Iceland's Bell (22 page)

The archpriest: “My lord Commissarius is mistaken if he believes that I would use learning to pride myself over the learned and to extend my imperfectiones* beyond the essential. It should be no secret to any Christian, however, since Christians have always been privileged to hear it in their sermons and to read it in their books, that poverty produces a simple heart, which is more pleasing to God and which is far closer to status perfectionis than all the finery and wisdom of the world. And our Redeemer himself counted the poor amongst the blessed when He said, ‘They shall always remain nearest to us.’ ”

The king’s envoy: “If the Lord wills the existence of the indigent, so that Christians can benefit from their proximity and take their destitution as a lesson, is He not then opposed to the improvement of their pitiful state? If the day should come when the indigent have something to wear and to eat, whom then should Christians take as models for their lives? Where then should one look to find an example of the simple heart, which is so pleasing to God?”

The archpriest: “Just as the Lord made the poor so that the rich might gain from them instruction for a more humble way of life, so has He also placed the higher classes under His special protection and invited them to strengthen the condition of their souls through almsgiving and prayer.”

“The sound of dialectic being pursued over the dinner table in Skálholt is long overdue,” interrupted the bishop. “And there has seldom been more need than in our day and age to hear lessons of morality as conveyed and interpreted in books. Yet we should not dig so deeply into the porridge, my praeclari et illustrissimi,* lest our appetites be ruined before we get to the steak.”

The bishop looked around, expecting everyone to laugh, but no one even smiled, except for the commissarius.

“We lads,” said he, and he smiled at the sisters as he chose to begin with such homely words instead of saying something in Latin, “we lads are weak when it comes to sitting with beautiful women, for then we try to display ourselves as just a touch more intelligent than we really are, instead of listening to their beautiful voices.”

“I am unable to comment on how beautiful our voices might be,” said the bishop’s wife, “but since the conversation turns to the poor, a memory appertaining to Skálholt comes to mind: one of my predecessors ordered the stone bridge that nature built over the Brúar River destroyed, and in doing so denied the indigent access to the diocese. That ugly memory has not infrequently visited me, as if I myself had been party to the deed. Nevertheless, it has occurred to me to have some sort of semblance of a bridge built there again so that almsmen would no longer have to die on the riverbank on the other side. It is assuredly a pernicious sin to destroy the bridge of Christian charity which, God willing, may be raised between the poor and the rich. And yet, when I contemplate the matter more carefully, I find that my old predecessor may have had an excuse: namely, Iceland’s honor could hardly have been increased if the bishop in Skálholt were to have been eaten out of house and home, and the ravenous mob from every corner of the land allowed to lay the diocese low.”

The red flecks on the madam’s face had by now merged into one, and though she smiled amicably at her guests one could clearly read in her eyes that she had not spoken first and foremost out of love for philosophy. Her sister put her knife down and stared at her from an incredible distance.

“What does Snæfríður think?” asked the commissary.

She gave a slight start when he spoke her name, then answered hastily:

“I beg your pardon, I have been sleeping all day and am not yet awake. I am dreaming.”

The bishop turned to his wife and said:

“My best beloved, tell me who is not an almsman in the eyes of our Redeemer? By my faith, how often have I envied the barefooted tramp who sleeps by the highways without sorrow, and wished that I might stay behind with the crowd of mendicants lying on the sand spit by the stream, watching the birds and praying to God, under obligation to no one. The burdens that the Lord has bestowed on us, the caretakers of this poor country, are heavy, in temporalibus no less than in spiritualibus,* though I doubt that the commoners would appreciate this.”

Arnæus asked: “How then shall our lord king best respond to the tearful petitions that are forever pouring out of this land, if vagrants and tramps are more blessed than their overseers?”

“All creation complains and moans, my dear lord Commissarius,” said the bishop. “Complaint is its distinctive sound.”

“Each and every man complains to his lord and all men bemoan their own lot, yet we know that everything that happens to us, for ill or for good, has its origins in ourselves,” said the archpriest. “It is not for men to alleviate the need of the people whom the Lord wishes to discipline with his justice: need cries out for the things that cannot be obtained through anyone’s prayer vigils until it has paid the price for its evil deeds. Inexorabilia* is its life.”

“You speak truly, Reverend Sigurður,” said the commissarius. “Men should never be so conceited as to hinder God’s justice, though naturally such a statement is no novelty. But I cannot agree, and presume it is certainly not your view, that this information lightens our obligation toward human justice. According to all Christian doctrine, our Lord granted to men the wisdom to discern right from wrong just as soon as the world began. Now, since good men have shown the king that it is not Sebaoth* who sells the Icelanders bad wares or else sells them too little for them to survive, nor whose judgments are too lenient for the vaunted rich and too severe for the indigent, ordering the hands of some cut off and the tongues of others cut out, hanging a third and burning a fourth for their bereavement and defenselessness, then it is not contrary to God’s will that the king should wish to inspect this foul business thoroughly and investigate acutely the overly lenient as well as the overly severe judgments; rather, he works in harmony with the wisdom given to us by our Creator to discern right from wrong and to use that understanding to live our lives with a certain honorable and regimented deportment.”

