Day 520: Iceland’s Bell

Iceland’s Bell is a curious novel. Most of the characters are based on actual people who were involved in court trials in Iceland and Denmark at the turn of the 18th century. One way to look at this novel is as the Icelandic version of Bleak House.

The novel begins with Jón Hreggviðsson, a disreputable farmer. He has been sentenced to a whipping for making a bawdy joke about the Danish king. While he is awaiting punishment, the king’s hangman has him help take down Iceland’s bell.

Although Iceland’s bell does not feature much in the novel, it is a symbol for the treatment of Iceland by its Danish overlords. The novel makes clear how impoverished the nation is and how the Danes bleed it dry. Iceland’s bell is at the time Iceland’s only national treasure. It has hung for centuries and is rung for court hearings and before executions. After a war with Sweden, the Danish king orders the bell to be removed so it can be melted down to help rebuild Copenhagen.

Jón Hreggviðsson has his beating and then goes off drinking with some men, including the hangman. On the way home the drunken men get lost in a bog. According to Jón’s story, when he wakes up the next morning, he’s lost his hat and his horse, so he takes the ones that are nearby. These turn out to belong to the hangman, who is later found dead in a nearby stream. A few days later, Jón is accused of his murder. We never find out if he murdered the hangman or even if the hangman was murdered, but thus begins a series of trials that last 32 years.

The day after Jón returns home from his beating, two other important characters enter the novel. Arnas Arnæus is a famous Icelandic scholar and a professor at the University of Copenhagen who comes to Jón’s farm with a group of eminent Icelanders searching for old manuscripts. Among the trash in Jón’s mother’s bed, Arnæus find several pages from a Skálda, a manuscript of Eddaic poems. Arnæus is trying to rescue Iceland’s heritage from destruction by searching out these old manuscripts. Having discovered the fragment of Skálda, he considers it the jewel of his collection.

With Arnæus is the bishop, his wife, and her sister Snæfríður, the beautiful young girl known as Iceland’s Sun, daughter of the magistrate. Snæfríður, we learn later, is in love with Arnæus. Arnæus leaves Iceland, promising Snæfríður to return for her. However, he soon marries an elderly rich Danish woman to save his precious manuscripts from being claimed for debt.

When Arnæus returns to Iceland years later, it is as a representative of the Danish king. He comes with the mission to end some of the Danish abuses of the Icelandic people. But his reversal of some of Snæfríður’s father’s decisions takes the perversity of their personal affairs to the international level.

Iceland’s Bell is written with the stark and cynical humor I encountered in Independent People. Laxness brutally depicts the state of the Icelandic people and their diminishment by the Danes. This novel is dark and comical at the same time—and beautifully written.