Iceland's Bell

by Halldor Laxness

  Most were in tatters, their feet either bare or wrapped with layers of rags, their chins shaggy, their scraps of clothing bound with bits of rope-ends or bands of unspun wool. They had no belongings, though some who still had hands carried broken rake-shafts for walking sticks. Some individuals in the group actually owned milch cows, wranglers who had at some time or other been punished by the authorities and who had never been able to forget it—these stayed up at night muddling over their lot, relentless in their ability to complain, lay blame, and curse. One of these men now said, since it looked as if he was about to be exonerated:

  “I demand a day’s wages for being torn away from my spring work and dragged up here.”

  Another man felt that the costs of the trip to Þingvellir would never be fully compensated until he got the chance to watch his bailiff being flogged.

  A holy man who’d been branded for stealing from the poor box said:

  “In my opinion, these demands are being made out of little love for the folk who were burned here in Brennugjá, hanged at Gálgaklettur,* or sunk in Drekkingarhylur, alone and abandoned, either because they couldn’t swear a counteroath against false charges or because the devil showed up in a dogsbody and testified against them. Are we more pitiable than them? Why not you and I?”

  Jón Hreggviðsson from Rein, who was sitting out in front of the men’s tent with a gray beard in place of his black one, wearing muddy skin-stockings, a thick wadmal smock begrimed with dirt and horsehair, and a piece of cord about his waist, cried out:

  “A long time ago they brought me here eastward over the heath, along with one Jón Þeófílusson from the Westfjörds, who was burned after the devil testified against him. And I’ve got one thing to say about that: a ladies’ man like him, who could sit up in the gables an entire night holding on to a Blusterer while his girl was in bed with another man, didn’t deserve any better, and that’s why I told him so many times in the black pit, ‘You’ll definitely be burned, dear Jón.’ ”

  “A lot of folks might say there’d never have been such trouble these days if they’d have cut your head off back then, Hreggviðsson,” said a handless thief.

  “Why wasn’t my head cut off, why wasn’t I hanged? I wasn’t better than any of them,” said the saint who’d stolen from the poor box.

  A certain soft-spoken man who’d been spared execution for incest said this:

  “My sister was drowned, as everyone knows, and by God’s grace I was sentenced to outlawry and banished to another quarter where I had to lie about my name. My first job was to snitch on thieves to the bailiff, and he flushed them out and stoned them. Of course my identity finally came out, and for ten years everyone’s known it was me. For ten years I’ve been walking repentantly from house to house, and the countryfolk have long accepted me as their own and God’s lawbreaker and have treated me kindly. And now, after ten years, it turns out it was a completely different man and a completely different woman who’d had the child that they drowned my sister for supposedly having had with me. Who have I been all these years and who am I now? Will anyone treat me charitably after this? Will anyone take me in in the spirit of mercy and forbearance after this? No, they’ll laugh at me throughout all of Iceland. No one’ll ever throw me as much as a single fish-belly. They’ll send the dogs after me. My God, my God, why did you take my crime from me?”

  “When I was a child I was taught to look up to the gentry,” said an old tramp who was on the verge of tears. “And now in my old age I have to watch four of the good bailiffs who had me flogged dragged into court. If there’s no one around to flog us anymore, who’s a man supposed to look up to?”

  “To God,” said someone.

  “Well said,” said a blind criminal. “What did Reverend Ólafur from Sandar mean in his venerable verses when he begged our Lord Jesus to defend the authorities?”

  “I would never think to put all authorities together in the same boat,” said the man missing a hand. “I was flogged at Rangárvellir for the same crime they cut my hand off for down south by the sea.”

  “Are you suggesting,” said the blind man, “that our Redeemer ought to defend certain authorities, certain good authorities, for example those authorities who allow men’s hides to be tanned, but not those who cut off men’s hands? I don’t think the dear reverend in his fair verse meant to leave anyone out: his prayer was that the Redeemer might defend all the authorities, those who chop off men’s hands no less than those who tan men’s hides.”

