which a little bird has hatched, though whether this is the sea-speckle or some other species we cannot tell.

Four summers ago the serpent brothers condemned me to exile, decreeing that anyone who offered me a helping hand would suffer the same punishment … On that terrible day, the site of the court was shrouded in libertine twilight … I noticed one man turn away when the sentence was read out; the blessed vice-principal Brynjólfur Sveinsson, a handsome, promising man who was only a guest there, though prepared in all humility to assume the office of the late venerable Bishop Oddur Einarsson, one-time disciple of Tycho Brahe and student of astronomy at his observatory in Hven … But the men of the south did not wish to accept the learned Brynjólfur’s offer of service in God’s acre, any more than they would suffer poor Jónas to administer his little spiritual plasters to the earthly afflictions of his neighbours … For a brief instant there was a gleam of sunlight through the darkness that loured over that assembly of wolves … As Nightwolf Pétursson’s hired thugs were driving me from the court with blows and ape-like howls, the younger brother of my old enemy, Sheriff Ari Magnússon of Ögur, saw his chance to trip me up at the gate, for the further amusement of the hyenas … A fall was prepared for me, but even as I was flying headlong into the mud, I felt a soft hand stroke along the chain where the irons chafed worst, and I was able to leave the court with my head held high … Throwing a quick glance over my shoulder I spotted Brynjólfur’s right hand vanishing into the sleeve of his cloak, for he it was who stood by the gatepost, but I could not fail to see that his wrist was guided by another hand, of milk-white maternal perfection: it was the Virgin Mary who led him to perform this act of mercy towards the miserable wretch for whom all succour was now banned by the law of the land … Blessed is he who is chosen as her instrument … That night all my wounds ceased their bleeding and filled the whole dungeon with the sweet scent of the lily … Jónas is the exile who cannot go anywhere … Twit-tweet … Whereas the sandpiper can fly away if his courage fails … But what might his piping ‘twit-tweet’ signify? Nothing, fortunately; he is only saying good day … A bird with such trivial news to impart surely harbours no bezoar in his skull … Twit-tweet … His low-lying brain-pan has nothing to offer the natural philosopher … No one would bother to ensnare him in order to char his little head since there is nothing of value concealed there: no healing stone or philosopher’s stone, no stone of any kind to protect against disorders of the blood or mind … No, there is no bezoar there … Bezoar! But I was not going to think about bezoar today … Bezoar! Bezoar! Bezoar! A volume containing scraps of wisdom from the works of Master Bombastus Paracelsus, translated from the German to Icelandic and inscribed with the name of the old schoolmaster at Skálholt, which arrived in Steingrímsfjord by crooked paths and was always hidden under my grandfather’s bed when strangers came to visit; this was the book from which I learnt to read and the first I learnt by heart … After which I read the old Saga of Bishop Gudmundur Arason … In that order … And things went as they did … For that is how my trials began, and who could have guessed that I would end up on this bird-fouled rock, this dance floor of seals? … But oh, what a joy it was to read! Once the letters had acquired their correct sounds and arranged themselves into words which I knew from my own speech and that of others; when the conjunction of the words begat all the explanations of the world and stories that together furnished my head from within, as if its bony vault were the walls of the gallery and libraries of the University of Copenhagen … places I will never see … For I am condemned to sit here alone, chattering to the foolish bird that most closely resembles me … Yes, sandpiper, let us not deceive ourselves about the rung we occupy on the ladder of human society … Although you can spread your wet wings and capture with them the far-travelled sunbeam, and I can hold up my thumb and forefinger till the moon is pinched between their tips like a pearl, neither of us will be able to hold on to our lucky catch … Enough of that, enough about you and enough about me; there is another they wish me to address and he is as grim as you are tender … I will not do it … No one can be expected to escape alive from wrestling with ancient revenants of dreadful power … I escaped from such an ordeal once before and doubt I could do so again … I would have done better to have kept quiet, kept my damned trap shut, instead of going around spewing out everything that shot up to the surface of the bottomless well of information and useless ideas that book-reading had etched in the leaf-mould of my mind, all boiling and bubbling like a potion in a magic cauldron … But no, of course I could not be quiet … I was forever blathering of bezoar … whose name alone is as intoxicating as the scent of the forbidden blossom on the Tree of Knowledge … I was drunk on the very idea of such a stone that could not only heal all human ailments but also prove useful to alchemists wise in the ways of converting base metal to gold … Wherever I went, wherever I broke my journey, I would ask after the carcass of a raven … Had anyone chanced upon a dead raven in the last few days or weeks? Yes, that is how it began … And should anyone remember having seen a dead raven, I would be off in a trice to examine it … Then one could find the child Jónas crawling into holes or scrambling up crags to retrieve the rotting hide of Corvus islandicus … For it was and still is my belief that the bezoar must be much more potent in the Icelandic raven than in its namesake elsewhere, on account of its affinity with that King of Fools, Odin, and his heathen tribe here in the north of the world … At any rate, I was nine years old when I began my quest for the cranial stone, which has now lasted fifty-three winters with no sign of success …

