by Eric Bies
Jules Verne sent Lidenbrock and Axel over—to crawl down the throat of a dormant volcano.
W. H. Auden visited between wars and found the place wanting for souvenirs. “Of course,” he wrote, “one can always bring home little bits of lava for one’s friends—I saw the Manchester school-teachers doing this at the Great Geysir—but I am afraid I have the wrong sort of friends.”
William Morris went twice: once in 1871, again in 1873. To what purpose he did, his daughter, May, elucidates in her introduction to the Journals he kept during those journeys:
not to shoot their moors and fish their rivers but to make pilgrimage to the homes of Gunnar and Njal, to muse on the Hill of Laws, to thread his way round the historic steads on the Western firths, to penetrate the desert heaths where their outlaws had lived…. The whole land teems with the story of the past—mostly unmarked by sign or stone but written in men’s minds and hearts.
In the summer of 1627, a decade after the death of Shakespeare, a trio of ships appeared off the southern coast of Vestmannaeyjar. The people of the island—the Einars, Helgis, Gudrids, and Sigrúns—assisted by nearly eighteen hours of sunlight, kept their eyes fixed on the horizon for close to an entire day, during which they convened and debated; they watched and waited, weighing their options. In the end, they threw up a meager bulwark of stone and went to bed.
The following day, just when it seemed they could stand the menacing presence no longer, the ships dispatched a fleet of boats: then the boats disgorged a mass of men ashore—pirates—who descended on the town with spears drawn. Those who were quick on their feet managed to flee over hills and down through the caves that dotted the erupted landscape. The rest were captured or killed. Among the former was a man in his sixties, the Reverend Olafur Egilsson, who was taken together with his wife and children.
Two weeks later, the lot of them landed in the alien port of Algiers. Their captors took no time to drive them from the ships, shoving them through the streets and lining them up in a dusty limestone square, where the locals gathered to get a load of the latest stock-in-trade.
The islanders shuffled uncomfortably in their chains. Many of them grieved to wonder what came next, for here was the immediate prospect of bondage to horrible Turkish devils. Their sense of disorientation only deepened when they found themselves surrounded by so much that was new and strange. In the manner of Icelandic eyes of the seventeenth century, Egilsson laid his for the first time on a donkey, passing in the street. He was astounded by the length of its ears.
The auctioneers began shouting their wares. Some of the slaves, freshly minted, drew relief from the news that they would be staying put. Others were flung farther afield, while the King himself laid hands on a whopping eighth of the pile—men, women, and children. All said, Egilsson’s report following this first dispersal sketches a surprisingly viable captivity. He may have had no choice in the matter of going about barefoot, but his table was always piled with food. Sure there was no liquor to speak of; but in the brutal heat of equatorial August (beating about like a bad drummer in his northern blood), it wasn’t long before he was giving thanks for the opportunity to take sips from the same tub as a lion, a bear, and an ostrich. And though he was finally separated from his wife and children—the only blow that really seemed to smart—the hope of their deliverance continued to flash at intervals as regular as his rededications in faith to Jesus Christ: “Whatever happens, we are the Lord’s.”
Thus the minister Egilsson spent his days, sharing a small stone apartment with two other men, more a prisoner than a slave, properly speaking.
Then one day he was commanded to leave, his family ransomed. “Go north,” he was told. “Secure from the King of Denmark the sum of twelve hundred pieces of eight. Should you fail to do so, do not bother to return.”
He was allowed a final visit with his wife and children. Wracked with intense emotion, he boarded an Italian ship and prayed for the strength to see his mission through.
Culture shock exists on another scale for travelers untutored in the ears of donkeys. Verne shot Lidenbrock and Axel out of the volcano on Stromboli, near Sicily, where Odysseus and his crew encountered the Cyclops. Back in Iceland, Auden entertained himself with the chunks of fermented shark he was given to nibble on (“It tastes more like boot-polish than anything else I can think of.”). It was Egilsson’s first stop in Livorno, on the coast of Tuscany, that occasioned the most bizarre passage in his Travels:
Every morning that I was there, I saw in all the streets of the town 100 people or more going about in chains, shackled two by two together, as horses are harnessed. These people were totally naked except for a small piece of clothing around the waist to cover their “shame.” Two other men went with them, whom I understood to be their overseers. With that group was a deer, from whom the antlers were cut, and also two big rams, and a fox and a sea cat [a kind of monkey], both of whom were in red dress. These two walked only on their hind legs, and wore black shoes and hats on their heads, and had blades at their sides, and—if I may say so—from behind their red trousers hung their long tails. What this act was for, I hardly know.
A Lutheran minister, Egilsson’s curiosity persisted in spite of his shock. In Livorno’s confounding blend of decadence and mortification he located the essential dimension of Roman Catholicism. Here was, to a greater extent even than Algiers, Iceland’s antithesis. Here were grand cathedrals in whose shadows rung the bells of tonsured monks in wooden shoes. Here were naked men and velvet men. Here was an unantlered deer and an upright fox—topsy-turvydom elevated to the status of high art. Of the monks themselves he wrote: “Even though they wash themselves with lye and strong soap, it would only serve to reveal their faithlessness and dishonesty all the more clearly.”
From Livorno Egilsson traveled through Genoa, Marseilles, and Holland. When he arrived at last in Copenhagen, he found a King embroiled in war, down to his last cent. So the Icelander sailed home, to Iceland, where the days were long and the days were short. He never saw his family again. He was glad to be home.