From the Mouth of the Whale

by Sjón

  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 …

  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 pr
esent 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.