Under the Glacier (7 page)

From Glacier it takes five days to travel to Skálholt. The pallbearers had a strenuous journey with their burden over mountain ranges and fast-flowing rivers, and were often in a bad way. Icelanders are not particularly hospitable in the sagas, and that reputation persisted for a long time, although things have improved since coffee was discovered; the farmers made no effort to ease the journey for those who were carrying a Christian corpse about the country. At Neðranes in Stafholtstungur they were even refused food, but were allowed to sleep in the spare room and keep the corpse in an outhouse. But during the night the woman’s huge corpse rose to its feet stark naked, went to the pantry and fetched flour, and then went to the kitchen and baked for her pallbearers bread in the Irish style and gave them thick slices from the loaf.

In explanation of this phenomenon the storyteller, Tumi Jónsen, has this to say: It could be, however, that it was actually flatbread. Flatbread is thought to have been more common in those days than bread in loaves. Some have argued that the foregoing incident happened to the pallbearers in their dreams. Others reckon that the men were deluded and that some other woman than Þórgunna was involved. My ancestors, the Jónsens, believed everything in the Icelandic sagas and I go along with them sort of more or less, though I am not the man my father and my forefathers were.

11

The Story of Úrsalei

The bishop’s emissary now put question number two to the parish clerk as follows:

Question No. 2: Is there any truth in the story that pastor Jón Prímus got married in his younger days, but that his wife ran away from him and that the pastor has since then taken no steps to obtain a lawful divorce from her?

Tumi Jónsen’s reply according to the emissary’s shorthand (unnecessary wordiness omitted):

The story goes that a woman came to Iceland, some say from England, others from Ireland or even Spain, who was called Úrsúla the English, or Úrsa, known as Úrsalei-at-Glacier. This happened in the days of the merchant Þorleifur
ríki
(the Powerful) of Stapi, the son of Árni, farmer and sheriff of Reykjavík, the son of Ingibjörg, the daughter of Narfi of Narfeyri. Some say that on one of his business trips to Scotland, the said Þorleifur had seduced this highborn maiden of noble English and Spanish lineage and brought her to Iceland with him, to Glacier. I would not dare to vouch for the truth of this story, but I do not dispute the accepted view that Úrsalei was certainly an Irish-Spanish noblewoman of carefully selected stock on both sides for many generations in the matter of flesh, and that she was therefore a thoroughbred. On the male side, all but a select few were said to have been castrated, and the story goes on to say that female children of this clan were suckled by wet nurses until they reached marriageable age. I’m only passing on what I’ve been told. But reliable scholars have asserted on their conscience that the fleshly conditions in Úrsalei’s family were such that those ladies can best be likened to the women the newspapers nowadays call “bombs,” named after powder-filled canisters designed to cause an explosion.

Another “tradition” in which Tumi Jónsen says he has as much faith as the first one: Úrsalei early got an urge, considered by scholars to be quite rare among the aristocracy, in that she had a burning desire to become a ship’s stewardess. This was granted her. On one of her journeys she landed in Iceland, at Glacier. Some might find this a little strange. Not to make a long story of it—no sooner had Úrsalei stepped ashore at Stapi than the Glacier men set to with all their celebrated broadmindedness and, saving your presence, gave the girl a baby. None can escape from destiny. For that reason Úrsúla the English settled here in these parts, according to this version of the story. The Annals say she later married the merchant Þorleifur
ríki
of Stapi. Her name, unfortunately, has never been found in the parish registers, but there was a needy anchoress of that name living in a hovel near Búðir in the seventeenth century. The world’s unsure and the earth is dung, as it says in the verse. And though I counsel people to believe the Annals only in moderation, there is no doubt that a strange woman has propagated her breed in these parts; her descendants are alive to this day. A host of place-names in the district are associated with her, and always the loveliest places.

Mrs. Fína Jónsen sings:

Úrsúlabrow and Úrsúlalock
Úrsúlatoe and Úrsúlasock
Úrsúlagully and Úrsúladock
Everything under the sun’s in hock.

Embi: What poetry is that, madam?

