Commentary:        By equipping his demons with the pectoral fins of skates (or rays) instead of the more traditional bats' wings, Jónas suggests that their movement is a slow-motion flapping and gliding and thus gives an eerie submarine quality to his portrayal of hell.

In the manuscript, the last line of the poem originally read: "Dead souls eternally alive." Jónas later altered this to "Satan [and] dead souls."

The notion that hell consists of alternating torments of heat and cold — that the damned "must walk between frost and flame" ("Sólarljóð," strophe 18), doomed forever

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice

(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure) — is very ancient.¹

Hell as a literally existing place where souls will be tormented after death plays no role in Jónas's thought. In his day the hell-terrors introduced into Iceland after the Reformation had pretty much subsided. And he had recently been reading in Feuerbach about the fictiveness of theological geography — not specifically hell, it is true, but its counterpart heaven:

Die alte Fabel lehret zwar,
Ich käme zu der Engel Schar;
Doch solches glauben nur Theologen,
Die um die Wahrheit sich längst betrogen. (1FFS360-1)

But though hell may have been well-nigh extinct for Jónas as a theological category,² it was still very much alive for him as a poetic myth (see, for example, "The Solitary").

Both the meter of this poem and its rhyme scheme (aaBccB) are similar to those of Jón Þorláksson's "The Short Lullaby of Devils" (AAbCCb), the subject of which is Satan, hell, devils (and the assault of the latter on Magnús Stephensen). Jón's poem, which Jónas probably read over the winter of 1841-2, clearly furnished him with hints for his elegy on Magnús Stephensen (written 1842; not included in this collection) and may have left its mark on the present poem as well.