‘Look, here comes Hákon with his grandson; I don’t suppose he’ll be able to keep the lad quiet for long before the little fool starts harping on about where he can find some damned dead crow …’

Even when I stood silently at my grandfather’s side while he talked to the old men about the kinds of things old men talk about, I could not fail to notice the glances, the pauses, the questions in which they hoped to trap me … I used to maintain a stony silence until in the end I would tug Grandfather Hákon’s coat sleeve and ask:

‘Might I go and take a look in the kitchen, Grandpapa?’

Here was company more fitting for a youngster who had learnt to read from the writings of Dr Bombastus and acquired so great a knowledge of the abdomen that there was scarcely a female malady in existence that I did not have a nodding acquaintance with — I would always have a prescription up my sleeve for a poultice that would cure the affliction … I used to take my learning and my requests for dead ravens into the heat and smoke with the womenfolk … And from those kitchen visits I began to acquire something of a reputation as a physician … ‘Little Jónas the healer,’ they would say, for that is what the womenfolk called me, ‘give me some good news about this swelling I have …’ And the woman would grasp my hand and draw it under her clothes, laying it low down on her belly and dragging it back and forth over some lump in her flesh … I would close my eyes and summon up the book of medical art until it lay there open before my nose, the verso folio inside my left eyelid and the recto inside my right … Then I would turn the pages in my mind until I reached the part about that divinely created miniature likeness of man, woman, who must presumably obey the same laws of nature as the male, for he is a world in microcosm, made from the substance of the cosmos, and woman is made from his substance … There on the page I would find accounts of the principal female ailments and compare these to the news my hand was reading from the corporeal page of the woman whom I was to cure … Thus I read together book and woman until both merged into one and then all that was required was to read out the prescription for the medicine that accompanied the description of the disease … Sometimes the medicines were to be boiled, sometimes kneaded, sometimes hot and sometimes cold … But the examination always ended with my saying aloud:

‘That bezoar would have come in handy now …’

Once my collecting mania became known, it would invariably turn out that some old lady had chanced upon the rotting little brother of Odin’s companions, Hugin and Munin, and taken the trouble to pull off its head and keep it in her pouch ‘for Jónas’ … If a long time had passed since I last acquired a raven’s head, I would be unable to rest from the moment I laid hands on it … I would find some excuse to slip away and almost before the farm buildings were out of sight I would take out my tinderbox, gather a pile of kindling and burn the head … I went about my quest in this way in obedience to my learned master Bombastus’s instructions … Once the head had been reduced to ashes the skull would be brittle and easy to crack open, and if luck was with me there should be a single specimen of bezoar inside, like an expectant chick in its shell … But luck never was with me … And I have lost count of the ravens’ heads I have roasted and crushed in my lifetime … Yes, those were my wages for the cures I used to perform in the kitchens of the Strandir folk, and it was a useful arrangement since Grandfather had made me swear a solemn oath that no raven would die by my hand … Eventually, though, there came a time when my female patients no longer wanted my great fists fumbling under their skirts … I was thirteen years old and examining a slightly peculiar old biddy whose appointed task was to bless the cows at the croft of Hólmskot when they were let out to graze in the morning … She used to do this by calling on Saint Benedicta, and had arrived at such a good understanding with the celestial lady that the cows on that farm never failed in their yield … Nevertheless, she thought it better to let me heal her than to place her trust entirely in the protection of the saints, for although they had been her helpmeets ever since childhood they had lately been abolished by law and banished from Icelandic homes, and now mainly took refuge with useless old folk, like this Hálotta Snæsdóttir, who was fated to awaken the puppy in me … The healing session had proceeded as usual; one woman after another had received a gentle caress and diagnosis of her complaint, accompanied by good advice and hope of improvement, and now it was the turn of Hálotta who sat at the back of the room, contemplating some dried fish that was soaking there … I had no sooner sat down beside her than she trapped my youthful hand in her blotchy old claw and shoved it under her skirts … There were no surprises there, just the usual worn-out woman’s belly, though the old lady was in fairly good nick … She took charge and I sat in my physician’s pose with head inclined and eyes closed, the book hovering before my mind’s eye, but just as she was about to return my healing hand to me, my fingers came into contact with the upper limits of her mons pubis … It was not as if it was the first time I had touched what I had heard the women themselves call half in jest their ‘mouse’, and the contours of the creature were fairly well known to me from diagrams in the books of medicine from Hólar … But this time when my fingertips brushed so unexpectedly against old Hálotta’s garden wall, I stiffened … It was only an instant’s response but enough for her to sense it; we were, after all, both in the same part of the old woman’s anatomy … As if to be certain of my miserable predicament, she made a pretence of pulling our hands down still further but this time I resisted in earnest … Upon which she whipped my hand from under her skirt band and squealed:

‘Ooh! He’s not touching me there again — not unless he marries me!’