  “Reverend Ólafur from Sandar can eat shit,” said one man.

  “It’s not for me to say what Reverend Ólafur from Sandar can eat,” said the blind criminal. “But I know for certain that when Master Brynjólfur had grown so old that he couldn’t understand Greek and Hebrew any longer, and had also forgotten all his dialectic and astronomy, and couldn’t remember how to decline mensa* in Latin, he always used to recite this verse by Reverend Ólafur from Sandar, which his mother had taught him when he was a child.”

  “Whoever trusts the authorities isn’t a man,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “I’ve walked across Holland.”

  “My king is just,” said the old, oft-flogged tramp.

  “Whatever a man doesn’t take for himself a man never takes,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “I’ve landed in adventures with the Germans.”

  “Blessed is the man who serves his sentence,” said the oft-flogged man.

  “I spit at The Grandees when their sentences are unjust,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “But I spit at them even more when their sentences are just, because then I know they’re scared. You think I don’t know my king and his hangman? I’ve chopped down Iceland’s bell, worn a Spanish Jacket out in Glückstadt, and had the Paternoster put on my head in Copenhagen. When I came home my daughter was lying on her bier. I wouldn’t trust them to bring an innocent child over a brook without getting it drowned.”

  “Jón Hreggviðsson is the very picture of Satan,” said the oftflogged man, and he quivered like an aspen leaf. “God have mercy on me for my sins.”

  The blind criminal said:

  “Let us keep the peace dear brothers, while we await the king’s soup. We are the rabble, the lowest creatures on earth. Let us pray for the health of each and every authority who comes to the aid of the defenseless. But there will never be any justice until we ourselves become men. Centuries will pass by. The reprieve granted to us by the last king will be taken from us by the next. But our day will come. And upon that day, when we become men, God will come to us and fight on our side.”

  19

  On the same day that the king’s poor innocents sat waiting for the king’s soup at Þingvellir by Öxará this newsworthy event occurred in Bræðratunga: the housewife rose from bed, summoned her farmhands and ordered them to round up some horses, then announced that she was leaving. They said that the master of the house had ridden from home for the time being and none of the horses remaining was ridable. She said:

  “Do you remember the horse that stood here tied to the horseblock last spring, the one I ordered you to slaughter?”

  They looked at each other, smiling sarcastically.

  “Go to Hjálmholt, where you will find this horse in the bailiff’s pastures, and bring it to me,” she said.

  They returned with the horse around midnight, to find her waiting and ready to leave. She ordered them to bring out her saddle and put it on the horse, then threw on a great, hooded wadmal cloak to protect herself against the incessant rain and assigned one of the men to accompany her westward over the river. She planned to ride the rest of the way alone that night. The weather was calm and mild, with dense drizzling rain.

  No sooner had her attendant crossed back over the Brúar River than her horse grew restive. She lashed at it for a short time before it suddenly jumped with a start into a gallop, nearly throwing her off. It tore along at a tremendous pace for a while and it took her everything she had just to stay in the saddle, her hands locked in a death-grip around the saddle horn
. Finally it pulled the reins from her grasp, ran out onto the moor, and stood still. She started beating the horse with her crop again, and when it grew annoyed at the beating it snorted and lashed its tail, giving warning that it was going to rear. In the end it did no such thing, but instead galloped away, just as before. This time it tried to catch her off guard with some old tricks, taking eccentric turns and doing as much as possible to throw her off. She dismounted and caressed the horse, but it refused to acquiesce to her kindnesses. Finally she managed to get it moving again, but only in a fast gallop, and in between spurts of galloping it stood stock-still. Maybe she was a bad rider. In the end it entered a hollow divided by a stream and turned sharply to one side. She was thrown forward off the saddle and in a flash found herself lying on the ground. She stood up and wiped off the dirt and the mud; otherwise she was unhurt. A whimbrel cried out sharply and energetically through the haze. The horse grazed by the bank of the stream. She remounted halfheartedly, struck at its groin, jerked at the reins, and shouted “Ho!” but it was all for nothing. Maybe she knew nothing about beating horses. One thing was certain: it wasn’t going to move. It went against everything in its constitution to continue on in this way. It gave a few ponderous starts, then reared. She dismounted, walked up along the shoulder of the hollow, sat down upon a moss-covered hillock, and stared at the horse through the rain.

