Commentary:        This famous poem was published in the important first issue of Fjölnir, where it immediately follows the editors' long programmatic essay about the aims and goals of their new periodical. The essay is largely the work of Tómas Sæmundsson; Jónas's poem is conceived as complementary to it, and sometimes even echoes it.¹ The piece is thus a poetic manifesto of the ideals and aims of Jónas and his Fjölnir colleagues: cultural and economic revival for Iceland, based on a greater measure of political independence and restoration of the Alþing at Þingvellir.

By emphasizing the extent to which Icelanders have declined in freedom, greatness, and glory since the days of their ancestors, Jónas indirectly exhorts and challenges his countrymen to wake up and repossess their inheritance. Readers who fail to perceive the exhortation and challenge (and some of Jónas's contemporaries did fail to perceive them, either inadvertently or deliberately) will find the poem unrelievedly grim and pessimistic — "an inscription for Iceland's grave" (grafskrift yfir Ísland), as a hostile reviewer in the periodical Sunnanpóstur called it.

Indeed, Jónas probably intended the poem to read like the inscription that might one day appear over Iceland's grave, if her people did not change their ways. This, at least, is suggested by his choice of form: the poem is written in elegiac distichs, a solemn and serious meter that was widely used in classical antiquity for epitaphs and memorial inscriptions (as Jónas had no doubt learned at Bessastaðir) and had occasionally been employed for this purpose in Iceland, too, prior to Jónas's day. Each distich (i.e., couplet) consists of a line of hexameter followed by a line of pentameter. The form is well exemplified in a modern accentual-syllabic language by Schiller's

Im Hexameter steigt des Springquells silberne Säule,
       Im Pentameter drauf fällt sie melodisch herab (1SWN285)

or by Coleridge's imitation of it in English,

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column,
       In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

In Jónas's usage in this poem (and in the present translation of it), all the distichs conform to the following pattern:

/ ⏑ (⏑)   / ⏑ (⏑)   / ⏑ (⏑)   / ⏑ (⏑)   / ⏑ ⏑   / ⏑
/ ⏑ ⏑   / ⏑ ⏑   /   |   / ⏑ ⏑   / ⏑ ⏑   /

The position of the caesura in the odd (hexameter) lines is variable, usually occurring somewhere in the third (more rarely the fourth) foot. In the even (pentameter) lines its position is invariable, occurring where indicated by the vertical line.

Jónas's poem seems to have been inspired by — and to have been in some respects a deliberate response to — a work very familiar to him and his Icelandic contemporaries in Copenhagen, a work that bore the same title and was also written in elegiac distichs: "Iceland" ("Island"), by the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger (1779-1850).² Oehlenschläger's poem was originally published in 1805 and began with the phrase "Island! hellige Øe!" ("Iceland! holy isle!"). It was republished in a revised and severely truncated form in 1823, beginning now with the phrase "Island! Oldtidens Øe" ("Iceland! Antiquity's isle"). Here is Oehlenschläger's first distich (1823 version) for purposes of comparison with Jónas's poem:

Island! Oldtidens Øe, Ihukommelsens vældige Tempel,
Hen til din fiernede Kyst vifte Gud Bragi min Sang.

Oehlenschläger, in his poem, draws a brightly-colored picture of the glory of Iceland's past in order to suggest — rather trivially — that this glory has been restored in the work of the celebrated sculptor Albert Thorvaldsen (1768-1844), the son of an Icelander who had moved to Copenhagen.

There is no question that Jónas's poem is closely dependent on Oehlenschläger's.³ But at this point the story of its origins becomes more complex. In a note in the second edition of Jónas's collected poems (1883), Hannes Hafstein wrote:

Konráð Gíslason had a dream in which a man appeared to him, huge and impressive, and addressed him in poetry. When Konráð woke he remembered this verse:

Comely and fair was the country,
       crested with snow-covered glaciers,
azure and open the sky,
       ocean resplendently bright.

He told the dream to Jónas, who built his poem around these lines. (B390)

Hannes may well have heard this story from Konráð himself, who — by then a very old man — was a member of the editorial committee responsible for the 1883 edition.

But some version of the story was current even in Jónas's lifetime and seems to have been actively promoted by him. In a letter of March 1844, nine years after "Iceland" was written and published, Jónas earnestly told Konráð how much he wanted to teach young Icelanders natural science at the proposed gymnasium in Reykjavík:

I would like to become a teacher at a good school in Iceland more than anything else. I could work there for a short time 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 comely and fair? Didn't you even say so yourself? But who is ever going to perceive this comeliness unless he can approach nature with intelligence and understanding? (2E198)

The relevant portion of Konráð's reply (16 March), written in a characteristically abrasive and anti-sentimental vein, starts out with slighting references to an old Icelandic poem about black rams' testicles and cod-liver oil lamps:

Oh, how Icelandic! "Island, Oldtidens Ø!" — This is where a big gob of snuff plopped out of my nose as a sign that I was starting to sniffle — a gob of that truly legendary snuff from Groot (or is it Groth?) on East Street. You charge me with having said — supposedly — Comely and fair is the country. If I said it, it was a damned lie. And how foolish of you to bring the matter up, you who based a poem on such crap. To my shame. And your glory! (BKG67; see also 139Skí91-2)

By quoting the beginning of Oehlenschläger's poem in the same breath in which he quotes Jónas's poem, Konráð makes it very clear that he understands the latter to be based on the former, and that his own role (and the role of his dream-visitor — if he ever had a dream-visitor!)⁴ was only intermediary (see Bbk110).

There is no record of whether Jónas had visited Þingvellir before 1835, when he wrote this poem. (He later paid two visits, in August 1837 and July 1841; the second of these visits resulted in his poem "Mount Broadshield").

As regards the identity of the persons mentioned in the seventh distich of "Iceland": Þorgeir is Þorgeir Þorkelsson Ljósvetningagoði ("the chieftain of the men of Ljósavatn"), the law speaker who played a critical role in the conversion of Iceland to Christianity; this took place at the Alþing in the year 1000 and is described by Ari fróði ("the Wise") in his Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók). The five other figures mentioned by Jónas are major characters in Brennu-Njáls saga (The Saga of Burnt Njáll), the best known and most loved of the Icelandic family sagas.

Jónas's poem (or at least the beginning of it)⁵ is still popularly sung in Iceland to a melody in the Lydian mode that goes back to the Middle Ages (for the notation see Íþl522). This melody is usually accompanied by a second voice that moves along with it in parallel fifths in the manner of organum (for the notation see ibid., pp. 775-6). The solemn, majestic tune — especially when sung in this traditional way — gives an impression of seriousness and high antiquity that wonderfully complements Jónas's text.

There is a prior English translation of the poem by Guðmund J. Gislason (IL49, 51).

Bibliography:       There is an excellent brief analysis of the poem (including its structure and rhetoric) by Oskar Bandle (see OB230-3).