The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

We Icelanders have always felt grateful to the Pope ever since he wrote a letter of consolation to Bishop Jón Arason shortly before the emissaries of a certain King Kristian III, a German malefactor in Denmark, led this chief clergyman of ours out to his execution. We have for a long time suspected that Popes are higher than emperors. But in one respect we had always, until now, considered what he said rather far from the truth and sometimes even a little laughable, and that was when he opened his mouth about religious faith. Yet we had now arrived at the point where we believed implicitly in his infallibility over a bit of news which came into the category of faith to the extent that we had been nowhere near when it happened, just as we had been far away when the world was being redeemed. We had fallen into the paradox of believing in one of the most improbable of the many doctrines which, rightly or wrongly, have been ascribed to the Pope.

I think I can assert that during this summer after the concert in St. Peter's Cathedral, the sun of Garar Hólm's fame stood higher in Iceland than ever before. So it was little wonder that the student at Brekkukot had difficulty in believing that he himself had actually exchanged shoes with this man up in Kristín of Hríngjaraber's hayloft last year.