With that my youthful innocence was laughed away … The time of the laying on of hands was over … I had to find a new way to ingratiate myself with the old ladies who always had a raven’s head ready to slip into the hand of a budding naturalist …

MOONWORT: Botrychium lunaria. One of the most potent of the herbs used in childbirth: to be laid on the cervix, the secret door or private parts, when a woman is about to deliver, and snatched away the instant the child is born to prevent the intestines or other parts from following. When administered to a patient it prevents lethargy and intensifies pleasure and recreation. Some believe it to have the virtue of opening locks. It is often found growing on old hayfield walls or ruins, but never in wetlands, and grows to half a finger in height. It proved of greatest virtue to me long ago when I was laid low with an intolerable whooping cough. I chewed it as small as I could, mixed with aqua vitae and thyme, no more than a tiny morsel at a time, but even that was enough. After that I did not catch a cough or cold for five years. It is more frequently used than other digestive herbs for internal cures but not for complaints of the flesh or skin. The moonwort bears sometimes twelve, sometimes thirteen leaves on one stalk, depending on the number of moons in the year when the earth is temperate; and seeds on the other, as many as the number of weeks that a mother carries her unborn child. Herbs should be used with caution.

It was the custom at Grandfather Hákon’s house for extracts to be copied from those among the books that found their way there which he judged to be most interesting and of most enduring value … His method was to collect in one place all the lore and verses or tales true or invented touching on a particular subject that were found scattered among the various books he borrowed … This amounted to something of an industry on Grandfather’s part and his scriptorium consisted of a reader, a scribe and an ink-maker, the last-mentioned of whom concocted the ink as well as cutting the feathers for quills … I was appointed special assistant to the ink-maker, ‘Squinting’ Helgi Sveinsson; a work-shy half-cousin of ours who had turned up on my grandparents’ doorstep with a group of wandering beggars … Even in that company he had managed to rub people up the wrong way and the beggars left him behind when it transpired that his family could be half traced to that of the householder … My grandfather used to make all the paupers who boarded with him contribute something towards their keep … Much of this was of limited value as the wretched people had small aptitude for anything, but every little counts in a large household; the cat may seem inclined to do nothing but lick her fur but we would soon be overrun by mice if we hanged her for her vanity … On account of this half-cousin’s feeble nature, the division of labour between us was quite contrary to what might be expected between a full-grown man and a boy … I was the master and he the apprentice, but we took great care not to let it show who ruled the roost when it came to preparing the ink, and no one found out until I was moved up a rung in the scriptorium and seated in one of the scribes’ chairs … There I took a new, more ominous step on the path towards the evil destiny that finally forced me into exile in my own country … Though what kind of exile is it, pray? I am condemned to forsake my homeland, no one may offer me a helping hand, wherever I am seen people are duty bound to arrest me and I may not linger for any space of time in any place without violating my sentence — which would give the villains an excuse to make my penalty even harsher, until ultimately I advance shrieking into the fires of hell …

‘Jónas Pálmason, by some called Jónas “the Learned”, that is I, and may God bid you good day, Captain Sir … I hear that you are sailing for England with a cargo of homespun cloth belonging to the Sheriff of Ögur — er, you wouldn’t happen to have room for a homeless vagabond like me aboard this fine vessel of yours?’

Flat refusal … No one is willing to transport Jónas from these shores … Not even if he composes handsome verses about the rotting hulks that he longs with all his heart would take him away from Iceland … For even so can a poet describe a ship that balances on nothing but a leaking, tarry hull:

The sail swells on the sea lion,

canvas cracks and sheets strain,

shrouds sing aloud to the wind’s wild refrain.

