Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Blaðsíða 213
conducts; it is the digit which enables the index to leave its work
of pointing, and take to holding a pen. The thumb is the mark of the
tractable, the hands working with texts or other substances – for
instance those of the bread-maker, kneading the dough, the work of
the lady, the hláfdíge, the loaf-kneader, with strong thumbs.
Charles Williams favours the thumb: he uses it as a mark of
humanity, and by extension of civilization. His arthurian knight,
Bors, addresses his wife Elaine, addresses her thumbs as much as
herself, the marks of her humanity, her power to knead bread to
feed the household:
On the forms of ancient saints, my heroes, your thumbs,
as on a winch the power of man is wound
to the last inch
– a power which has superseded the wild marshes and forests
where the unthumbed shapes of apes swung and hung
and built a promise of comfort and civilisation:
Oh lady, your hand held the bread
and Christ the City spread in the extensor muscles of your
thumbs.15
The pollex, the thumb, is the turned finger that complements and
activates the index, bending the index down from its straight point-
ing into the working mode. The pollex grounds the index in reali-
ty, the small domain in which we can manipulate the third dimen-
sion, the kitchen, the workbench and the yard. and most certainly
also the text, the pen and paper on the kitchen table beside the
bread. If the bent pointing finger is the textual index, the thumb its
mate is the extratextual pollex, steering the pen’s movement into
and out of the text.
PÉTur KnúTSSOn
213
15 Charles Williams, “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins”, Taliessin through Logres, London:
Oxford university Press, 1938, pp. 42–45.
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