(This essay was written in 2017, and is included in my book “Sanctuary.” I’m reposting it here on July 20, 2024, on the anniversary of “the fire mass.”)
The miraculous part of the story, in a highly condensed version, goes like this: On July 20, in the year 1783, an Icelandic volcano known as Laki sent a greedy tongue of lava toward the village of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. When lava threatened to engulf the church—with all of the villagers inside—the Lutheran pastor Jón Steingrímsson prayed and preached with great passion and vigor until the river of molten rock hardened into a wall, sparing the huddled parishioners.
These days, travelers passing through this small village in the south of Iceland can visit a wooden cross memorializing “the fire mass,” as Jón Steingrímsson’s famous sermon is known. There are no plaques offering an explanation, no displays. Simply a metal plate that says: “Hér Var Eldmassan 20 Juli 1783.” At dawn, when no one is around, the cross seems to bear witness in much the same way as a tree or a stone.
Stopped the lava. Sure, he did. I don’t expect you to believe it. Or you may believe, as I do, that the approaching lava hardened, sparing the church, but not at the prompting of prayer. (The ice-cold waters of the Skafta River might have had something to do with it.) Nevertheless, it is a compelling story. And, as is usually the case, the miracle is both the most dubious and the least interesting part of the story.
In 2017, Iceland is a largely secular and scientifically literate nation, with a definite streak of practicality when it comes to volcanoes. It is not likely that many Icelanders actually believe that the good pastor’s prayers stopped the lava. It’s not even clear that the people of Jón’s time believed it. Maybe some did and some didn’t. I’d venture to guess that Icelanders, throughout their history, have often prayed to stop lava, and usually to no avail. They had prayed to their Norse Gods before the year 900, and they had prayed to their Christian God after that, with no discernable change in result.
One famous story gives insight into the attitudes of Icelanders toward their troublesome mountains. In the year 900, at the annual gathering called the Althing that brought together families and factions from all parts of the island together to settle feuds and establish treaties, a very important order of business rose to the top of the agenda: whether or not to keep the old Norse Gods, or adopt the new religion of Christianity.
The Althing was really Europe’s first parliamentary democracy, and the chieftains were debating policy. Passionate speeches were given both for and against the new religion. Stakes were high. In the middle of the deliberations, Hekla, the island’s most notorious volcano, ominously began to rumble and smoke. The defenders of the Norse Gods said “See! It is a sign of Odin’s anger! We must not do this thing!” When a man named Snorri Godi, a respected cheiftain, ascended to the law rock to speak, he said, “What angered the Gods when the lava burnt which we are standing on now?”
In other words: Don’t our mountains erupt all the time? After their long experience with volcanoes, it’s fair to say Icelanders probably understand the behavior of lava as well as anyone on earth. They understood it pretty well even in the year 900. So, it is hard to know what the farmers in 1783 really thought.
Nonetheless, the “Fire Priest” is a celebrated and beloved figure, a national hero. He is acknowledged as much for what he did after the eruption, as for what he did during it. To put it in a nutshell: with persistence and knowledge, and over the long haul, he tended to his neighbors. And that is an understatement.
As I write this 226 years later, Seattle, where I live, is choking on smoke—not from a volcano, but from hundreds of massive fires that are burning across the Canadian border, as British Columbia suffers its worst fire year in history (so far). In complicated ways, humans have power over nature, and at the same time nature has power over us. It’s easy, in our era, to forget the second part of that truth.
Calamity comes in many forms. Meanwhile: daily life continues for those outside of calamity’s immediate reach. We may wonder, if we have time for it, how we will behave when we are in calamity’s reach. While I’m doubtful of the miracle, the story of the Fire Priest speaks to me. It asks the question: How do we take care of each other in times of deteriorating circumstances?
***
It is a peculiar truth of human nature that people are more often moved by the suffering of one person than by the suffering of many. Our reactions are out of proportion because there is only so much room in our hearts for grief. Our eyes and our minds become glazed over by statistics.
