Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1913-01-13
icELAND'S PEOPLE.
Their Strange Dignified Abstraction
and Their Literary Energy.

Beneath me lies the public square of
Reyckjavick, where grouped close to
the statue of Thorwaldsen. the band OF
the Grosser Kurfurst is playing to the
crowd. 1t is half-past IL at night, but
almost full daylight.
The balcony of the Parliament house
across the square is crowded with leg
islatOrs also listening to the band of
the greet German liner, which put in
yesterday and will be gone tomorrow:
but il is the crowd in the square that
attracts me. for here you may see the
world of Iceland and his wife. and it
is the wife that faseinates me most.
You cannot tell an Icelander's ma
tionality at sight. He might be Ger
man or a Dane or Il Swede; btt the
Icelandic woman is i thing apart. She
is different from any woman | have
hitherto met. She rarely laughs and
the responsive smile of the southern
woman is absent: a first one almost
rcsents this absence of temperature,
especially when nearly all my shop
ping transactions must be conducted in
pantomime for the native rarely has
q word of English, and all of the ma
tive | know are the words Vow" and
"Og"
But after While resentment fades
before the fact that this chilliness of
face and manner is neither the off
spring of Indifference nor disdain, but
Of something else. That, in fact, ii is
not ehilliness at all, but-something
else. Something for which | can find
no name, unless ii be dignified abstrac-
ton. Some great, universal. mournful
thought seems ever present to these
women. Something sad yet uplifting
1t is as though the deatllsof national
hero had occurred yesterday and that
the fact were known only to the wo-
men.
see in the square before me many
poets: nearly every Icelander writes
poetry and many Icelanders are poets.
me literary energy of Iceland is vol
canie, and I know that in the crowd
down below there are 20 editors. for
every enc IN Reyckjavisk is here. and
there are 20 newspap crs printed every
Week. The most humble person you
meet may be a literary man, and the
best book about Iceland have yet read
was written by a local guide.
THIS balcony is SO high that | can see
beyond the square and the crowd and
the Parliament house to the lake at the
back of the town, round which the bet
ter residential houses are grouped.
Nearly every house in Keyckiayick is
built OF corrugated iron or wood. That
does not sound promising. yet the eff
feet is both solid and gay, so we'll and
sqiarely built arc the houses and SO
brightly painted. Indeed, the effect is
wonderful considering that all the
building materials must be imported,
for Iceland produces neither wood nor
corrugated iron. Iceland produces
nothing, in fact but sheep and dairy
produce. fish, ponies and poets not to
speak of a weird effect upon the inn
aginstion which meets one first far out
at sea in the form OF the lcelandic fog,
which becomes intensified amid the
basaI:tic crags and chanting gulls of
the Westmann islands, and reaches its
| full strength when lava dome and
| lonely lake greet the eye upon the hills
above Thingyeller.
Far in the interior. amid valleys of
utter desola ton. surmounted by basalt
castles and bastions that seem built
by devils, the effect of the scenery up
ing: at times the atmosphere lends q
hand to the legerdemain and the far
off hills move and undulate like horse
men heavily cloaked and riding fast.
and the Quorn seems in full cry along
| the basaltc ridges. Yet there is not
a sound except the cry of raven,
nor a sign of life. The smoke rising
| from the boiling spring hints of things
going on below of which the scenery is
but the mask, and the far-off hills
move and undulate restlessness is suf-
ficient in itself to fill land with Leg
ends. as You will admit If you have
ever heard the deep gong strokes that
( herald the roaring spout of the great
geyser.
Can it be that we see the reflection
| of these immensities of desolation and
power in the faces of the women whose
foremothers have lived in this land.
| fer a thousand years and more. whose
forefathers have known earthquakes
and floods. Is eruptions of Hecla, and,
worse even than these, the tyranny of
| the priests and the tyranny of the
Danes?
| The band has ceased playing and the
crowd is dispensing. I can see, leav-
| ing the square, a courtly old gentle
man who came up to me this morning
| in the street to inquire as to the con-
dition OF Europe and the relationship
of England and Germany. Knight have
stepped out of post -chaise in the pre-
Victorian era in some foreign capital
nd tltct N