For most of the day they would discuss the Saga heroes over their carpentry.
Bard-Jon was a particular devotee of those heroes who had lived on moors or on outlying skerries. He did not admire above all else the hero’s poetry, but rather how long the hero could hold out along against many in battle, quite irrespective of his cause; it made no difference to Geiri whether the hero was in the right or in the wrong. As a rule, heroes were in the wrong to begin with, he would say; they became heroes not through any nobility of cause, but simply by never giving up, not even though they were being cut to pieces alive. Of those heroes who had lived in the wilderness as outlaws he loved Grettir the Strong best of all, and for the same reasons as are enumerated at the end of Grettir’s Saga: that he lived longer in the wilderness than any other man; that he was better fitted than all other men to fight with ghosts; and that he was avenged farther away from Iceland than any other hero, and what’s more, in the greatest city in the world, away out in Constantinople.
My father’s heroes were cast in a more human mold; they had at least to be lineal progenitors before they could engage his full confidence, and more especially they had to be poets. Mountains and outlying skerries were not the right setting for his heroes. This man of integrity, who had never taken a wrongful farthing’s worth from anyone, never found it remarkable that these heroes should have sailed with gaping dragon-heads and open jaws to Scotland, England, or Estonia, to slaughter innocent people there and plunder them of their possessions. Nor did this courteous upland farmer think it a blemish in the hero’s conduct that he squirted his vomit into people’s faces, bit people in the throat, or gouged their eyes out with his finger as he walked past, instead of raising his hat; and a Saga woman could be none the less noble for having a destitute boy’s tongue cut out for eating off her dish. I do not think there was a single incident in the Saga of Egil Skalla-Grimsson which was not more absorbing, nor indeed better known, to my father than all the important events that had taken place in the country during his own lifetime, and scarcely a couplet ascribed to Egil which could not come dancing off his tongue.
“My hero is and always will be Thorgeir Havarsson,” said Geiri of Midhouses. “And why? It is because he had the smallest heart in all the Sagas put together. When they cut out that heart of his which had never known fear, not even in Greenland, it was no larger than the gizzard of a sparrow”—and with that he laughed one of those laughs that would suffice to raise a cathedral.
The pastor thought nothing of calling in from farther down in the district, a five-hour ride, to take snuff and drive in a few nails with these entertaining believers. And now when the moulds were removed from the concrete walls it was seen that by far the largest window was on the east side, over the altar, looking out on to the slope where the meadow began to climb the hillside.
The pastor’s expression was solemn that day, until at last he declared over the coffee: “A tremendous revolution has taken place here—one of the greatest that has ever occurred in the history of mankind; and like all great revolutions it has happened silently, without anyone taking any notice of it.”
We had no idea where this was leading to, and waited.
“I do not know precisely how many churches have been built in the world since the introduction of Christianity,” said the pastor. “But this is the first time in the history of mankind that any man has dared to design a church with a window over the altar. Previously, any church-builder who made so bold as to dare to do that would have been boiled alive.”
Gieri of Midhouses brightened up and roared with laughter, for he thought the pastor was making yet another of his jokes.
Bard-Jon said, “It would not have been much of a window-horse if there had only been blank wall there.”
“How lovely the slopes are,” said my father.[17]
“How lovely the slopes are,” echoed the pastor. “There, you see, the paganism in the Sagas suddenly breaks through. The purpose of Christianity is that men should not see the slopes; and the purpose of a church is to shutter Nature from man’s eyes, at least during divine service. In old churches, all windows were painted. And above the altar in every church in the world, even in our Lutheran churches, in all except this one, there hangs a picture of a symbol that leads man’s thoughts towards the mysteries of holy faith and away from the delusions of Creation.”
“Why then are you having a church?” I asked them. “What do you believe in?”
At that the pastor rose and came over to me and patted me on the cheek and said, “That’s just the thing, my dear: we believe in the land that God has given us; in the district where our people have lived for a thousand years; we believe in the function of country districts in the national life of Iceland; we believe in the green slope where Life lives.”
Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them Saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at in the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all its problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither Nature nor mirage, no link with folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river-gulleys and out beyond the grass-plains, no landmarks from the Sagas?—only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment.
“How can it occur to you, Father,” I said, when the pastor and the church-builders had gone, “that it is possible to live off 45 lambs when you know that a lamb only provides one laborer’s single day-wage? When you have received these 45 day-wages for your efforts there are still 320 days of the year left.”
“We live,” he said. “We live.”
“And only two milk-meager cows, dry in turns for half the year? And it says here in the paper that in America it is only considered an average day’s work to make a hundred horse-loads of hay and look after a hundred and twenty cows and milk them.”
“It also says in the paper there that in America forty million people would be blown to shreds on the first day of a nuclear war. All their milk would not help them then. It is better then to be an Eystridale man in a dry grave and rise from it again in one piece beside one’s church.”
“Do you all then farm solely to be able to lie in a dry grave?” I asked.
“I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholastic books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low-yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all lived; your sisters now have sturdy children in far-off districts. And what you are now carrying under your heart will also live and be welcome, little one, despite all the arithmetic and scholastic books. Here, moreover, life will be lived off one cow, and the child will thrive on it, long after Paris, London, and Rome have become insignificant moss-grown heaps of rubble.”
17
The famous words spoken by Gunnar of Hlidarend, in