Many Icelanders speak English, and they are often surprisingly well-informed, both concerning their own history and the affairs of foreign lands. Still read are the sagas in the land of their birth, and they were Englished largely by Icelandic minds. There are very good secondary schools in the towns, and a College at Reykjavik itself. Though no elementary schools exist, almost every one can read and write from the excellent teaching in the homes. Reykjavik, Akureyri and Isafjordr are fair-sized towns, the former has a population of about ten thousand souls, but the loneliness of life in many parts is evident from the fact that the rest of the nation, about fifty or sixty thousand in number, tending cattle and ponies, and fishing for whale and cod, is thinly sprinkled through some two hundred and eighty parishes.
HOT SPRINGS NEAR REYKJAVIK
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Of the rocky islands in Reykjavik Harbour by far the most interesting is Videy, the resort to-day of ptarmigan and eider duck, in past years the seat of one of the chief religious houses of Iceland, a Priory of the Benedictine order. The founder and the first Prior (1226-35) was one Thorvald, son of a Speaker of the Law, who was fifth in descent from Gizor the White. He was succeeded by Styrmir, surnamed hinn fródi or the Wise, who was one of the editors of the Landnama-bok, and died in 1245. The chapel in which he worshipped still exists, a rude early thirteenth century structure, plain oblong with gables, built roughly of volcanic stone. The sole original features are the very plainest of windows under segmental arches. It is still used for service, and has plain eighteenth century fittings with tall screen, and pulpit rising behind the altar, all painted green and blue and red. Three bells are dated 1735, 1752 and 1785. In the loft under the roof is a collection of old spinning wheels. The absence of surnames, which is still a characteristic of the unchanged Norse tradition of Iceland, appears on a gravestone of 1820, to Viefus Scheving and his wife, Aunnu Stephansdóttur.
This little chapel appears to have been almost the only stone church in mediæval Iceland; even the famous Cathedral at Skalholt, which was in every way glorious above any other building in Iceland, the finest and most precious in the island, was merely a structure of wood.
From the highest point of the island of Videy there is a really superb view over the plantless mountains and the steepleless city across a few miles of blue-black, white-crested sea. The island pastures support fifty head of cattle and slope right down to the shore, where the waves have carved arches and caverns in the yielding rocks. The farmhouse by the chapel is a long stone building, whose weathering by the storms of some two hundred winters is concealed by a coat of whitewash, while the rooms are comfortably panelled within. The outhouses seem in some cases to be on foundations that were laid by the monks, for the monastic buildings were evidently detached in the Celtic fashion; there was no attempt to reproduce the conventional plan of a monastery that is so unvaried in southern lands.
Iceland belongs geographically rather to America than to Europe, a much wider stretch of ocean divides her from Norway than from Greenland. But so close are the lands in the Far North that a present-day steamer might sail with ease from London to New York, permitting her passengers to go ashore for some part of every day.[28]
Five hundred years before Columbus crossed the Western Ocean Icelandic barks had plowed their way, first to Greenland, then to the American mainland. The latter their crews called Vinland from its vines and surnamed from its character "the Good." In the Saga of Olaf Tryggvison we read: "That same spring also King Olaf sent Leif Ericson to Greenland to bid christening there; so that same summer he went thither. He took up a ship's crew on the sea who had come to nought, and were lying on the wreck of the ship; and in that journey found he Vinland the Good, and came back in harvest-tide to Greenland." In the Vinland Voyages, commonly called the Saga of Eric the Red, the North American coast is described with great accuracy, but unfortunately still greater brevity, "The land seemed to them fair and thick wooded, and but a short space between the woods and the sea, and white sands. There were many islands and great shallows." Many Icelanders in these latter days have emigrated to the United States or Canada, and the son of one of them is V. Stefansson, who, in the service of the American Museum of Natural History, discovered the blond Eskimo of Victoria Land known as Akuliakattamiut, just possibly descended from the ancient Norse settlers in Greenland. To-day (1913), in the service of the Government of Canada, he is exploring the polar ocean to the north of that wide land.