Even foundering in the monster-filled deep in a tub like that would surely be better than languishing as a prisoner at home … I long more than anything to go abroad … I have so often visited foreign lands in my dreams, whether waking over illustrations in books or asleep in my bunk, only to find myself in that very city, usually on my way to a meeting with the wise men of the place … With a long parcel in my hand; no mean gift and one that would look well in the chambers that house the finest treasures in the land … Then a voice calls out in Icelandic: ‘Look at Jónas!’ And in that instant the outer appearance of the countrymen is transformed and they turn into grey maggots, crawling towards me, hissing foolishly: ‘Look at Jónas!’ … And each of the slitherers has three human faces, one named Nightwolf, one named Ari, that is Eagle, and the third named Ormur, that is Serpent … More bearable were the daydreams, glimpses through the windows of books that I once owned, although the desperate longing to go there in the flesh never resulted in anything more than mournful sighs over the wretched fate of being Jónas the Learned … Perhaps my nature is bound to these icy shores … Even if all the sheriffs and beggars in the land, all the judges and thieves, bishops and whores, squires and crofters clubbed together to apprehend the fellow and drive him out to sea, even then the ship would not travel far from shore with this sorry cargo before the crew would be forced to put out their boat and convey Jónas back to land … For he would be assailed by an overwhelming attack of homesickness … Ah, did you think I had forgotten you, sandpiper, or how my nature seems bound to yours, you Jónas of the bird world? No, hardly have you set your course out to sea than you turn back … You did so a little while ago and now I see you repeating the game … And then I remember that I have been sitting here far too long … In England you are known as sandpiper. What should I be called there, I wonder? Jonah Palmson the Learned? I would like to fly there … England has been described to me as the land where the Virgin Queen reigned with such modesty that her subjects thought they had acquired a new mother after gentle Mary had been taken from them … A well-travelled man who had visited London told me that he had met an old man there, Benjamin Jonson the actor, a quarter Icelandic and as well-informed about life in the palaces as on the streets of the capital … He drew a fair picture of the queen, saying that the noble Elizabeth lived like a holy maid on her throne, for her flesh was never sullied by any man; her insides were innocent of all male outpourings … And no lord dared so much as raise a finger against her for fear of drawing down upon himself the ire of the people … For although her delicate virginal breasts were quite unlike the divine bosom of the Holy Mother, and devoid of the white balsam that heals the deepest wounds, yet such sisterly mildness shone from her breast that even her most inveterate enemies would shed tears and fall to their knees with clasped hands … They thanked her even as their heads were lopped from their bodies … But she was harsh to papists — and she will not be forgiven for that — although the Bishops’ Church in her English realm is not shrouded in the same fetid, satanic darkness as ours here in Iceland, nevertheless it was just as ugly a deed to deprive the people of their saints … For to whom is a person to turn when the powerful break the law in their dealings with the innocent, caring neither for their honour nor for the final reckoning on Doomsday? At times like that it was a comfort to be able to turn to the blessed Virgin Mary, and John the Apostle, and Saint Barbara, or to Luke who will do anything for a painter, or to those chaste maidens, Agatha with her veil and tongs, and Lucy with the cord and her eyes on a silver dish … Who is now to step forth on the cloudy floor of the high chamber in the city of Heaven and present the complaints of the downtrodden? Often the matters for which we seek redress are small, sometimes no more than a stubborn swelling in the armpit, though mostly it is by our fellow men that we are oppressed and ill-treated, both in flesh and in spirit … He who has been flogged and starved and flogged again for trying feebly to procure food, and flogged yet again, this time much longer and harder because the name of Saint Dismas, protector of prisoners, came to lips bloody from a slit tongue; he is proof that in his defencelessness a cruelly beaten man needs the help of an intercessor in Heaven … But, saddest of all, the very reason the man is in prison is due to his belief in the intercession of which he has been deprived … Out of sight does not mean out of mind, however … Saint Thorlákur still walks among his poverty-stricken countrymen and they still call on him to mention their names when he stands under the cascade of light that streams from Christ’s four nail wounds and the hole in his side and from his battered head where the thorns pierced the skin to the bone … But only those who have learnt the tongue of angels can tell how one’s name will sound in the language of light … So there is little to be gained by craning one’s neck to the skies and combining one’s name with prayers; that twittering will be of no more use than the croaking of a soulless Great Auk if there is no intercessor up there to interpret the mortal name of the one who prays and translate it into the language of Heaven … We need the glorious Saint Thorlákur and Gudmundur the Good to translate the names of us poor sinners for the wondrous race above … My name is Jónas Pálmason in Icelandic, Jonas Palmesen in Danish, Jahn Palmsohn in German, Jonah Palmson in English, and could be Johannes Palmensis in Latin, but what I am called in the language of eternity I will not learn until Doomsday … I hope the call comes from above, because it is also said that everyone has another name in hell and I will be damned if I ever want to learn what they call me in that hideous place … Ah, but you, sandpiper, have nothing to fear, for you have no name besides what people call you at any given moment, and those are all earthly names … Heaven only has room for good men … I suppose I will miss you when I get there … Yes, just as those with the second sight can sense the presence of elves in the landscape despite never having set eyes on them, so true souls can experience the presence of the saints, despite the fact that the Church has been stripped of their images …

JERUSALEM HADDOCK: nine ells long, the fairest of all fish, with a girth almost equal to that of a flounder. Its flesh is sweet and exudes a great pile of fine, handsome butter in the dish, especially when chilled over night. One such fish was cut off by low tide with some trout in a river estuary on Skardsströnd, but no one dared to taste it until I did, who knew it well.