“Indeed, dear Commissarius, we owe you a great debt of gratitude for your vigorous admonition of the merchants, many of whom are in fact my good friends and some of them my true and faithful friends,” said the bishop, “though unfortunately they are sinful men no less than we countryfolk. And may God grant that your dealings with them will serve to bring us better flour next year, and, if possible, compensation in silver.”

The meal soon came to an end and the bishop began his prayer of thanksgiving, saying that all gathered should lift up their hearts, edified as they were by the conversation of our erudite and beloved table-companions: his friend the archpriest, who prays that God’s justice may find its place, and his friend and Lordship the specially appointed commissarius to His Most Worshipful Grace, who prays that human justice might prevail over the Danes as well as the Icelanders, the learned as well as the unlearned, the high as well as the low—

“. . . and that the illustrious men who protect the honor and dignity of this our destitute land might hold their heads high, along with their good wives, unimpeded until their final end—” the bishop’s wife added her own pious voice to the prayer as she sat with her head bowed, her eyes closed, the palms of her hands clasped together.

“And, as my ardently beloved prays,” continued the bishop, “let His divine grace strengthen the illustrious noblemen who uphold the honor of our destitute land. Let us thereby in conclusion raise our voices in singing the humble verse left to us by our dearly departed Reverend Ólafur from Sandar,* which we learned at our mothers’ knees:

‘May the grace of our Lord Jesus sublime
Protect us all throughout all time,
May God bless our comrades wracked with fear,
Whether they be far or near;
May the bounds of God’s Christendom ever increase,
May His defense of authority never cease,
May He grant to all of us heaven’s peace.’ ”

9

The next day Arnas Arnæus went around midday to visit the bishop’s wife in her bower. Sitting there with her was her sister Snæfríður. Both were engaged in needlework and the sun shone in upon them this autumn day.

He greeted them companionably and begged that they excuse his intrusion, but he owed Madam Jórunn an apology for having instigated such frivolous table-chatter the previous evening; his imprudent citation of Luther’s words had most likely given offense to that illustrious man their friend Reverend Sigurður, but he did not fully realize it until his puerile repartee, directed against the respectable servant of God, had excited that pert boy his secretary. He said that cosmopolitans were slow to reach a level of maturity sufficient to enable them to speak properly to those who hold the world in contempt.

The bishop’s wife accepted the assessor’s apology good-naturedly and said that it would certainly be something new to hear kings’ courtiers in Iceland describe themselves as lacking in courtesy, but as far as the baccalaureus was concerned, it had simply been a case of youth’s natural disdain for those who scorn the world—Reverend Sigurður had encountered such disdain before and understood it. Snæfríður, on the other hand, answered that it could hardly come as any surprise to champions of the faith like Reverend Sigurður, who would readily order men’s tongues pulled out of their mouths and cut off, if these weapons struck out at them while they were still attached to their owners.

The assessor said that he was of course quite familiar with Reverend Sigurður’s proposals, reiterated at ecumenical councils and the Alþingi and founded on his brimfully learned interpretations of Scripture and abstruse articles of law, that heretics should be tortured and sorcerers burned, but, he said, the archpriest did not deserve to be treated any less courteously by others on account of this.

Arnæus was still standing in the middle of the room, but now the bishop’s wife bade him humbly honor two helpless females by remaining in their company for a short time.

“. . . and let’s stop talking about our friend the honest inquisitor and erudite tongue-cutter Reverend Sigurður; instead tell us some trifle about the realms of the world”—it was Snæfríður who spoke, casually and insuppressibly, her eyes radiant, a completely different woman than the one to whom they had raised their glasses last evening in the Grand Salon.

He said that although he was actually quite pressed for time, since people who had traveled long distances to meet him were waiting downstairs, he could not conceivably refuse such a noble invitation, and he accepted the easy-chair offered to him by the mistress of the house. After he was seated Snæfríður stood up and placed a footstool at his feet.

“Now then, I am of course unfamiliar with those delightful realms of the world which cause elegant ladies to feel homesick, but from those poor countries with which I am acquainted you may choose as you like,” he said, and he produced little golden snuffboxes and handed them to the women. They took tiny pinches of snuff, in the manner of noblewomen, and Snæfríður sneezed and laughed and hurriedly wiped her nose and eyes with a handkerchief. “I am familiar namely with those countries to which my demon has drawn me,” he continued, “compelling me, as it has done for so long, to search for my very own.”

“My sister is well-educated, she may choose her country first,” said the bishop’s wife. “Perhaps she will choose for both of us.”