For instance, a lone small Syrian girl washed up upon a beach in Cypress may be a cause for tears, while ship after capsized ship of refugees may be, merely, a cause to turn off the television. A person who may shrug with indifference at the horror of Aleppo may rise in indignation when a refugee is assaulted on a city bus. Is it because we don’t really care about Aleppo, or is it because we are touched, mainly, by what is right in front of us?
Maybe reports of a massacre in Aleppo, or a tsunami in Indonesia, or a famine in Somalia strike most of us as happening in some other world, while what happens on a bus in our city is in our world. We seem to understand best the pain that we see, and to sympathize most with the pain that we share. When the scale of suffering is too large, the location too distant in time or geography, the victims too unlike us in culture or belief, it all becomes a blur.
But every world is someone’s world. There is only one world, and we are part of it. We are more connected than we may think.
***
On June 8, 1783, Laki erupted. It continued to erupt for the next eight months. This volcano did not consult the monarchs of Britain or France, or the Founding Fathers of America. These men of consequence on both sides of the Atlantic knew nothing about it. They knew only that it had become hard to breathe in Paris and London. By September, they would hear rumors of cataclysm, but at first, only a smattering of farmers and fishermen knew about the eruption, as they hunkered down in their sod houses and prayed for deliverance.
In the highlands of Iceland, far from the capitols and parliaments and the armies of men, the skin of the earth split open along a 16-mile seam. The resulting outpouring of lava from this open gash in the earth was one of the most significant geological events in several thousand years.
To be clear, no pyroclastic cloud swallowed cities whole. There was no tsunami wiping out harbors full of ships. In terms of magnitude, Laki was not as explosive as the more famous eruptions of Krakatoa and Tambora, which happened in the same century. But here’s the thing: Laki kept going. After eight months, Laki had created the largest lava flow in historic times.
So the eruption of Laki is every bit as significant as the eruptions of Krakatoa and Tambora. Arguably, it is more so, because it was the beginning of an ordeal that would affect more lives than any other volcano. While Laki was not spectacularly explosive, it to this day counts as the deadliest instance of atmospheric pollution in the past few thousand years.
Air knows no boundaries. What happens in one place, no matter how removed from the centers of people and power, affects all the others. Few people knew about the presence of Laki, because few people lived on the Southern coast of Iceland in 1783. But as the toxic cloud from the eruption spread—first over Europe, and then Africa, Asia, and America—Laki made its presence known to them.
Suffering is both universal and personal. It both isolates and unites us. The farmers in Egypt and Japan who starved by the hundreds of thousands in the year following Laki’s eruption had no idea why the air was bad and the rains failed. They did not even know about a place called Iceland. And on that small island nation, in the aftermath of catastrophe, an obscure Lutheran pastor demonstrated, as well as anyone I can think of, care in the face of deteriorating circumstances.
He is rather unique, as national heroes go. He declared nothing, he conquered no territory, he made no one rich, and he commanded no army. He was never a head-of-state. He was not particularly forceful or intimidating. Yet every schoolchild in Iceland learns his name. He is as integral to their story of themselves as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are to us. What he was, above all, was a healer, a binder of wounds. A shepherd.
***
First, back to the beginning, and with some context: It is interesting to know when things happen, as well as why and how. The Reverend was a man of his time and place, with one foot in the Enlightenment, and one in the Reformation. Can we imagine what it would be like to be him? How would he see the world?
Jón Steingrímsson was born in 1728 on a hardscrabble Icelandic farm. This puts him, more or less, into the same time period as the Founding Fathers of our nation: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the rest. It also places him alongside of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment—David Hume, Francis Bacon, John Locke. Although he was a contemporary of these men, in circumstance he could hardly be further apart.
In the salons of Paris and London, men more “cultured” (and wealthier and certainly more powerful) than Jón were debating ideas that would transform Western civilization. In what would soon become the United States, Benjamin Franklin had already distinguished himself as a leading example of an enlightened thinker. And a young Thomas Paine, still in Britain, was developing the political theories that would soon give birth to his tract ‘Common Sense,’ which would in turn spark the American Revolution.
