“Round the isle where loud Lofoden
Whirls to death the roaring whale,” etc.
Campbell could not have seen the Maelström, or he would not have written so ridiculously about it. I doubt, too, if he was ever frightened by the “roar” of a whale. A minnow or a tadpole could swim through the Maelström without realizing that he was in it, and as for a whale being “whirled to death”—well, perhaps a poet has a right to say such things. The good Bishop Pontoppidan, in the same work in which he dilates upon the horrors of the Maelström, tells of a sea serpent or kraken: “Its back or upper part,” he says, “which seems to be in appearance about an English mile and a half in circumference (some say more, but I choose the least for greater certainty) looks at first like a number of small islands surrounded with something that floats and fluctuates like seaweed.”
You may imagine, Judicia, how I was comforted by a certain guide book’s reassurance that “there is no doubt that this dreaded monster is a purely optical illusion.” So there isn’t any sea serpent with a back an English mile and a half in circumference, and there isn’t any yawning chasm.
Regardless of whirlpools and sea serpents, the approach to the Lofotens gave one of the most interesting views I have seen anywhere. It was high noon when we left Bodö, and, as it did not get dark until nearly three o’clock, we had a good view. Dear old Baedeker, for whom I am coming to feel a genuine affection, states that these islands form a chain which has “not inaptly been likened to a backbone, tapering away to the smaller vertebræ of the tail at the south end.” Whoever said that originally had a good command over similes, for it does have very much that form. The jagged outline of the mountains as we sailed over the “darkling” expanse of water was something for poets to write about.
One very prosy author describes the scene as “picturesque.” What a fine, expressive, original word it is, and incidentally how faithful and obliging! It will attach itself to a Neapolitan beggar, or a Damascus rag fair or a Nile dahabiyeh, or anything else in the wide world, and I do think the Lofotens might have a word of their own. Without any directly applied adjective, Campbell makes you see the Lofotens and feel their spell by these two lines:
“Round the shores where runic Odin
Howls his war-song to the gale.”
After these lines, can’t you see the wind swirling around the sheer, rocky mountains?
It began to get dark as we approached the islands, and we had to feel our way through a big fishing fleet, which was just beginning operations. This fishing fleet was only a small section of the entire squadron. An average annual catch mounts up to nearly thirty million cod, and the record is thirty-seven million. Thirty million cod livers are taken out and boiled into cod-liver oil. Thirty million cod heads are burned and pulverized and made into fertilizer, and thirty million cod carcasses are hung up to dry, eventually to be sent all over the world.