Date:	Mid-January 1839.
Form:	Six stanzas, each containing eight four-stress lines rhyming aBBaCCdd and with the alliteration pattern 21122.
Manuscript:	Ny kgl. samling 3282 4to, which a note by Páll Melsteð dates to 11 January 1839 (facsimile KJH73-5; image).
First published:	16 January 1839 in a pamphlet that had been specially printed for distribution at the Gaimard banquet (image) (facsimile in Chants Islandais); it bears the title "Til herra Páls Gaimard í samsæti Íslendinga í Kaupmannahöfn."
Sound recording:	Dick Ringler reads "To Mr. Paul Gaimard." [2:10]

Commentary:        The distinguished French naturalist Paul Gaimard (1793-1858) paid his first visit to Iceland in the summer of 1835 and returned the following summer at the head of a scientific expedition lavishly funded and outfitted by the French government. This expedition — La Commission scientifique de Islande et de Groënland — consisted (in addition to Gaimard himself) of a physicist and cartographer (Victor Lottin), a linguist and literary man (Xavier Marmier), an artist (Auguste Mayer), a geologist (Eugène Robert), a meteorologist (Raoul Anglès) and a depicter of animals (Louis Bévalet). According to Benedikt Gröndal, "Gaimard's expedition is the most famous of its kind ever to visit Iceland" (4BGR299).

Gaimard and his six associates, with 48 horses and numerous Icelandic attendants, set out from Reykjavík on 20 June 1836 and circled the country counterclockwise, arriving back in Reykjavík at the end of August.²

The following spring Jónas and his colleagues published a glowing account of the expedition in the third issue of Fjölnir (3FII/21-5).³ The portions of this account quoted below provide valuable insight into how Jónas and his colleagues viewed the Gaimard expedition, and also illuminate a number of statements in Jónas's poem.

Tómas writes that in the course of their travels around Iceland, Gaimard and his associates

collected specimens of everything that struck them as characteristic or impressed them as being able, somehow, to give a clear idea of the quality, nature, and condition of the country and the customs of its inhabitants in both ancient and modern times. They either carried back to France with them — or else shipped off from market towns along their route — samples of the most important types of soils, rocks, and plants they encountered, as well as household articles, clothing, antiquities, artifacts, and everything else imaginable.

Wherever he came, Dr. Gaimard, who led the expedition, was universally admired, thanks to his kindliness and other endearing qualities. He was extremely adroit at adapting himself to the conditions of our country and making the best of everything: tenacious and full of stamina on the road, capable of dealing with any crisis, and skilled at leading the expedition in such a way that it achieved its aim as fully as anyone could possibly have hoped. He organized everything himself and had total authority and responsibility. It was hard to believe the man ever ate or slept, so utter was his involvement in every aspect of the expedition. Even while riding on horseback he almost always had pen in hand.

"Never before has our land been studied with such sophisticated equipment, such learning, such exactitude," Tómas wrote.⁴ And he added:

There is absolutely no doubt that we shall soon see published a work about our country that will be more remarkable — not only in content, but in outward appearance — than anything we have ever seen before. (3FII/22-4)

Tómas's expectations were not disappointed. The official report of the Gaimard expedition⁵ was published in Paris between 1838 and 1852 in eight volumes of text and one of geological illustrations, all in octavo format, plus three large and sumptuously produced folio volumes of lithographs. The first two of these (Atlas historique) contain pictures of the expedition itself and the places it visited, as well as drawings of antiquities and portraits of Gaimard and a number of Icelanders. The third folio volume (Atlas zoologique, médical et géographique) contains pictures of animals, additional portraits of Icelanders (including eight victims of leprosy), and maps of Reykjavík, Skálholt, and Geysir. Voyage en Islande et au Groënland is the most elaborate single work ever published about Iceland: "There will never be another like it," Gröndal thought (4BGR297).

