The Fish Can Sing (13 page)

The sprinkling of books we had at Brekkukot was mostly a motley collection of strays, as I said earlier. And yet it was easier than one might think to arrange them into literary order. It bore witness above all to the nature of our visitors, in particular to the fact that there had been more of those who were fond of champions, knights, and sea-epics than of those who preferred Danish novels – this was the name which was applied in our house
to modern literature in general, but particularly anything to do with hysteria.

When we talked about Danish novels, it was as if we had in mind a vague impression of Dostoyevsky and those other storytellers who appear to have spilled a great mass of tar which then, obeying only the laws of gravity, somehow oozes along formlessly into every crack and crevice.

Many of those who came to visit us were not only good readers but also masters in the art of telling stories. The stories we heard most often were of disasters at sea and on land, or of Herculean feats; also, tales about great gluttons and other peculiar people – not forgetting stories about ghosts and the Hidden Folk …

A weatherbeaten man from some far-off place sitting under the lamp at the door-post of the mid-loft, reading aloud from a book or telling a story; my grandfather with a net fixed to one of the rafters, silently mending mesh after mesh; and likewise Captain Hogensen’s rope growing longer and longer, and the bed-post creaking at his every pull; Runólfur sitting with his fingers in his toothless gums like a baby, and the tears trickling down his cheeks not because he was crying, but because he had been so long at sea that the salt-burn never left the corners of his eyes now; a few others sitting on the beds and on other seats; the trap-door over the stairs lying open, with my grandmother sitting knitting on the bottom step, for she was expecting more visitors. And the story slowly unfolding.

What story can it have been?

The stories were innumerable, but most of them had this in common, that the method of telling them was diametrically opposite to the method we associated with Danish novels: the story-teller’s own life never came into the story, let alone his opinions. The subject-matter was allowed to speak for itself.

They never hurried the story, these men. Whenever they came to anything that the audience found desperately exciting, they would often start reciting genealogies at great length, and then they would launch into some digression, also in great detail. The story itself had a life of its own, cool and remote and independent of the telling, free of all odour of man – rather like Nature itself,
where the elements alone reign over everything. What was one little shrivelled person in some fortuitous lodging compared with the wide world of the heroic age, the world of epic with its great events that happened once and for all time?

The Lives of Great Icelanders –
sometimes I dream that I have this book in my hands once again. What can have become of this book? I remember it so clearly at home in Brekkukot. I have run my eye over various catalogues, but cannot find it listed anywhere. Is my memory deceiving me in thinking that it ever existed at all? Or did it just come to exist inside me, somehow? How can it be that I know so many stories from it? Since I myself am now engaged in composing a book, I would just like to have written up a few stories from
The Lives of Great Icelanders
.

If I were now to write from memory, without a book, a story about a Great Icelander, like one of those we used to hear at home in between sagas and
rímur
, I think that one of the first to come to mind would be the story of Pastor Snorri of Húsafell. Perhaps I ought to try to recall it here; but I would point out that I am not telling it as it stands in the book, because the book is lost, but rather according to its essence, and what I feel were its main features when I heard it told at home in Brekkukot. It may well be that I confuse incidents from the Lives of other Great Icelanders with the Life of Pastor Snorri, but what does that matter? It is only because I feel, deep down, that all Great Icelanders ought to be the way Pastor Snorri was.

Pastor Snorri was a huge man, powerfully built and manly in every respect. Even in his old age he never lost his agility and strength, as can be seen from the fact that when he was in his seventieth year he leapt over the Hvítá at the lava outcrop below Húsafell. When he was working as a seaman off Snæfells Glacier in his youth, most men found him an overpowering partner to be rowing beside; and such was his fishing luck that even when he put out his line where others found nothing and called the sea barren, he would haul in fish after fish.

Pastor Snorri was immensely quick at composing verses, even when he was very young. When he went to school at Skálholt, he made such rapid progress that many teachers and hoary old
Latin scholars had to watch their step. It has never been forgotten that about the time he graduated from school, a distinguished Frenchman arrived at Skálholt bringing with him an enormous book in Latin, and this Latin was so difficult, particularly towards the end of the book, that not one of the teachers there could translate such a text. Then Snorri of Húsafell was called in. Snorri looked at the book and smiled, and then he set to, translating into Icelandic every word that was printed in the book just as if it were another native tongue to him; and around him stood pastors, teachers, and Frenchmen, all agape with amazement at such learning. Many years later, when someone asked Snorri what sort of Latin it had been that had so baffled the pastors of Skálholt, he gave a little laugh and said that this had not been so surprising, since the first half of the book had been in Greek and the second half in Hebrew.

Pastor Snorri of Húsafell was so good at Icelandic wrestling that it is believed that for more than fifty years there was no clergyman in the whole synod who could stand up against him. He was also uncannily skilled at fighting with bulls. There are many stories of how on his travels he would often rush up to vicious bulls, seize hold of them in a wrestling hold, and throw them to the ground.