My grandmother once said to her husband: ‘Let little Master Nosy come with us this evening to see the Peter Lamb …’ For they still kept up the custom of dedicating the first lamb of summer to Saint Peter … It was the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the day on which the Virgin Mary at the end of her life rose from Earth to Heaven like the scent of a lily blossom, encountering on her way Our Lord Jesus Christ who, for love of his mother, stepped down from his throne, descending halfway from the sublime to the corporeal sphere, bringing with him a choir of angels to make the occasion more festive. He has not come near the mortal world since, but on that occasion he embraced the soul of the Holy Virgin and escorted her to the glories of Heaven … And the old couple, my grandparents, had long been in the custom of visiting the lamb in honour of these events … In truth, they seized every opportunity to visit it, though always after I had gone to bed, but I had never been surprised by their charity towards this motherless creature, taking it for granted that they were as kind to other orphans as they were to me … After supper, Grandmother took me to my room and told me to put on my finest clothes … I obeyed, and she did the same … Then she made the sign of the cross over me and recited every five-year-old’s favourite prayer about Mary:

Mary went to church,

met a holy cross,

wore a key on her belt,

to unlock Heaven …

Almighty God and Peter

were singing there from books:

We shall go in summer

to visit our holy relics …

Please God, make the sun shine

on that fair hill,

where Mary milked her cow …

Then she took me by the hand and off we went to see the Peter Lamb … But when we went round the back of the farm buildings to meet Grandfather, I was met by an extraordinary sight … All the farmhands were gathered there, both men and women, as neatly combed and finely turned out as Grandmother and me … They were waiting for us … Grandfather Hákon led forward an old man with a nodding head and bent shoulders, clad in a cloak with the hood drawn down over his nose and holding a tall staff in his hand … He set off towards the mountain with us following in his wake … Grandfather Hákon went first with the menfolk hard on his heels, carrying torches which instead of being lit were painted a fiery red at one end:

‘So they won’t be seen all over the district …’ said one of the farmhands.

The women brought up the rear with us children … The man with the staff toiled up over the hayfields and no one but me fretted at his slow pace … I was wild with excitement to see the lamb … My grandmother kept a firm hold of my hand and I responded by dragging her along with all my might, leaning almost horizontally with the effort like a badly trained dog on a leash, but she would not be hurried … I thought the lamb must be one of the most remarkable creations on earth, given all this effort to make the visit so ceremonious and yet so secret … Ceremonious, for the people sang under the torches; secret, because the torches could not be lit and the singing was muted so as not to be heard beyond the procession … It was the seventh day of August and the summer nights were still light, though the shadow of the mountain had begun to turn blue in the evening and a stronger scent rose from the dewy grass of the farm mound in the morning … But the grassy farm knoll was not the only such mound in the world … When I saw where the procession was heading, I abruptly slackened my hold on my grandmother’s hand and pressed close to her skirts instead … Before us was a hummock known as the Mary Mound, near which we children had been strictly warned not to play our noisy games … We were told that it was the abode of the hidden people, who protected their home with magic spells … These warnings were invariably accompanied by tales of rash youths who in their eagerness to show off had advanced boldly into battle against the mound dwellers … All these youths lost their wits and ended their days tethered in stalls, lowing with the cattle … Some of the older children had heard human lowing of this kind on their travels to distant lands, such as the next farm but one in the valley, or even further afield, the farm beyond that, and I used to shudder when they mimicked the sound of these half-men … Now I leant backwards as I walked and dug in my heels, for from what I could tell the procession was headed to that very spot, the dreaded Mary Mound, where men went mad and were turned into beasts … How come they kept the Peter Lamb there of all places? Why on earth would they put the blessed little beast in such peril? And what might the lamb not turn into if it happened to graze on the mound and fall foul of the spells of the malevolent unseen power? My imagination gave birth to a monster as huge as the dreadful mound itself … A hairy sack that rolled inexorably along, dragging with it everything in its path … Man and beast alike were ensnared in the wet tangles of its wool and pulled inwards to the corpse-pale flesh which was covered all over with yellow sheep’s eyes, a coffin worm writhing in every one … That would be the last thing I saw before the monster rolled another ring around itself and crushed me on a rock … The material for this nightmarish vision was derived from the bloated carcass of a drowned ram that the older children had shown me at Hraunlón earlier that summer … I cried out:

‘I don’t want to see the lamb!’

