From the Mouth of the Whale

IV (Spring Equinox, 1639)

The island rises … It emerges from the deep as the flood tide strips the waters from its shores … Fish flee the dry land, out to the dark depths … Shore birds, newly arrived, follow the ebbing tide, scurrying along the water’s edge, pecking around their feet … The tide-mark retreats rapidly, like a silk glove drawn off a maiden’s hand … A bank of liver-coloured seaweed glitters in the morning sun, swollen and vulnerable … Ever more is revealed of the neck of black bedrock on which the island sits … Seaweed flows down over its shoulders … All around me the world is turning green … Sap is flowing through the plants, swelling their veins … Grass that was dull and muted yesterday now ripples on the island’s head like brilliant green fire … The balmy breeze carries the promise of dandelions yellow as suns … Meanwhile the sea is sucked ever further from the island, swept from the shallows … The sparse white hairs lift themselves on my skull, blowing down over my brow and into my eyes … The breeze is freshening … It is blowing from the east, and just a touch to the south, into Trévík Cove … Conditions will soon be perfect for what is to come … I crawl forward to the edge of the Gold Mound and look over … Today I am hoping to see the island sing, to hear the sound of its form — to confirm that it is a string, pitched in harmony with its Maker … And why should it not be? Everything here was ordered according to the same rules as everything else that came into being in those six days; yes, even here one is in a harmonious place … It is easy to think this way when the wind sounds so gentle that it is hard to know whether the whisperings one hears are snatches of its conversation with the grass or addressed to oneself as it wafts past the ear with a soft, soothing murmur … For it cannot tell the difference between human beings and tiny flowers, as becomes apparent when it blows up a storm … Now, would it be better to stand here or there? At the highest or lowest point? Up on the Gold Mound or down by Gullbjörn’s Cave? Where the island draws breath or where it exhales? But what is that plaintive bleating? I cannot be doing with that … Where is it coming from? Baaaa … I leap up and peer around … A sheep is trapped on its back down by the Elf Knolls … A stranded black sheep … Baaaa … The symphony is about to begin … It must not be ruined by the bleating of a stranded sheep … I run down off the mound, if you can call it running, and ramble through the tussocky dells, if you can call it rambling … I reach the knolls somehow … The sheep is thrashing around on its back, kicking wildly in the air, and glares at me with malignant yellow eyes before trying to strike at me with its cloven hooves … I approach the animal from the side and roll it back on to its legs again … It was its own fault that it got into this mess … What was it doing grazing in a place like this? The sheep lowers its head, grunting angrily as if I were somehow responsible for its plight … There is nothing as wrathful as the glare of a sheep that believes it has a grudge against one; no animal seems to believe as unconditionally as the sheep that we govern the world and that every mishap that befalls it should be laid at our door … The sheep snorts … I snort back … Abandoning the idea of butting me, it bounds away towards the shed … Never mind the music of a whole island, I must make amends for the animal’s behaviour … I clasp my hands over my stomach:

Hidden the house, the mound is green,

wherein the hayfield’s treasures sleep.

Well may you prosper, race unseen,

now as ever, rewards to reap.

Hear me, gentle yet potent queen,

elfin lady, dwelling in the deep,

be forgiving now, as you’ve always been,

to an old man and a foolish sheep.

I hear a voice recite from the mound:

Welcome, well-spoken one,

sage and civil-tongued,

thanks to thee

and thine I will give,

a reward in return

when need requires.