Rural Iceland, at this time, was reeling from a century of non-stop misfortune: eruptions, smallpox, livestock diseases, famine. The country was poor and isolated, the settlements were small. In the mid-eighteenth century, it was a far cry from the salons of Paris or London.
Still, compared to his neighbors, Jón was literate and well-educated. He was a keen observer of nature, and would employ this gift in a way that would make geologists happy in future centuries, providing them with a first-rate and first-hand account of the deadliest volcanic eruption in recorded history.
Jon’s account of the Laki eruption is one of the best primary sources in volcanology. His record-keeping was meticulous and detailed, and his precise observation of natural phenomena leading up to, during, and after the eruption have given scientists and historians the best information they have about this mysterious event.
And yet, Jón was not a scientist. He was a believer in signs and visions, a man who felt that God spoke to him through dreams, and who believed that he was perceptive of the presence of ghosts. He was not, by any means, a man of reason in the mold of Hume, Franklin, or Paine.
His path to this vocation began in dire poverty and hard work, after his father died young. By the age of nine, Jón had already become adept at working pasturage and running livestock. It was probably not unusual for Icelandic boys to be astute about sheep and horses. But he had more in mind for himself: He was curious about both the natural and the supernatural world, so he left the farm for the diocese school in Hólar, and began to study.
His start at the school was inauspicious. As skilled as the boy may have been with livestock, his interactions with humans were hampered by an awkward stammer. Initially, the teachers were not impressed with the stuttering boy.
But he proved to be determined. He had an interest in both natural science (such as it was in 1745) and theology. He learned Latin and read classical literature. He developed a keen interest in herbal medicine. And he must have possessed something else, something hard to define. A certain aptitude for dealing with difficult people, for caring about and calming others. Because upon his graduation, he was tapped by the Bishop of Hólar for a peculiar task.
Near Hólar, a certain wealthy farmer and former soldier by the name of Jón Vigfússon was known for his explosive temper, excessive drinking, and brutality. Vigfússon also had a wife named Þórunn, and he was known to abuse her. There was a church on this man’s property.
The peculiar task the bishop had chosen was this: The Bishop asked Jón to become the deacon of this church, hoping that Jón’s calm and steady presence might encourage some piety in Vigfússon, and stem the man’s violence toward both his neighbors and his wife.
Although it doesn’t seem to me like the most promising job for a bright young scholar who could have easily left Iceland for the University of Copenhagen, Jón said yes to the Bishop.
The rest is fairly predictable, but no less true. Þórunn Hannesdóttir, the unfortunate wife of Jon Vigfússon, was considered something less than a beauty. She was described as “sway-backed, with a protruding stomach, a receding hairline, and a face scarred by smallpox.” And Jón Steingrímsson fell deeply in love with her.
Adultery would probably have been inevitable, had the hard-drinking Vigfússon not died in his sleep, probably of liver failure. Earnest young Jon wasted no time with the widow Vigfússon, and one year after the irascible farmer’s death, Jon and Þórunn were married. Unfortunately, a daughter was born only a few months after the wedding. The Bishop considered the timing clear evidence of sin, and Jon was removed from his position as deacon. He had to move. The year was 1755.
Also in 1755, a volcanic eruption of Katla, a volcano along Iceland’s southern coast, unleashed what is possibly the earth’s largest flood in historic times. Hardly anyone in America or Europe knew about it or comprehended its scope. Few people lived in the flood’s path. In the same year, an earthquake unleashed a tsunami off the coast of Portugal that devastated Lisbon, killing upwards of 50,000 people. (You’d think this event might make it into the history books, but I don’t remember learning about it in school.)
In North America, Great Britain and France jockeyed for control of the Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley, in what would become known as the French and Indian War. Colonists were expanding into the same region, and within a decade, as a result of the Stamp Act, would begin to chafe under British Rule. The first steam engine in America was installed in a mine. Trains would not be far behind. In the West Indies, Alexander Hamilton was born. And in far-away Iceland, Jón, with his new wife and daughter, made an arduous trek to the south of Iceland (not far from the volcano Katla), nearly freezing to death along the way.
