As regards uncleanliness in house and body, it may be said that the Icelander holds a middle rank between the Scotchman and the Greenlander, and he contrasts badly with the Norwegian of modern days. Personal purity, the one physical virtue of old age, is, as a rule, sadly neglected. Concerning this unpleasant topic, the author is compelled to offer a few observations. The old islander could rival the seal: his descendant, like the man of Joe Miller, will not trust himself in water before he can swim. The traveller never sees man or woman in sea, river, or brook, though even the lower animals bathe in hot weather. It is a race abominantes aquam frigidam, and, even as pagans, their chief objection to Christianity was the necessity of baptism: they compounded for immersion in the Laug or hot spring,[171] and the latter is still, though very seldom, used. Washing is confined to the face and hands; and the tooth-brush is unknown like the nail-brush: the basins, where they exist, are about the size of punch-bowls. Purification by water, after Moslem fashion, is undreamed of. Children are allowed to contract hideous habits, which they preserve as adults; for instance, picking teeth, and not only teeth, with dinner-forks. Old travellers, who perhaps had not observed the cellarman in the wine vaults (London Docks) bore a hole and blow through it to start the liquor, record a peculiarly unpleasant contrivance for decanting the milk-pan into narrow-necked vessels; the same, in fact, adopted by the Mexican when bottling his “Maguey;” and “Blefkenius” alludes to a practice still popular amongst the Somal: it is only fair to own that the author never saw them. The rooms, and especially the sick rooms, are exceedingly stifling and impure. Those who venture upon an Icelandic bed may perhaps find clean sheets, but they had better not look under them. The houses, except in the towns, or the few belonging to foreign merchants, have no offices, and all that have, leave them in a horrible condition: there is no drainage, and the backyard is a mass of offal. Such is the effect of climate, which makes dirt the “poor man’s jacket” in the north; which places cleanliness next to godliness in the sub-tropical regions, and which renders personal uncleanliness sinful and abominable to the quasi-equatorial Hindú. Nor must we forget that the old English proverb “Washing takes the marrow out of a man,” still has significance amongst our peasantry.
§3. Character.
Appreciations of national character too often depend upon the casual circumstances which encounter and environ the traveller; and writers upon Iceland differ so greatly upon the matter, that perhaps the safest plan will be to quote the two extremes.
The unfriendly find the islanders serious to a fault; silent, gloomy, and atrabilious; ungenial and morose; stubborn and eternally suspicious; litigious and mordant; utterly deficient in adventure, doing nothing but what necessity compels; little given to hospitality; greedy of gain, and unscrupulous in the quocumque modo rem. “Gaiety,” says one, “seems banished from their hearts, and we should suppose that all are under the influence of that austere nature in the midst of which they were born.”
Henderson (i. 34), who represents the bright side of the picture, enlarges upon their calm and dignified, their orderly and law-abiding character; he denies their being of sullen and melancholy disposition; he was surprised at the degree of cheerfulness and vivacity prevailing among them, and that, too, not unfrequently under circumstances of considerable external depression. They are so honest that the doors are not locked at night in their largest town; strangely frank and unsophisticated; ardent patriots and lovers of constitutional liberty; fond of literature, pious, and contented; endowed with remarkable strength of intellect and acuteness; brimful of hospitality, and not given to any crimes, or indeed vices, except drunkenness.
And, upon the principle of allowing the Icelander to describe himself, we may quote as an exemplar of character the following model epitaph: “To the precious memory of A., S.’s son, who married the maiden C., D.’s daughter. He was calm in mind; firm in council; watchful, active, his friends’ friend; hospitable, bountiful, upright towards all, and the affectionate father of his house and children.”
The truth is, that although isolation has, as might be expected, preserved a marked racial character, the islandry are much like other Northmen. During the pagan times, and indeed until the sixteenth century, we read “their chief characteristics were treachery, thirst for blood, unbounded licentiousness, and inveterate detestation of order and rule;” but we shall hardly recognise the picture now. They are truthful, and they appear pre-eminently so to a traveller from the south of Europe, or from the Levant. They have a sense of responsibility, and you may believe their oaths: at the same time, they look upon all men as liars, and they are as desconfiados (distrustful) as Paulistas or Laplanders—a mental condition apparently connected with a certain phase of civilisation. Compared with the sharp-witted Southron, they are dull and heavy, stolid and hard of comprehension as our labouring classes, without the causes which affect the latter. They cleave like Hindús to the father-to-son principle, and they have little at home that tempts either to invention, to innovation, or to adventure. They are a “polypragmatic peasantry;” the love of lawsuits still distinguishes the Norman in France after ages of separation from the parent stock. Even in private debate they obstinately adhere to the letter, and shun the spirit: an Icelander worsted in argument takes up some verbal distinction or secondary point, and treats it as if it were of primary importance. An exaggeration of this peculiarity breeds the Querelle d’Allemand.
Another peculiarity of the islandry is a bitterly satirical turn of mind, a quality noted of old. We rarely meet with a “Thorkel Foulmouth,” but we see many a Skarphèdinn who delights and who takes pride in dealing those wounds of the tongue which according to the Arabs never heal. An ancient writer gives a fair measure of what could be done by Níðvísur[172] (lampoons), which never spared even the kings. They threatened Harold the Dane to write as many lampoons upon him as there were noses[173] in Iceland (Ólaf Tryggvason’s Saga, xxxvii.), and escaped by magic from an invasion. Nor did they spare even the gods; for instance, Hjalti sings (Burnt Nial’s Saga):
“I will not serve an idle log,
For one, I care not which;
But either Odin is a dog
Or Freya is a——.”
The term “Tað-skegglingar,” Dung-beardlings, applied by a woman to certain youths whom she hated, caused a small civil war. When Dr Wormius was Rector Magnificus of the Copenhagen University, an Icelandic student complained of a libellous fellow-countryman. The poet, when summoned, confessed the authorship; contended that it contained no cause of offence, and, with characteristic plausibility and cunning, talked over the simple Vice-Chancellor. Thereupon the plaintiff in tears told the Rector that his fair fame was for ever lost, explaining at the same time the “fables, figures, and other malicious designs under which the malignity of the satire was couched;” and even the “spells and sorceries” which threatened his life. Thereupon Dr Wormius took high ground, and by citing certain severe laws against witchcraft, persuaded the poet to tear up his satire and never to write or to speak of it again. “The student was ravished with joy,” because he had made his peace with a pest who could exceed in power of annoyance Aristophanes, Horace, and Juvenal.