I bow down before her … Then return to my investigation … I scan the land from the Gold Mound to the cave: in a direct line between them are two rocks, the middle rock and the southernmost rock, then the Elf Knolls where I stand, and the pond, like the stops or keys on a divinely crafted instrument … Below them lies the tunnel through the island, a shaft bored from east to west … Now there will be a great sucking and gurgling as the sea empties from the mouth of the tunnel under the mound, which is covered with water every day of the year except today … The pipe is clear …. A herring gull flies in from the sea on gleaming wing, riding over the island on the easterly breeze; first over the Gold Mound, then over the middle rock, then the southernmost rock, now the Elf Knolls … It is right over my head … I follow its course, spinning on my own axis, catch it reflected in the pond, see how all of a sudden it swoops to the mouth of the cave … What can the bird want there? Ah, yes, there it gains an updraft under both wings, which lifts it in an arc high into the sky where it hovers, its white-feathered breast towards me, brilliant in the morning sun like a dove over the high altar … And now another puff comes from the same lung that elevated the herring gull to the clouds … Invisible lips of air are placed against the Gold Mound … They blow into the pipe … I hold my breath … The blast of air passes through the rock to burst out of the cave mouth on the shore, sounding the first note of the symphony … It is a low note … As if the island were joining in with the song … The ground vibrates beneath my feet … Small birds fly up … The sheep take fright … A newly wakened spider curls into a ball … Seals slide into the sea … The note reverberates long and loud … I close my eyes and my soul begins to vibrate along with it … And I feel a sensation of mingled awe and joy … Then it falls silent as suddenly as it began, the wind drops … I grow cold, my body is covered with gooseflesh, even the taut skin of my leathery scalp … The black sheep stands quite still in the pen, every muscle tensed … He chews uneasily, glaring accusingly at me, as if I have played this noisy trick on him … No, my lad, that bookish old fellow Jónas Pálmason has not the power — though some may think he can twist great forces round his little finger with ease … Look, sheep! Here is one who has amused himself by becoming the plaything of the air: the gull has allowed the noise to carry it still further, still higher, to where its silhouette now circles … The grass begins to whisper again … I start to run; my legs may be decrepit and bent but they will do for a short sprint, such as from here down to the shore … Once there I walk slowly out on to the sand, picking my way prudently over the slippery rocks, taking care not to tread on the slimy seaweed, and station myself where I can see into the cave, bracing myself … Here the sound must surely be loudest … The odour of seaweed carries from the darkness inside, the lapping of pools on the cave floor … Water drops with a hollow sound on the rocks, the weed …. And in some places the plinks have a brighter tone, as if they are falling on something more precious than wet stone … There, the old people say, Gold-Björn’s treasure is supposed to lie hidden … Directly below the Gold Mound itself is the gold that gave him his nickname … A chest full of bright metal … Fire of the sea god Aegir, tears of Freyja, mouth-fee of the Giant Thjazi, and more gold … For a long time I wanted to go in search of it, but no more … I have been deprived of life’s luxuries for so long that gold no longer seems desirable to me unless I can make it myself … But here I have no means to do so … It seems to me that the roof furthest inside the cave is blue with light … There the tunnel dips, running down towards the sea, so it must simply be daylight … The smell of the sea plants grows suddenly stronger … The breeze becomes a gust … It sounds as if black-headed gulls are shrieking in the cave … It is the birds which swarm out by the Gold Mound at the other end of the pipe … I call in reply: ‘Come, wind, come …’ My voice echoes … The gulls fall silent … And the gale replies … A mighty roar hits me, heavy as a waterfall … It fills my senses, bellowing in my ears, parching my eyes with salt, whining in my nose, bellying out my gaping mouth … I stagger but manage to stay upright … I bend and sway like a blade of grass so that it cannot knock me off my feet … It snatches and tears at my clothes, stretching them over my body … Breeches and coat-tails whine and crack … Then it drops slightly … A little more … A little lower …. And lower still … Then hops abruptly up to the fourth rung again … Sketching a ladder of notes … Leaping up and down the scale … Sometimes it blows gently and calmly … Stopping perhaps for a long pause on a single rung with one airy foot poised, as the other runs wildly up and down the scale … All at once it has three feet, five … It howls and shrieks, murmurs and plains, laments and whistles … There are animal sounds and human speech, whole choirs sing in chorus, whole herds call their names … What a symphony … It is as if the east wind is bringing me all the songs of the Earth at once, bellowing out the saddest dirge together with the most joyous paean … As if he had swept up the news on his journey around the globe, as he passed over continents, wildernesses, forests, nations, farmlands, villages; as he leapt through palaces and houses, under tables and benches, in and out of dark corners, up skirts and down collars … Before sweeping all he has learnt high into the sky — just beneath the ethereal sphere, where the ravens go to gather news of events that have not yet occurred … There he kneaded all the news together into thick bales of cloud which he floated like post bags across the sky, sending them hither and thither, adding to them until they were so swollen with story and incident that they were ready to burst, and then he had to find them a way back into the world again … He rakes together the clouds in the sky, gathering them like a haystack in an embrace so vast that the wind can only just peep over his right shoulder … He heaves the cloud-stack to and fro, keeping a look-out for a suitable place to set it down … Then an islet rises in the north at low tide, with a hole through its middle … The wind opens his jaws wide, stuffs the clouds in his mouth, packing them into his cheeks, knits his brow, stoops down to the islet and lays his mouth to the eastern side … His name is Euros … And he blows … And plays … And blows …

SOUL FLY: large and long in appearance, almost in the shape of a man, with red thighs and two legs which hang low in flight, like the redshank when it drives an interloper from the nesting grounds. It has a distinctive singing voice.

