II. Biographical Sketch of Jónas Hallgrímsson

8. Denmark (1842-1845)

"Jónas was a big man of average height," Konráð tells us,

stocky and with well-shaped limbs, tending toward fat in his last years because of ill health. He walked upright, had large broad shoulders, a somewhat stubby neck, and an unusually large head with fine brown hair. He had a small beard and dark eyebrows. His face was attractive, manly and easily identified, and had a high forehead (like others in his family). His nose was straight and somewhat fleshy. He had broad jaws (as is common among Icelanders) and broad cheeks, but his cheekbones were not as high as is usual in our country. His mouth was handsome, his lips a little fleshy. He had big brown eyes — and it is absolutely indescribable how much warmth and life flooded into those eyes when he was in a good mood, especially when he was discussing some subject he cared about deeply.⁹⁵ (9F5)

"He was definitely not a hail fellow well met," Páll Melsteð told Hannes Hafstein.

There was no deceit in his nature, and his temper was generous, but he wouldn't put up with slights any more than the next man. He was blunt and sharp-spoken with people he disliked. . . . He was buoyant and playful — but depressed even so. (4E44)

Hannes Hafstein adds: "He was cheerful and witty when talking with his friends, and very vehement. But he was introverted and kept his feelings to himself" (BX). Bitter experience had no doubt taught him that this was the safest way to operate. He wrote in "The Lay of Hulda":

What must be kept a secret? All our anguish,
which only brings us scorn if poorly hid.

"He was stand-offish with strangers," Hannes continues, "so it was easy for them to conclude that he was stiff and unsociable, even arrogant. And he certainly did not suffer fools gladly. He was warm-blooded and therefore naturally somewhat given to pleasure, corpulent and inclined to take it easy. But when he was of a mind to work, he could work like a man possessed" (BX).

Hannes gives us a wonderful picture of Jónas in action:

In addition to the citizens of Reykjavík, there were people all around the country who had it in for Jónas because he was one of the editors of Fjölnir. . . . He frequently found himself involved in arguments, since he was often challenged to defend his opinions — which he was always more than willing to do. He was very adept at sensing where other people were coming from and talking them round to his own point of view. And he was not reluctant to use the method that often works best with uneducated people: taking them by the shoulders and shaking them. Professor Steenstrup recalls that once when they were lying in their tent, a well known parish manager dropped by and started harassing Jónas about Fjölnir. Jónas got to his feet and — bracing himself against the tent-pole with one hand and grabbing hold of the farmer's shoulder with the other — proceeded to tell him what was what in no uncertain terms. (BXXVII-XXVIII)

When he returned to Copenhagen in November 1842, Jónas was in such desperate financial straits that he could not even afford to buy new clothes. In mid-February 1843 he wrote Finnur Magnússon: "It is (as you can imagine) an unpleasant and unseemly situation that I should have to avoid visiting people — because of a lack of clothes! — when the best houses stand open to receive me" (2E151). In March he wrote a humiliating letter to Forchhammer explaining that this was the reason he had put off calling on him since his return to Denmark (2E152).

The publication of Fjölnir had been suspended during Jónas's residence in Iceland. After his return to Copenhagen, and no doubt largely at his prompting, a larger group of collaborators was formed — the "Fjölnir Society" (Fjölnisfélag) — which held regular meetings and superintended the publication of the last four issues of the periodical (of which about 500 copies were printed [BPÆ85]). Extremely detailed minutes of these meetings were kept⁹⁶ and exchanges among the members were sometimes reported with such verbatim accuracy that one fancies one can still hear their voices today: during their second meeting, for example, in December 1842, when they were discussing the first article of their new society's proposed bylaws. This had been drafted by a subcommittee chaired by Brynjólfur Pétursson and stated: "We all want to be Icelanders."