He was not interested in starting a revolution, changing the culture, controlling trade, or questioning his religion. His goal, simply stated, was to have a successful farm with a woman he had seen abused by another man, and now loved as his wife.
***
There is more to say about both the Fire Priest and the eruption of Laki, but first, let me say a thing or two about Icelandic churches. I don’t mean the giant church in the center of Reykjavik, the one on all the postcards, the one with its towering gothic ramparts. No, I mean the small chapels that are scattered across the rural landscape and that are not much different now than they were two hundred years ago.
I will confess that I once was, but no longer am, a religious man. American evangelical Christianity, especially, does not impress me. But I will also confess that on a recent trip to Iceland, something in my soul was stirred by the small chapels that are scattered across the landscape of Iceland. Both the chapels and cemeteries that accompany them. It was almost enough to make me want to find some kind of faith again. Almost.
These chapels are small. They are one-room affairs, built according to a common template. They look, more or less, like a child’s Christmas tree ornament. Many of them would hold no more than 30 people. They are, to me, the perfect antidote to the “mega-churches” of our current culture. They seem to be built, intentionally, in places where they are dwarfed by the landscape.
While it might have been the intention of the architects of Europe’s great cathedrals to give glory to God by raising structures of unparalleled magnificence, it seems to have been the intention of Icelanders to give glory to God by building structures of simplicity and modesty. These lovely buildings speak, to me, more of humility than of dominion. They speak to me of community and care.
These churches were not built by slaves, nor were they commissioned by kings. They were built by free men and women, farmers and shepherds and fishermen, people who lived and died in these rocky valleys. None of them were built out of marble; through the centuries, they decomposed, and then were rebuilt in the same spot over and over and over again. A church that dates back to the year 1200 may be still, in 2017, cleaned and maintained and ready for use.
Most of the churches are built next to farms, as the priests who served here for countless generations have been farmers. After completing the same work in pasture and field and fishing boat as their neighbors, these clergymen would tend to the needs of their neighbors: a baptism, a marriage, a confession, last rites, a burial.
Pews, altars, chalices, and other instruments of worship are well and lovingly crafted. These churches seem hallowed by centuries of prayer paired with communal care and struggle. Inside, the air is still and waiting.
It was into such a church that pastor Jón gathered his flock on July 20, 1783, as the sky darkened and the gray ash fell, and an enormous river of lava threatened to obliterate his church, his farm, his animals, his village, and all the people he called friend and neighbor.
***
Let me now bridge the gap between Jón and Þórunn’s arrival in the south, in 1755, and the famous day of July 20, 1783, when Jón, filled with the Spirit of The Lord, is said to have stopped the lava in its relentless march to the Atlantic Ocean. In a way, it’s a shame to skip over the years lightly. In our telling of history, we focus on dramatic days, fateful moments, while giving short-shrift to day-to-day living. But isn’t daily life the crucible in which lives and loves are shaped?
Nevertheless, here’s the short version: In 1755, Jón and his new wife headed for the remote south, where, over time, they established a prosperous farm. His neighbors saw in him a steady and dependable man. He was a skilled and observant farmer and fisherman. He understood the care of and the habits of livestock. In addition, he put to use what he had learned at school, and broadened his knowledge and experience with medicine. He understood a great deal about plants, and the use of healing herbs. His parishioners came to him not only for good advice, but for physical healing as well; he became the region’s doctor, and over the course of his life, assisted over 2000 patients. Considering that Iceland at the time had fewer than 50,000 residents, it’s clear that people came from near and far.
In time, his natural inclination to be a peacemaker, healer, and leader attracted the attention of his neighbors. It also attracted the attention of the church that initially educated him and placed him in a role of service—and then later removed him from service for the sin of loving his wife too ardently, too soon. Once again, he was persuaded—although he at first was reluctant—to step into a difficult situation for the good of others.