I lie in the grass by the pond, quite spent … The island has fallen silent, the tide is coming in … I think: how wonderful Sigrídur would have found it to see and hear this … But fortunately she is on land with Reverend Pálmi, otherwise she would be dead again … And I think: how newsworthy this would seem to my esteemed rector, the famous, divinely blessed philosopher and defender of bodily as well as spiritual knowledge, the kind-hearted Ole Worm, who took pity on his downtrodden, ill-used little brother in the study of natural phenomena, Jónas Pálmason of Iceland … How I wish I could send him this musical island in gratitude for having sheltered me awhile under his academic gown; make one of the English herring boats out here on the bay tow the island south to Copenhagen … But it cannot be done … I will have to draw it instead … I will try to send him a drawing … I am exhausted … My grizzled head lolls to one side, my arms lie flung out, my legs splayed … As floppy, I suppose, as a rag doll thrown aside by a child after a vigorous game … The child has run off somewhere, the doll sprawls in a corner … So it is when the forces of nature enjoy a fleeting game with one, which ends in an instantaneous victory for the mighty, leaving behind the poor toy with all the unrealised games playing out before its mind’s eye; not that anything would ever have come of them … But today it is neither the gnawing doubt that anything will ever return to its place nor the painful certainty that the mountain will never lack for snow … It was neither an earthquake nor an avalanche … Like the game that lingers on in the doll, the music continued inside me … I am inspired, puffed up with the stories, the poems that the boisterous east wind has taught me … I feel as if I know all there is to know! The compartments of my body have been filled with all the knowledge a solitary man can possess, alone and unaided by books, schoolmasters, picture stories, wise old dames … I myself am like a compendium, which inside one thick leather cover contains all the wisdom of the world on many closely written folios, lavishly illuminated and bound up with horsehair string to prevent it from spewing out pages … Whatever I am asked, about great matters or small, I will know the answer … I can describe with equal certainty the hoarse mating call of the goosander, the cruel nature of the red-combed whale, the last days of the Greenland colony, polygamy among the Negroes, the explosive force of gunpowder, a certain cure for the squitters, the mildness of the wild pansy … Nothing, nothing at all, is strange to me any more … I am omniscient … A fit of yawning assails me … I let my mouth gape wide, stroking my face with flat palms … Breathe in and out with great sucking sounds, quite unafraid that any spirit of the air will sneak inside me … I clap my hands together: let them come! There is no room any more in this wisdom-stuffed Jónas … I feel as if at least three spirits are trying to force their way into my mouth at once, seeking an entrance to my body down my windpipe … I let them rage … Feel them crashing into my uvula again and again, but they will have to go away disappointed … My gorge is stuffed like a Danish sausage, full perhaps of lore about the natural history of bean plants and garlic, and nothing that has the merest hint of the selfish character of fallen devils can get past that stuffing; no, only the self-sacrificing breath of life can pass down there, clear, blue and pure, which keeps the heart cool and nourishes the brain … I sit up … Rock uncontrollably forwards and from side to side … Lie down again … The world may have entered my carcass but that is not to say that it has arranged itself there according to any rational order … Indeed, how could it? There was too much going on when the symphony rose to its height and the tempo of the notes merged with my own tempo … For the most part I received it with open arms but there were times when I turned my back or knelt … Five times the storm of notes knocked me out cold … I squealed and wailed, bellowed and moaned … Yes, it entered me in every conceivable manner … Fire, air, earth, water … From these elements everything is made, including me … Whatever was thrust inside me is made of the same substance as myself … It may be hot, dry, cold or damp … And so I can find the proper place for everything, as if I were a tall building of twelve floors, very spacious and furnished with cabinets containing many shelves and chests with many drawers … In the two compartments of my heart I organise everything that is warm, light and spring-like … Tales of the endearing nature of infants, the deeds of virtuous girls, the unlooked-for helpfulness of wild beasts; healing herbs that must be picked in the morning dew; fair golden jewels made in honour of the heavenly family and other holy beings or else to encase the bones and skin of saints, and of course the pelican … Some things I launch into my blood, home to all that is hot and damp: many things connected to the world of woman, her work, her womb and her love for her children and husband, though some of her fair things find a place in my kidneys, according to the alchemical order, and some even lower, in the lap, and there I am guided by the rules of astrology … And so it goes on, as if I were a curator in the great building that houses my collection … Yes, it is large but dilapidated; the copper shingles on the tower that have not been blown off have turned green, the internal timbers are rotten and the cellar needs mucking out … I walk from room to room, a large bunch of keys at my belt …. In my mind I go up and down the passageways, open the door to the kidneys, close the door to the bladder, take things out of coffers, hang them from the ceiling, lay them on the examination table … And so, slowly but surely, I move everything inside me from place to place until it ends up on the right shelf … One item goes into the brain, another into the liver, others into the limbs … And when I have placed in the spleen all that is cold and melancholy in the world, governed by the bitter black gall that it cooks in its cauldrons or its natural equivalent in the brew of tribulations — there is far too much of me in there, alas: a container of poison from plants, venomous shells and stones; an etching of the man who murdered his wife by shoving her head in a pan of boiling barley porridge; various sad poems about the dark times we live in, including several by the one who is holding the reins here, such as: ‘a coal-black sun of sins now climbs / the skies to light the ways / the defender of such heinous crimes / ’tis obligatory to praise’; the swim bladder of a pike; the blunt blade of the axe used by the eighty-year-old executioner Jón Jónsson to chop the head off Björn ‘ladies’ man’ Thorláksson, taking three dozen blows to sunder the joints of his neck; as well as gloomy clouds and all that sort of black gall rubbish — when all this has been placed in the spleen, an equilibrium is finally reached … Now at last I can stand up … I scramble to my feet … I stand upright … If an eagle-sighted man standing on the mainland placed a good spy-glass to his eye and scanned the island from end to end, he would get a tremendous shock … On the bank of the pond at the western end of the island what should he see but a sixty-five-year-old gaffer in a threadbare canvas coat, grey-haired as a head of cotton grass in autumn … No, if the onlooker’s miraculous sight was sufficiently powerful and penetrated deep, he would see not the figure of a man but the building that I feel myself to be … Built from the trunks of trees that drank water and sprouted from the earth; walled about with bricks of clay hardened in the fire, dried in the air:

