‘Transitus Mariae … On the day when the glorious Queen of Heaven and Earth, the Holy Mary, passed away, all the Lord’s apostles were present … And wise authorities tell us that wherever each of the apostles had been standing previously, he was raised from there by angelic power and set down on the spot where the Holy Mary died … For God’s angel was sent by the Lord to raise up each of the apostles and carry him many days’ journey through the air in the winking of an eye to bring him to this place …’
I had abandoned any attempt to understand what the grown-ups were up to … But of one thing I was sure: if you had to go through all this fuss just to set eyes on the Peter Lamb, then I was bored to death by the whole affair and determined to refuse any further invitations to visit, should they be forthcoming … I loosened my clasped hands, feeling the blood rushing to my fingers, and stretched and flexed them in the air … Grandmother gripped my skinny arm hard with a low cry … I lost my temper with her since I had done nothing to deserve such rough treatment and was about to strike off the hand that crushed my arm so mercilessly … But at that moment other people in the crowd began to emit similarly muffled cries … Yes, it must be starting: the evil spirits were entering the people and without warning each would turn on his neighbour, bellowing and beating, crushing and tearing off fingers, noses and ears … With a wail, I sprang to my feet … Experience had taught me that the best course was to run to my grandfather Hákon, but if the world was turning topsy-turvy, he must surely become the most fearsome ogre of all, so I made up my mind to run off alone into the blue …
‘Wise men say that God had previously revealed to his apostles that they would all, on the day that the glorious Holy Mother passed away, gather in the valley known as Vallis Josaphat …’ intoned the old man.
I could not move an inch … We were in the thick of the crowd, my grandmother and I … When the homilist fell silent I heard Grandfather Hákon say:
‘Come forth in jubilation, O Holy Mary, Mother of God, nursemaid of our Lord Jesus Christ!’
This did not sound like very monstrous talk to me so I plucked up the courage to look in his direction … The brush twirled as before in his hand, but where there had been sand there now peeped forth the finely shaped tip of a nose made of painted wood, then ruddy cheeks, and with the next swirl of the brush appeared the celestial blue eyes, turned heavenwards, of God’s Holy Mother … The third swirl swept all the sand from her countenance and the fourth dislodged it, causing it to trickle like water to her feet, revealing her robed body … My grandmother began to weep … For, as I understood later, it was a long time since she had last set eyes on the Holy Virgin, the lady who had given her strength through all the years of childbirth, childrearing and housekeeping … Her confidante in every trifling feminine concern that comes of being made not in the image of the Creator but in the image of an image, made from the substance of the male who was himself moulded from the earthly clay which became visible when the word fell from the lips of the Maker … Upon which He took the substance in His palm and made from it ever smaller worlds until He made woman and all that she contains within … The Holy Virgin knew women’s insides better than any other, being herself a daughter of Eve; the most perfect of her line, but a mortal woman nonetheless … Until the apostles saw her rise from her grave like a silver cloud which rose higher and higher until the Saviour floated to meet it, reaching a hand into the clouds and whisking his mother up to highest Heaven … Now she sits crowned at his side, pleading the cause of mortal women … It transpired that Our Lady was not the only statue in the elf-mound … For here the images of the holy saints, carved, cast and painted, from our own and our neighbouring districts had been preserved when twilight fell over the land like snow, like ash from the infernal lava-spewing Mount Hekla that is fatal to any livestock that have not been brought into shelter … For what are we but your flock, O Lord? We face the same perils as the cattle, sheep and geese that graze on grass turned an acrid black by the disaster … That is why your flock has hidden its salvation underground, and from there draws its strength, acting in secret while celebrating in its heart, until the rule of the usurpers has come to an end and the libertine hordes lie with their innards burst open like young rats that have gorged themselves in the tallow barrel … From this fair meeting with the Virgin in the Mary Mound, little Master Nosy’s childish mind became gripped with the conviction that every mound, knoll and bump in the landscape concealed heavenly wonders … Shortly before his death, my grandfather Hákon entrusted to me, then twenty-three years old, the instructions that showed