As the expedition made its way around the country in 1836, its official artist, the landscape painter Auguste Mayer (1805-1890), made many sketches of its scenery, its people, and their customs and living conditions. The sketches were subsequently used as the basis for the lithographs published in 1842 in the Atlas historique. These pictures — "genuine works of art," according to Gröndal (4BGR297) — remain today the single most important source of visual information about life in Iceland in Jónas Hallgrímsson's time. A number of them are reproduced in the present work.⁶

In January 1839 Gaimard, en route from Lapland and Spitzbergen back to France, stopped off in Copenhagen, where the Icelandic community honored him with a banquet on 16 January. Jónas was asked to write one of the four poems composed for Gaimard and sung on this occasion.⁷ An account of the poem's composition, and its reception both at the banquet and afterward, is given by Gröndal (who says that it is based on the recollections of Páll Melsteð). The day before the banquet, according to Gröndal,

Þorgeir Guðmundsson and another man went round to the Garður to pay a call on Jónas. Páll Melsteð was there at the time. Þorgeir said to Jónas: "We're putting together a banquet for Gaimard tomorrow, so you're really going to have to show what you can do." Jónas made hardly any reply and Þorgeir left.

Later Jónas began pacing the floor, muttering to himself. (Páll was paying hardly any attention.) Suddenly Jónas sat down, dashed off the first three stanzas [of the poem], then flung down the pen with the words, "Damned if I can write any more!"

But by the middle of the next day the poem had appeared from the print shop in published form. (4BGR299n)⁸

Gröndal thought it "one of the loveliest poems ever written in the Icelandic language" (4BGR299). It was sung for Gaimard at the banquet and Páll Melsteð translated it into Latin for him:⁹

He was greatly moved, and tears of pleasure and delight came to his eyes when he realized the honor he was being shown. . . . Jónas's poem quickly made its way out to Iceland, where people memorized it almost involuntarily and it was sung everywhere, because it stirred everyone to the soul. . . . It is unquestionably one of the poems that have done most to awaken the people of Iceland. (4BGR300)

When composing "To Mr. Paul Gaimard," Jónas seems to have had in mind the dramatic account of Gaimard's ascent of Hekla published in Paris, only a few months after it had taken place, by the expedition's literary scholar and chief publicist, Xavier Marmier (1809-1892).¹⁰ Marmier says that from the moment he and the other members of the expedition arrived in Iceland, climbing Hekla had been their most cherished ambition ("notre rêve le plus beau").¹¹ The actual ascent (on 28 June) proved very challenging, exhausting the group's most experienced climbers. When they reached the summit, with Gaimard in the lead, it was snowing and the view was obscured by clouds (2VIG214). But suddenly the clouds parted and the sun broke through. Marmier ratchets excitedly into the present tense:

At our feet the plain rolls away far into the distance, with lakes of crystal water scattered across its green robe like diamonds and two rivers meandering through it like garlands. In the midst of the valley is the blue mountain near Geysir, and in front of us — on the horizon — we behold the open sea, coruscating with light like a belt of gold, and the Westman Islands.

We were overcome by feelings of inarticulate awe in the presence of so sudden a spectacle. It was the springtime of this desolate nature. It was the fiat lux of this night of chaos.¹²

It is this dramatic moment, remembered from Marmier's account, and deliberately echoing Marmier's language, that Jónas wished to conjure up in the first stanza of his poem.

It is hard to imagine a more satisfactory opening for the poem than its portrait of Paul Gaimard standing atop Mount Hekla. It flattered Gaimard (appropriately enough) with memories of that triumphant moment and also served to introduce Jónas's central theme. For "To Mr. Paul Gaimard" is a hymn to the scientific spirit and scientific achievement — and what better symbol could Jónas have found for the triumph of science over ignorance and superstition, than the ascent of Hekla? Surely he remembered, when he composed the poem, that the first known ascent of Hekla had been made in 1750 by his own hero and alter ego Eggert Ólafsson, whose climb had been motivated — at least in part — by a desire to plant the flag of science on Hekla's summit and thus confound the widespread ancient superstition that regarded this volcano's crater as one of the mouths of hell.

And there is still another dimension to this complex poem. Benedikt Gröndal was convinced — no doubt rightly — that it showed the influence of Sigurður Breiðfjörð's "Fjöllin á Fróni" ("Hvað fögur er mín feðrajörð"). Gröndal points out that Sigurður's piece had been printed only two years before Jónas composed his poem for Gaimard, was sung to the same tune, and showed considerable convergence in subject matter.¹³ It also uses the same stanza form and rhyme scheme (aBBaCCdd). Nothing shows more clearly the remarkable gifts of diction, tone, and fluidity that Jónas brought to Icelandic verse, than a comparison of these two poems in the original.¹⁴