  “I should’ve known that a horse given to someone by a crook as compensation for injury wouldn’t turn out to be any better than you, you sluggard,” she said to the horse.

  Luckily there was no one to witness her stop-and-start journey, since it was near daybreak and the countryside was asleep. It seemed to her as if the haze was brighter than it had been a short time ago, so she knew that the sun must have risen.

  She straightened out her cloak and pressed onward. A fog lay over the hills and the heather glistened with moisture. A gray web of mist glistened upon the turfless patches. The birch was partly in bud and smelled almost sickly sweet in the warm and tranquil drizzle. She was poorly prepared for walking: her boots quickly became waterlogged and her skirt soaked and heavy as her feet were entangled by the dripping copsewood, besides the fact that she had only newly risen from her sickbed and was lacking somewhat in strength. She fell several times, but forced herself up again and pressed on. She was thoroughly drenched by the time she made it through Bláskógar.

  When she finally reached Öxará it was late enough that the drunks had gone to sleep. The purl of the cold river seemed to be frozen in the break of the fog-enshrouded day, distant even to the ears of someone standing at its bank. Several sleeping horses stood hobbled in the pasture, their heads drooping.

  Standing here and there near the courthouse were a few tents, and she spied the canopied magistrate’s booth and made her way toward it. The booth had a double canopy of a protective outer tarp and an inner lining, and its walls had been rebuilt. Three stone steps led up to a practical door set in a comely doorway in the paneled front wall. She rapped on the door. One of her father’s attendants came out, drunk with sleep, and she bade him wake the magistrate. The old man turned over in bed and asked hoarsely who was outside.

  “It is I, dear father,” she said softly, in a melancholy tone, and she leaned up against the doorpost.

  The tent’s inner lining was dry in spite of the rain and there was a removable wooden platform for a floor. Her father was lying in a sleeping bag made of skin, beneath him a pad smelling of manured hay, which was a princely fragrance on spring days when no one had any hay. He raised himself halfway, clad in a thick wadmal nightshirt, with a scarf around his neck, blue-faced, quite bald, his nose overly large and his eyebrows appallingly thick. Old age had made him noticeably emaciated and his cheeks were sagging; a dewlap had replaced his double chin. He looked at her apathetically.

  “What do you want, child?” he asked.

  “I wish to speak with you in private, father,” she said, the same dusky tone in her voice. She did not look at him, but continued to lean tiredly against the doorpost.

  He told his attendant to go to the servants’ tent for the time being, then asked her to wait at the threshold while he dressed. When she was finally allowed in, her father was on his feet, having put on his boots and thick cloak and peruke. She noticed the heavy golden ring on his right ring finger as he took some snuff from a silver box. She went straight up to him and kissed him.

  “Well now,” he said, after she finished kissing him.

  “I’ve come to you father, that’s all,” she said.

  “To me?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “one has to be able to lean against someone, otherwise one dies.”

  “You always were an unruly child,” he said.

  “Dear father, will you permit me to stand at your side?” she asked.

  “Dear child,” he said. “You are no longer a child.”

  “I’ve been lying ill in bed, father,” she said.

  “I heard that you were ill, but I see that you must be feeling well again,” he said.

  “Father,” she said. “One day this spring I saw nothing but darkness. It engulfed me and I lost my strength and gave in to its power. All I could do was lie there in the darkness. And yet, I didn’t die. How can it be that I didn’t die, father?”

  “Many people fall ill in the spring and live to tell about it, good child,” he said.

