Zöga went in to tell the pastor of our arrival, leaving us to dismount in a deep miry lane between two rough stone walls leading to the house. He had been busy with his hay, but speedily appeared and hospitably offered us what shelter he could afford.
Zöga arranged for the grazing of the ponies; we were to dine in the largest room of the house, and he was to have the use of the kitchen fire to cook our dinner—the preserved meats, soups, &c.—which of course we had brought with us. The pastor provided a splendid trout from the river, to the great delectation of half a dozen travellers all as hungry as hawks.
PRIEST’S HOUSE AT THINGVALLA.
Now commenced the unstrapping and unpacking, presided over by the indefatigable Zöga; boxes, bags, and packages, bespattered with mud, lay about singly and in piles. Everybody seemed to want something or other which was stowed away somewhere, and forthwith the patient obliging Zöga, in a most miraculous manner, never failed to produce the desiderated articles. Taking a rough towel and soap, I performed my ablutions in the river close by, while dinner was getting ready and felt quite refreshed. “Time and the hour runs through the roughest day,” and this was certainly one to be marked in our calender. Shortly after 6 o’clock we dined and attempted some conversation in Latin with the priest, Mr. S. D. Beck. He is a pastor literally and metaphorically, farming and fishing as well as preaching. Hay, however, is the only crop which is raised here; and the Icelanders are consequently very dependent upon the hay-harvest. With their short summer they might not inappropriately quote Shakspere’s lines,
“The sun shines hot; and if we use delay
Cold biting winter mars our hoped for hay.”
The scythe used by the Icelanders is quite straight and not half the length of ours. The numerous little hummocks, with which pasture land is covered, necessitate the use of a short implement, so that it may mow between and around them; the hillocks are from one to two feet high, and from one to four feet across. In some places the ground presents quite the appearance of a churchyard or an old battle-field. These elevations are occasioned by the winter’s frost acting on the wet subsoil. If levelled they would rise again to the same height in about 7 or 8 years; but the farmers let them alone, because they fancy they get a larger crop from the greater superficial area of the field, and this old let-alone custom certainly saves them much labour. The primitive state of their agriculture, as well as the peculiar nature of the Icelandic soil, may be inferred from the fact, that there are only two ploughs in the whole island and no carts. A spade, a scythe two feet long, a small rake with teeth about an inch and a half deep, and ropes made of grass or hair to bind the hay, which is carried on men’s backs or conveyed by horses to be stacked, are all that the farmer requires for his simple operations. The hay, especially that which grows in the túns, is of fine quality, tender and nutritive; and, with even any ordinary attention to drainage, many a fertile vale could be made to yield much more than is now obtained from it. Latin was our only mode of communicating directly with the priest; but having had little colloquial practice of that kind, we blundered on, feeling that, in appropriating the stately language of Cicero and Virgil to creature comforts and the vulgar ongoings of daily life, we were almost committing a species of desecration: yet the ludicrous combinations and circumlocutions, grasped at in desperation to express modern things in a dead language, afforded us no little amusement. Professor Chadbourne, Mr. Murray, and myself got most of the work to do, and were often greeted with the pastor’s goodnatured “Ita,” or “Intelligo,” when our propositions could not have been particularly remarkable for perspicacity. Amongst foreigners, charity covers a multitude of sins of this kind. We cannot however apply the same remark to our own countrymen, who are often more inclined to laugh at a foreigner’s mistakes than to help him.
The fragrant tedded hay and the green vale of Thingvalla stretching before us were peculiarly refreshing to the eye, after the dreary rugged lava-wastes through which we had passed—where tracks of flat rocks were corrugated and shrivelled up like pitch, having been left so when the lava set; and where other rock-surfaces appeared ground and polished in grooves by the ice-drift; or where all was covered with a pack of lava blocks and slabs, of all sizes and lying in every conceivable direction.
After tea I walked out alone a little way north-west of the church to examine the Althing, on the upper part of which stands the Lögberg or sacred law hill, where, when the Parliament or Althing was assembled, the judges sat; and where justice was administered to the Icelanders for nearly 900 years; thus rendering Thingvalla, with its numerous associations and stirring memories, to speak historically, by far the most interesting spot in the island.