Thorlacius:	I'd like to see it spelled out what we mean by "Icelanders."
Jónas:	Well, we members of the society all understand what the word means. How we interpret it is nobody else's business. So there's no need to explain it in the bylaws.
Thorlacius said there was a need, however, for the benefit of people who might want to join the society.
Konráð:	There's an advantage in having bylaws that are as explicit as possible. The members of the other society are Icelanders, too — and we don't want to be them.97
Brynjólfur:	As far as I can see, the article is perfectly clear and everybody here understands what it means.
Konráð:	I propose — here's another example of something that ought to be added to the article — that our Icelandic language be kept as pure as possible.
Brynjólfur said he agreed, adding that he had felt the same way himself when the draft of the bylaws was being prepared.
Thorlacius:	Well, I don't speak pure Icelandic — so I suppose I'm not qualified to be a member!98
Brynjólfur:	All the article says is, "We want to be Icelanders."
Jónas:	I don't think there's any need to add anything to the article. The word "Icelander" implies all these things for us. They say that when O'Connell utters the word "Ireland" in the British Parliament, both the British and the Irish can hear all his passionate conviction in that single word.99
Konráð:	Well, I think we're a long way behind the British and Irish! (32Eim89-90)

In the first issue of the revived Fjölnir, Jónas published a large number of poems: sixteen altogether, eight original pieces (including "The Pipit" and "Bjarni Thorarensen") and eight translations and adptations from Goethe, Schiller, and Heine (including "The Maiden's Lament"¹⁰⁰ and "The Vastness of the Universe").

Jónas prized the art of translation very highly and devoted a good deal of time, energy and talent to it.¹⁰¹ The lion's share of his translations are from German (since most of his countrymen needed no help reading Danish), and among these translations his renderings of Heine take pride of place. Jónas is a master at turning Heine's generalities into Icelandic specificities, for example the following four lines from Heine's "Sterne mit den goldnen Füßchen" (Neuer Frühling XXXVII), which Jónas translated under the title "Night Stillness" ("Næturkyrrð"):

Horchend stehn die stummen Wälder Jedes Blatt ein grünes Ohr! Und der Berg, wie träumend steckt er Seinen Schattenarm hervor.

Hlustar hinn dimmi Dalaskógur öll eru blöð hans eyru grænlituð; sefur nú Selfjall og svartan teygir skuggafingur of skeiðum fram. (6F40)

The dark depths of Dalewood hearken, its leaves are green listening ears; the shadow finger of Shieling Hill traces slumber on tranquil plains.

Bärbel Dymke has pointed out that both Jónas's frequent practice of transforming Heine's stanzas into fornyrðislag strophes (on the model of earlier translators of foreign poetry like Benedikt Gröndal the Elder and Jón Þorláksson), as well as his frequent "Icelandicization" of the content of those stanzas, had the effect of naturalizing Heine's work in Iceland (HHi54, 136-7).

In 1843-4 Jónas devoted a good deal of effort to correcting topographical details and place names and reading proof for Björn Gunnlaugsson's great map of Iceland: preparations for publishing it were now well advanced (see 5DCXLIXn). This was time-consuming work, Jónas complained to Steenstrup, because Björn, "for all his skill as a surveyor, has a wonderful talent for overlooking — and failing to make note of — any topographical details" (2E155).

Progress on his own "Description of Iceland" was disappointing, as Jónas confessed to Steenstrup in the same letter:

My work goes slowly. There's an enormous — absolutely overwhelming — amount of material that I am obliged to root around in. And there's the added annoyance of knowing that it was I myself who tied this big stone around my neck. (2E155)

Not only had the Literary Society's questionnaire produced a mountain of data: in addition Jónas felt it necessary to consult all previous written accounts of Iceland.

In midsummer 1843 he left Copenhagen and moved to Sorø, a small town in mid-Sjælland, located next to a peaceful lake (the Sorø Sø) some 75 kilometers southwest of the metropolis.

Here Jónas lived for nine months with Steenstrup and his family. Steenstrup — who regarded his Icelandic colleague as a "brilliant and perspicacious natural scientist" (Ín150) — was at this time a lector at Sorø Academy.¹⁰² Jónas and Steenstrup had a number of joint projects to work on, including an account of the sulfur mines in Iceland.

For a time, now, Jónas was freed from financial anxieties. Life in Sorø seems to have been carefree and idyllic, involving both new activities and new interests (as attested by the poem "After the Ball," written in Danish). New acquaintances included two of the most important Danish literary figures of the day, the poets B. S. Ingemann (1789-1862) and Carsten Hauch (1790-1872).¹⁰³

In September Jónas wrote Páll Melsteð:

I'm living here as contentedly as the yolk in an egg. I'm staying with Steenstrup and we're working together on things Icelandic, planning to put together a book that will have real value. For relaxation I take walks, ride horseback, or drive around the countryside and nearby woods. Sometimes I go rowing on the lake with the ladies, or visit Hauch or Ingemann to enjoy a bit of instructive and entertaining chat. It's enormously gratifying to be invited to visit these men, and cordially welcomed by them at any hour of the day.

Of course I haven't forgotten our Literary Society or the "Description of Iceland." But — with regard to that project — it's no exaggeration to say that I've saddled myself with an enormous burden. Not only is writing the book going to be a daunting task; so is laying the groundwork for it. And worst of all, the Society isn't able to pay me a reasonable wage and I'm not in a position to do the work without remuneration. If I could find some way — or rather, if I could find some other person who would be capable of doing the job, I'd turn it over to him. (2E158)

It did not help his peace of mind that Brynjólfur and Konráð had become teetotallers and were trying to badger him into abstinence,¹⁰⁴ nor that the Fjölnir Society was being turned into the flagship of the Icelandic temperance movement. Jónas was torn between loyalty to his virtue-stricken friends and ironic disapproval of their activities; he himself was of the opinion that a moderate use of alcohol made more sense than total abstinence (2E203).¹⁰⁵

He was often in good spirits at Sorø, as evidenced (for example) by a poem he wrote Konráð, who had playfully misspelled his name on a package addressed to "Hr. Cand. Philos. Jónash Hallgrihmsson":

Who has defiled my famous name, flecking it with pollution? I owe the author of this shame instant retribution! G will attack him, O will too, T, and another O as well; H and E will make him rue, as will nasty L and L. Am I upset? Of course I am! And if these curses don't suffice — kiss the ass of an old grey ram, eat my shit and chew my lice!

Hvur hefur garfað heitið mitt, hraður til slíkra efna? vort fordjarfað fóstursnitt; fús skal ég þess hefna. B og Ö eru bókstafir tveir, bæti ég L-i þarna við. V, A, Ð er varla meir, vil eg U-ið stytti grið; R-i meður endahnút á þá stöku bind eg fús; kysstu rassa, hreddu hrút, hræktu skít og éttu lús!106

There is a good deal of this sort of thing in Jónas's letters to his old Bessastaðir cronies — and this example will suffice.¹⁰⁷

A serious note — or at least a half-serious note, guarded by irony — is frequently struck in the friends' letters to one another. On Good Friday 1844 Konráð glanced back ten years to the heady days when they were all engaged in founding Fjölnir, and wrote Jónas:

Rev.Tómas is in his grave — you are in Sorø — Brynjólfur has heart trouble (and is about to become a sýslumaður). And the sun is not as bright or the weather as warm or the world as beautiful as it was in 1834. For God's sake, Jónas, console me! I have lost the whole world. Give me back the world, Jónas my friend! (BKG70)

Jónas sometimes divested himself altogether of irony and spoke in perfect earnestness. In a letter to Konráð in March 1844 he expressed his deepest and most heartfelt thoughts about his own future. There were plans afoot to close Bessastaðir and open a new and somewhat different kind of school in Reykjavík. Jónas desperately wanted to be the natural science teacher at this new school.

You say there will soon be a gymnasium established at home, and I can stop having to go about in rags. Are you making fun of me? . . .

I would like to become a teacher at a good school in Iceland more than anything else. I could work there for a short or long time, who knows, maybe twenty years, God willing. And who knows how much brighter, by then, Iceland's pitch-dark night might not have become — that damnable high-country fog that disfigures both body and soul!

Didn't we say the country is attractive and beautiful? Didn't you actually say it yourself?¹⁰⁸ But who can really appreciate this beauty, unless he is capable of approaching nature with intelligence and understanding? The stirrings of human emotion we felt as youngsters die out, later on, as our bodies age, unless reinforced by knowledge and profound love for the outer integuments of the spirit.

I could teach natural history and natural science (naturhist. and fysik), geology, and as much surveying and mathematics as necessary. I have familiarized myself thoroughly with one of the best schools in Denmark [i.e., Sorø Academy] for more than half a year, now, and have a year or more ahead of me to get to know the schools in Copenhagen. . . .

What is essential is to create the job. Then I will be the natural man to fill it. Please note — among other things — that I am familiar with the whole of Iceland and with a large number of people there. I have many friends in the country and am the only person — at the moment — capable of establishing a natural history collection. (2E198)

While it is true that he had many friends in Iceland, he also had many enemies — and he knew it.

In Sorø, in addition to working on his treatise on Icelandic volcanos, Jónas composed his burlesque "The Queen Goes Visiting" as well as a number of important poems: "Mowing Song," "Valley Song," "I Send Greetings" (the first sonnet written in Icelandic), and perhaps "The Beast." "Mowing Song" is a poem about a typical Icelandic agricultural activity — and about the Man with the Scythe:

All the flowers have fallen, fairest grasses perish: life is brief, aborted by the ripper's stripping. Haft is humming softly, hefted firmly, deftly; iron edge is tireless; under him, earth thunders.

Totally different in character and mood is "Valley Song," in which Jónas celebrates Öxnadalur (and all the similar valleys in Iceland):

Summer valley, blissful, blest, brimmed with sunlight now and ever, slowly sweeping east to west! Summer valley, gorgeous, blest! Childhood's idyll, age's rest after years of long endeavor! Summer valley, blissful, blest, brimmed with sunlight now and ever!

Jónas returned to Copenhagen in May, 1844, fully expecting to remain there only briefly and then go back to Sorø to continue his work with Steenstrup. But this plan came to nothing when Steenstrup was invited to accompany Prince Frederik (soon to reign as Frederik VII) on a voyage to Scotland and the Faroes. As far as is known, the two friends never met again.

Street scene in Copenhagen, July 1844, as reported by Jónas in a letter to Konráð (who was in Germany undergoing treatment for eye trouble):¹⁰⁹

Gísli [Thorarensen] left me a good while ago and I just got back from a trip outdoors, where I ate some plaice on credit — since G. never wants to lend me any money. (Which is only natural.)

As I came into Studiestræde, a prostitute held her hand out of a window and said: "Sweet sir!"

"Thank you, hello," I said and took her hand.

"You promised to come up to visit me sometime."

"Ein Wort ein Wort," said I, "ein Mann ein Mann."¹¹⁰ (But of course I'm not foolish enough to have made any such promise.)

"Sleep well, Iceland man." (2E218)¹¹¹

Konráð tells us that in Copenhagen, during the last year of his life, Jónas "composed more poetry, comparatively speaking, than at any time before" (9F3). Hannes Pétursson calls it Jónas's "most remarkable period as a poet" (Kf212); it was certainly his most productive. To this year belong "Bósi," "Journey's End," "Quatrains," "On New Year's Day (1845)," "Above the Ford," "Hell," "The Solitary," "Spring and Fall," and "Home"; the twelve poems in the cycle By Land and Sea (represented here by ten poems, "Ólafsvík Headland," "Horn Crag," "Drangey," "Kolbeinn's Isle," "Moon Island," "Southlands," "Sheepfold Tarn," "Eagle Mountain Glacier," "The Sog," and "Tómas's Meadow"); the fragment "Öxnadalur"; and translations from Ludwig Feuerbach and Heinrich Heine ("Feuerbach's Nihilism" and "Drudgery"). "Shankbone and Seashell," Jónas's adaptation of H. C. Andersen's "The Sweethearts" ("Kjærestefolkene") also belongs to the last year of his life.