Mrs. Fína Jónsen: It’s a nursery rhyme from Glacier. All to do with Úrsúla the English. This is her realm, although no one in Hafnarfjörður knows of her.

Embi: Nor in the bishop’s office, either. And I’m afraid there’s not much chance that this intelligence will be of much use to us there in the immediate future.

I glance through my notes and summarise: Inquired about the church and parish life; answer—about the feeding of snow buntings and the shoeing of horses. Inquired about suspicious journeys, possibly funerals, up on the glacier; answer—about a corpse that rose up naked and baked bread for its pallbearers. Regarding the parish pastor’s marital status, I get news of a Spanish noblewoman who was suckled all her life until the Glacier men gave her a baby. Instructive replies, but rather tangential to the questions I was trying to raise. Could be a little difficult for the people in the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs to make head or tail of information of this kind.

Tumi Jónsen: On the whole, there are various things at Glacier that people would find difficult to understand if understanding of the womenfolk is lacking.

Embi: If these women have no human characteristics, there’s a risk they will not throw much light on things in my report.

Mrs. Fína Jónsen: It’s said of Úrsúla the English and these women, and no doubt applies to Þórgunna as well, that they never wash.

Embi begins to get bored with all this: Haven’t they got smelly armpits, then?

Mrs. Fína Jónsen: Always clean. The cleanest women at Glacier. Never seen to eat, but always plump. No one’s seen them sleep, but ready for anything, even at three in the morning. Never known to read a book, but never stumped by anyone, however learned. Oddest of all, though, they never age. They disappear one fine day like birds, but never decline; always as doughty as Þórgunna; even come back from the grave as ghosts.

Tumi Jónsen: They’ve been known to make rather poor wives; not easy to cope with, despite that good flesh. Could be that their husbands did not always have the qualities that suited such women.

Mrs. Fína Jónsen: Everyone in the know is agreed that they have exceedingly beautiful navels.

Postscript: It’s a dangerous mission for Lapps, said Ingimundur the Old’s Finns in
Vatnsdœla Saga
, when he sent them on a magic journey to explore Iceland. One poor little part-time tutor from the south has no motorway to guide him when he finds himself in the footsteps of the extraordinary Otto Lidenbrock, who years ago went looking for the Icelander Árni Saknússemm. Professor Lidenbrock followed the trail of this philosopher and alchemist down the crater on Snæfellsjökull all the way to the centre of the earth; there he found Saknússemm’s rusty old knife lying on the bare ground. I seem to recall that Professor Lidenbrock came out again through Stromboli. Perhaps the poor part-time tutor who writes this has yet to go through the centre of the earth before Christianity at Glacier is fully explored. But where shall I come up?

12

Farriers

The sun shone on the glacier and the door of the primus repair shop was wide open. Horses were shod here, too. On the 18th of June, 1857, when professor Dr. Otto Lidenbrock came here, the parish pastor had been busy shoeing a horse; and it’s the same today, but this time with a helper. The horse was tethered to the staple on the door of the shed. The farrier took after his predecessor and finished shoeing the horse before greeting any visitors. The horse was a big rawboned beast, not properly moulted yet and not in good condition after the winter. A farm-owner stood with his back under the horse with its hock in his arms, holding up the hoof for the shoe; the farrier was fastening it, wearing smithy clothes, his hair grey-streaked and dishevelled. He had the shoe-nails in his mouth. This big horse would certainly have had no difficulty in wrenching the staple from the door-frame or even yanking the shed from its base.

Farrier: May I ask the visitor to hold the horse for a moment just while I’m finishing? We didn’t have the heart to put a muzzle-noose on him. It wouldn’t do any harm to scratch him behind the ears. Unfortunately I don’t have a horse-scratcher.

The undersigned caught hold of the horse’s reins at the muzzle and began to scratch him behind the ear. The horse accepted this and quietened down, so the undersigned began to contemplate the glacier. In actual fact the glacier is too simple a sight to appertain to what is called beautiful, which no one knows the meaning of and by which everyone means something different from everyone else: one of those words it is safer to not use about a glacier nor anything else.