This time, he was conscripted to assist a cantankerous and drunken priest who was in failing health. He was made an “assistant” priest and given one half of the parish. In time, the people in the parishes of the south petitioned the church to make Jón their primary priest. And so, despite his earlier disbarment, he was ordained in 1760.
As well as understanding animals, Jón knew the habits of people—how they bickered, how they sometimes hated and sometimes loved one another. His neighbors looked to him for leadership, and by all accounts he provided it; he performed their weddings, christened and baptized their babies, treated their illnesses, advised them in their trials, and buried them when they died.
Although he liked his neighbors, he was disturbed by what he considered “moral laxity and ingratitude” during times of plenty, and he felt that he had been warned in dreams about an approaching time of hardship. He began to feel uneasy. In 1783, he began to have strange and troubling dreams. And on June 8, the earth split open.
***
Of course, other things of consequence were also happening in 1783. One of the most important things, from an American point of view, happened in Paris, on September 8. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay signed a piece of paper, and the United States of America officially became a nation.
Wait a minute, you might protest. Didn’t that happen on July 4, 1776? Well, no. While July 4 marked the beginning of America’s labor pains (or maybe we could say the start of labor was as early as 1765, with the Stamp Act), it wasn’t until 1783 that the difficult birth of our nation was over. It was not until 1787 that we had a constitution.
It took some time and effort for Americans to get free. (Just as it may take some time and effort to stay free.) The United States declared its independence in 1776, but just saying something doesn’t make it so; a war still needed to be fought. Finally, on September 8, 1783, at the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain relinquished its hold on its former colony, and recognized the United States as an independent nation. And then another struggle began, for the ideals and the identity of the new nation. Would it live up to its own expectations?
At the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the American delegation made note of the malignant air that hung thickly over Paris. If they had known about the reason for the acrid air, they might have reflected on the truth that nature is unconcerned with the ideological conflicts of men. No doubt, there was some discussion about the weather. It had been a disastrous summer, with crop failures, unexplained malignancies, and strangely-colored “fogs” that burned the lungs.
The dignitaries assembled in Paris might have heard rumors about a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland. It is doubtful they had much understanding of how this eruption was affecting the whole world. In fact, the bad air had been killing Europeans all summer long. Before long, it would kill people all over the world.
As a person obsessed with Iceland, I have for a long time been familiar with the eruption of Laki in 1783. What had not occurred to me before writing this essay was the curious juxtaposition of this eruption with the birth of our nation. Is it coincidental? It is the complex way of the world that what may be a year of hope and birth in one nation may be a year of despair and death in another. It is also the complex way of the world that people are never quite as independent as they think they are.
In 1783, The United States of America—manifestly destined, perhaps, to become a superpower in world affairs—celebrated its birth. At the same moment in history, Iceland—neither a new nor a great country in the sense of economic or military might—faced its gravest challenge and most devastating catastrophe.
In both nations, remarkable people rose to the occasion in their country’s time of need. In the smaller nation ravaged by the whims of nature, a man of extraordinary character would be forced to confront a kind of despair most of us will never experience. In his own country, the Fire Priest is revered. But outside of his homeland, he would never achieve the fame of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton.
How do we measure greatness? How do we measure patriotism?
***
To explain the global consequences of Laki in a brief phrase: A large volcanic eruption affects weather. And because of how long it lasted, the volume of gases it put into the air, and the peculiar chemical composition of those gases, the eruption of Laki affected weather to a great and deadly degree. It’s hard to calculate with certainty how many people died, directly and indirectly, from the Laki eruption. If famine is taken into account, certainly, millions—first in Europe, and later in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The year following Laki was known, in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, as the year without a summer. But in Europe, the summer of 1783 began, in fact, with stifling heat. A strangely yellowish miasma slithered with a kind of quiet malice across the continent, starting first in the British Isles and Norway, and spreading inexorably south and east. Sunsets were unnaturally red. The “dry fogs,” as they were known, stung the eyes and burned the nose, throat, and lungs. Crops in the field took on a withered and bleached appearance. These caustic fogs shrouded London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Rome: everywhere. People began to die in unusual numbers. The malady struck the healthy and hale as well as the weak, particularly affecting those who worked in the fields.
