From the Mouth of the Whale

The Tail or Leftovers

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

So we say:

‘Farewell, brother Jónas, and thank you for entertaining us. That is sufficient now, we have enough on our plates with our own twilight portents …’

Jón Gudmundsson the Learned comes to his senses in pitch darkness. His clothes are soaking, yet he is warm to the bone. He is reclining on his back in a fairly shallow hot pool. His arms lie close against his sides, his legs straight out; he is as stiff as a board. The back of his head rests on the soft bed of the pool. The thick, viscous water reaches up to his temple and fills his ears, making all sounds deeper, more remote. Jón half rises, stiffly, waiting for the shiver of cold. It is very hot in this dark place, the air even hotter than the water, as when a large saucepan comes to the boil. The shiver of cold does not materialise. Jón heaves himself out of the warm liquid, stands up, misses his footing on the slippery floor and half falls: the whole place is moving gently, like a ship in a light breeze. He squats down and leans his head from side to side, letting the water run out of his ears which are now assailed by a heavy, rhythmical booming, a tremendous distant roar of water rising and falling, and a sucking noise.

While Jón the Learned was asleep — or swooning — he dreamt that a man came to him in a grey-brown homespun coat, with a grey-speckled cap of the same material. Under the peak of his cap gleamed beady brown eyes, surrounded by feathers. The man leant towards Jón, laying his thick, powerful beak to his ear, and chirped in a low voice:

‘When you awaken you will have forgotten your name; for all you know, you may be called Jónas Pálmason.’

Jón finds the dream bizarre for that is his name: Jónas Pálmason — generally known as ‘the Learned’, but sometimes called a painter, or more rarely an ivory-smith.

Jónas the Learned makes another attempt to stand up and this time he is successful. He rides the wave, picking his way gingerly over the slippery floor. This must surely be a cave, wide and high-ceilinged here where Jónas is standing, narrowing as it deepens, and yet it is constantly on the move. How on earth did he get here? The last thing Jónas remembers is standing on the end of the curved lip of lava that forms the northern harbour on Gullbjörn’s Island. The tide was at its height and he retreated from the wave when it licked the toe of his shoe. Then the surf began to break on a reef out in the harbour where there had been no reef before. Jónas had waited a little, craning his neck to see what was rising out of the water. It was black and the sea foamed over it, for it was moving fast. Before he could even scream with fright, a great fish had swallowed Jónas.

He knows the species; Jónas the Learned knows that he has been consumed by a north whale; an evil leviathan that grows to eighty or ninety ells long and the same in width, and its food is by all accounts darkness and rain, though some say it also feeds on the northern lights. In spite of this knowledge, Jónas reacts to his discovery like a man. Judging by the length of his beard and his hunger pangs, he calculates that he has been lying unconscious in the fish’s belly for three nights and two days. It must be going to spew him up on to dry land. Jónas gets on all fours and crawls out of the stomach, up through the gullet, into the head and takes a seat on the animal’s tongue.

After swimming all day the north whale comes to a halt. It opens its jaws. Light floods into the fish. It takes Jónas time to grow used to the brightness, but soon he sees that the beast has rested its chin on a grassy bank on the shore, as if its lower jaw were a drawbridge, and at the other end of the bridge he glimpses two human figures, one splendidly robed, the other dressed in black. It is Jónas the Learned’s unfailing benefactor, the excellent Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson, in full regalia, a mitre on his head and golden crosier in his hand, and his loving son, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur Jónasson, Minister of Hjaltastadur. Jónas sets off at a run, racing over the slippery tongue as fast as his feeble legs can carry him, out of the whale’s mouth. There he throws himself flat on his face, pouring out tears of gratitude, kissing the bishop’s feet. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur kneels down beside his father and raises him up. They fall into one another’s arms with a great shedding of tears.

The Bishop of Skálholt smiles blithely at father and son. Raising his gloved hand, he makes the sign of the cross over the leviathan. The great fish slams its jaw shut, gives a splash of its tail and disappears once more into the deep.