Jónas Pálmason the Learned was one of those people whose life is forever turning with the wheel of fortune. He had no sooner reached a safe haven than he was sent straight back out on to the stormy sea, and always in a leakier vessel than the one in which he had arrived. Father and son took rooms at an inn called the Sommerfugl, or Butterfly, which Jónas nicknamed ‘the Summer Snipe’ after the harbinger of summer on his island; a respectable lodging for decent men and a sign that Providence was apparently prepared to handle him and Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur with silk gloves from now on. Indeed, his stay at the inn was so delightful in comparison with his exile on the island or being tossed at sea on the merchant ship that for the first week he could not be persuaded to leave the house but lay all day long in bed, haltingly reading a recent edition of Aesop’s Fables. Besides, he was fairly insulated there from the hubbub of the city. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur on the other hand dashed all over town, working to resolve their case, which was the purpose of their journey after alclass="underline" to obtain a royal writ dismissing the charges against them. He went hither and thither among those of their countrymen who he had reason to believe would be well disposed towards him and his father, asking their advice on how best to bring the matter to the attention of the king, for it would take no less than a handwritten, sealed writ from His Majesty King Christian IV to induce the judges of the Icelandic Althing to change their minds. And that was easier said than done. Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur discovered in addition that those responsible for their passage to Denmark were a group of scholars who had grown weary of Ole Worm’s incessant questions about this Jónas the Learned, who the Danish professor was convinced possessed a vast fund of knowledge about the ancient runic alphabet. For six years they had given him the same answer: that little was known of this Jónas beyond the fact that he was continually on the run from the authorities, a condemned man who infected all who came near him with his misfortunes. In the end, however, when Dr Wormius had contrived it so that the University Council was prepared to take up Jónas’s cause, and his son’s too if need be, his Icelandic colleagues could no longer ignore the requests of their brother in academia and personal friend of the king, so they had instigated a whip-round to pay for Jónas’s passage. And they sent Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur with him in the hope that the troublesome father and son would never return to Iceland.
By dint of telling Jónas that one of the stalls by the harbour had a monkey on display, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur finally managed to rouse his father’s interest in seeing more of Copenhagen than the inn and its garden. Ever since Jónas had read Aesop’s fable about the monkey and the fox, he had been puzzling over the paradox that the animal which most resembled man should be bested by a four-footed beast with apparently human wits. He now longed to see a monkey with his own eyes, having seen more than enough of foxes. But before Jónas the Learned could abandon his straw mattress for the monkey, the machinery of Fate creaked into action once more; news came to the ears of father and son that their enemies from Iceland had reached Copenhagen before them and already launched a campaign of slander. The fiends had compiled a scroll containing all the vilest and most vicious things that had ever been said or written about Jónas the Learned, largely derived from the polemic by Reverend Gudmundur Einarsson of Stadarstadur, commonly known as the Treatise but described by himself as ‘In versutias serpentis recti et tortuosi, that is, a little treatise against the deceits and machinations of the Devil who works sometimes by straight, sometimes by crooked ways, to ruin the redemption of mankind.’ The juiciest morsels of this stew were highly seasoned with warnings to the Danes not to take pity on a scoundrel like Jonas, let alone permit him entry to the country, or, perish the thought, risk sheltering scum like him in Copenhagen, where Mayor Juren had long been troubled by an obscure but agonising internal complaint for which he had undergone extortionately expensive and painful cures that had achieved little but to keep him hanging on at death’s door. But since it was commonly rumoured that witchcraft lay at the root of his disease, no cost should be spared in tracking down the culprit. In such an atmosphere it proved easy for Jónas’s enemies to sow the seeds of mistrust and ill will towards him. In consequence, one noontide in mid-October a group of constables stormed the inn and arrested Jónas in the name of the king.
He was dragged before a magistrate at the City Hall where the slanderous scroll against him was read aloud and given credence, despite its mediocre composition — it lacked both tail and hind legs — and Jónas was sentenced to be transported back to Iceland. However, as there would be no ships now until spring, he was to remain in custody until that time. The magistrate paid no heed to Jónas, or rather to Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur on his behalf — since Jónas could not speak a word for the lump in his throat — who explained that he had come to Copenhagen to pursue his rights over a miscarriage of justice that had been perpetrated at the Althing, and, quite apart from that, he was a special envoy with a gift for none other than Olaus Wormius and his errand had not yet been fulfilled. The learned professor would unquestionably confirm that Jónas was not the dangerous criminal described in the letter. Was the magistrate unaware that he was known as ‘the Learned’? The magistrate did not listen, any more than he had listened to the other defences that Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur pleaded on behalf of his father. In the end, however, it was the gift for the esteemed Rector Ole Worm that decided the matter by lending support to the idea of Jónas’s dubious character, for it was a live Great Auk.
The creature had already caused alarm among the other guests at the Sommerfugl Inn, being unlike any bird they had ever seen, not only larger and more imposing but with a hoarse voice and a croak like the death rattle of a choking man. For the first few days Jónas had taken the Great Auk down to the dining room with him, placing the oblong box at his side, removing the lid and feeding the bird herring, which was plentiful in this country. The creature liked the food as much as the Danes did, though Jónas himself retched at every mouthful of this fatty inedible muck. After dinner he had permission to air the bird in the back garden. There was no danger of its escaping when he let it out of its cage, since it could not fly and was easy to corner. It was the Great Auk’s evening perambulations that had filled the onlookers with such misgivings; the manner in which the bird, if it was a bird, waddled about among the hens, upright like a mannikin, conjured up ghastly tales from the dark recesses of the mind: tales of people who had been lucky to escape alive from the clutches of witches on Walpurgisnacht, being left dumb, disfigured and a burden to themselves and their families for the rest of their lives, or rather the descriptions of the witches’ corporeal familiars. These were often a mixture of man and beast, not unlike the oddity that stood alone in the hen coop, bathed in moonlight, like a miniature version of a long-nosed witch swathed in a black cloak. For the bird was alone; the hens were all in their house, huddled together trembling, showing an uncanny fear of the malignant-looking visitant. At least the innkeeper’s testimony before the court went something along these lines when he was cross-examined about the conduct of the accused, Jónas Pálmason the Learned, during the fortnight he had stayed at the Sommerfugl Inn. No other witnesses were called; the Icelander was clapped in irons forthwith and transferred to a new and worse place, Gaoler Rasmussen’s House of Correction. There he discovered for himself that Copenhagen is like Lady Luck: capricious to many, but especially to Jónas.