"Ólafsvík Headland," the first of the poems in By Land and Sea, can serve as a specimen of Jónas's work from this period. In this poem he relives a moment from his summer travels of 1841, when he rode the narrow foreshore between Ólafsvík Headland and Breiðafjörður, where Eggert Ólafsson had drowned in 1768:

The glad sun gleamed in the shallows as we galloped along the sand under Ólafsvík Headland, out near the jaws of the land. Blazing and broad, the fjord basks there calmly enough: twelve leagues' travel across it, two short yards to the bluff. Ought I to turn and enter into this black cliffside? Or sink down beside you, Eggert, in the sunless depths where you died?

The poem suggests, as do a number of Jónas's other late works, a changing attitude toward nature. More and more, nature is seen as dangerous and even openly hostile to human beings ("Horn Crag" and "Moon Island" are particularly striking examples of this tendency).¹¹² It also suggests, like a number of other late poems by Jónas, a bleak — even morbid — state of mind. Einar Ól. Sveinsson writes: "I think I sense an atmosphere of desolation in and around Jónas's best poems from his last three years: a desolation which gives them a deeper resonance than anything yet written by this great master of language" (Vu283). These late poems are often highly personal, even semi-confessional.

When he had finished making a fair copy of the four poems that he called (collectively) Capes and Islands (Annes og eyjar) — and this may well have been one of the last acts of his literary life — he jotted down a ferskeytla in the margin of the manuscript. It was not a poem of his own, but one that seems to have interested him because of the sentiment it expressed:

Most men hide their secret smart, sorely though they're aching. Under easy smiles the heart oftentimes is breaking.

Margur sundurmolar stinn mein svo lund ei kvartar; getur undir glaðri kinn grátið stundum hjarta.113

Jónas was "very reluctant to display his sorrows and emotions," Hannes Hafstein writes.

Disappointments and antagonisms collected inside him and festered there. This is why he felt there was a "cold undersea current" running beneath the surface of life. People were not supposed to acknowledge this openly but simply to "keep on rowing their boats." (BXLIII)¹¹⁴

His health was poor and he continued to be afflicted by seasonal depression.¹¹⁵ In mid-December he wrote Jón Sigurðsson to apologize for his failure to attend a committee meeting, pleading indisposition.

And furthermore I have been very badly depressed, these days, and did not even want to think about the matter at issue. . . . The winter darkness has always bothered me terribly, ever since that winter I lay ill. But I know from experience that my mood will change for the better after the solstice — and then I will be up for anything. (2E225)

That, at least, is what he prayed in December 1844 as the solstice approached:

Triple God, now guide me! Give me the strength for living! Soon the sun will mount higher, sending its endless blessing. Bright eye of God, shine gladly; glide from your winter hiding; comfort each of your creatures, king of the flaring chariot!

Eilífur guð mig ali einn og þrennur dag þenna! lifa vil eg, svo ofar enn eg líti sól renna. Hvað er glatt sem hið góða guðsauga? kemur úr suðri harri hárrar kerru, hjarðar líkn og jarðar.116

More and more he seems to have suspected that the "Description of Iceland," at least in the form originally proposed, was a task beyond his powers — perhaps beyond the powers of any single human being. Travelling around Iceland had been exhilirating and deeply satisfying. So was recalling places and incidents from those travels in verse. But collating and sifting through mounds of data was a chore, and an intolerable chore when he was depressed. In February 1844 he had written Brynjólfur from Sorø, only half joking:

You wouldn't believe how much trouble I'm having making any headway with this project I'm so deeply involved in. The geography is practically driving me crazy, and I fancy my work may turn out — in the end — to be like poor Halldór Kröyer's History of the World!¹¹⁷ (2E190)

His initial enthusiasm had flagged and the project was becoming mere drudgery: a Grettistak at which he strained and strained but which it became harder and harder to budge. Hannes Hafstein wrote, no doubt drawing on the memories of Konráð Gíslason:

The winter deepened. He was struggling with the "Description of Iceland" but making only slow progress. He would start working on one chapter, then another, abandoning them in midstream and starting over again somewhere else. It is clear from this that he was getting sick and tired of being obliged to work in this fashion and forced to read a multitude of books on a single narrow subject. His mind started straying to other things. (BXXXVII-XXXVIII)

The "other things" included bittersweet memories of the past, painful religious speculation, and agonizing premonitions of approaching death. "More and more," Hannes Hafstein wrote,

his spirit began to turn in upon itself. Ancient sorrows revived and depression deepened around him. The memory of forgotten love affairs from his school days revived. . . . He felt totally isolated. . . . It seemed to him that life was unbearable. (BXXXVIII)

The memory of forgotten love affairs surfaced most poignantly in the poems "Journey's End" and "Quatrains," the sense of total isolation in "Hell" and "The Solitary."

Gloomy religious speculation contributed to his depressed state of mind. Jónas never ceased to believe in God, however he may have come to define that term; Konráð assured Björn M. Ólsen in 1890 that "Jónas was no atheist [guðníðingur], as some people suppose" (BKG294),¹¹⁸ and this is borne out by a late poem like "Christmas Song":

Christmas! bright as days gone by! Though brazen men have routed highest God from His own sky I have a brace of reasons why the blessèd truth cannot be truly doubted.

Jólum mínum uni ég en, og þótt stolið hafi hæstum guði heimskir menn hef eg til þess rökin tvenn að á sælum sanni er enginn vafi.119

On the other hand Jónas appears, at least in certain moods,¹²⁰ to have lost all his early faith in God as a loving father who watches over individual creatures and takes an interest in their suffering and death.¹²¹ And it seems extremely likely that he had lost all belief in any sort of individual consciousness or personality beyond the grave,¹²² bitter as it may have been for one who valued friendship so highly — and had seen so many friends and relatives die at an early age — to think that he might never journey "to the bright world of meetings" ("fundanna skært í ljós") and see them again. Jónas seems to have reached the conclusion that living one's life on earth with energy and authenticity is the best that one can hope for (see "On New Year's Day [1845]" and "Above the Ford").

"Give what you get!" they urge me. "Hold your own!" But I would rather live and feel and see — even when this earns me men's antipathy — than be a hollow half-decayed sheepbone, hidden by pack-train boys in piles of stone, stuffed full of slander and obscenity.

In memorial poetry written by Jónas after spring 1842, Christian consolation ceases to play any role.¹²³ He made a very moving translation of a poem about metempsychosis by the Danish writer P. M. Möller, however, and toward the end of his life he was reading and translating — apparently with approval — passages from a poem by the German materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, a poem attacking the Christian belief in immortality ("Feuerbach's Nihilism"):

O mighty God! O monstrous desolation! Our end is Nothingness, everlasting death. O my blithe soul, bear unshaken this burden of truth — bitter as it seems.

At about the same time, he turned some sardonic verses by Heine into a statement of universal futility and despair ("Drudgery"):

Sturdy Sisyphus strains at his rock, the Danaids' jar drips forever, and earth whirls herself endlessly out of light and into darkness.

Perhaps this is how Jónas felt — in his blackest moments — about the "Description of Iceland."

A late poem like "Earth," finally, suggests his poignant grasping at life in the face of what he sensed to be approaching death:

Earth, you endlessly offer men pleasure, filling field and sea full beyond measure. It hurts to see you sink from under me. In my infancy I came out of you, creeping; broken, I soon shall be back in your keeping. It hurts to see you sink from under me.

