Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1936, Page 33

Our destiny rests in Thy hand.
Iceland’s thousand years!
The hoar-frost of morning which tinted those years.
Thy sun rising high, shall command!
Our country’s God! Our country’s God!
Our life is a feeble and quivering reed;
We perish, deprived of Thy spirit and light
To redeem and uphold in our need.
Inspire us at morn with Thy courage and love,
And lead through the days of our strife!
At evening send peace from Thy heaven above,
And safeguard our nation through life.
Iceland’s thousand years!
O prosper our people, diminish our tears
And guide, in Thy wisdom, through life.
Equally beautiful and profound is the New Year’s Hymn,
from which I include three verses in the English adaptation by
Professor Kemp Malone:20
Fear not, though here he cold today
And worldly joys a feast fordone,
And all thy strength as driven spray,
For God is lord of earth and sun.
He hears the tempest’s minstrelsy,
He hears the sleeping babe draw breath,
He hears the very heart of thee
And knows each throb from birth to death.
Ay, God is lord in every age:
He speaks, his creatures but give ear.
His words excite, his words assuage
The mighty deep, the secret tear.
Assuredly, Jochumsson has written some of the most
beautiful hymns in the Icelandic language—hymns where deep
and abiding faith, and rare spiritual insight are transmuted
into the purest gold of lyric poetry.
The richness and many-sidedness of Jochumsson’s literary
genius, his unusual mental stature, is further seen in the fact
that this great master of the grand style, the deepest and the
highest notes of the poet’s lyre, was equally capable of the
lighter touch, the humorous and even the hilarious.21
Surveying Jochumsson’s production as a whole, it is readily
20 The American-Scandinavian Review, January, 1931, p. 23.
21 This side of his genius and poetry is discussed extensively, with
appropriate illustrations, in Steingrimur Matthiasson’s article: “t eftirleit
brgfa og kva:8a foSur mins," EimreiOin, 1931, pp. 389-399.
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