where the True Believers had buried their saints … This later became my passport to the fortress of learning that is Hólar … There I exchanged the instructions for the schooling and priestly education of my son, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur Jónasson … Not that he has had much joy of being the son of Jónas the Learned, but the poor fellow obtained his place at Hólar because I knew the hiding places of those who had escaped the twilight portents, though that was not all I had to pay towards his keep: there was also the piece of paper proving Sheriff Ari of Ögur’s treasonous dealings, that is, the contract he made with the Spaniards over the harpooning of whales, in defiance of his monarch’s strict edict banning foreign ships from entering Icelandic waters, which referred to the captains who sailed to these shores as ‘filthy thieves’ …
SHELL-HEAD, or HUMPBACK WHALE: has shells and barnacles covering most of its head. Wherever the water is deep enough it rubs itself against barnacle-encrusted rocks. Of all the inedible whales, this is the greatest scourge of ships and men, for it will charge at boats and smash them in two with its fins, flippers or tail. At times it will block men’s course, so they have no alternative but to collide with it. Upon which it will cast the ship high in the air if it can, and pick off everyone on board, unless men succeed in dodging so that it misjudges and charges past. However, the sound of an iron file is insupportable to it, causing it to go mad or kill itself. On hearing the sound of a thin piece of iron, about the size of a saw, being rasped against the gunwale using a large file, the humpback will be repulsed and flee or, if shallows are to be found nearby, take its own life by running aground. It contains a good deal of blubber and its short baleen makes fine runners for sledges. The humpback can grow to some sixty ells long.
Yes, strutting sandpiper, your footprints in the sandy beach are your handwriting; thus you write your ephemeral tales and reports of what you have seen on your short-winged travels … I learnt to form letters and illuminate capitals in the scriptorium in my grandfather’s house, where I was entrusted with the copying and compilation of books … These were minor works at first, timeless neither in content nor in execution … A ballad or two and verses to entertain the traveller; handy little books containing instructions on how to cook tasty dishes; prayer books, and workbooks in which to preserve illustrations found in borrowed tomes but left out of the copies due to lack of space or else because they were out of fashion or contravened the new Church law … I also copied the diagrams of anatomy in books of healing which showed mankind as we are: our form, the places where the flesh hugs the bone or swells out, all according to how the Creator’s hand moulded our substance like clay … Since the old women in country kitchens would no longer allow me to fumble their bodies, I collected in one volume everything I could find about healing the principal maladies afflicting the female anatomy … There in alphabetical order you could find every kind of blockage, disorder of the blood, fever and chill, or swelling of their vitals or upper body … Between these I copied out old prayers to the Virgin Mary and appeals to those saints who had proved most efficacious in curing the Icelandic belly, together with exorcisms and similar invocations of white magic to aid in the battle against the wiles of demons and other horrid sprites … The bulk of this material was copied from the leechbook of the good Bishop Jón Halldórsson, and patients regarded it as an honour to hear that reverend man’s wise counsel vying with the boiling of the kettle, the sucking of the chimney, the crackling of the lamps and the crunching of the gravel floor. They used to exclaim that it was as if the Lord Bishop himself had descended to the sooty kitchen to heal them … In other words, I held to my course when it came to the healing of female disorders and the collection of ravens’ heads … But the leechbook would later land me in such desperate straits that I will never again be able to return to society but am fated instead to sit here talking nonsense to birds … Having burnt one man, they were eager to burn more … ‘Schoolmaster of Necromancy’ they called me when I helped some lads copy the leechbook and pronounce the names of the holy women who are addressed in the invocations … Those hypocritical jackals would have burnt me too if the ladies I cured with the help of the late bishop had opened their mouths … But no, they kept mum out of gratitude for my care … Yet although my body hair was not singed on their bonfire, I felt the heat of the animosity they bear towards me, the vindictive nature that drives a man to destroy his neighbour in a fire as if he were a banned book … For what is the difference? Every book is imbued