Iceland's Bell

by Halldor Laxness

  Thirty years had passed since the last outbreak of smallpox and fifty years since the outbreak preceding that when the great smallpox epidemic hit the country.* Most of the Icelanders who lived into their thirties were marked by the disease: the hands or feet of many were withered, some had bulging eyeballs, others disfigured faces or scalps. Besides this the majority of people bore the scars of one or another of the chronic illnesses affecting the population: rickets left people doubled over and crippled, their limbs askew; the lepers were ulcerous and nodous; hydatids distended the abdomens of others. Many could barely keep themselves going, having suffered the ravages of consumption. Due to prolonged famine people’s growth was so stunted that anyone who reached a decent height became fodder for folktales. Such giants were not only considered the equals of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi and other ancient Icelanders, but were also thought to possess strength to match that of the Negroes sometimes found aboard the Danish ships.

  The pox overwhelmed these folk once again, and now with such an unimaginable vehemence that nothing but the Black Death could have equaled it. The disease came out on a merchantman that had arrived in Eyrarbakki near the start of the moving days in the spring, and within one week three tenant farms in that district were laid waste. On a fourth farm all that survived was a seven-year-old child, and the cows were no longer milked. After ten days forty people in that poor district had lost their lives.

  The decimation continued on in this way. Sometimes thirty people at a time were buried in the tiny churchyards. Heavily populated parishes recorded losses of two hundred or more people. The clerical ranks were hit so hard that divine services were no longer held. Many a married couple went hand in hand to the same grave, some lost all of their children at once, and in one particular case, the only surviving member of a very large family was the half-wit. Many became phrenetic or demented. Most were called away before they reached the age of fifty—the most youthful, healthy, and promising folk—while the aged and decrepit lived on. Great numbers lost their sight or hearing, others were bedridden for a long time afterward. The outbreak deprived the episcopal seat at Skálholt of its head and the head of its crown, when the bishop, that shining witness to the faith and friend to the poor, and his beloved wife, this country’s radiant light of piety and beneficence, passed away just one week apart and were laid together in one grave.

  This was two years after His Royal Majesty sent hither his special envoy, with the full authority to take whatever steps were necessary to alleviate the people’s suffering. When Arnas Arnæus returned to Copenhagen he was met with the news that our then-reigning Highness lay upon his bier, and that the magnates were making preparations to crown the new king. The commoners were treated to soup and steak, beer and red wine, in the square before the palace on the day of coronation. It was the dawn of a new age in Denmark. The goodwill toward Icelanders that Arnæus, due to his long acquaintance with the court, had been able to awaken in the heart of His Highness was now benumbed along with Denmark’s sleeping king. Arnæus’s reports concerning conditions in Iceland, along with his proposals for the improvement of trade, industry, the judiciary, and the country’s government, were received unenthusiastically by the Chancery, and it was doubtful whether they would ever be given a reading; everyone knew that the new king’s thoughts were directed toward more valorous deeds than looking after the Icelanders. It would soon be necessary to renew the struggle against the Swedes. The functionaries gave little thought to anything but remaining in their posts after the crowning of the new king. In any case, it had never been of great advantage to advancement, and hence was not much of a temptation for the finest men in Denmark, to trouble oneself concerning that outpost of the Danish realm, that remote ulcer in the shape of a country whose name alone, Iceland, could nauseate any man in Copenhagen, even if everyone knew that from that country ran the whale oil that fed the lamps of their city.