John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin breathed this sinister air as they signed, on Sept 8, the treaty that gave them and their fellow patriots a country. The people on the south coast of Iceland had no knowledge of such events, and by September they were just trying really really hard not to die.
Eventually, the foul air even reached Turkey, Cairo, and beyond. Some places that suffered greatly were far from the source of the pollution, and could never have guessed its cause. In Egypt, crops failed and one sixth of the population died of famine. In Japan, tens of thousands starved. In France, social distress caused in part by famine made the country ripe for revolution.
Winter arrived with a vengeance. After catastrophic harvests, Europe was in poor shape to withstand a harsh winter. When it came, the cold was so beyond the range of normal variance that those inclined to see “signs and portents” in the weather had a field day. The predictable panic led to both political strife and religious zealotry. Surely, God must be speaking. But was it a judgment, or was it a test of resolve? No doubt many believed that the end of the world was nigh.
Those with scientific curiosity and some knowledge of world affairs, like Benjamin Franklin, probably understood that a disastrous eruption had occurred in Iceland, and suspected this as a cause both of the noxious vapors and the crazy weather. But they had no understanding, yet, of the precise mechanisms by which such things could happen.
America felt the effects too. It turns out that in some senses, no place is independent. And that all places are vulnerable.
The western hemisphere had been spared the toxic clouds, but still had to endure a harder winter in the New World than any of the colonists had ever experienced. To say that the winter of 83-84 was bitterly cold in the United States would be an understatement. Ice floes choked the Mississippi and actually floated into the Gulf of Mexico. The harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, froze solidly enough to skate on. Can anyone in 2017 imagine this? The next year, a horde of New Englanders—a hardy lot, not easily intimidated by cold—were chastened enough to pick up stakes and migrate to the Ohio Valley.
But no place on earth suffered—and in isolation, with neither comfort nor aid from any outside source—as acutely as Iceland. And in Iceland, the epicenter of the pain was the parish of Jón Steingrímsson.
***
In speaking of the winter, I have jumped ahead of the day on which Jón Steingrímsson earned the name Eldprestur: The Fire Priest. So let me now go back to July 20, 1783.
This is how I imagine it: Jón closed the door. The air was acrid with fumes and fear. And then, filled with the Spirit of The Lord, Jon preached and prayed. Sweat beaded his brow. He prayed for a long time. (After all, where else was there to go, and what else was there to do? It’s not like people could go home for lunch.) This has been immortalized as Eldmessa: The Fire Mass. When the people finally opened the door of the church, they saw that what had been a river of molten rock had hardened into a wall of protection.
It’s the miraculous version of events: How, when the sky darkened and the world seemed about to end, when the air burned the lungs and smelled of sulfur, when streams of lava surrounded the farmers and left them no means of escape, Jón gathered his people into his small church and began to pray for mercy. And mercy was granted!
Only… it wasn’t.
And here is where the story gets interesting. If the story of the Fire Priest was simply the hagiography of an Icelandic Moses, it would not be so compelling. No, the story matters precisely because it is not miraculous.
Jón Steingrímsson could not stop the lava, any more than he could stop the pain that would follow. Deliverance happens all in a rush, but suffering unfolds slowly.
The famous scene at the church was only one small slice of the story, taken from the middle. The eruptions didn’t stop; Laki belched lava and toxic fumes from June to February. Earthquakes rumbled incessantly, plumes of choking smoke darkened the sky, grey ash fell like sleet, and caustic rains burned holes in the leaves of plants. More and more farms succumbed to relentlessly advancing tongues of lava.
After the farmers at the church were spared, they had to continue living, and there was nowhere to escape to. Their pastor had no more influence over the elements than they did. From this point on, it is less a story of a powerful Moses, and more a story of a tired and human and increasingly heartbroken man who, nevertheless, did not let his decency rest. His job was to shepherd his flock.
In carrying out this task, he did not seem to get much help from the Almighty. God, as He or She is sometimes inclined to do, spared the farmers a quick death in order to give them a lingering and gruesome one instead. Having survived the eruption, the unfortunate Icelanders had to endure its aftermath.
Poisonous ash, slick as viscera from the acid rain, coated every plant that an animal or human might consider eating. Flourine in the water killed the fish. There was no escaping the necessity of breath, which burned a person’s lungs on every inhalation. At times, the eruption plume obscured the sun, making mid-day as dark as night.
Weeks turned to months, and the lava that spared the church continued to consume farms, pastures, lives. From June to February, Laki belched sulphuric acid, fluorine, and other noxious gases, leaving the air, water, and plant life poisoned. While the land eventually recovered, people suffered from starvation and flourinosis for several years. These years have been christened Móðuharðindin: The Mist Hardships.
The poison began to take its toll on both animal and human bodies. Sharp pains in the stomach, excruciating muscle contractions, swelling of joints, bleeding gums. Farmers watched their animals gradually die from the fluorine, their bodies sloughing skin and flesh, their bones and cartilage becoming freakishly bendable and malformed, their teeth and tongues falling out of their mouths.
The farmers had to know that their children would be next.
There was no refuge. No place to go. To some degree, the whole island was affected. The only food for a farmer’s livestock and family was what he had put away in the cellar and barn—and since the eruption began on June 8, not much was in the cellar or the barn. All fresh water was probably contaminated.
And then: winter. A long tunnel with no light at its end.
It might be a bit easier to imagine this for people who have traveled the southern coast of Iceland. There are no trees. There is nothing to stop the never-ending wind. And when winter comes, a merciless blankness of white. (Beautiful, yes, but merciless.) And that winter, just as in Europe, New Orleans, and Japan, would be the worst Iceland had experienced in centuries.
To those who have read accounts of the Donner Party, some of the details of that winter might be familiar: After animals died, people ate the hay—moldy and contaminated as it was—intended for their horses. They scoured beaches for fish bones, and boiled them down into thin gruel. Some chose to take their chances on the putrid flesh of their dead horses, salting it as best they could; others preferred starvation to this unbearable fare. Those who ate it doubled over in bizarre contractions that folded them up before they died. People boiled and ate leather from shoes, bridles, and farm implements. Accounts from the time don’t mention cannibalism… but who knows?
Between one fourth and one fifth of the population of Iceland starved. What is surprising is that more did not. It helped that food from the ocean—cod, seals, whales—was still edible. But it was hard to fish in the brutal winter. Along the south coast, in Jón’s parish, which was closest to Laki, certainly more than a fourth of the people died.
The volcano finally decided to rest in February, 1874. But it was a long road back to health, for both the land and its people. All through 1874 and 1875, people continued to starve; homeless and hungry refugees wandered the countryside, looking for mercy.
Those who found Jón, found mercy.
As desperation grew, social order began to disintegrate. Farms were looted and burned; people without farms wandered aimlessly. Jón traveled up and down the district, using his knowledge of herbal cures to do what he could, wherever he could.
Through the winter of 83-84, people kept dying. Jón buried them. He built their caskets.
A strange twist in the story, and one that I find more mysterious and more compelling than the story of the halted lava flow, is this: Out of all the horses in the district, the only horse that remained healthy enough to carry dead bodies was Jón’s own horse, which, though not exactly energetic, somehow didn’t succumb to fluorine poisoning, even though it ate the same contaminated grass.
If God is in this story, He may be in that horse.
Finally, Jón decided to leave his struggling family and people in order to make a difficult trek westward to seek help from the Danish officials in Reykjavik. (Iceland at this time was under the authority of the Danish king.) His appeal was heard, and he was granted a sealed money box with significant funds, to take to the Danish district overseer in the town of Vik, to distribute as the overseer saw fit.
On his way to Vik, while Jón was attending to a sick man, someone broke into the money box and stole just enough money to buy a cow. But the seal to the box was broken, and Jón was now likely to be in big trouble with the Danish overseer.