A lighthouse at the edge of the world …

Here I stand, swaying on my feet, imagining myself almost grand …

CORAL: coral is the name of a stone which, when it comes to the surface, loosened from the seabed by the tides or fierce storms, is as green as a tree or growing shoot, but afterwards hardens to stone, turning red or variegated according to the colours of the sea floor. It allays storms and bad weather, and is effective against trolls and thunder: wise men say that if it is carried on the person, lightning will not harm the bearer, nor the ship, house or field in which it is found. Nor will the person who carries it be harmed by black magic, for it counteracts sorcery and all wicked spirits avoid it. Some say that those who own it will prosper and always be well liked. If it is scattered in a vineyard or in other such places there will be a prolific harvest. Worn about the neck it wards off all ailments of the stomach. And it has been well proved that if coral is heated until it glows, then quenched in warm milk, and afterwards drunk by the man who has no appetite or a gripe in the guts, he will be cured. Some claim that coral must be what the ancients referred to as the work of mermen or dwarfs.

After midday it began to pour with rain, thanks and glory be to the merciful Lord … There is hope that this terrible winter is coming to an end … Well, perhaps … If I am not mistaken, the deathly cold fleet of icebergs still looms outside the bay to the north … But in this as in other things the good Lord will weigh up the deeds of His children and allot us our condition and fortune according to which side is more crowded when He closes the gates of the soul-pens … One cannot be certain of an early spring — and yet … At the summer court gathering last year that kindly, noble man Brynjólfur Sveinsson was elected Bishop of Skálholt, so now he is to be addressed as My Lord Bishop, along with all the other fine titles descriptive of his wonderful benevolence and charity … As a result, some of the electors have moved from the Creditum pen over to the better, which is known as Debitum … The sheep fled the downpour, huddling together in the shed, all except the black sheep which galloped around in the cloudburst until his fleece had soaked up so much of the rainwater that he staggered home, haunches dragging, to join the rest … There will be a fine stench of wool when he starts steaming … I leave them to it; my sheep look after themselves, so to speak … I feed them in the yard in the depths of winter, let them out in spring, spread the remaining tufts of hay in the fields, leave the doors of the shed open … Of course this is no sort of husbandry, but then I am no farmer, I have no time for that … I myself seek shelter in my human shed … I blow on the fire, add a fistful of driftwood kindling, put the small clay pot on the flames and boil the last of the vetch in a splash of milk … At times I wish I knew the art of smoking tobacco leaves, which seems to me a pleasant pastime for those who have the means … When I was in the Blue Tower there was a Dutchman who used to smoke tobacco after dinner every evening and would willingly instruct his fellow prisoners in the art … Before long they were communing alone with their pipes, eagerly drinking in the smoke, saying little, wrapped up in their thoughts … I could not afford to join the Dutchman’s school; ah yes, there are many things I have had to miss out on … I stir the vetch milk together with a little porridge left over in my bowl from this morning and sit down on the bed … The mouse now pays me a visit … She seeks out the warmth, hoping for a crumb, courtesy of Jónas’s bad table manners … She is welcome, I owe her a debt of gratitude … The little mouse sailed here on the wreckage of a house after the big storm in November … Where she came from I do not know, but it was clear that a farmhouse had been blown out to sea, and the mouse had guided the flotsam here … Tatters of the former inhabitants’ clothing were sadly tangled with the broken timbers: knee stockings, a coat, undergarments, swaddling bands, but no body parts … The mouse herself was riding on a battered bed post, quite decently carved, on which one could make out inscribed in plain lettering:

‘ … NSDOTTIR THE LORD’S …’

