SIREN FISH: sings so sweetly that sailors are overpowered by her song if they hear it; the Norwegians are accustomed to sing, chant verse and row like madmen if they hear her calls.
There is a stone called hysterolithos, which can be seen in royal collections or illustrated in printed books, that possesses the remarkable nature of being shaped like the penis and scrotum of a man with, above them, a fully formed female vagina … What the supremely good and vigilant Lord means by allowing nature to scoop up a morsel like this from His cooking pot is not hard to guess: by demonstrating how easily He can mould the likeness of a man from earthly clay He wishes to warn the frail children of men that He can smash the existing form and cast it anew … They must take heed of their conduct, cultivate good habits, love one another, fear and worship Him … And He chooses these particular bodily organs so that the populace will respect the excellent task He has set them: to go forth and multiply and people the Earth … Which can only be done by reproduction, whereby the man introduces his member into the female genitalia, leaving behind his seed so that it may mingle with her blood, a shoot like a seed in damp soil … The genitals of woman are the doorway through which the infant must pass, by the process we refer to as labour or birth pangs or birth throes, which terms are witness to the difficulty of the task … Midwives place healing herbs or stones on this doorway to ease the birth, for the suffering of the daughters of Eve is terrible enough even if we do not deny them the aids that are to be had … People also speak of a woman’s secret door … But that is a paltry name, expressive of our helplessness when faced with the conundrum of foretelling what lies within and what will emerge from that mysterious hole … Seldom does a man sit willingly before that doorway, waiting for it to open for the babe that grew from his seed … Waiting around by a woman’s groin and tearing the child from within is rightly women’s work … Yet I myself have been there … It was during our first flight from the Vulture of Ögur’s henchmen … We had no horse, Pálmi Gudmundur was just nine, Hákon four, and Sigga was carrying our third child … Winter had begun and our progress was slow … The human wolves had not yet stolen the chest containing our clothes, books, stones, salts and the other useful objects I had amassed … Sigga was in the lead, Pálmi Gudmundur followed in his mother’s footsteps, and I brought up the rear with the little boy in my arms and the chest tied on to my back … Evening fell … The wind picked up from the north … It became difficult to find one’s footing on the slippery grass of the shingle bank, though this was preferable to toiling through the heavy sand of the beach … When I had to turn my shoulder to the wind to avoid being knocked over, I called to my wife: