Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness

No one had ever had such a frightening effect on the imaginations of the people here in the village as Kristófer Torfdal, the most fanatical Bolshevik in Iceland. This peculiar person was not content with persecuting all the better people in the country in word, by publishing a horrendous daily newspaper called The People, the reading of which was prohibited in Óseyri in Axlarfjörà°ur, but also, had repeatedly assaulted the authorities in deed. He was said to be living his life in open and ceaseless blasphemy, and was believed to be receiving regular payments from either Russia or Denmark to undermine the country's independence, overthrow the government, and corrupt the faith. He surrounded himself with a group of men, if men they could be called, who were black as hell and stout as bulls; many people even believed that they didn't walk on two legs, but four, like some half-human, half-bovine hybrid. They were usually called "Bolshies" in the Evening Gazette, but Guà°mundur Jónsson, who said that he never used nicknames for people or animals, simply called them bullies. It was generally believed that Kristófer Torfdal and his minions had an arsenal of explosives and other sorts of instruments of war, which were shipped to them from Russia and Denmark along with sacks of gold sand. Just over a year before, Kristófer Torfdal had drawn the attention of the entire population to himself and his gang by fomenting a revolt against the authorities on account of a young Russian Bolshie whom he had brought to this country with the object of turning the people away from Christianity and infecting them with syphilis, but when the mayor of the capital ordered Torfdal to send that man back, Torfdal refused and gathered his forces, leading to battles in the streets and at the crossroads of the city, as in the old Ballad of Úlfar, and hospitals had to be set up to treat the wounded. The authorities had given orders that all the church bells of the city should be rung when the two opposing forces met; for this was a holy war. Finally, the municipal forces succeeded in capturing the young man and he was sent home; some said aboard a Danish warship. Kristófer Torfdal was taken into custody and sent to prison, but his Bolshies broke into the prison and freed their leader, and in the end, he was pardoned by the merciful order of the king. About all of these events, the schoolmaster here in Óseyri had composed a moving patriotic poem, which was printed in the Evening Gazette in Reykjavík. In the poem, he issued a firm challenge to the Icelandic people to follow in the footsteps of their forefathers and stand united against the dominance of the Turks or other such peoples that now sought hard to destroy the country's newly acquired sovereignty and corrupt the Icelanders' faith. The parish-council chairman, Sveinn Pálsson, could never forgive the schoolmaster for his poem, saying that it dropped the alliteration in two places, apart from the fact that it was loaded with padding- which led to the rumor that the parish-council chairman had secretly bought a subscription to The People through an intermediary in Sílisfjörà°ur, no doubt intending to have one of his own poems printed in it. Concerning Kristófer Torfdal, it was reported that following these events, he devoted himself to rearing malevolent carrion birds and other creatures obtained from Russians or Danes, in opposition to the mayor of Reykjavík.