I perceived immediately that this was an example of the riddle known as Anagramme, which can be used to predict the future, although I have still come no closer to solving it than: ‘STRID NOT’, ‘NID STORT’ … Neither of which satisfies me … The enigmatic board now hangs over the door inside my hut, while other bits of the flotsam came in useful for firewood or draught-proofing the walls and roof … This saved my life when the weather was at its coldest in February … I take a spoonful of vetch porridge from my bowl and shake it out on the floor in front of the fire … The mouse is there in a flash. Squatting on her haunches like a toddler, she sets about devouring the porridge, raising it to her mouth in her front paws … Afterwards, she must fastidiously clean her snout, for the porridge sticks to her whiskers as it does to mine … I burst out laughing, because we are both ridiculous … She flinches, pauses in her toilette and waits, listening … I laugh again, a forced laugh this time … Now the mouse knows that it was only old Jónas and carries on with her ablutions … My hand lifts of its own accord and gently pats the blanket beside me, reminding us that Sigrídur is not here … When we used to sit together on the bed, when the wind was blowing a gale, for example, or the snow had drifted over the hut, there were times when this same hand would steal under my wife’s shift … There it would flatten out and slide its palm up the small of her back in a slow caress, proceeding from there up between the shoulder blades to the neck bone, and rubbing the knotted muscles … Sigga used to enjoy this after a day’s toil, for she was always harder working than I and never begrudged me the fact … In her absence I miss being able to fondle her like that … ‘You have such hot hands,’ she used to say when my hand was on its travels, looking at me from her gentle, stone-grey seal’s eyes … Then my hand would want to move lower, down from the shoulder blades, rubbing the poor flesh beside the armpits where the weariness could be sorest … From there it would slide down her spine, pressing the tips of its long fingers here and there into the muscles that lie beside it … After this my hand would rest on her hip, where it would lie still for a long while … Back and palm would draw warmth from one another …. With that my hand’s proper business was finished, but there were times when, before slipping back out, it would pause at the sacrum where the spine disappears between the buttocks … A soft place on a woman … At that point I always grew thoughtful, and always thought the same thing: this could just as well be the place for a tail, whether furry, feathery or scaly … And before I knew it I would be investigating and probing the spot … Mistress Sigrídur used to react quickly, shooting out a hand behind her to grab mine tightly and pull it from under her shift … She would kiss me on the back of the hand and palm and say: ‘Thank you, my dear, that’s quite enough …’ For my touch was no longer aimed at pleasing my wife, instead it had turned into a medical probing, in support of the thoughts that had begun to rage in my head: in Tartary there grows a plant called Boramez, the fruit of which is a lamb … Each plant bears a single lamb on a tall stalk that grows up from the middle of the bush, like a rhubarb flower from a rhubarb patch … The lamb foetus grows inside the bud, as white and furry as fulled wool, until it reaches maturity and wakens to life with a piercing bleating … Then the farmers of Tartary harvest their sheep … They go up on to the moors, their scythe blades flashing, and snip the lambs from their stalks, to which they are attached by the navel like the umbilical cord on human babes … It must be a noisy job but well rewarded, for the meat of the Boramez lamb tastes like fish, its blood like honey … This form of generation is similar to that of the little bird called the sea-speckle here in Iceland, which is said to be born from leaves of seaweed, though we do not harvest it … It is also well known that in Finnmark it rains rodents of the species known as Mus norvegicus, which the Finns call lemmings, that do not breed like most other species of furry animals but quicken to life from seeds in storm clouds … I myself have laid eyes on and handled the dried skin of this creature in the Museum Wormianum … The tirelessly searching, ever resourceful curator had managed by sheer force of will to have a specimen sent to him from Bergen in Norway, though it is hard to find even in its native haunts, for it suffocates in the meadows at midsummer when the grass grows over its head and its corpse quickly rots away … In England they reap the benefit of barnacles that give birth to geese, which they were allowed to eat during Lent in papist times because the Church classed them as fish … It is also widely written that the Egyptians endure plagues of mice, born from the clays of the River Nile, which