The Icelandic Canadian - 01.11.2007, Side 16

58
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 61 #2
This is part of a large collection of trans-
lations from Jonas (with accompanying com-
mentaries) that can be found on the Web site
h ttp://www.library. wise, edu/etext/Jonas/ or
in the booh BARD OF ICELAND: JONAS
HALLGRIMSSON, POET AND SCIEN-
TIST (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).
- Richard N. Ringler
Hannes Hafstein stated in 1883 that
"Journey's End" was written during the final,
depressed winter of Jonas's life. It was at that
time, says Hannes, that "the memory of for-
gotten love affairs from his school days
revived, surfacing in the exquisite poem
'Journey's End1".
Nothing more concrete about the poem's
origins was forthcoming until 1925, when
Matthias Por3arson published his important
article "Journey's End''("Fer3alok";
9l3ul 69-74), in which he showed that the girl
whom Jonas recalled so poignantly in this
poem was named Pora Gunnarsdottir and she
and Jonas had fallen in love in July 1828 when
Jonas—on his way home to SteinsstaSir for
the summer after completing his fifth year of
school at BessastaSir—accompanied the pack
train of Pora's father, Reverend Gunnar
Gunnarsson, north from Reykjavik to
Eyjafjordur (where Gunnar had been given
the pastorate at Laufas).
Matthias says that the source of his infor-
mation was Pora's much younger half sister,
Kristjana Havsteen (born 1836), who had
obtained her knowledge partly from her
mother Johanna Gunnlaugsdottir Briem
(who had obtained it directly from her hus-
band, Pora's father), and partly from an
unidentified female friend of Pora's.
Pora had been born on 4 February 1812
and was some four years younger than Jonas.
In the summer of 1828, when the events in
question are supposed to have occurred, she
was sixteen, "an extremely lovely and
promising girl, adored by everyone" (5DXL).
Reverend Gunnar with his pack train and its
attendants, accompanied by Pora and Jonas,
took the usual inland route (the old
SkagfirSingar Track) from Kalmanstunga in
Upper Borgarfjor3ur, travelling northeast
across Eagle Lake Highland
(ArnarvatnsheiSi) and Big Sands
(Storisandur). It was in these highland sur-
roundings that Jonas's and Pora's love blos-
somed; it was here that he "held her on
horseback / in the hurtling stream" - proba-
bly as they rode double across the danger-
ous Blanda Fords (BlonduvoS). A few kilo-
meters farther on he combed her hair—a
touching sign of their growing intimacy—
on the banks of Boar River (Galtara), a tiny
tributary of the Blanda, where the party
may have paused to rest its horses or camp
for the night (cf. 12I3u278).
"Journey's end," for Jonas, came when
they reached his mother's farm at
SteinsstaSir after a trip from Reykjavik that
had probably taken 3-4 days. Here the
lovers parted. Before they did so, however,
Jonas asked Pora's father for her hand in
marriage. Reverend Gunnar told him that
the pair were too young to be formally
engaged: "The future was uncertain, he said,
and it would be best to see how their situa-
tions developed during the next few years
and whether they remained attached to each
other" (5DXLI). Perfectly sensible. After
all, Pora was only sixteen, and Jonas was
still a student at BessastaSir.
We are told that the pair exchanged let-
ters for a while but in all likelihood never
met again. Jonas did not go out of his way to
look Pora up and two or three years later he
seems to have had another woman in mind
as a prospective bride (see ABT54-9).Color
photo of Pora Gunnarsdottir's grave, small
version. In 1832, not long after Jonas sailed
for Copenhagen, Pora was betrothed by her
father to a clergyman fourteen years older
than herself whom she married ("half-
unwilling" it is said) in 1834. Some dozen
years later, not long after Jonas's death, she
is reported to have heard "Journey's End"
read aloud at a wedding feast, to have real-
ized how deeply he had loved her (and that
he had never forgotten her), and to have
been so overcome with sorrow that she took
to her bed. She outlived Jonas many years,
dying of typhus in 1882.
All this is the stuff of which legends are
made, of course, and "the bittersweet love of
Jonas and Pora has become one of
Icelanders' best known love stories"
(ABT80).
It is not known with certainty when
"Journey's End" was written. As noted ear-