Under the Glacier 
by 

Halldór Laxness, 

 

Magnus Magnusson (Translator)

 

Yessing on the In-breath

I knew Laxness could be wonderfully ironic, even creatively sarcastic. But I never imagined he could be a comic writer, and a first class one at that. The Icelandic Stanley Elkin perhaps.

The comparison is not all that far-fetched. Icelanders are like a lost tribe of Danes. Nominally Lutheran, only God knows what strange practices they get up to cut off in the hinterland of moors, lava fields and mountains. There are rumours that a sort of Nordic Voodoo reigns among the sparse population. The bishop is concerned. A one-man Inquisition (Emissary of the Bishop, EmBi for short, also known as ‘the undersigned’) is sent out to investigate and report on the state of religious health.

Like Voodoo, the local cults are syncretistic and somewhat ill-defined dogmatically. Their talismans and rituals are purely pragmatic though. If you can repair a Primus stove, or shoe a horse, or fix a carburettor, or rig up a 240 volt circuit you’re a saver of souls and a high priest.

This doesn’t mean that the spiritual is unregarded amongst the natives. These are not crass materialists (although they recently have received the luxury of alternating current). The place, sitting at the base of the great Snæfellsjökull, the omphalos and fiery source of Icelandic existence, is so overwhelming that it’s impossible not to perceive some sort of higher power, or at least one’s own powerlessness . So thoughts of the supernatural tend to run toward the great volcano and its glacier with a few old (fractured) Nordic sagas thrown in to explain things coherently (or at least poetically).

To call the devotees of this non-faith in the wilderness tight-lipped would be an understatement. They may speak the same language as the bishop in Reykjavík but they don’t speak it freely. A snatch of a typical conversation with the emissary:

“Embi: Are you Tumi Jónsen, clerk of the congregation?
Farmer: So they say. I’m only passing on what I’ve been told.”
“Embi: So you are the parish clerk?
Tumi Jónsen: You can put a name to anything, my boy.”

Such a population is naturally un-dogmatic in religious matters. But their religious views would hardly be noticeable even if they were fundamentalists. As one of the local myth-bearers,the parish clerk, puts it: “My ancestors, the Jónsens, believed everything in the Icelandic sagas and I go along with them sort of more or less, though I am not the man my father and my forefathers were.”

Pastor Jón has nailed the church shut and allowed the locals to take the pews for emergency firewood (and the pulpit, but not all of that was needed). His congregation loves him. When confronted with the accusation that he doesn’t conduct services even for Christmas, his reply is entirely matter-of-fact:

“Pastor Jón: That which is beyond words remains silent at Christmas too, my friend. But the glacier is there, all right.
Embi: No revelation?
Pastor Jón: The lilies of the field.
Embi: Yes, the lilies of the field! Exactly! Isn’t it ideal to preach about them—at Christmas, for instance?
Pastor Jón: Oh no, better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.”

The natives are correct when they say that “There’s nothing much happens around here. Nothing ever happens to anyone. No one has ever seen anything.”Nothing, in any case, that could possibly interest those who think that they can capture in words what is really important to these people.