Read Iceland's Bell for Free Online Page B

began their search a blush appeared on her shriveled cheeks and her pupils widened, and the longer they searched the more startled she became as another nerve was touched with each new item they uncovered, until finally she started to tremble. In the end she lifted her skirt up to her eyes and sobbed quietly. The bishop of Skálholt had been standing nearby, watching the assessor’s methods with a skeptical eye, and when he saw the old woman begin to cry he stroked her soft, wet cheeks with Christlike mercy and tried to assure her that they would not take away anything that was of value to her.
    After a long and thorough search through the old hay the noble visitor dragged out some wadded and hole-riddled parchment scraps that were so shriveled, shrunken, and hardened by age that it was impossible to smooth them out.
    While he was searching through the rubbish, the quiet nobleman’s eyes had reflected a modest and apologetic amusement, but this suddenly gave way to an impersonal, dutiful earnestness as he held his find up to the soft light coming through the window screen. He blew on the parchment and scrutinized it, then took a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it.
    “Membranum,”* he said finally, glancing momentarily at his friend the bishop, and they both examined it: several sheets of calfskin gathered and threaded at the spine, the thread having long since torn or gone rotten. The surface of the parchment was black and grimy, but one could easily discern a text there, written in a Gothic script. They became eager and reverential at once, handling these shriveled rags as carefully as if they were holding a skinless embryo, and muttering Latin words such as “pretiosissima,” “thesaurus,” and “cimelium.”*
    “The script can be dated to circa 1300,” said Arnas Arnæus. “It would be my guess, from the evidence, that this is a page from the Skálda* itself.”
    Then he turned to the old woman, said that here were six pages from an ancient manuscript, and asked how many pages she might have had originally.
    The old woman stopped crying when she saw that they didn’t want to take anything more valuable from the bottom of her bed, and answered that she wouldn’t have ever had more than one other page. She could dream back to having once, a long time ago, softened up this tangled mess of skin and torn a page from it to use as a patch for her dear Jón’s breeches, but the piece had turned out to be completely useless because it wouldn’t hold a thread. When the visitor asked what had become of this particular page, the woman answered that she’d never been in the habit of throwing away anything that might be useful, least of all scraps of skin—she’d had enough trouble throughout her entire life trying to scrape together enough material to make shoes for all the feet in her house. It was a poor patch of parchment that wasn’t useful for something during a hard year, when so many were forced to eat their shoes—even if it were nothing but a shoestring, it could still be stuck into the children’s mouths for them to cut their teeth on. Her lords shouldn’t consider it providential that she’d gotten nothing out of this scrap.
    They both looked at the old woman as she stood there, drying her tears and sniffing. Then Arnas Arnæus said quietly to the bishop:
    “I have been searching for seven years now, and have inquired of folk throughout the entire country whether they knew of a place where a fragment, even minutissima particula,* of the fourteen pages that I am missing from the
Skálda
might be found. The most beautiful poems in the northern hemisphere have been collected in this one single manuscript. Here we have six pages, crumpled up and nearly illegible, of course, and yet, sine exemplo.”*
    The bishop congratulated his friend with a handshake.
    Arnas Arnæus raised his voice and turned back to the old woman. “I will take these misfortunate shreds with me,” he said.