The undersigned has never before seen this mountain glacier except from too far away, but was now about to become acquainted with it for a while. The mountain reminds one of an upturned earthenware bowl, the glazing a little bluish at times, but sometimes like gold-rimmed transparent Chinese porcelain, especially if the sun is low in the west over the sea, because then the rays play on the glacier from two directions. From here the glacier looks somewhat coarse-grained like a print that isn’t good enough; the ice is rain-sullied in many places in the lower regions, and has developed streaks like a smudged print. Probably half the snowdrifts on the glacier have yet to melt before one can say that summer has arrived. Some magnetism that I cannot yet explain draws one’s eyes towards the summit. There is a hollow on the summit, and two brilliantly white glacial crests rear upwards, bathed in an icy mesmerising light. Between these crests lies the crater into which, on the advice of the alchemist Árni Saknússemm, the party of three plunged—Professor Lidenbrock from Hamburg and his kinsman Axel, and the Icelander Hans Bjelke talking out of some dictionary or other that appears to have existed in France in the middle of the nineteenth century and could have been Swedish; and these fellows found the centre of the earth, as has been mentioned.

Pastor Jón Prímus has finished shoeing. He straightens up, rubs his palms together to clean them, comes over to me and greets me: a tall, slim, sinewy man, begrimed with iron filings, rust, smithy soot, and lubricating oil. Through all this ingrained dirt twinkles a pair of lively eyes, blue as springwater in sunshine.

Pastor Jón Prímus: What a way to treat visitors at Glacier— making them scratch a horse! It’s a shame I haven’t managed to get a decent horse-scratcher from Reykjavík, though I’ve tried for long enough. They’ve got nothing but plain cow-scratchers.

The undersigned reached into his pocket and brought out the bishop’s written brief. Pastor Jón Prímus put on a pair of seamstress spectacles and read it. The letter was quite short.

Pastor Jón Prímus: I was hoping the bishop would be coming himself. He’s a terribly agreeable chap. I always find it so enjoyable to blether with the old fellow. We don’t agree about anything. But everything depends on agreeing to disagree. I hope his rheumatism is better. But I don’t rightly know what I’m to make of you. What is your status, if I may ask?

Embi: I tutor in arithmetic and Danish.

Pastor Jón Prímus: I want you make the acquaintance of an eminent out-parishioner from a distant county who has come here in search of two stray horses, one red, the other grey. He has found the grey one and got news of the red one. He is my good friend Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir in Langavatnsdalur, the district officer for his area. He owns the biggest horses in the country. Do come and greet the bishop’s emissary, Helgi.

Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir is a ruddy, red-haired man with a large honest face and a powerful gleam in his glasses; he came toward me with a sunny smile straight from outer space and said in a thin silky voice through the smile: I have always had a weakness for buying big horses. What a pleasure it would be now if one could debate with learned men and not have to go and look for horses!

Pastor Jón: There will be plenty of time to debate with bishops, my dear Helgi, when you have found the red one.

Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir in Langavatnsdalur (hereinafter called the Langvetningur in the text): It so happens that I have promised both the nags for a glacier trip tomorrow morning.

Pastor Jón: I shall shoe the red one for you as well when you bring him in. But that’s all you’re getting from me. The other matter we were discussing we shan’t mention again, my friend; we shall agree to disagree on that, and be just as good friends in spite of it.

Langvetningur: Well, I don’t need to rely on you any more, my dear pastor Jón. Now I can ask the bishop himself, who happens to be here with us, I understand,
per analogiam
. But while I remember, pastor Jón, what do I owe you for the shoeing?

Pastor Jón: Let us say 25 aurar the foot
per analogiam
, since you brought the shoes yourself.

Langvetningur: It’s said they have stopped minting 25-aurar pieces, pastor Jón.

Pastor Jón: Well, come back anyway when you have found the red one.

Langvetningur, perhaps to me, since he had argued it many a time with the pastor: As a matter of fact, we’re making a trip up the glacier to fetch a little something tomorrow morning, and it could well be that we shall need the church.

Pastor Jón: You had better be getting on your way now, old chap, and lead not the devil into temptation, as the late pastor Jens of Setberg used to say to people.

13

A Highly Responsible Office