Ó þú jörð, sem er yndi þúsunda, blessuð jörð sem ber blómstafi grunda, sárt er að þú sekkur undir mér. Hef eg mig frá þér hér og hníg til þín aftur, mold sem mannsins er magngjafi skaptur; sárt er að þú sekkur undir mér.124

The combination of heroism and desperation in Jónas's late works is very moving.

Spring seems to have brought some remission of his depression, as he expected. There are signs of buoyancy and returning energy, even of concentrated activity.¹²⁵ His popularity among fellow Icelanders in Copenhagen, and the trust they placed in him, is shown by the fact that he had been elected to serve on all three committees formed by the General Assembly of Icelanders (Almennir fundir Íslendinga)¹²⁶ to prepare petitions to the restored Alþing. Jónas was particularly active on the education committee, which wanted to see a national school (þjóðskóli) created — and even proposed that a university be established.¹²⁷ There can be little doubt that Jónas played a major role in drafting the committee's petition, which stated:

The more general that education becomes among all classes of men, the closer we will be to realizing the chief goal of human society, which is to ensure that every individual person attains as much fulfillment and happiness as possible — this being something to which all people have, from the beginning, an equal right. (51TMm27)

In mid-April Jónas moved to new rooms on the third floor of Sankt Peders Stræde 140.

In his last surviving business letter, written on 19 April to the Copenhagen Division of the Literary Society, he says optimistically — or perhaps only resolutely — that he expects to finish his part of the "Description of Iceland" within a year (2E265).¹²⁸

I have made a certain amount of progress on my portion of the "Description of Iceland," though not as much as I wished. I have had to spend much more time on preliminary research in various scientific fields than on the actual compilation of the work. I intend to see that it is as carefully done as possible. . . .

I plan to spend one more year on this project. I cannot devote any more time to it. I know that a good deal will still be wanting at the end of that period, and I ask you in advance to excuse me. (2E265)

Jónas seems very determined, here, to rid himself — as soon as he can — of what he had come to regard as a nightmare burden. Two days later, in his last letter to a close friend, he wrote Þórður Jónasson:

At last I'm feeling pretty good, as far as health is concerned — God be praised! Everything wrong with me seems to be clearing up, except for a touch of hypochondria — bringsmalaskotta — whatever you want to call it, the devil that plagues so many of us Icelanders. I'm gorgeously fat — a delightful creature! But I'm not dressed as well — or as elegantly — as I deserve to be. (2E227)

The eighth issue of Fjölnir contained nine poems by Jónas, among them "Mount Broadshield" and "Journey's End." It was in print by 6 May (see BPB77). Brynjólfur Pétursson wrote his brother Jón that the poems were "pure gold, this time."

But what use is that? No one derives any benefit from it except maybe one man per sýsla. No one wants to write anything for Fjölnir any more, so this issue will probably be the last. And the reason they don't want to write is they feel it's a perfect waste of time — since nobody reads it. Well, no point in saying anything more about that! (BPB77)

In his letter to Þórður Jónasson, Jónas mentioned his poems in this issue of Fjölnir: "There aren't many of them and they aren't very important. I would always be a happy man if I could write better poetry" (2E227). On 19 May, at a meeting of the General Assembly of Icelanders, he spoke once again — as so often before — in favor of reestablishing the Alþing at Þingvellir (BPÆ95).

In the night between 20 and 21 May, returning home to his new quarters in Sankt Peders Stræde, Jónas lost his footing on the stairs — either because he was not yet familiar with the staircase (which was steep and fairly narrow, as is common in old houses in central Copenhagen), or because he had been drinking, or both¹²⁹ — and broke his right leg very badly above the ankle. "Even so," Konráð tells us,

he managed to get to his feet and make it up to his room, where he lay down fully clothed and waited for the night to pass. When they came to him in the morning and asked why he hadn't called for help, he said he had seen no point in disturbing people in the middle of the night when he knew he wasn't going to live anyway. (9F3-4)

He was taken to Royal Frederik's Hospital.