Traveling alone toward Vik, Jón then came upon a large company of his own parishioners, traveling west in search of livestock. Hungry, weak, and dead broke, his people were hoping to be able to buy animals on credit—an unlikely transaction, given the economic state of the whole island.
The seal to the box was already broken. Knowing that he would be adding bigger trouble to already-present trouble with the Danish overseer, Jón distributed the money anyway. When he arrived in Vik, he was, indeed, in big trouble. Fortunately, his bishop vouched for him before the Danish governor, and Jón was spared serious consequences.
Somewhere in the deep pit of the winter, his beloved wife Þórunn died. Jón wrote, “When I lost my wonderful wife, everything… collapsed around me.” In time, he began to sicken too. After ministering to his neighbors’ needs, he returned home only to lay in the dark and cold, without lighting his lamps. He fell into a deep depression. He badly injured his arm, and could barely dress himself.
Still, he continued to care for others. He gathered the herbs for healing tinctures, he nursed them, bathed putrid sores, splinted limbs, and when his ministrations failed, he built the caskets for them and he buried them. And he kept a record. In typically Icelandic fashion, he recorded and he remembered everything. How many buried. Their names.
I have no idea if, at some point during the long winter of 83-84, the good reverend Jón cursed his God. I have no idea how he understood his faith, or if he was tempted to discard it. I know only this: He kept going.
More than two years after the Eldmessa, and once again in a role reminiscent of Moses, Jón was leading a group of hungry refugees eastward along the coast in search of food. And a second “miracle” occurred: advance scouts of the party came upon 70 adult seals and 150 pups. While it might, to our modern sensibilities, seem awful to club baby seals, it was salvation to the long-suffering men, women, and children who had huddled, two years earlier, in Jón’s church to be delivered from the lava. It was the turning point. Jón held an impromptu service of thanksgiving on the beach, and it was, finally, the beginning of the end of the Móðuharðindin: The Mist Hardships.
And when things finally got better, not the next spring, but the one after that, when the grass grew once again green and fresh and unpolluted, and the sheep no longer had teeth falling out of their mouths, and the human survivors once again found joy and vitality enough to fall in love and get married and have children, he recorded their births and baptisms. Their names.
***
We get to choose our heroes—not only for what they do, but for why.
For two desperate years after the eruption, while the land was poisoned and people died in cold houses, and the most selfish of men raided their neighbors for the slightest scrap of food or a still-living horse or sheep to butcher, Jón was the strong and humane presence that held together the community.
It would have been tempting to just take care of himself and his family. In an unraveling world, in a situation of little hope and apparently limitless suffering, he exhibited a kind of leadership that is all too rare in politicians and corporate tycoons—a kind that grows out of love and is manifested in acts of generosity and sacrifice.
We have our Jón Steingrímssons too; every country does. We can find them and honor them. We may get the dubious privilege to be them. I don’t want this privilege; who does? Americans may not have to endure anything as difficult as the Laki winter of 1783. We haven’t had to yet, although we have had some hard times; in my lifetime, Hurricane Katrina comes to mind—but it was short. The Dust Bowl was longer. I didn’t have to go through either of these. I’m humbled by how little I’ve had to endure; when I let this realization sink fully in, it tempers both pride and self-pity.
We are vulnerable. All of us, whether we are from the most powerful nation in the world, or a small island in the North Atlantic.
Power and toughness are not the same thing.
It is possible to be both gentle and tough. We may be called upon to be both. No amount of hubris or wealth should lead us to believe that we are great enough to resist nature, which surely has something planned for us.
Nature gives us beauty beyond measure, as well as the water, soil, and patterns of weather that sustain us. It gives us life, but it does not necessarily give us mercy. That is something we must provide for each other. Sometime soon, we may have to be self-sufficient enough to take care of ourselves, and generous enough to take care of our neighbors.
And, always, let us hold on to the belief that everyone matters. Every birth, every marriage, every death, breath, kiss, bite of food, drink of clean water, animal companion, friend at the door, lover in the night, flower in the meadow—recorded and remembered, held in the heart with tenderness.