“We would like to hear about all the countries where noblewomen are skilled in the proper use of snuff,” said Snæfríður.

“Then it seems to me that I could hardly offer women of that sort anything less than the city of Rome,” said the royal commissarius.

Snæfríður was delighted, but her sister the bishop’s wife felt that Rome was far too remote. Turning to her sister, she asked: “Oh, do you really wish to hear about the cursed pope now, Snæfríður mine?”

But the commissarius said that there was always a first time for everything, and that he finally found himself forced to disagree with the bishop’s wife, since, in his opinion, there were few cities lying closer to Iceland than Rome, and in fact it was easy to recall the time when it lay closest of all cities, closer even than the city of Zion, which is on a height. As far as the pope was concerned, he preferred not to quarrel with the ladies about him, but it could not be denied, he said, that the further south one traveled in the northern hemisphere, the less remote one would find St. Peter.

“I am certain, though you would never admit it, Assessor,” said the bishop’s wife, “that there can exist two kinds of genuine truth, one for the south, the other for the north.”

Arnas Arnæus answered slowly, in his droll, centrifugal manner of speaking, which sounded at times like mere rambling, but which never endangered solemn conversation:

“Up north in Kinn there is a mountain called Bakrangi by those who look to it from the east, but Ógöngufjall by those who stand to its west; sailors out in Skjálfandi call it Galti. And I am ashamed to say it, but I went to Rome not to search for the truth—though it certainly would have proven difficult for me, as for many others, to leave there without finding it. But now I am certain that I am confusing my ladies. Therefore I shall tell you exactly how it was: I went to Rome to search for three books—particularly one of the three. They all have something to do with Iceland, especially the one I desired most to find. This book gives much more accurate information than those mistily veiled fabulae* we know so well concerning how our people discovered America terra* and settled there shortly before the year 1000—and also how they abandoned the place.”

When they pressed him for more details he said that a letter written in the Middle Ages, now stored in Paris, mentions that in the archives of an ancient cloister in Rome there exists a codex containing the writings of a certain woman from Hislant terra,* Gurid by name, who undertook a pilgrimage to Rome around the year 1025. The source says that when the woman went to make her confession, a monk discovered that she was neither more nor less than the most widely traveled woman who existed in all of Christendom at that time. As a youth she had dwelt for ten years with her husband and several of her countrymen in a land to the west of the world’s ocean, beyond the world’s boundary, and had borne a child for her husband there, but strange creatures had made war on them in that land, forcing them to take their infant son and leave. This woman related such great tidings in the sight of God in the city of Rome that the monk finally decided to put them down in letters, and his text could still be read there in the cloister long afterward. Later the cloister was torn down and its possessions were scattered or lost, but some were rediscovered and collected centuries later, when work began on the construction of the papal library after the papal seat was reestablished at Rome following its extended exile.

The two other books Arnæus tried to find in the papal collections were the
Liber Islandorum,
containing both genealogies and biographies of kings omitted by Ari in his Icelandic version, and the
Breviarium Holense,
which, under Jón Arason’s initiative, was the first book printed in Iceland, and which had been laid upon the breast of Master Þorlákur in his grave as far as anyone knew.*

The pope is a great bookman and there is little doubt that he had all of these books in his possession at one time or another, and there is nothing more likely than that he still does. But a great many beautiful old books have been filched from the poor old fellow these days, and because of this he has become, as one might expect, somewhat suspicious of people who arrive from far and wide, wanting to rummage through his scraps of books. For years Arnæus had worked to secure the intercession of potentates: ambassadors, generals, archbishops, and cardinals, who for various reasons required him to be permitted entrance to the dark forest called the Papal Archives. Yet the entire time that he wandered in this earthbound recess of history he was never accorded such trust as to be allowed to search alone; a canon was ordered to stand at his side, with an armed Swiss guard behind him, to ensure that he neither stole a single slip of paper nor took it upon himself to make unauthorized copies of any of the memoranda that the evangelists could most likely put to good use in their ongoing struggles against the servant of the servants of God.

He wandered about for so long in this catacomb of the ages that the contemporary world turned into a remote dream. Many of the satchels containing deeds and schedulae* that here filled the halls, the narrow passageways, and the earthen tunnels had grown dusty in repose and had been chewed by termites throughout the march of time; from some of them crept worms and other vermin. Again and again the searcher was afflicted with a catarrh like some farmer out in Iceland who for years has had to pitch moldy hay out in the haymow; there were even times when he had to remain bedridden due to the obstruction in his lungs. In this place his hands uncovered as much important as unimportant evidence concerning every tiny detail ever mentioned in all of Christendom since its history began, everything except for the
Liber Islandorum,
the
Breviarium Holense,
and the memoirs of the woman Gurid from Hislant terra. The leave of absence granted to him by His Gracious Sire the King of the Danes for the undertaking of his journey had long since expired. In the end he became absolutely convinced that even if he were to search for the rest of his days, no matter how many he had left, he would remain equidistant from his goal until the hour of his death. And yet he was as certain that the books were there as an insane tramp he recalled seeing in his youth was certain that treasure was to be found hidden under stones. In his own case, however, the solace inherent in God’s promise that all who seek shall also find seemed to have deserted him completely.