with the human spirit … They knew that, the sooty guardians of the kitchen hearths, when they claimed to hear the bishop’s voice in the descriptions of their maladies and fell on their knees, only to jump up with reproaches when they heard that I had compiled the text myself … It was all in fun … And yet … I would not dream of comparing myself to Bishop Jón, any more than it would cross your mind, sandpiper, to liken the puff of air from your short wings to the whoosh from an eagle’s flight … To watch a book burn … My eyes are smarting … In the conflagration I hear the breath of the man who composed the text, and the breath of the man who formed the words, one after the other, and the breath of the man who reads it … I hear this trinity breathing as one and the same being, steadily in and out, until the fire consumes the breath from their lungs, disbanding the fellowship of those whom the book nurtured, like the soil that brings forth different plants … And many were the intertwined souls that burnt at Helgafell when the old monastery library was cast on the bonfire, along with the few holy relics and statues that had not already been destroyed … Alas, I was there! … What could my puny strength achieve when set against the giant pyre that raged like three volcanic craters, so great was the heat from that diabolical act? … And who should have been the Royal Incendiary of the first pyre, the Master Incendiary of the second pyre, the Grim Incendiary of the third? He whose duty it was to take the lead in the spiritual education of the flock in that parish, Reverend Sigurdur Pétursson, a young man who had recently taken up the living there … A sunny countenance, spare of flesh, nimble in his movements and loving to his wife and the child she bore under her belt … They had occupied the living for only four months when he lost his mind … which was seventeen days before he ordered the burning … That day Reverend Sigurdur awoke before anyone else, already raving … He ran in his nightshirt to the library, locked himself in and began hurling the books higgledy-piggledy on the floor … The servants watched aghast through the windows as he tore off his shift, flung himself on his back and rolled around on the books like a flea-bitten stray in the farmyard … Howling, he seized the writings at random, laid them on his naked flesh and rubbed them against himself, up and down, up and down, in a sinful fashion … But when he started ripping pages from the books and shoving them into his bodily orifices, the servants, afraid that he would choke himself, broke down the door … They overpowered the minister and tied him to his bed … The source of his madness was traced to a thumb-sized statue carved of whale ivory, supposedly representing Saint Barbara with her tower, which the minister’s young wife had found among the old clutter belonging to the monks and intended to use as a bogeyman for the unborn child … She had been toying with this object, which had probably been carved by some newly baptised Greenlander, while sitting on the bed in the couple’s room and had inadvertently pushed it under her husband’s pillow … So Reverend Sigurdur had been sleeping on it the night he went mad … When he was released from his bed-prison seventeen days later, however, the parson’s mind was sharper and more lucid than ever before … He ordered his sexton to clear out the library, pile the heretical collection in a heap in the field and build three bonfires with the books, which he then set alight himself … Providence guided me to Helgafell that day … I was meant to witness the tragedy … I was on my way to Stadarstadur to paint an altarpiece that I had carved earlier that winter … Seeing a pall of smoke over Helgafell as if the very hill were on fire, I gave in to curiosity and headed for the parsonage … Had I been able to fly like a bird, I might have made do with lifting myself over the hill to see what was causing the smoke … But no, I covered the whole distance on foot, arriving to find the fire at its height and, falling on my knees before it, I wept … That day Jónas ‘the Learned’ sank to new depths of ignominy in the eyes of his fellow men … But they did not see what I saw … Or if they did see, they did not understand what was happening before their eyes … When the bonfire in the middle, the largest, breathed its last, admitting a rush of air to the embers like a thousand devils all racing in single file down the same pipe, there was a great crack of thunder from the pyre … Everyone jumped — there was not supposed to be any gunpowder in the fire … While they were exchanging astonished glances, I kept my gaze fixed on the flames … I saw an open book rise from the pyre and float over the blazing pile … It appeared to be quite intact, the spine facing down, the pages spreading like wings … In an instant it glowed a dazzling white … And the parson’s youngest daughter cried out in a high voice: