Paradise Reclaimed (eBook)

The wonder pony In the early days of Kristian Wilhelmsson, who was the third last foreign king to wield power here in Iceland, a farmer named Steinar lived at Hl?dar in the district known as Steinahl?dar. He had been so named by his father after the rubble of stones that cascaded down off the mountain in the spring when he was born. Steinar was a married man by the time this story opens, and had two young children, a daughter and a son, he had inherited the farm of Hl?dar from his father. At this time, Icelanders were said to be the poorest people in Europe, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been, all the way back to the earliest settlers, but they believed that many long centuries ago there had been a Golden Age in Iceland, when Icelanders had not been mere farmers and fishermen as they were now, but royal-born heroes and poets who owned weapons, gold, and ships. Like other boys in Iceland, Steinar's son soon learned to be a viking and king's-man, and whittled axes and swords for himself out of pieces of wood. Hl?dar was built in the same way as the average farmhouse in Iceland had been from time immemorial--a floored living-room and entrance, and a small timber-lined spare room with a bed for visitors. A row of wooden gables faced on to the yard in the normal order of farm-buildings of that period, with an outhouse, store-shed, byre, stable, sheep-hut and finally a small workshed. Behind the buildings the haystacks reared up every autumn and dwindled down to nothing by the spring. Farms of this kind, turf-roofed and grass-grown, were to be found huddling under the mountain-slopes in a thousand places in Iceland in those days, what distinguished the farm we are now to visit for a while was the loving and artistic care with which the owner made up for what it lacked in grandeur. So scrupulous was his attention to his property, by day or night, that he would never see damage or deterioration of any kind, indoors or out, without making haste to repair it. Steinar was a master-craftsman, equally skilled with wood and metal. It had long been the custom in the district to point out the dry-stone dykes and walls of Hl?dar in Steinahl?dar as an example for aspiring young farmers to follow in life, there were no other works of art in those parts to compare with these carefully built walls of stone. The farms in Steinahl?dar stand on a plain under cliffs which had been the seaboard twenty thousand years before. Pockets of soil keep forming in crevices up in the rock-face and various plants take root in them, which undermine the fabric of the rock. In the heavy rains of spring and autumn the soil is washed away from the fissures, and pieces of rock bounce down on to the farms below. On some farms these stones would cause great damage every year to the meadows and home-field, sometimes even to the buildings themselves. Steinar of Hl?dar often had his hands full in the spring, clearing the boulders from his home-field and meadows--the more so since he was more meticulous than most. Many were the times he had to bend double and straighten up with a heavy boulder in his arms, for no other reward than the joy of seeing a destructive stone fitted with dedicated care into a wall. It is said that Steinar of Hl?dar had a white pony which was considered the finest animal in the south. This horse was the sort of phenomenon that every farm needs. It seemed beyond serious doubt that this was a supernatural beast and had been so ever since he was a foal, when he had unexpectedly appeared on the scene at the side of a rather elderly white mare which had been running with the...