attack their cornfields and eat up every grain … Thus we have examples of damp air, plants of land and sea, and river silt engendering living creatures with warm blood … Not to mention the extraordinary origins of several creatures with cold blood, or else little or no blood at all: sponges grow from the stony sea floor, pearls from shellfish, flies from amber … As I was reflecting on this, inspired by the feel of my wife’s sacrum, it seemed to me that the great strides that natural history has taken over the past few decades have left us confronted with the notion that it is doubtful the Creator placed unbreachable barriers between the species that he scattered around the Earth in the beginning … Now it seems to us natural philosophers that not only is a connection possible between living beings through various portals in their diversely composed bodies — once I saw a hawkweed growing and thriving in a man’s ear — but the Lord has placed in the haversack of every single creature a book containing recipes for all the rest … From a philosophic standpoint every single species of animal, vegetable or mineral is capable of engendering the rest, and although more often than not physical constraints render such a thing absurd — size difference and the like — the same versatile sap of life flows through them all as that which flows deep down in the earth, taking on the petrified forms of shells, leaves and feathers … Indeed, if you stroke your finger over the fur of a honey bee and a rat, the feeling is the same, they are sisters in that both are short-haired … But this merely tells me that rodent and bee come from the same workshop, bear the same hallmark … More remarkable by far is the rarest expression of this nature, which most closely affects mankind and is abhorrent to all God-fearing people — but which the naturalist must, with God’s permission and the strength that He grants him in his mercy, confront, examine, research and investigate — and that is the fact that human women can give birth to cats or indeed lay monstrous eggs …

SIREN FISH: sings so sweetly that sailors are overpowered by her song if they hear it; the Norwegians are accustomed to sing, chant verse and row like madmen if they hear her calls.

There is a stone called hysterolithos, which can be seen in royal collections or illustrated in printed books, that possesses the remarkable nature of being shaped like the penis and scrotum of a man with, above them, a fully formed female vagina … What the supremely good and vigilant Lord means by allowing nature to scoop up a morsel like this from His cooking pot is not hard to guess: by demonstrating how easily He can mould the likeness of a man from earthly clay He wishes to warn the frail children of men that He can smash the existing form and cast it anew … They must take heed of their conduct, cultivate good habits, love one another, fear and worship Him … And He chooses these particular bodily organs so that the populace will respect the excellent task He has set them: to go forth and multiply and people the Earth … Which can only be done by reproduction, whereby the man introduces his member into the female genitalia, leaving behind his seed so that it may mingle with her blood, a shoot like a seed in damp soil … The genitals of woman are the doorway through which the infant must pass, by the process we refer to as labour or birth pangs or birth throes, which terms are witness to the difficulty of the task … Midwives place healing herbs or stones on this doorway to ease the birth, for the suffering of the daughters of Eve is terrible enough even if we do not deny them the aids that are to be had … People also speak of a woman’s secret door … But that is a paltry name, expressive of our helplessness when faced with the conundrum of foretelling what lies within and what will emerge from that mysterious hole … Seldom does a man sit willingly before that doorway, waiting for it to open for the babe that grew from his seed … Waiting around by a woman’s groin and tearing the child from within is rightly women’s work … Yet I myself have been there … It was during our first flight from the Vulture of Ögur’s henchmen … We had no horse, Pálmi Gudmundur was just nine, Hákon four, and Sigga was carrying our third child … Winter had begun and our progress was slow … The human wolves had not yet stolen the chest containing our clothes, books, stones, salts and the other useful objects I had amassed … Sigga was in the lead, Pálmi Gudmundur followed in his mother’s footsteps, and I brought up the rear with the little boy in my arms and the chest tied on to my back … Evening fell … The wind picked up from the north … It became difficult to find one’s footing on the slippery grass of the shingle bank, though this was preferable to toiling through the heavy sand of the beach … When I had to turn my shoulder to the wind to avoid being knocked over, I called to my wife:

‘Hold on to the boy, he could be blown away …’

She paused in her tracks and sighed heavily before answering:

‘No, you can do that yourself, Jónas; I’m going to give birth to our child …’

After which she slid down a gully in the bank to the beach, found a cleft in the lava wall and vanished inside … Pálmi Gudmundur started to run after her but I told him to come back and look after his brother … I found the boys shelter from the storm, set down little Hákon on a tussock, tipped the chest off my back and opened it … While I was gathering together the things that might come in useful for the birth, I explained to Pálmi Gudmundur that their mother was about to undergo a long and terrible torment, that the illness now beginning was one of the toughest and most dangerous a woman could endure and she was not certain to survive, but that it was with the knowledge and will of Almighty God that she should suffer so dreadfully, for by this she was paying off an ancient debt incurred by Eve … I instructed him to lead his little brother in prayer; together they should pray to the good Lord to protect and bless that honest and God-fearing woman, their mother Sigrídur, and their unborn and unbaptised sibling who was still a foetus in her womb but at this moment wished to be born so that it could fear Him and do good deeds to glorify His Name … I said that their mother’s torments would be so great that they would hear her scream and wail, beg for help and plead for mercy, her lamentations would be shrill and unceasing, she would howl like a wounded beast, so the brothers must pray fervently, raising their thin, boyish voices as loud as they could … I closed the chest … Before descending the bank to see how my wife was doing, I made our sons sit on the chest, and there they perched, those two little fledglings of the Lord, Pálmi Gudmundur and Hákon, with their thin shoulders and heads bowed over their clasped hands, piping to God to have mercy, shedding tears and singing psalms to save their labouring mother … She, meanwhile, was lying propped against the wall at the back of the cave, having braced herself against the rock with her heels in the wet shingle … Fronds of seaweed fell in a tangle from every outcrop, tiny dog whelks studded the roof like stars in heaven, fragments of mussel shell lay strewn all over the floor, with the odd starfish among them; it was well sheltered from the wind … Sigrídur had pulled up her skirts; she was silent but sweating profusely … Eventually, when I had spread out the sheet underneath her and was about to lay the birthstone on her groin, she opened: the child came to the door … It was the little girl, Berglind, who leapt from her mother’s womb like a spring from a rock … Once the afterbirth had come out and the child’s umbilical cord had been cut and tied, I fetched the little lads from their seat on the chest lid and showed them their sister … They found it an extraordinary notion that such a tiny minnow could endanger the life of a full-grown woman like their mother … We waited there in the lee of the lava until the wind had dropped and mother and child had recovered their strength, by which time it was morning … The fervent and effective hour of prayer on the shingle bank had made such a deep impression on Pálmi Gudmundur that he was called to his holy vocation, the ministry … But how it touched Hákon we were never to know, because before it could become apparent we lost him and his little brother Klemens during our desperate travels in the winter of 1621 … It still pierces my heart to think how few days of our lives Sigrídur and I were allowed to share with our little boys … Yet I am grateful and happy that the glorious Heavenly Father should have taken pity on them and pressed them to His nourishing breast when their earthly father was denied all succour and everywhere turned away from the homes of his countrymen with pitiless curses and hissing … It was no mystery what lay behind those closed doors: they housed cold hearts, as tightly locked as the fist of an executioner about the handle of a whip … When Sigrídur rose from her sandy-pillowed bed, I noticed that during the birth reddish-coloured pebbles had mingled with the sand under her hips … I gathered several handfuls of them, which I put in our chest, and they turned out to be brother of haematite … Right up until the day that we were robbed of the chest, Sigga would use these healing stones to ease the birth pangs of many a woman … For just as the human foetus dwells and grows in its mother’s secret womb, unknowable and as likely to take on the form of a beautiful girl as the most misshapen wretch, so nature breeds in its lap both unimaginable horrors and precious gems … And the anterooms of their birth chambers are the clefts and fissures in the body of the Earth, caves like the one in which my little Berglind was born … I lean back in bed, stretching my arms and cracking my joints … The mouse is still huddled cosily by the fire; it is quite extraordinary how she puts up with my ramblings … The vetch porridge has hardened in the bowl; I scrape out the leftovers and scatter them on the floor … In a place of entertainment like this it is the storyteller who must pay his audience rather than the other way round … Mousey nibbles at the food, pricking up her ears at my voice …

