Independent People by Halldor Laxness

Once I loved a maiden shining Warm her eyes, so brightly gleamingIn her cheeks the red blood beckonedIn the earth they laid my dearest WITH this maid-song from the Jomsviking Rhymes, Asta Sollilja began her education. When she had spelled her way through one stanza, Bjartur leaned back in his chair with half-closed eyes and chanted. Every verse that she read she learned by heart, the chant as well, humming them away to herself whenever she was alone. All the love-songs in this group of ballads were addressed to the same girl; she was called Rosa. Asta Sollilja never inquired who the girl commended so highly by these songs might be, but she saw her together with her father, and loved her with him in the primitive, rugged language of the Rhymes, reminiscent of nothing so much as the pious but despairing cuts in the carving of her grandmother's spindle-holder. Her notions about how poetry is composed and circulated were vague: she could not distinguish between the voice of her father chanting and the love that lived in the heart of a poet who died in a distant century, but looked at her reflection in the water-bucket in a childish desire to make herself resemble the maiden shining, who in the earth was laid low.

But once they left the maid-songs for the ballads themselves the going became much heavier. Here Bjartur's explanations did little to dispel the obscurity and knit the few intelligible passages together; the inexperienced reader wandered lost and despairing in an unlit fog of unpronounceable words and difficult kennings that seemed to lack any sort of connection-the Jomsviking heroes, their voyages and battles, were far beyond her meagre imagination. And when the story turned to the lives of the Jomsvikings, her father read it to himself only and laughed, my God, what wenching, then closed the book and said it did young people harm to hear about such things, it's smut. Finally the wenching of the Jomsvikings developed to such a pitch that they had to give the book up altogether. Her father produced the Bernotus Rhymes, they are much nicer for youngsters.