Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Blaðsíða 78

68 NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS
and evidences of the visits of Christian priests were found by
the early pagan settlers. Next comes, in the narrow Faskruds-
fjorSur, a glimpse of Skrudurin (the “jewel” , a green and
heather-grown speck, shooting upwards as a lofty rock, loved of
birds and of the sun, and besung by the poets - a pleasing
contrast to the dark cliffs so near it. Some hours later, the
long north-eastern cape is rounded, and the boat skirts miles
of huge rocks, gay with the flutter of countless birds and flecked
with white masses of guano. In the distance comes into view
Grimsey, Iceland’s only really and truly Arctic possession in
a strictly geographical sense, for its sorely isolated people look
out upon the boundless boreal seas beyond the Arctic circle.
They form the northernmost indigenous little community of
our Germanic race — living by fishing in the most frigid of
waters, and by capturing, at the peril of their lives, the storm-
birds which build their nests on the almost inaccessable cliffs
bounding the Eastern shores of their tiny home. Dwelling on
a dozen sterile farms, they maintain, with difficulty, three or
four score of sheep, and half a dozen cattle and ponies, whose
existence, like that of their owners, is one of perennial hunger.
Yet they have a little church and an intelligent pastor, and a
much-read island-library of a few hundred volumes. The winter
days are long and dark and icy and windy, and the winter
seas between them and the mainland, wave-tossed and storm-
swept, are sometimes impassable for week after week, so that
if one in the outer world write an autumn letter to a Grfmseyan
he must await with patience a vernal or summer reply. Of
late years a new period has dawned in the island’s history,
for one small Icelandic coast steamer now calls twice a year
(in July and August) to bring the islanders their slender supply
of coal. The next island which will greet the voyager is a
famous one, Drangey in the Skagafjordur, where Grettir, the
hero of the Grettissaga, with the aid of its lofty and precipitous
cliffs, long held his fierce enemies at bay, and yielded at last