“But apart from the nuclear bomb, Father,” I said, “I still feel that you would be better to own even one stallion the fewer and build yourself a privy instead.”
“I know they have these privies in the south,” he said. “But we have Nature. If one considers human life from that particular standpoint, then Nature is the best privy. And the ponies, little one, they live in the mountains.”
“I heard it said in the south that you actually believed in wild ponies, Father,” I said.
“They say the most unlikely things sometimes, our friends in the towns,” he said. “But it is quite true, on the other hand, that here in these parts it has long been the custom to reckon a man’s worth in ponies. No one ever thought much of a man in these parts who did not have a choice of ponies if he had a journey to make. It’s a fine sight in summer, the herd of brood mares; and a splendid beast, the stallion.”
“It’s even harder to understand that men who can use Nature for their privy and who worship ponies should build a church before anything else,” I said.
“Man is that animal species that rides a pony and has a God,” said my father.
“And builds a roof over God and lets the ponies go roofless,” I added.
“The herd looks after itself,” said my father. “But the God is a domestic animal,” he said, giving the word a neuter inflection.
“The God?” I said.
“The God.” said my father. “Snorri Sturluson[18] inflected ‘god’ as a neuter, and I am not going to pretend to know better than he.”
“What God is that, if I may ask?” I said.
“To explain God would be to have no God, my little one,” said my father.
“It can hardly be a Lutheran God,” I said.
“Icelanders have always been taught that Lutheranism was forced on us by a German robber, King Christian the Third of Denmark,” said my father. “His Danish stewards beheaded Bishop Jon Arason.[19] We who work our farms up in the valleys of Iceland do not much care what Gods are thought up by Germans and preached with murder by Danes.”
“Perhaps then it was the late Papal God,” I said.
“Rather Jon Arason than German Luther and those Danish kings,” said my father. ‘But still that is not it.”
I asked if he did not then want to change the church into a temple dedicated Thor, Odin, and Frey.
My father repeated their names slowly and thoughtfully, and his face softened again as if at the memory of departed friends: “Thor, Odin, and Frey. Be blessed for naming them. But still it is not they.”
“I think you do not know yourself what you believe in, Father,” I said.
“Oh yes, little girl, I believe in my God, we believe in our God,” replied this unfanatical believer, and smiled at our innocent chatter. “It is certainly neither a Lutheran God nor Papal God; still less a Jesus God, although that happens to be the one most often named in the pastor’s prescribed reading; neither is it Thor, Odin, and Frey; nor even the stallion himself, as they think in the south. Our God is that which is left when all Gods have been listed and marked No, not him, not him.”
20. The country sold
The hammering faded into its own echoes and melted into the quiet of the mountain valleys; and still the plover was heard. Why not live for ever in tranquillity and peace, and fetch water from the stream instead of making it gush from an indoor tap? And no mixing machine? And the question of a privy still undecided?
Unfortunately, peace and tranquillity are only a poem to be recited in cities, the poem of country folk who have straggled into the towns through lack of money and there been infected by the great world-bacteria; and soon not even a contemporary poem any longer, but a poem by Jonas Hallgrimsson. Would it strike any chord in a modern poet to hear a church being hammered together in a far valley and the golden plover calling in between the hammer-blows? And the southeast breeze, which does not in fact exist in the south—where is the poet now who knows it?
Until the calm was suddenly shattered: the politicians had started screeching, there was to be an election. This unpleasant crew, which it was impossible to get rid of by any known device (the only consolation being to know it far away), had now migrated to us for a while. Their words of abuse and mutual insinuations of crimes filled this tranquil, discreet-tongued valley. And the story repeated itself: even though country people heard them outlaw one another all day, and always with irrefutable evidence, it never occured to them to believe any of this mutual smearing, any more than it occurred to them to believe what the pastor said in the pulpit. When the candidates had concluded their addresses, the country people greeted them smilingly just as if they were ordinary plain folk.
A man who slaughters the wrong ewe in a district is excluded from the genealogies after his death, and his descendants, moreover, are branded for two hundred years; so it is little wonder that country people are sceptical of the misdeeds that the politicians prove against each other; indeed, they listen to the crime-stories of political meetings in the same frame of mind as to Saga-tales of throat-biting, vomit-squirting, and the gouging out of eyes. And inasmuch as they are themselves guiltless, whether because they have never had the opportunity to commit crimes or because they are holy men by nature, they find it as easy to forgive crimes as they find it difficult to believe them.
No power could have forced my father to believe, even had it been proved with hard facts before his very eyes, that there existed in Iceland men who wanted to hand over her sovereignty to foreigners the year after the establishing of the Republic, or, as it is called in modern terms: Sell the country. Right enough, it had happened once before in the Sagas, Gissur Thorvaldsson and his associates had handed over her sovereignty to foreigners: sold the country. That crime, which the men of the valleys would have refused to believe in the year 1263,[20] they had now, after a 700-year-long struggle for independence, forgiven with an historical forgiveness. If now there arose new politicians to sell their country, they would not believe it even though they saw it, but would forgive the crime with an historical forgiveness again when their descendants had struggled for another 700 years.
The politicians swore solemn oaths in the north that summer, no less than they had done in the south that winter: Iceland shall not be sold nor the nation betrayed, no atom station shall be built where Icelanders can be wiped out in a single day; at the very most a resting place will be allowed, out on Reykjaness in the south, for foreign welfare missions. They swore it on the country, on the nation, and on history, swore it on all the gods and sacred relics they claimed to believe in; swore it on their members; but first and foremost they swore it on their honor. And then I knew that now it had been done.
There was one further thing that gave me an indication: they had started the bones rigmarole again. They made fervent speeches about the Nation’s Darling and called him our fellow-parishioner, the freedom of the Icelandic nation had been his life, nothing would be left undone to find his grave and raise his bones from foreign soil and give them a stone because they had not been given bread while they were alive.
18
The great Icelandic historian, poet, and saga-writer of the thirteenth century. He wrote
19
The last Catholic bishop of Holar, one of the two sees in Iceland. He and his two sons fought bitterly against the Reformation and Danish oppression, and were executed in 1550.
20
In that year, after a long period of power seeking and civil strife, Iceland entered into a confederate union with Norway, under the Norwegian crown.