And dropped into the grass … My grandmother jerked me briskly to my feet and pressed me close to her side without once breaking the rhythm of her stride or song … There was no escaping … For the remainder of the march I kept silent while the monster writhed and rolled and tumbled in my imagination … When the procession reached the Mary Mound, the crowd gathered in its lee so as not to be seen from the other farms … I had expected the Peter Lamb to greet us, bleating hungrily as is the custom of hand-reared lambs, but there was nothing here apart from the mound … The crowd fell to their knees and clasped their hands, all except Grandfather Hákon, the old man in the hooded cloak and two farm workers; I myself naturally copied my grandmother’s every move … Peeping over my clasped fingers, I cast around for the lamb … Instead I saw the farmhands remove spades from under their coats and, on my grandfather’s orders, start to break soil on the mound … They inserted the spades into gaps between the tussocks and sliced the turf crosswise, top and bottom, then down the slope from the middle of the upper cut to the middle of the lower one, until it resembled nothing so much as a pair of church doors as tall as a man … Now each of the farmhands stuck his spade deep under a door, thereby loosening the turf from the soil … After this, they peeled aside the doors, laying them back on the slope on either side like the panels of an altarpiece, revealing a rectangle filled with black earth … I was deeply unimpressed by my grandfather’s foolhardiness and could not understand why the good man should amuse himself by disturbing the peace of the cruel forces that dwelt in the Mary Mound, but then things took a turn for the worse … Grandfather fetched from his pouch a thick hog-bristle brush and began to sweep it along the soil at head height … I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my forehead against my clasped hands: the spirits would not like this … At that moment I heard a new sound: the gentle clacking of wooden beads … Rosaries dropped from the sleeves of the people in the crowd and they began to tell them with sighs and moans, calling forth in my breast a mixture of laughter and anguish which I had never before realised could exist in the same place … The brush whisked in my grandfather Hákon’s hand … The man in the cloak drew back his hood and at last I could glimpse something of his face: nose and eyes … a tuft of hair on the nose, the blue eyes vacant … Thrusting his staff into the spongy ground, he leant on it with his left hand while producing a small book from his scrip with his right … The brush sent the last crumbs of the thin layer of earth whirling away to reveal underneath a layer of mottled sand from the seashore … Grandfather wielded the brush on the sand with the same dexterity, working faster the deeper down he got … Meanwhile, in a reassuring and unexpectedly boyish voice, the hairy-nosed, poached-eyed man with the staff began to read aloud from the little volume that lay open in his hand, without once looking at it:

‘Transitus Mariae … On the day when the glorious Queen of Heaven and Earth, the Holy Mary, passed away, all the Lord’s apostles were present … And wise authorities tell us that wherever each of the apostles had been standing previously, he was raised from there by angelic power and set down on the spot where the Holy Mary died … For God’s angel was sent by the Lord to raise up each of the apostles and carry him many days’ journey through the air in the winking of an eye to bring him to this place …’

I had abandoned any attempt to understand what the grown-ups were up to … But of one thing I was sure: if you had to go through all this fuss just to set eyes on the Peter Lamb, then I was bored to death by the whole affair and determined to refuse any further invitations to visit, should they be forthcoming … I loosened my clasped hands, feeling the blood rushing to my fingers, and stretched and flexed them in the air … Grandmother gripped my skinny arm hard with a low cry … I lost my temper with her since I had done nothing to deserve such rough treatment and was about to strike off the hand that crushed my arm so mercilessly … But at that moment other people in the crowd began to emit similarly muffled cries … Yes, it must be starting: the evil spirits were entering the people and without warning each would turn on his neighbour, bellowing and beating, crushing and tearing off fingers, noses and ears … With a wail, I sprang to my feet … Experience had taught me that the best course was to run to my grandfather Hákon, but if the world was turning topsy-turvy, he must surely become the most fearsome ogre of all, so I made up my mind to run off alone into the blue …

‘Wise men say that God had previously revealed to his apostles that they would all, on the day that the glorious Holy Mother passed away, gather in the valley known as Vallis Josaphat …’ intoned the old man.

I could not move an inch … We were in the thick of the crowd, my grandmother and I … When the homilist fell silent I heard Grandfather Hákon say:

‘Come forth in jubilation, O Holy Mary, Mother of God, nursemaid of our Lord Jesus Christ!’

