Sjon - From the Mouth of the Whale

SIREN FISH: sings so sweetly that sailors are overpowered by her song if they hear it; the Norwegians are accustomed to sing, chant verse and row like madmen if they hear her calls.

There is a stone called hysterolithos , which can be seen in royal collections or illustrated in printed books, that possesses the remarkable nature of being shaped like the penis and scrotum of a man with, above them, a fully formed female vagina … What the supremely good and vigilant Lord means by allowing nature to scoop up a morsel like this from His cooking pot is not hard to guess: by demonstrating how easily He can mould the likeness of a man from earthly clay He wishes to warn the frail children of men that He can smash the existing form and cast it anew … They must take heed of their conduct, cultivate good habits, love one another, fear and worship Him … And He chooses these particular bodily organs so that the populace will respect the excellent task He has set them: to go forth and multiply and people the Earth … Which can only be done by reproduction, whereby the man introduces his member into the female genitalia, leaving behind his seed so that it may mingle with her blood, a shoot like a seed in damp soil … The genitals of woman are the doorway through which the infant must pass, by the process we refer to as labour or birth pangs or birth throes, which terms are witness to the difficulty of the task … Midwives place healing herbs or stones on this doorway to ease the birth, for the suffering of the daughters of Eve is terrible enough even if we do not deny them the aids that are to be had … People also speak of a woman’s secret door … But that is a paltry name, expressive of our helplessness when faced with the conundrum of foretelling what lies within and what will emerge from that mysterious hole … Seldom does a man sit willingly before that doorway, waiting for it to open for the babe that grew from his seed … Waiting around by a woman’s groin and tearing the child from within is rightly women’s work … Yet I myself have been there … It was during our first flight from the Vulture of Ögur’s henchmen … We had no horse, Pálmi Gudmundur was just nine, Hákon four, and Sigga was carrying our third child … Winter had begun and our progress was slow … The human wolves had not yet stolen the chest containing our clothes, books, stones, salts and the other useful objects I had amassed … Sigga was in the lead, Pálmi Gudmundur followed in his mother’s footsteps, and I brought up the rear with the little boy in my arms and the chest tied on to my back … Evening fell … The wind picked up from the north … It became difficult to find one’s footing on the slippery grass of the shingle bank, though this was preferable to toiling through the heavy sand of the beach … When I had to turn my shoulder to the wind to avoid being knocked over, I called to my wife:

‘Hold on to the boy, he could be blown away …’

She paused in her tracks and sighed heavily before answering:

‘No, you can do that yourself, Jónas; I’m going to give birth to our child …’

After which she slid down a gully in the bank to the beach, found a cleft in the lava wall and vanished inside … Pálmi Gudmundur started to run after her but I told him to come back and look after his brother … I found the boys shelter from the storm, set down little Hákon on a tussock, tipped the chest off my back and opened it … While I was gathering together the things that might come in useful for the birth, I explained to Pálmi Gudmundur that their mother was about to undergo a long and terrible torment, that the illness now beginning was one of the toughest and most dangerous a woman could endure and she was not certain to survive, but that it was with the knowledge and will of Almighty God that she should suffer so dreadfully, for by this she was paying off an ancient debt incurred by Eve … I instructed him to lead his little brother in prayer; together they should pray to the good Lord to protect and bless that honest and God-fearing woman, their mother Sigrídur, and their unborn and unbaptised sibling who was still a foetus in her womb but at this moment wished to be born so that it could fear Him and do good deeds to glorify His Name … I said that their mother’s torments would be so great that they would hear her scream and wail, beg for help and plead for mercy, her lamentations would be shrill and unceasing, she would howl like a wounded beast, so the brothers must pray fervently, raising their thin, boyish voices as loud as they could … I closed the chest … Before descending the bank to see how my wife was doing, I made our sons sit on the chest, and there they perched, those two little fledglings of the Lord, Pálmi Gudmundur and Hákon, with their thin shoulders and heads bowed over their clasped hands, piping to God to have mercy, shedding tears and singing psalms to save their labouring mother … She, meanwhile, was lying propped against the wall at the back of the cave, having braced herself against the rock with her heels in the wet shingle … Fronds of seaweed fell in a tangle from every outcrop, tiny dog whelks studded the roof like stars in heaven, fragments of mussel shell lay strewn all over the floor, with the odd starfish among them; it was well sheltered from the wind … Sigrídur had pulled up her skirts; she was silent but sweating profusely … Eventually, when I had spread out the sheet underneath her and was about to lay the birthstone on her groin, she opened: the child came to the door … It was the little girl, Berglind, who leapt from her mother’s womb like a spring from a rock … Once the afterbirth had come out and the child’s umbilical cord had been cut and tied, I fetched the little lads from their seat on the chest lid and showed them their sister … They found it an extraordinary notion that such a tiny minnow could endanger the life of a full-grown woman like their mother … We waited there in the lee of the lava until the wind had dropped and mother and child had recovered their strength, by which time it was morning … The fervent and effective hour of prayer on the shingle bank had made such a deep impression on Pálmi Gudmundur that he was called to his holy vocation, the ministry … But how it touched Hákon we were never to know, because before it could become apparent we lost him and his little brother Klemens during our desperate travels in the winter of 1621 … It still pierces my heart to think how few days of our lives Sigrídur and I were allowed to share with our little boys … Yet I am grateful and happy that the glorious Heavenly Father should have taken pity on them and pressed them to His nourishing breast when their earthly father was denied all succour and everywhere turned away from the homes of his countrymen with pitiless curses and hissing … It was no mystery what lay behind those closed doors: they housed cold hearts, as tightly locked as the fist of an executioner about the handle of a whip … When Sigrídur rose from her sandy-pillowed bed, I noticed that during the birth reddish-coloured pebbles had mingled with the sand under her hips … I gathered several handfuls of them, which I put in our chest, and they turned out to be brother of haematite … Right up until the day that we were robbed of the chest, Sigga would use these healing stones to ease the birth pangs of many a woman … For just as the human foetus dwells and grows in its mother’s secret womb, unknowable and as likely to take on the form of a beautiful girl as the most misshapen wretch, so nature breeds in its lap both unimaginable horrors and precious gems … And the anterooms of their birth chambers are the clefts and fissures in the body of the Earth, caves like the one in which my little Berglind was born … I lean back in bed, stretching my arms and cracking my joints … The mouse is still huddled cosily by the fire; it is quite extraordinary how she puts up with my ramblings … The vetch porridge has hardened in the bowl; I scrape out the leftovers and scatter them on the floor … In a place of entertainment like this it is the storyteller who must pay his audience rather than the other way round … Mousey nibbles at the food, pricking up her ears at my voice …