  Concerning the Icelanders there is this to say: although the members of the country’s criminal class might have been Arnæus’s friends, with one or two exceptions, including some of those whose brands he had invalidated, and although many Icelandic paupers rejoiced at the compensation he had forced the merchants to pay for their shoddy flour and at the grain supplements he had been able to importune from the crown, and although huge numbers of them were grateful to him for his willingness to carry to His Most Merciful Heart their petitions for fishing line, pig iron, and sacramental wine, not to mention more lenient taxes, which the governor had been shoving under his seat for seven years, there was scarcely less animosity directed toward Arnæus by the gentry in his fatherland than there had ever been at any time in Denmark. In addition, whereas the merchants had brought Magnús Sigurðsson from Bræðratunga to Copenhagen and financially supported his lawsuit for two years in order to get back at Arnæus, there now came word that the Icelandic bailiffs themselves were preparing litigation against him, with the goal of having the verdicts he handed down at Öxará, the so-called Commissarial Verdicts, overturned, thereby allowing them to recover the property that had been confiscated and vindicate the honor that had been defamed by the very same judge.

  This bookman, who had let himself be lured away from his books for a time and who had for the sake of righteousness heeded the call to become the savior of his native country, now reaped what had once been sown, the reward of the eternal dolorous knight. The man who heeds this call never gains another opportunity to return to the books that are his entire world. And thus on the morning when he received news of the disappearance of the crown of all his books, all he could do was let himself sink back down, pale with insomnia, and say these words:

  “I’m tired.”

  He sat there for a long time after the Grindavíkian had gone, and finally started to doze off. He shook himself awake and stood up. He hadn’t undressed since leaving the queen’s banquet, but now he washed and tidied himself and changed his clothes. He bade his coachman prepare his carriage, and then they drove away.

  5

  Arnæus acted as arbitrator in countless cases involving Icelanders, and thus he often visited the Chancery in order to keep informed of current events.

  The statesman in charge of Icelandic affairs had sent for a barber to come to his office in the Chancery, and several times during his shave he raised himself up to eat fruit preserves from a crock standing upon his desk amidst the piles of reports on floggings, brandings, and hangings that had been sent to him from Iceland. The reek of coiffeur’s unguents filled the room.

  When the Professor Antiquitatum Danicarum opened the door, the statesman gave him a sidelong glance out from under the razor, said “My lord” in German or Low German, and motioned for the visitor to take a seat. Then he said in Danish: “I hear that there are plenty of pretty girls out in Iceland.”

  “That is so, your grace,” said Arnas Arnæus.

  “But they supposedly smell like whale oil beneath their clothing,” said the supervisor of Icelandic affairs.

  “That I have never heard,” said Arnas Arnæus, and he took out a stubby clay pipe.

  “Item, I’ve read that there’s not a single virgin to be found in your country,” said the statesman.

  “Where might you have read this?” asked the Professor Antiquitatum.

  “The good auctor Blefken says this.”

  “I wonder if the good auctor might not have misread his sources,” said Arnæus. “The best auctores tell us that Icelandic girls remain chaste virgins up until they’ve had their seventh child, Your Benevolence.”

  The statesman lay dead still and spoke not a word as the barber shaved his throat. When this procedure was finished he sat up in his seat, not to eat preserves, but instead to express his sincere indignation at the outcome of a rotten case:

  “Though we two have not had the good fortune to come to terms in most matters concerning Iceland, there’s no making a secret of it: I do not understand how any righteous court can condemn an esteemed nobleman like yourself for his contacts w
ith shameless persons. Das ist eine Schweinerei.* I have here the documents from a case prosecuted the year before last involving an Icelandic girl in Keblevig who was raped by two Germans. When the Germans were sentenced by the regent to fines and flogging, the girl’s mother burst into tears and begged God to let fire and blood rain down over the judge.”

  Arnas Arnæus had lit his pipe.

  “In my opinion,” asserted the statesman, as the barber continued his work, “if honorable noblemen are not allowed to have mistresses, what are our lives worth? Surely no one can expect a man to be in love with his wife. My lord is well-versed in classicis* and therefore knows better than I that such a thing was unheard of amongst the ancients—they took wives out of duty, mistresses out of necessity, and boys for their pleasure.”

  The Professor Antiquitatum Danicarum leaned back contentedly in his chair, his facial expression tranquil as he watched the smoke rising from his pipe—“Oh, I’m not so sure about that—what does the barber have to say?”

