Iceland's Bell by Halldór Laxness Page A

and swore the entire night before his tongue was cut, and amongst those he cursed were his father and mother. Jón Hreggviðsson couldn’t get any sleep and finally became so angry that he said that whoever didn’t go to the altar was a fool, and he started singing the
Ballad of Jesus,
which he unfortunately didn’t know very well. Apart from thieves, there were quite a few other visitors who had been sentenced for crimes against the royal trade monopoly. One had been caught with English tobacco. Another had added sand to his sacks of wool. Some had illegally purchased flour in Eyrarbakki, because the flour in Keflavík was rotten and swollen with maggots. One or two had called their merchants thieves. There were endless amounts of these petty criminals, and they were all flogged. The king’s whip continued to flicker voraciously over the prone bodies of naked and emaciated Icelanders. Last but not least there were several hardened criminals of Jón Hreggviðsson’s mettle who were brought to the dungeon for a night’s lodging, men who were either to be executed or sent south to Denmark, to Bremerholm,* the most familiar of all places known to Icelanders in that distant country.
    Jón Hreggviðsson was never allowed to see the light of day during those twenty-four weeks, except for an insignificant glimmer at Yule and Easter when he was brought to church to hear the word of God. On both of these holy days the regent’s men came down into the dungeon, pulled a bag over his head, released him from his fetters, and escorted him to the church, where he was seated upon a corner bench between two brawny men and forced to listen to the customary message with the bag over his head. The rope, however, wasn’t pulled too tightly around his neck, which enabled him to catch a faint glimpse of his surroundings as he sat there in the house of God. Otherwise he saw nothing that whole winter.
    Around Easter another man was lowered down to the farmer, a man from the Eastfjörds who’d been sentenced to prison at Bremerholm for one of the most infamous crimes ever committed in Iceland: he’d rowed out to a Dutch dogger and bought a spool of twine. His case had been prosecuted during the fall and he was to be sent abroad that spring on a ship lying at anchor at Suðurnes.* During the winter he’d been sent from one bailiff to another throughout the land until he finally ended up here.
    “No,” said Guttormur Guttormsson. “They couldn’t prove that I had anything but this one spool. On the other hand, the merchant’s servants were spying on my trips out there. In my region everyone trades with them. A man who’s never seen a Dutch gold ducat doesn’t know what it means to have lived.”
    This was a man who spoke passionately and was moved to tears and gasped for breath every time he mentioned Dutch money.
    “They’re this big,” he said, and he grabbed Jón Hreggviðsson’s shoulder and made a ring on his forehead in the darkness.
    “It would never cross my mind to betray my Hereditary King and Sire for such blood money,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.
    “The Dutch are made of gold,” said the man. “At night when I wake up and can’t fall asleep again I think about those blessed huge coins and then I feel very well indeed. Such size! Such weight! Such luster!”
    “Do you have a lot of them?” asked Jón Hreggviðsson.
    “A lot?” said Guttormur Guttormsson. “Whether I’ve got a lot or just a few—and that’s not really any of your business, pal—I know what it means to have lived. I’ve lived many happy days. You southerners never live a single happy day.”
    “You’re a liar,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “We love and honor our king.”
    “We men of the Eastfjörds have never been a mob of slaves,” said Guttormur Guttormsson.
    After they’d become better acquainted Jón Hreggviðsson found out from the Easterner that even if he hadn’t committed any other crime than to buy a spool of twine from the