“You found nothing at all?” asked Snæfríður. She had placed her needlework on her lap and was staring at him. “Not a single thing?”

“I know,” he said, directing his gaze at the bishop’s wife, “that it is a sin, when studying Scripture, to extrapolate or to interpolate, but original sin, that abominable burden, always reveals itself. For a long time I have been plagued by the suspicion that the passage I cited just now originally read something like this: seek and you shall find— something entirely different from whatever it is you were searching for. But now I must apologize for my prattle—I feel I really have said quite enough for today.”

He made a move as if to stand up and leave.

“But you have forgotten to tell us of Rome,” said Snæfríður. “We chose this city and now you intend to neglect your duty to us.”

The bishop’s wife also pleaded that for the sake of courtesy he be less hasty in his departure.

He remained seated. In truth he was in no hurry—it was quite possible that he had never had any thoughts of leaving. They allowed him to examine their cloths, and he unfolded them and expressed his admiration for them, displaying his knowledge of women’s needlework. His hands were delicate, with slightly declining fingertips, his wrists slender, the backs of his hands smooth and covered with fine dark hair. Afterward he leaned back again in his easy-chair, but he still had not put his feet up on the footstool.

“Rome,” he said, and he smiled distractedly, looking out into the distance somewhere. “I saw two men there and one woman; of course I saw several others, but always these two men and this one woman; morning and evening these three, two Icelandic men, one Icelandic woman.”

The women’s eyes opened wide—“Icelandic men, an Icelandic woman?”

He described for them a small, brisk woman, rather lean, traveling with a group of German pilgrims to Rome, an unremarkable individual in a group of gray folk, who appeared even grayer than usual in contrast to the residents of the city and who, to the natives, were as deserving of notice as a flock of migrant birds; even the beggars and thieves of Rome were like grandees compared to them. And alone amongst this drab company is, namely, this everyday, unattractive woman in a torn black smock of wadmal, with a cap tied to her head, barefooted like all of Europe at the dawn of the eleventh century, when Christians, due to indigence, were still little more than cannibals. But in a little scrip that this barefoot commoner carried under one arm she kept shoes that looked new, though she had had them for a very long time. They were made of colored, tanned hide, wondrously soft, with stubby toes and soles sewn up around the outside of the foot, the stitching covered over with delicate leaf-shaped cuttings and the vamps set with beautifully colored leather beads. Such shoes had never been seen in Christendom, nor in ancient Rome, nor during the days of any other distinguished nation of ages past; another such pair of shoes shall never be seen again in the world for the next four hundred years. These seldom-seen shoes, a token of a path longer than any other in the world, she had brought south to present to the pope in recompense for the sins she had committed in the land where she had acquired them, Vínland the Good. I tried to look into the eyes of this woman, who alone of all earthly women had discovered the new world, but they were only the eyes of a tired traveler; when I strained my ears I could hear clearly that she spoke to her fellow travelers in a Low German dialect, the language of pilgrims at that time. This woman was Gurid from Hislant terra, Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir, from Glaumbær in Skagafjörður in Iceland; she had worked a farm in Vínland the Good for close to a year, and had there given birth to a son from whom generations of Icelanders are descended, Snorri the son of Þorfinnur Karlsefni.*

Next he told them the story of the two other Icelanders he had seen in Rome. One of them had traveled south upon a kingly steed, as noblemen do, in the company of other noblemen carrying silver and gold, accompanied by a troop of soldiers hired to protect them from brigands. He was a handsome and vigorous man, with wide but somewhat deep-set eyes; his countenance was like that of a curious child, yet nothing in his bearing indicated that he considered himself less than any other man in the inhabited world. Here come to Rome was the incarnation of the man who had as a merchant escaped from Constantinople and traveled to the land of the caliph while Europe lay in the grip of barbarianism; here was the man who had besieged Paris and Seville, set up kingdoms in France and Italy, brought his ship to the coast of Straumfjörður in Vínland—and composed the Völuspá. Now he had slaughtered his kinsmen in Iceland and brought his country to the brink of Ragnarök, as described in the poem, and he had come to Rome to receive shrift from the pope. Penance was ordered: he was led barefoot before the churches of Rome and chastised before most of the cathedrals, as the populace lingered in the streets and watched in amazement, lamenting that such a distinguished man should be so deplorably treated. The man’s name was Sturla Sighvatsson.*