  “As beseems a simple townsman, the barber doesn’t care for irregularity,” said the statesman. “Just before my lord came through the door he was telling me that early this morning our Most Gracious Lord happened to be in that infamous house, the Golden Lion, where he and his entourage of cavaliers were engaged in some sort of coarse commerce that ended in nothing less than a scuffle with the watchmen.”

  “I would never utter such words in the presence of two witnesses,” said the barber, “but since it pleased Your Excellency to ask me the news, and since it so happened that I had just come from the baron’s, and sitting there were two drunk lieutenant-generals who’d been present in a certain unnamed house, and who’d joined forces with our Grace against the master of the watch, then, Lord forgive me—I who merely attend to the lords and ladies, how could my ears have helped but learn German?”

  “The barber may apply the perfume and pomade,” said the statesman.

  The man being addressed immediately fell silent and bowed quite elegantly, then started opening small boxes of pomade and gave his perfume atomizers several test sprays. Arnæus sat quietly in his chair and smoked enthusiastically while the barber sprayed and anointed the statesman’s head.

  “By the way,” he said quite casually as he gazed at his smoke: “Did the shipment of fishing line make it onto the Hólmship, like we discussed last time?”

  “Why should the king always have to be supplying these people with more and more cord? Lying there in front of you is yet another petition for cord. What are these people doing with all that cord?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that the petition to the king that I managed to get back from Gyldenløve two years ago, after he’d been napping on it for seven years, has finally been rejected here.”

  “It’s of no concern to us whether the Icelanders dredge up more fish than we have use for. When we recommence the war with the Swedes they’ll get more cord; and hooks as well.”

  “Your Benevolence would rather have the king send these people grain supplements than allow them to fish?”

  “I never said that,” said the statesman. “In my opinion what we have always needed in Iceland is a beneficent despot, to see to it that the underhanded gang of tramps that’s forever roaming about the country would disappear once and for all, so that those few men possessed of any sort of pluck might be untroubled by thieves and beggars in doing their jobs: pulling in the fish that the Company needs now and then and smelting the oil that Copenhagen must have.”

  “May I convey the opinion of your Benevolence to the Alþingi?”

  “You may speak as poorly of us to the Icelanders as you wish, my lord. It matters not one whit what Icelanders say or think. No one knows better than you yourself, my lord, that the Icelanders are plebeians. May I offer your Excellency some preserves?”

  “I thank your Benevolence,” said Arnas Arnæus. “But if my people are plebeians, what good are preserves going to do me?”

  “No man sent by the king has ever defamed the honor of this folk as much as you have, my lord.”

  “I endeavored to make sure that the Icelanders are treated fairly and justly.”

  “Oh, do you think it matters what laws are used to adjudge the Icelanders? The Chancery has proof that this is a degenerate race: all of its better men in the old days killed each other off, until there was nothing left but this collection of beggars, thieves, lepers, lice-infested nobodies, and drunkards.”

  Arnæus continued smoking unconcernedly and mumbled several words in Latin, his voice low, like someone absentmindedly quoting poetry: “Non facile emergunt quorum virtutibus obstat res angusta domi.”*

  “Yes, I know, there’s not a single poor excuse for a priest in Iceland who doesn’t know his Donatus* backward and forward, quoting the classics day and night, besmirching petitions to His Majesty with so much out-of-place pedantry that it’s a damned job to get to the bottom of it all, and then it turns out that all they really want is cord. In my view it’s a vice for a cordless man to know Latin. Which brings me back to what I wanted to say in the first place: there were still a few people in Iceland who could be reckoned men, and you deprived them of their honor; people like old, honorable Eydalín, who was loyal to his king—you pounced on him in his old age and sent him to his grave an ignominious pleb.”

  “It’s true—one result of my trip was that a number of regal Icelanders lost their honor; but defenseless men recovered theirs. If the folk there could hold on to the fruits of this victory, their lives would be more secure against the authorities in the future.”

