Read "Independent People" by Halldor Laxness online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
BY the time that Term Day comes round, Iceland's splendidly patriotic grass has begun sprouting for the inhabitants with a welcome rapidity; one could almost take a scythe to the growth in the manured fields. The sheep have begun to lift their heavy heads again and hide their ribs in flesh, and the eyeless face of the carcase down in the marsh is buried in grass. Yes, life is sweet at such a time, and now, surely, is the time to marry, for all the nests of the mice in the old ruins have been pulled out and a new croft has been built. It is Bjartur of Summerhouses' croft. Stones have been carried, turf cut, walls built up, framework nailed, rafters hoisted, boards nailed for a clincher roof, range built in, chimney set in place-and there stands the croft-house as if part of nature itself.
Up-country, in pretty much the same sort of dwelling, the marriage was solemnized at Nithurkot, the home of the bride's parents, and it was from the same sort of farmhouses that most of the guests came: crofts standing at the foot of the mountains or sheltering on the southern slope of a ridge, each with a little brook running through the home-field, marshy land beyond, and a river flowing smoothly through the marsh. When one journeys from one homestead to the next, nothing seems more likely than that they all bear the same name and that the same man and the same woman work them all; yet that is not so. Old Thorthur of Nithurkot, for instance, had cherished throughout the years the dream of building himself a mill across his farm brook. There was some strength in its flow, and if he could build a mill and grind Scotch barley for folk he would make quite a decent little profit out of the enterprise. But no sooner had he got the building finished than they stopped importing unground corn; and in any case folk preferred their corn ready-milled. His children played about the mill-cot in the spring days of childhood with no evening; the sky was blue in those days; they never forgot it as long as they lived.