The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

I have now said something about fish, but I have not said anything yet about the Bible. I cannot leave this subject without referring briefly to the price of the Bible in our house.

My grandfather Björn of Brekkukot was no bookman. I never knew him to read anything other than the family Book of Sermons by Bishop Jón Vídalín – unless one counts that he sometimes ran his eye over the advertisements in the Ísafold. He read aloud from Vídalín every Sunday just after noon. He usually read correctly (although he sometimes made mistakes) but never really well, and he always laid special emphasis on two things: to get the proper pulpit drone into his reading, and not to skip any of the figures which gave book, chapter and verse references to scriptural citations – sometimes several times in each sentence. But he never expanded these abbreviations when he read them; instead he would say, for instance, Mark, Rom, Cor, and Hab. Nor did he ever use ordinals among the numbers that accompanied these references, and he paid no attention to commas or other punctuation marks between the numbers. Instead of reading, for instance, "First Corinthians, thirteenth chapter, fifth verse" (written as I. Cor, 13: 5), he would read out "One Cor a hundred and thirty-five". But he never deviated from the special manner of reading that people in Iceland once used for God's Words, a monotonous and solemn chant in a high-pitched tone that dropped a fourth at the end of a sentence. This style of reading bore no trace of worldliness, although it had certain affinities with the mumblings of some of the mentally deranged. The artist is no longer born in Iceland who knows this particular chant.