When he arrived there and was put to bed, the leg was examined. The bones were jutting out through the flesh. While this injury was being attended to and the leg bound up, he lay perfectly still reading a book and did not even wince.

He lay there four days, talking as brilliantly as ever and looking the picture of health. But on the evening of the fourth day, when the head doctor visited the ward, he said to his assistants after leaving Jónas's bed, "Knives in the morning, gentlemen. That leg is going to have to come off." He had seen that the leg was gangrenous. What he hadn't seen was how quickly the gangrene would spread through the whole body.

Jónas asked that a light be left burning by his bed. He stayed awake all night, reading Jacob Faithful — a novel by an Englishman named Marryat — until late the next morning. Then he asked for some tea and drank it. Suddenly he gave a great shudder. And he was gone. (9F4)¹³⁰

The date was 26 May 1845, and Jónas was in the middle of his thirty-eighth year.

"As I end this letter," Konráð wrote his father,

my thoughts are in absolute chaos. My beloved friend Jónas Hallgrímsson has just died and was buried today. He broke his leg last week (today is Saturday), dying on Monday of gangrene that developed in the foot. I don't hold onto my friends for very long! I miss them both — Jónas and Reverend Tómas — more than I can possibly say. (BKG136)

Jónas's funeral and burial took place on 31 May "in good weather and bright sunshine," according to Konráð.¹³¹ The Copenhagen Division of the Literary Society treated their late employee to an elaborate send-off costing 27 rixdollars, 5 marks, 6 shillings (51TMm32).

All the Icelanders in Copenhagen who had any connection with him were present and helped carry his coffin from the hearse to the grave, saddened by his fate and by the tremendous loss that had befallen his fatherland. Those who knew him best — and best knew his true worth — grieved the most.¹³² (9F4)

At the request of Finnur Magnússon, who was president of the Copenhagen Division of the Literary Society, Brynjólfur and Konráð collected and sorted through the "documents, letters, and books" in their dead friend's possession (20SkíVIII). They turned all materials pertaining to the "Description of Iceland" over to Finnur, who enumerated them the following April in his report to the annual general meeting of the society, and then said:

The items just mentioned demonstrate clearly, in my opinion, that the late Jónas Hallgrímsson, since his return to Copenhagen, richly deserved the salary our society was paying him for his work on its behalf, even though the ill health and nervous illness with which he had to struggle during the last years of his life may have hindered and frustrated his efforts to complete that complex project as rapidly as possible. (20SkíXI)

Konráð Gíslason's memorial words about his friend, printed in the final issue of Fjölnir in 1847, may be taken as representing the feelings of all Jónas's friends and associates about his early and tragic death:

His surviving work will keep his memory alive in Iceland for a long time to come, testifying to his powers far better than we are able to do. And yet — excellent as much of this work is — we venture to assert that most of it does not even begin to compare with what he was really capable of. And it is totally incapable of suggesting what he was like as a person.

It was true of him, as of many another Icelander, that promise was one thing — achievement another. And yet it is important to remember that men like him experience many moments of ecstasy of which the ordinary run of mortals know nothing. (9F4-5)

Equally moving, in a different way, is the memorial poem by Benedikt Gröndal published in the same issue of Fjölnir. Benedikt compares Jónas and the brief astonishing blaze of his genius to the northern lights:

High overhead their torches kindle, holding a dance of radiant bliss. Swiftly, alas! they dim and dwindle, dying away in the cold abyss. Where do they come from? Where do they go? We here on earth will never know.

Ljómar um stund á himni háum hverfula blysið norðurheims, lítur til vor frá brautum bláum og burtu flýr í dimmu geims. Hvaðan það kom og hvert það leið, hylst oss um jarðar daga skeið. (9F8)