57. CHURCH AT THINGVALLA.
“The interior of this strange abode is even more complicated than one would be led to expect from the exterior. Passing through a dilapidated doorway in one of the smaller cabins, which you would hardly suppose to be the main entrance, you find yourself in a long dark passage-way, built of rough stone, and roofed with wooden rafters and brushwood covered with sod. The sides are ornamented with pegs stuck in the crevices between the stones, upon which hang saddles, bridles, horse-shoes, bunches of herbs, dried fish, and various articles of cast-off clothing, including old shoes and sheepskins. Wide or narrow, straight or crooked, to suit the sinuosities of the different cabins into which it forms the entrance, it seems to have been originally located upon the track of a blind boa-constrictor. The best room, or rather house—for every room is a house—is set apart for the accommodation of travellers. Another cabin is occupied by some members of the pastor’s family, who bundle about like a lot of rabbits. The kitchen is also the dog-kennel, and occasionally the sheep-house. A pile of stones in one corner of it, upon which a few twigs or scraps of sheep-manure serve to make the fire, constitute the cooking apartment. The floor consists of the original lava-bed, and artificial puddles composed of slops and offal of diverse unctuous kinds. Smoke fills all the cavities in the air not already occupied by foul odors, and the beams, and posts, and rickety old bits of furniture are dyed to the core with the dense and variegated atmosphere around them. This is a fair specimen of the whole establishment, with the exception of the travellers’ room. The beds in these cabins are the chief articles of luxury.”
The poverty of the clergy corresponds with the meanness of their churches. The best living in the island is that of Breide’-Bolstadr, where the nominal stipend amounts to 180 specie dollars, or about £40 a year; and Mr. Holland states that the average livings do not amount to more than £10 for each parish in the island. The clergymen must therefore depend almost entirely for subsistence on their glebe land, and a small pittance to which they are entitled for the few baptisms, marriages, and funerals that occur among their parishioners. The bishop himself has only 2000 rix-dollars, or £200, a year, a miserable pittance to make a decent appearance, and to exercise hospitality to the clergy who visit Reykjavik from distant parts.
58. THE PASTOR’S HOUSE, THINGVALLA.
It can not be wondered at that pastors thus miserably paid are generally obliged to perform the hardest work of day laborers to preserve their families from starving, and that their external appearance corresponds less with the dignity of their office than with their penury. Besides hay-making and tending the cattle, they may be frequently seen leading a train of pack-horses from a fishing-station to their distant hut. They are all blacksmiths also from necessity, and the best shoers of horses on the island. The feet of an Iceland horse would be cut to pieces over the sharp rock and lava, if not well shod. The great resort of the peasantry is the church; and should any of the numerous horses have lost a shoe, or be likely to do so, the priest puts on his apron, lights his little charcoal fire in his smithy (one of which is always attached to every parsonage), and sets the animal on his legs again. The task of getting the necessary charcoal is not the least of his labors, for whatever the distance may be to the nearest thicket of dwarf-birch, he must go thither to burn the wood, and to bring it home when charred across his horse’s back. His hut is scarcely better than that of the meanest fisherman; a bed, a rickety table, a few chairs, and a chest or two, are all his furniture. This is, as long as he lives, the condition of the Icelandic clergyman, and learning, virtue, and even genius are but too frequently buried under this squalid poverty.
But few of my readers have probably ever heard of the poet Jon Thorlakson, but who can withhold the tribute of his admiration from the poor priest of Backa, who with a fixed income of less than £6 a year, and condemned to all the drudgery which I have described, finished at seventy years of age a translation of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” having previously translated Pope’s “Essay on Man.”
59. THE PASTOR OF THINGVALLA.
Three of the first books only of the “Paradise Lost” were printed by the Icelandic Literary Society, when it was dissolved in 1796, and to print the rest at his own expense was of course impossible. In a few Icelandic verses, Thorlakson touchingly alludes to his penury:—“Ever since I came into this world I have been wedded to Poverty, who has now hugged me to her bosom these seventy winters, all but two; and whether we shall ever be separated here below is only known to Him who joined us together.”