Sjon - From the Mouth of the Whale

CONCH SHELLS: several species of conch are found in Iceland. Wise men make use of our edible conches by burning them until they glow, then quenching them in ox urine and giving the fish to the patient to consume in food or drink without his or her knowledge; it protects the maid against man’s lechery and the lascivious against intemperate fornication. Also, those afflicted with seasickness may go secretly to the beach and swallow the raw fish out of the shell three times during the waxing and then the waning moon, with a sip of seawater each time. If people eat a lot of them, they will become too drunk to stand; a condition that we call ‘conch totters’, which can be slept off. The conch mostly crawls up out of the deeps from the middle of Pisces onwards.

A rock cavity can also be called a cave … Shallow caves are often known as grottos, from the Latin word grotto , which also means ‘small cave’, and grotto is the stem of the word used in southern countries to describe a particular kind of decorative picture or grotesque … I saw many such pictures in Ole Worm’s library … They appeared in the frontispiece of large tomes of learning, in the margins, in chapter openings or between sections … For the modern master printers think like the scribes of our old Icelandic manuscripts, who wove sphinxes and chimaeras into their illuminated capitals and the decorated borders of their books … A centaur here, an old woman with bird’s feet there, a three-headed dog … Bibliophiles as they were, the scribes understood better than anyone that little curios like these provide longed-for staging posts for the readers’ eyes on their monotonous descent down the ladder of the pages, word by word, from left to right, along one line and down to the next … And offer the mind respite from the matter … If one watches a river of lava, or clouds of steam or great torrents, or a field rippling in the wind, the eye and mind will not rest until they have tracked down familiar images in the flow … Even though these figures are never still, never clearly defined, never whole, never the same, one’s mind can grasp them merely by blinking … Then time ceases to flow like a river and becomes instead a series of moments which may follow fast upon one another’s heels yet each has its own unique form … The grotesques are just like those fleeting images that I myself have often perceived in smoke, lichen or clouds … It is as if the artist has transferred the image from the surface of his eye to the page without stopping to wonder whether it is believable or scientifically accurate … Pictures the draughtsman saw with his eyes and thought up in his imagination have become in an instant part of our visible world … Oh, those pictures! … Oh, those thousands of freaks and interwoven absurdities that invigorated me when I was stumbling my way through the thick volumes in the Museum Wormianum … One never knew where one creature began or ended … A goat’s hind legs might, on closer inspection, turn out to be the beginning of a flower stalk … But the stalk sprouted not petals but stork feathers, on top of which sat a cluster of butterfly wings … Nor was it certain whether the goat’s body was made of flesh, mineral or vegetable … And even if one was fairly sure that the lower half of its body was made of marble, it was just as certain that blood flowed through its stony veins … Was the blood red and hot or green and cold? Everything grows from something else, as if nature were forever having second thoughts, pausing, pursuing a new idea or changing its mind halfway: a blue bird’s wing extends from a small boy’s temple, but by the time one reaches the tip of the wing the feathers have changed into bright green cabbage leaves with foam bubbling over the edges … A cat sits not on hindlegs but on a tail, which swells from the hip and curls up under its breast in countless joints like a lobster tail, while the cat’s nose is formed from a bunch of berries and about its neck is a collar studded with precious gems … And one asks oneself: if the pet is this odd, what on earth can the owner be like? A crown of flies’ wings rests on the head of a woman with nine udders dangling from her chest and stomach; she has no arms and her legs are like two scaly serpent bodies twined together … The old Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson would not have approved … For as he says in his Skálda , or Handbook of Poetry:

‘It is a metaphor to call the sword a serpent and name it rightly, so that the sheath is its path and the baldric and fittings its skin. That is to stay true to the nature of the serpent, for it slides out of its skin and also to water. Here the metaphor is so contrived that the serpent goes in search of the river of blood when it slides down the path of thought, that is, into the breasts of men. A metaphor is thought to be well conceived if the notion that has been adopted is maintained throughout the verse. But if a sword is called a serpent, and later a fish or a wand, or changed another way, people call it monstrous and regard it as spoiling the verse.’

Balderdash, I say, let the sword turn into an adder and the adder a salmon and the salmon a birch twig and the birch twig a sword and the sword a tongue … Let it all run together so swiftly that it cannot be separated again … The twilight portents have toppled the world from its foundations … It is slipping out of joint … It has been turned upside down … The heavens are used to walk upon … While the common populace crouch on their upturned roof beams, hanging from their fingertips, or fall off weeping, the libertine armies rebel against the Creator, using sorcery to turn themselves upside down in the air, dancing their loathsome war dance on the roofs of His celestial abode … The din of the portents reverberates through the gloom … God’s houses are trampled and kicked to pieces by stamping, bounding, newly rich magnates and their trinket-greedy wives … Squealing like a sow in season, grunting like the boar when he clambers on her back, they hammer their iron-heeled shoes and lethal spurs on the cloudless, night-blue, star-studded outer walls of Heaven as if they were the beaten-earth floors of brothels strewn with sawdust, or the grey floorboards in the smoke-filled backrooms of the merchants’ halls … The laughter of the dancers mingles with the starving cries of their humblest brothers and sisters … Yes, old Snorri’s teachings are a thing of the past, even reason is at a loss when it comes to describing the libertine world … While the colony on Greenland still endured, useful wares made by the Eskimos were brought to Iceland, the most important among them being protective clothing made of sealskin and polar-bear pelts — the Eskimo women must have been skilful with their needles … Yet among them were objects that no Christian should possess, such as the pagan caricatures called tupilaks … Grandpa Hákon had an ugly little demon like that, carved from wood and decorated with small bones and a patch of human skin with the hairs still attached … He kept quiet about this possession, hiding it under the floorboards in his study … The creature had the body of a dog, flayed from its snout to the tip of its tail, protruding ribs and vertebrae like the teeth of a saw, but instead of a dog’s head it had the skull of a child, which faced over its shoulder as if its neck had been wrung and it had frozen back to front; its belly, on the other hand, was the face of an imp, grimacing with enormous teeth and eyes on stalks, while between its hind legs the beak of a whimbrel took the place of a prick and beneath its tail a seal’s head could be glimpsed, forcing its way out of its arse … The story went that this bizarre object had been carved for the purposes of witchcraft … It was said that the sorcerer had with his magic gifts seen the demon inside a piece of driftwood and whittled off its bonds, and as a reward he was permitted to send it through the air to assail his enemies … Oh, there would be no question what was happening if one met a familiar like this … Indeed, I think one would resort to defending oneself by sending it home again … The story goes that the one who originally raised it should point at the tupilak , saying angrily: ‘It was I who freed you from the wood’ … At which the demon will be disempowered, for of course it knows its own foolish form … And the sorcerer is saved for now … Though he will not be so fortunate on the Day of Judgement … But not all evil spirits are as misshapen as this, not all are as easily recognisable …