Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness Read Free Book Online

good as new.”
    “Really?” said Steinar. “But what I find most remarkable is all that excellent land you said there was over in your part of the world.”
    “Yes, you people in Iceland can beat me and kick me just as you please,” said the Mormon. “My land is good.”
    “You must be used to most things by now,” said Steinar.
    “Oh, this affair tonight was nothing,” said the Mormon. “I have seldom escaped so lightly. I have three times had a thorough beating, several times a black eye—and one of my teeth is loose. I have travelled through whole counties where I have nowhere been offered so much as a bite of food or a sip of water, never mind a roof over my head. Orders had gone out from the sheriffs and pastors.”
    Steinar of Hlíðar was not in the habit of criticizing others, but now he could not restrain himself from repeating an old saying which is normally used when little fellows get uppish with their betters: “Wipe my arse, Mr. Lawman!”
    “But that was nothing at all compared with taking my poor little pamphlets off me,” said the Mormon. “I travelled 2,000 miles across America, most of them on foot, all the way from Salt Lake Valley to Dakota, until I finally found the one and only printing-press in the Western hemisphere that possessed the letters þ and ð so that I could get my pamphlets set up in type; if you search there long enough you will find some paupers like me from Iceland living on a riverbank behind the forests. When my pamphlets had been printed out there in Dakota I set off with them for Iceland. And now there is none left.”
    “Excuse me,” said Steinar, “but what did these misguided people do with the pamphlets?”
    “That’s easy,” said the Mormon. “They sent them to Denmark—Iceland’s brain has always been in Copenhagen. They told me that the Danish ministries would have to decide. So now I have come to Þingvellir to waylay the king. I have heard he is a German peasant, and I have met many of them in Salt Lake Valley: Denmark’s brain has always been in Germany. But Germans don’t belittle Icelanders, on the other hand, and for that reason I can expect more of a German than a Dane. I am going to ask him why I cannot have books just like anyone else in this kingdom.”
    “That is sensible of you,” said Steinar of Hlíðar. “He is said to be a good king.”

6
    The millennial celebrations.
Icelanders reap justice
    This book does not profess to give the history of the festivities which were held at Þingvellir to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of the settlement of Iceland* and to welcome the Danish king. Detailed accounts of these events were compiled at the time, and later some excellent books were written. But there were one or two not entirely irrelevant incidents, in the judgement of some, which never received attention in those worthy publications. This is the story of one such incident, only to be found in some of the less significant books, which are none the less true for all that.
    But first, a few words on a topic that people now are apt to overlook: there was a time once when Icelanders, despite the fact that they were the most indigent nation in Europe, all traced their ancestry back to kings. Indeed, in their literature they have given life to many kings whom other nations had made little effort to remember and who would otherwise have been consigned to oblivion in this world and the next. Most people in Iceland traced their lineage back to the kings who were written about in the sagas; some only claimed descent from warrior-kings or sea-kings, others to remote petty kings in the valleys of Norway and elsewhere in Scandinavia, or to the leaders of the Norse warriors who served in the Varangian Guard under the emperor in Constantinople;* but a few claimed descent from kings who, it can be proved, were actually crowned. No farmer was considered worth his salt if he could not trace his genealogy back to Harald hárfagri (Fine-Hair)* or