It is also said that he once laid low a giant negro with a hip-throw on board a merchant-ship at Stapi. And it has been reliably reported that he once threw an ogress on Holtavör
uheidi; he felled her with a special crutch-throw known as the ogress throw.

Pastor Snorri was so skilful a smith that people in Borgarfjör
ur believed that he could do cold-welding. He was also such a prodigious snuff-taker that when he went over to the parish-of-ease at Kalmanstunga to sing Mass there, only a day’s journey from Húsafell, he would take with him for the night two ram’s-scrotum pouches crammed full of snuff. He was also a very fine singer of the Mass.

Of Pastor Snorri’s versifying, it is commonly held (and this is supported by many learned men) that there are perhaps a few master-rhymesters who at their best could compose verses as intricate as those of Snorri, but none more intricate. He composed
a great number of
rímur
, of which
The Ordeals of Jóhanna
is the largest cycle.

And now a word about Pastor Snorri’s strength of faith. It is said that there were more Christians in Iceland in his time than ever before or since; and this was thanks to the influence of the Danish kings here in Iceland, who issued an edict about church attendance, that people were to be birched if they fell asleep in church. It is the general opinion that although there were many men in Iceland at that time who could give a good account of themselves in this question of faith, there were few of his countrymen who were any match for Pastor Snorri in a trial of religious conviction. It is also said that there was scarcely a disputant in the land whom Pastor Snorri could not convert; nor was there any blasphemer alive in Iceland in those days, learned or lay, who dared to debate with Pastor Snorri.

At that time, Magnús Stephensen, the Chief Justice, lived at Leirá. He was considered the greatest expert in French humanism of all his countrymen and he even wrote books on those matters with discriminating intelligence.

The story goes that Magnús Stephensen took a horse one summer’s day and rode over to the Borgarfjar
ardalir with a few attendants, and did not pause until he reached Húsafell. He asked to see Pastor Snorri, and when they met and fell to talking, Magnús the Chief Justice let it be known that he had come for the express purpose of holding a disputation with Pastor Snorri about Hell. Pastor Snorri accepted the challenge and invited Stephensen to enter his home and accept his hospitality; he proposed that after they had eaten they should go to bed, and begin their disputation the next morning. This they did.

In addition to his skill in French learning, Magnús Stephensen is reckoned by men of wisdom to have been one of the most erudite of Icelanders both in antiquities and in dialectics, and not least in those studies which derive from Latin and Greek; he always had at his fingertips weighty references to fundamental sources and to those Latin sorcerers known as
auctores;
and it is said that the man sufficiently adept at citing these
auctores
can refute most people’s arguments.

For most of the day the two of them, Pastor Snorri and Chief Justice Magnús, wrestled over the matter in hand, using every hold in learning and logic and matching one another’s rhetoric; the aforementioned
auctores
were cited with greater zeal than had ever been heard before in any one room in Iceland, and indeed they drank so much whey during the disputation that four serving-women had their hands full fetching and carrying away for them. They cited evidence from
auctores
from Ireland, France, and the Roman Empire, all the way east to Muscovy and even a few from China, some say. Such uncommon sages as Avicenna and Averroës were brought forth there, and for a long time it was uncertain which of the disputants would gain the upper hand.

But it is generally believed that towards evening the contest was beginning to turn against Pastor Snorri, until he was in danger of being completely overthrown; and that was because Chief Justice Stephensen managed to bring up some rather rare thesis by the hellhound Abracadabra, who lived in Persia seven centuries before the birth of Christ. Pastor Snorri had never heard of this cleric before, and was left completely defenceless against the potent and evil heresy contained therein; it made little difference when Snorri remonstrated with Magnús that this Abracadabra must certainly have been a child of the devil. Pastor Snorri now fell silent for a while, and the lobes of his ears were like two large blisters, swollen because of the seething in his blood at the arguments against Hell that Magnús Stephensen the Chief Justice had managed to dredge up from Abracadabra. But after Pastor Snorri had been silent for a while, he summoned up all his reserves and said to the Chief Justice: “Would you walk up the hill behind the farm here with me for a spell, Magnús?” Stephensen consented to this. So they walked up the hill. And after they had been walking for a while, Pastor Snorri led his visitor into a ravine and pointed down into a fissure there, from which there arose smoke and fumes that smelled horribly. And after Snorri had lured the Chief Justice into peering down into this fissure for a while, it is said that certain exceptionally rare sights appeared in the depths before the eyes of this erudite official and renowned rationalist,
some of them so loathsome and abominable that scholars have shrunk from committing such things to writing. And Magnús the Chief Justice was so terrified at this sight that he took to his heels and ran back to the farm as fast as he could. He called on his attendants to have the horses ready at once, saying that he had just seen Hell itself before his very eyes in that place; and he rode away from Húsafell that same evening.