This did not sound like very monstrous talk to me so I plucked up the courage to look in his direction … The brush twirled as before in his hand, but where there had been sand there now peeped forth the finely shaped tip of a nose made of painted wood, then ruddy cheeks, and with the next swirl of the brush appeared the celestial blue eyes, turned heavenwards, of God’s Holy Mother … The third swirl swept all the sand from her countenance and the fourth dislodged it, causing it to trickle like water to her feet, revealing her robed body … My grandmother began to weep … For, as I understood later, it was a long time since she had last set eyes on the Holy Virgin, the lady who had given her strength through all the years of childbirth, childrearing and housekeeping … Her confidante in every trifling feminine concern that comes of being made not in the image of the Creator but in the image of an image, made from the substance of the male who was himself moulded from the earthly clay which became visible when the word fell from the lips of the Maker … Upon which He took the substance in His palm and made from it ever smaller worlds until He made woman and all that she contains within … The Holy Virgin knew women’s insides better than any other, being herself a daughter of Eve; the most perfect of her line, but a mortal woman nonetheless … Until the apostles saw her rise from her grave like a silver cloud which rose higher and higher until the Saviour floated to meet it, reaching a hand into the clouds and whisking his mother up to highest Heaven … Now she sits crowned at his side, pleading the cause of mortal women … It transpired that Our Lady was not the only statue in the elf-mound … For here the images of the holy saints, carved, cast and painted, from our own and our neighbouring districts had been preserved when twilight fell over the land like snow, like ash from the infernal lava-spewing Mount Hekla that is fatal to any livestock that have not been brought into shelter … For what are we but your flock, O Lord? We face the same perils as the cattle, sheep and geese that graze on grass turned an acrid black by the disaster … That is why your flock has hidden its salvation underground, and from there draws its strength, acting in secret while celebrating in its heart, until the rule of the usurpers has come to an end and the libertine hordes lie with their innards burst open like young rats that have gorged themselves in the tallow barrel … From this fair meeting with the Virgin in the Mary Mound, little Master Nosy’s childish mind became gripped with the conviction that every mound, knoll and bump in the landscape concealed heavenly wonders … Shortly before his death, my grandfather Hákon entrusted to me, then twenty-three years old, the instructions that showed where the True Believers had buried their saints … This later became my passport to the fortress of learning that is Hólar … There I exchanged the instructions for the schooling and priestly education of my son, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur Jónasson … Not that he has had much joy of being the son of Jónas the Learned, but the poor fellow obtained his place at Hólar because I knew the hiding places of those who had escaped the twilight portents, though that was not all I had to pay towards his keep: there was also the piece of paper proving Sheriff Ari of Ögur’s treasonous dealings, that is, the contract he made with the Spaniards over the harpooning of whales, in defiance of his monarch’s strict edict banning foreign ships from entering Icelandic waters, which referred to the captains who sailed to these shores as ‘filthy thieves’ …

SHELL-HEAD, or HUMPBACK WHALE: has shells and barnacles covering most of its head. Wherever the water is deep enough it rubs itself against barnacle-encrusted rocks. Of all the inedible whales, this is the greatest scourge of ships and men, for it will charge at boats and smash them in two with its fins, flippers or tail. At times it will block men’s course, so they have no alternative but to collide with it. Upon which it will cast the ship high in the air if it can, and pick off everyone on board, unless men succeed in dodging so that it misjudges and charges past. However, the sound of an iron file is insupportable to it, causing it to go mad or kill itself. On hearing the sound of a thin piece of iron, about the size of a saw, being rasped against the gunwale using a large file, the humpback will be repulsed and flee or, if shallows are to be found nearby, take its own life by running aground. It contains a good deal of blubber and its short baleen makes fine runners for sledges. The humpback can grow to some sixty ells long.