  “Yesterday I heard a voice whispering to me that I should go to you. Someone said that the verdicts would be handed down today. I suddenly recovered. I arose. Dear father, in spite of this dreadful poverty, our family is still of some worth, isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is,” he said. “I come from excellent folk. Your mother comes from even better folk. God be praised.”

  “They haven’t succeeded in confounding us,” she said. “Not entirely. We’re still standing upright. Are we human or aren’t we, father? I’m certain that if I’m bound by any obligation, it’s to you.”

  “You have proven to be a great challenge to your mother, child,” he said.

  She said, “Now I’m going to ride home to her with you, as she asked me to do.”

  He looked away.

  “Father,” she continued. “I hope that they’re not still disputing the verdicts in court.”

  He said that he wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by verdicts, since things had reached such a state that no one knew any longer where justice was to be found in this miserable country. He himself didn’t know what name he should give to the buffoonery taking place just now. Then he asked what sort of grudge she bore that could have persuaded her to transfer control of Bræðratunga back to Magnús Sigurðsson after it had become clear that he would be defamed for his libelous censure against her, instead of declaring herself divorced from the man with legal documents and witnesses. “Yet you knew,” he said, “that those who were more heedful of their reputation and honor than Magnús Sigurðsson would be prosecuted here and deprived of their names and their estates though they might have done far less to offend the country’s newest ruling power.” He said that a vice-magistrate and two bailiffs had been appointed and invested with the power of magistrate to make a ruling in the lawsuit against him, because Arnæus had announced that he could not perform his official duties until his name was cleared of this aspersion, and he had demanded that this be accomplished not just by means of the judgment of one district court, but also by means of a magistrate’s judgment. The verdict was to be announced early this morning, and then Arnæus would take over in court.

  “Father,” she said. “What sort of penalty will be imposed if Magnús’s accusations are verified?”

  He answered: “If a married man takes a married woman, the punishment is loss of reputation and respect, and a pecuniary fine to be paid to the crown is imposed upon each of them—and of course the fine may be paid with skin in place of cash.”

  “Father,” she said, “will you permit me to come forth in court and say a few words?”

&
nbsp; “Words are worth nothing here,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I’ll force a mistrial—the court will be brought to ruin and the judges vitiated, and good men will have the chance to send their advocates to council with the king. Perhaps if this man is forced out, they’ll think twice about appointing a successor to prosecute you into ignominy next summer.”

  “I don’t know what sort of dream it is you’re living in, child,” he said.

  “I’m going to request a hearing,” she said, “and demand to be called as a witness in the case against Magnús Sigurðsson. I’m going to explain to the court that Magnús was justified in writing the letter he had read in the choir doorway in Skálholt cathedral.”

  “It shocks me to hear you say such things,” said Magistrate Eydalín. “Both your sister and her husband the bishop sent word to your mother that this calumny was the blackest lie that any man could conceive of. And just who is supposed to confirm such testimony?”

  She said, “I’ll swear an oath to it.”

  “My honor wouldn’t be worth much if I were to consider saving him from the trampling of the reputation-thieves by putting my daughter’s life and honor on the line in this judicial dispute,” said the magistrate. “Particularly and especially since the oath that you intend to swear in praejudicio Arnæi* in this case must necessarily be perjurious.”

  “It’s not your business,” she said. “It’s our fatherland’s. If the few of you who stand upright throughout this time of need are to sit upon the outlaws’ bench and be condemned, if our family is to be trampled down into the mire, if there are no longer to be men in Iceland, then what was all this for?”

  “If you believe that I am prepared, good child, to let someone swear a false oath in order to promote my own advantage in a lawsuit involving me, then you do not know your own father. I shudder to hear such support being offered by my child, support that even the most dishonest man would refuse to accept from a bandit. The ideas that a wretched female can come up with are incomprehensible to sensible men. I readily acknowledge that my senility has caused me to make one or two mistakes; but I am a Christian man. A Christian man holds his soul’s well-being above all other things. If someone swears a false oath with another’s consent and on behalf of that person, then both of them eternally forsake their souls’ well-being.”