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Updated: October 1, 2025
The work of the women consists in the preparation of the fish for drying, smoking, or salting; in tending the cattle, in knitting, sometimes in gathering moss. In winter both men and women knit and weave. As regards the hospitality of the Icelanders, I do not think one can give them so very much credit for it.
My landlord at Reikjavik, the master-baker Bernhoft, told me that only one crime had been committed in Iceland during the thirteen years that he had resided there. This was the murder of an illegitimate child immediately after its birth. The most frequently occurring crime is cow-stealing. I was much surprised to find that nearly all the Icelanders can read and write.
These discoveries, as we now believe, took place in the far-away eleventh century; but they made no impression on Europeans of that time, because Iceland and Scandinavia were not in touch with other European countries. Civilization then had the Mediterranean for its center, and no one in Southern Europe ever heard of what the Icelanders or the Norsemen were doing.
What a work had Christianity to perform upon such a people as the Icelanders, for instance, of the tenth century! to substitute in rude, savage minds the idea of its benign and gentle Founder for that of the Thor and Woden of Norse mythology; the forgiveness, charity, and humility of the Gospel for the revenge, hatred, and pride inculcated by the Eddas.
In all Iceland welcome and farewell is expressed by a loud kiss, a practice not very delightful for a non-Icelander, when one considers their ugly, dirty faces, the snuffy noses of the old people, and the filthy little children. But the Icelanders do not mind this. They all kissed the priest, and the priest kissed them; and then they kissed each other, till the kissing seemed to have no end.
This contest of the poets was an old custom with them. And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it down from father to son. We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power which literature gives them to live outside it.
I must confess that I found the character of the Icelanders in every respect below the estimate I had previously formed of it, and still further below the standard given in books. In spite of their scanty food, the Icelandic horses have a marvellous power of endurance; they can often travel from thirty-five to forty miles per diem for several consecutive days.
Though the Icelanders owned no Over-Lord, and, indeed, left their native Scandinavia to escape the sway of Harold Fairhair, yet each wealthy and powerful chief lived in the manner of a Homeric "king." His lands and thralls, horses and cattle, occupied his attention when he did not chance to be on Viking adventure "bearing bane to alien men."
As for Scandinavian, not every one in England is aware that the Icelanders are, and have been for a thousand years, the most literary people in the world; that in one important branch of literature, that of story-telling, they are absolutely without a rival, except in the Old Testament.
It is seen in the Indians of the Isthmus of Darien, the Hottentots, and the Icelanders. Why the cells of the rete mucosum should have the function in some races of manufacturing or attracting pigment in excess of those of other races, is in itself a mystery.
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