176 HERR JON STEFANSSON, PH.D., ON ICELAND : 



Iceland has another and greater claim to your interest. 

 It is, as William Morris said, the Greece of the North. It 

 produced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a literature 

 unparalleled after Rome before the golden age of England 

 and France, in character drawing, in passionate dramatic 

 power, in severe, noble simplicity, in grim humour. All the 

 characters of the Sagas live and move to-day. Every hill and 

 headland and valley in the island is full of their presence. 

 The Icelander of to-day knows them by heart. It is as if 

 every Englishman, from pauper to king, knew Shakespeare's 

 historical plays and could retell them more or less in his or 

 her own words. It has kept the national pride alive through 

 evil times. It has preserved the language almost untouched 

 by time and foreign intercourse. 



Nowhere is the contrast between man and his surroundings 

 so glaring as in Iceland. Buried in snow and darkness, 

 deprived of every comfort, living on rancid butter and dried 

 fish, drinking sour whey and milk, dressed like his servants, 

 seeking in a little boat his food, yet a cultured mind, 

 possessing an intimate knowledge, not only of the history of 

 his own country but of Greece and Rome, a poet fond of 

 throwing off satires, intellectually and morally the equal of 

 his European guest, considering himself your equal and 

 refusing to be ordered about by a rich Englishman, owner 

 of several square miles of land and hundreds of sheep, with a 

 pedigree going farther back than that of his visitor, a jack- 

 of-all-trades, a blacksmith in his smithy, boat-builder and 

 carpenter, an artist in filigree work, a carver in wood, an 

 eager reader of books. He has universal education up to the 

 degree to which it is useful for a man. There are no schools 

 in Iceland, yet every child at twelve can read, according to 

 the parish statistics. In no country in Europe are so many 

 books printed and sold, in proportion to the population. A 

 population equal to that of Hampstead, 76,000, has twelve 

 printing presses, the earliest one being established as far 

 back as 1 530. About one hundred books annually, fourteen 

 newspapers and eight periodicals are produced to satisfy the 

 literary needs of this little nation. 



Yet this literary people still live in a pastoral and Homeric 

 civilization which is a modern lesson of the healthfulness of 

 human life lived in close contact with the free, wild life of 

 nature, such as would have delighted the heart of Rousseau 

 or Thoreau. As a proof that this life is healthy I give the 

 example of a clergyman who died four years ago, 113 years 



