Milli mála - 05.07.2016, Síða 27

SEASONAL TALES, FAR-FLUNG SETTINGS

Milli mála 7/2015

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close to nature and far from the great cities of modern Eu-
rope are somehow more virtuous and happier than their
urban counterparts:

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood
upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude
stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of
giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed – or would
have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing
grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the
west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared
upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning
lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest
night.
“What place is this?” asked Scrooge.
“A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the
earth,” returned the Spirit. “But they know me. See.”
A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they ad-
vanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone,
they found a cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire.
An old, old man and woman, with their children and their chil-
dren’s children, and another generation beyond that, all decked
out gaily in their holiday attire. The old man, in a voice that sel-
dom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste,
was singing them a Christmas song – it had been a very old song
when he was a boy – and from time to time they all joined in the
chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got
quite blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour
sank again.5
The notion that those who live and work amidst spectacular
scenery are more virtuous than mere urbanites occurs again
with the two lighthouse-keepers who “wished each other
Merry Christmas in their can of grog”6 in a solitary light-
house set near “a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league
or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed,
the wild year through.”7

5 Charles Dickens, “Stave 3,” A Christmas Carol (1843), p. 101–102.
6 Ibid., 104.
7 Ibid., 103.