CONCH SHELLS: several species of conch are found in Iceland. Wise men make use of our edible conches by burning them until they glow, then quenching them in ox urine and giving the fish to the patient to consume in food or drink without his or her knowledge; it protects the maid against man’s lechery and the lascivious against intemperate fornication. Also, those afflicted with seasickness may go secretly to the beach and swallow the raw fish out of the shell three times during the waxing and then the waning moon, with a sip of seawater each time. If people eat a lot of them, they will become too drunk to stand; a condition that we call ‘conch totters’, which can be slept off. The conch mostly crawls up out of the deeps from the middle of Pisces onwards.

A rock cavity can also be called a cave … Shallow caves are often known as grottos, from the Latin word grotto, which also means ‘small cave’, and grotto is the stem of the word used in southern countries to describe a particular kind of decorative picture or grotesque … I saw many such pictures in Ole Worm’s library … They appeared in the frontispiece of large tomes of learning, in the margins, in chapter openings or between sections … For the modern master printers think like the scribes of our old Icelandic manuscripts, who wove sphinxes and chimaeras into their illuminated capitals and the decorated borders of their books … A centaur here, an old woman with bird’s feet there, a three-headed dog … Bibliophiles as they were, the scribes understood better than anyone that little curios like these provide longed-for staging posts for the readers’ eyes on their monotonous descent down the ladder of the pages, word by word, from left to right, along one line and down to the next … And offer the mind respite from the matter … If one watches a river of lava, or clouds of steam or great torrents, or a field rippling in the wind, the eye and mind will not rest until they have tracked down familiar images in the flow … Even though these figures are never still, never clearly defined, never whole, never the same, one’s mind can grasp them merely by blinking … Then time ceases to flow like a river and becomes instead a series of moments which may follow fast upon one another’s heels yet each has its own unique form … The grotesques are just like those fleeting images that I myself have often perceived in smoke, lichen or clouds … It is as if the artist has transferred the image from the surface of his eye to the page without stopping to wonder whether it is believable or scientifically accurate … Pictures the draughtsman saw with his eyes and thought up in his imagination have become in an instant part of our visible world … Oh, those pictures! … Oh, those thousands of freaks and interwoven absurdities that invigorated me when I was stumbling my way through the thick volumes in the Museum Wormianum … One never knew where one creature began or ended … A goat’s hind legs might, on closer inspection, turn out to be the beginning of a flower stalk … But the stalk sprouted not petals but stork feathers, on top of which sat a cluster of butterfly wings … Nor was it certain whether the goat’s body was made of flesh, mineral or vegetable … And even if one was fairly sure that the lower half of its body was made of marble, it was just as certain that blood flowed through its stony veins … Was the blood red and hot or green and cold? Everything grows from something else, as if nature were forever having second thoughts, pausing, pursuing a new idea or changing its mind halfway: a blue bird’s wing extends from a small boy’s temple, but by the time one reaches the tip of the wing the feathers have changed into bright green cabbage leaves with foam bubbling over the edges … A cat sits not on hindlegs but on a tail, which swells from the hip and curls up under its breast in countless joints like a lobster tail, while the cat’s nose is formed from a bunch of berries and about its neck is a collar studded with precious gems … And one asks oneself: if the pet is this odd, what on earth can the owner be like? A crown of flies’ wings rests on the head of a woman with nine udders dangling from her chest and stomach; she has no arms and her legs are like two scaly serpent bodies twined together … The old Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson would not have approved … For as he says in his Skálda, or Handbook of Poetry:

‘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 …