  “All the same, you were not entirely satisfied, my lord. To top it all off you took it upon yourself to use all sorts of litigious pretexts to chase after the island’s very own benefactors, the Iceland merchants, those honorable Danish citizens and honest men who place themselves in great mortal danger by transporting provisions to these people—so many of them perish out on the dreadful sea surrounding that miserable land. This slanderous rumor starts making the rounds, instigated primarily by you, that the Iceland trade should be made to hand over part of its profit. Forgive me, my lord, though we who know best are of a different opinion. We Danes have always been charitable in our trading operations with Iceland. And when our deceased Highness monopolized trade with the island it was only in order to prevent outsiders from extorting those pitiable people.”

  As the statesman spoke the barber continued to massage his face with one pomade after another, while his guest sat there quite contentedly, continuing to gaze at the smoky output of his pipe.

  “It’s true,” he said finally, in his calm, almost entirely lackluster voice, “the tariffs set by the Hamburg merchants were never considered favorable in Iceland in the old days. But well-informed men reckon that things have in fact worsened since then, under both the Hørmangar and the Helsingør trade leagues as well as under the Company. And as far as monsieur’s colleagues and partners in the Iceland trade are concerned, there’s no need to bemoan their lot since they still enjoy the support of the Icelanders whom they rate most highly.”

  “We don’t have any particular Icelanders in our employ or service beyond any others; we do, however, take pains to be faithful servants and true benefactors to the whole island.”

  “Hm,” said Arnas Arnæus. “Jón Marteinsson certainly feels quite well these days.”

  “Joen Mortensen,” said the statesman. “I don’t recognize the name.”

  “The Danes claim not to know him when he’s named,” said Arnas Arnæus. “But he is the only Icelander whose door they can find. Representatives of several other countries also know the way to his door.”

  “There are no Danish books that say that the Icelanders are descended from traitors and pirates, at least the ones who aren’t descended from Irish slaves—this comes from your own books,” said the statesman, and he positioned himself better under the barber’s hands. “By the way, what is your business here, my lord?”

  “I’ve been asked to become Iceland’s
governor,” said Arnas Arnæus.

  “Wigmaker!” yelled the statesman as he tried clumsily to get up from his chair. “Enough! Take your grime away from me!—it stinks! Get out! What are you waiting for? Whom are you spying for?”

  The barber was terrified and hurriedly attempted to towel off the statesman’s face and clear away his pomade boxes, bowing repeatedly in the meantime, saying that he was a simple man who neither heard nor saw anything, and even if he did hear or see anything he understood nothing. After he backed out of the room, the statesman rose from his seat, turned toward the calm and recalcitrant master of Danish antiquities, and expressed his shock at the news his guest had delivered:

  “What was that you were saying, monsieur?”

  “I don’t think I was saying anything of particular interest,” said Arnas Arnæus. “Unless I might have said something when we were talking about Jón Marteinsson, the Iceland merchants’ litigator, the great conqueror.”

  “What were you saying about a governor? Who’s supposed to be governor where and for whom?”

  “Your Benevolence knows much more about all of this than I do,” said Arnas Arnæus.

  “I know nothing!” yelled the statesman, who was standing in the middle of the room.

  When it looked likely that there was no possible way that Arnas Arnæus was going to add anything, the highly placed gentleman grew all the more curious and gesticulated violently in self-pitying surrender.

  “I know nothing,” he repeated. “We here in the Chancery are always kept in the dark. Everything’s taken care of by the Council of the Crown or by the Germans on the Council of War; or else by the queen in her bedchamber. We don’t even get paid. I spend fifteen to sixteen hundred rixdollars a year for my maintenance, and in three years I haven’t received a single two-shilling piece from the king. They cheat us; they don’t talk to us; all sorts of schemes are going on behind our backs here in the city; and I could very well believe that we’ll wake up one morning only to discover that that beast of a king has sold us.”