Yes, strutting sandpiper, your footprints in the sandy beach are your handwriting; thus you write your ephemeral tales and reports of what you have seen on your short-winged travels … I learnt to form letters and illuminate capitals in the scriptorium in my grandfather’s house, where I was entrusted with the copying and compilation of books … These were minor works at first, timeless neither in content nor in execution … A ballad or two and verses to entertain the traveller; handy little books containing instructions on how to cook tasty dishes; prayer books, and workbooks in which to preserve illustrations found in borrowed tomes but left out of the copies due to lack of space or else because they were out of fashion or contravened the new Church law … I also copied the diagrams of anatomy in books of healing which showed mankind as we are: our form, the places where the flesh hugs the bone or swells out, all according to how the Creator’s hand moulded our substance like clay … Since the old women in country kitchens would no longer allow me to fumble their bodies, I collected in one volume everything I could find about healing the principal maladies afflicting the female anatomy … There in alphabetical order you could find every kind of blockage, disorder of the blood, fever and chill, or swelling of their vitals or upper body … Between these I copied out old prayers to the Virgin Mary and appeals to those saints who had proved most efficacious in curing the Icelandic belly, together with exorcisms and similar invocations of white magic to aid in the battle against the wiles of demons and other horrid sprites … The bulk of this material was copied from the leechbook of the good Bishop Jón Halldórsson, and patients regarded it as an honour to hear that reverend man’s wise counsel vying with the boiling of the kettle, the sucking of the chimney, the crackling of the lamps and the crunching of the gravel floor. They used to exclaim that it was as if the Lord Bishop himself had descended to the sooty kitchen to heal them … In other words, I held to my course when it came to the healing of female disorders and the collection of ravens’ heads … But the leechbook would later land me in such desperate straits that I will never again be able to return to society but am fated instead to sit here talking nonsense to birds … Having burnt one man, they were eager to burn more … ‘Schoolmaster of Necromancy’ they called me when I helped some lads copy the leechbook and pronounce the names of the holy women who are addressed in the invocations … Those hypocritical jackals would have burnt me too if the ladies I cured with the help of the late bishop had opened their mouths … But no, they kept mum out of gratitude for my care … Yet although my body hair was not singed on their bonfire, I felt the heat of the animosity they bear towards me, the vindictive nature that drives a man to destroy his neighbour in a fire as if he were a banned book … For what is the difference? Every book is imbued with the human spirit … They knew that, the sooty guardians of the kitchen hearths, when they claimed to hear the bishop’s voice in the descriptions of their maladies and fell on their knees, only to jump up with reproaches when they heard that I had compiled the text myself … It was all in fun … And yet … I would not dream of comparing myself to Bishop Jón, any more than it would cross your mind, sandpiper, to liken the puff of air from your short wings to the whoosh from an eagle’s flight … To watch a book burn … My eyes are smarting … In the conflagration I hear the breath of the man who composed the text, and the breath of the man who formed the words, one after the other, and the breath of the man who reads it … I hear this trinity breathing as one and the same being, steadily in and out, until the fire consumes the breath from their lungs, disbanding the fellowship of those whom the book nurtured, like the soil that brings forth different plants … And many were the intertwined souls that burnt at Helgafell when the old monastery library was cast on the bonfire, along with the few holy relics and statues that had not already been destroyed … Alas, I was there! … What could my puny strength achieve when set against the giant pyre that raged like three volcanic craters, so great was the heat from that diabolical act? … And who should have been the Royal Incendiary of the first pyre, the Master Incendiary of the second pyre, the Grim Incendiary of the third? He whose duty it was to take the lead in the spiritual education of the flock in that parish, Reverend Sigurdur Pétursson, a young man who had recently taken up the living there … A sunny countenance, spare of flesh, nimble in his movements and loving to his wife and the child she bore under her belt … They had occupied the living for only four months when he lost his mind … which was seventeen days before he ordered the burning … That day Reverend Sigurdur awoke before anyone else, already raving … He ran in his nightshirt to the library, locked himself in and began hurling the books higgledy-piggledy on the floor … The servants watched aghast through the windows as he tore off his shift, flung himself on his back and rolled around on the books like a flea-bitten stray in the farmyard … Howling, he seized the writings at random, laid them on his naked flesh and rubbed them against himself, up and down, up and down, in a sinful fashion … But when he started ripping pages from the books and shoving them into his bodily orifices, the servants, afraid that he would choke himself, broke down the door … They overpowered the minister and tied him to his bed … The source of his madness was traced to a thumb-sized statue carved of whale ivory, supposedly representing Saint Barbara with her tower, which the minister’s young wife had found among the old clutter belonging to the monks and intended to use as a bogeyman for the unborn child … She had been toying with this object, which had probably been carved by some newly baptised Greenlander, while sitting on the bed in the couple’s room and had inadvertently pushed it under her husband’s pillow … So Reverend Sigurdur had been sleeping on it the night he went mad … When he was released from his bed-prison seventeen days later, however, the parson’s mind was sharper and more lucid than ever before … He ordered his sexton to clear out the library, pile the heretical collection in a heap in the field and build three bonfires with the books, which he then set alight himself … Providence guided me to Helgafell that day … I was meant to witness the tragedy … I was on my way to Stadarstadur to paint an altarpiece that I had carved earlier that winter … Seeing a pall of smoke over Helgafell as if the very hill were on fire, I gave in to curiosity and headed for the parsonage … Had I been able to fly like a bird, I might have made do with lifting myself over the hill to see what was causing the smoke … But no, I covered the whole distance on foot, arriving to find the fire at its height and, falling on my knees before it, I wept … That day Jónas ‘the Learned’ sank to new depths of ignominy in the eyes of his fellow men … But they did not see what I saw … Or if they did see, they did not understand what was happening before their eyes … When the bonfire in the middle, the largest, breathed its last, admitting a rush of air to the embers like a thousand devils all racing in single file down the same pipe, there was a great crack of thunder from the pyre … Everyone jumped — there was not supposed to be any gunpowder in the fire … While they were exchanging astonished glances, I kept my gaze fixed on the flames … I saw an open book rise from the pyre and float over the blazing pile … It appeared to be quite intact, the spine facing down, the pages spreading like wings … In an instant it glowed a dazzling white … And the parson’s youngest daughter cried out in a high voice:

‘Baba, see de birdy!’

Next moment the book exploded in a shower of sparks … And the heat blew them to heaven … A year later Reverend Sigurdur rowed out in a boat to collect down and eggs from a small island in Lake Helgafell with two of his siblings to help … By then he had become so arrogant in spiritual matters that he did not give a fig for the enchantment under which the island was said to lie … But on that trip his boat was holed in the middle and all three of them drowned … O little bird, do not let Man’s innumerable acts of wickedness weary you into fluttering too close to their bonfires, lest your flight feathers be singed … Indeed, we must look to our wits, brother Jeremiah …

BLUEBOTTLE: lays oblong eggs from which maggots hatch; if they are kept in a bull’s horn, come the spring they will turn into flies which the trout enjoys. The bluebottle is fat and as thick as a man’s thumb.