by Sjón
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 …
