Jón versus the Volcano: Reading an Eighteenth-Century Icelandic Priest’s Account of a Moment of Crisis in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Eldrit sr. Jóns Steingrímssonar. Landsbókasafn Íslands - Háskólabókasafn (Lbs) MS 1552 4to f. 1r.
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has become a global pandemic and brought not only illness and death but also panic and uncertainty. As it has spread societies have had to decide how they will confront this and future moments of crisis. Many are hoarding supplies to prepare themselves for a dystopian future or to price-gouge others concerned about the virus and its consequences. Some are resorting to racism and xenophobia and reacting with suspicion to others in their communities. Some are spreading disinformation and obfuscating to protect political power and to profit. Many are ignoring the guidelines provided by experts on how to protect themselves and their communities. We have seen more endearing and encouraging responses as well: residents singing from balconies as they shelter-in-place, the young visiting the old through windows and doors, and many valuing community over self.
Since reading has always helped me cope with stress and anxiety, this has been my impulse during the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders as the virus continues to spread in San Diego. Among the texts I’ve been reading are the autobiographical writings of the Icelandic priest Jón Steingrímsson (1728-1791) – known as the “eldklerkur” (fire-priest). Jón’s parish (Kirkubæjarklaustur) in southern Iceland suffered greatly when the volcanic fissure Laki erupted between June 1783 and February 1784. Jón lived through a calamitous century. In 1707 a smallpox outbreak wiped out one-fourth of the population. The year before he was born there was an eruption at Öræfajökull which was followed by one at Katla in 1755. Only slightly overshadowed by Laki was a VEI 4 eruption of the infamous Hekla in 1766-68. Leprosy was common throughout the eighteenth century. There were also frequent personal hardships and disappointments for Jón.
Jón’s efforts to protect his community and commitment to recording the Laki calamity and enumerating its consequences continue to be celebrated. It his response to a catastrophic volcanic eruption that is offering me some solace and that I hope can be emulated during this pandemic and by future generations who will confront expected and unexpected moments of crisis – from new pandemics to war, rising seas, a warming climate, economic inequality, and any number of other catastrophes of anthropogenic and natural causes.
The Laki craters (Lakigígar) are part of a volcanic system that has the sub-glacial Grímsvötn as a central volcano. The 1783 eruption, also known as the Skaftáreldar (fires of Skafta), was catastrophic. 42 billion tons of basaltic lava spewed out. 122 megatons of sulfur dioxide and 349 megatons of carbon dioxide spilled into the atmosphere while 15 megatons of hydrogen fluoride and 7 megatons of hydrogen chloride soaked plants and grasses below. Glacial melt from the heat flooded nearby rivers, farms, and villages. The gases belched out of the craters reached altitudes of 15 km and spread across much of the Northern Hemisphere.
The violence of the eruption dismayed Jón and others living below Lakigígar, as his account of the calamity makes clear. It was what followed the eruption that caused the most destruction both in Iceland and across the globe. As Jón’s description records so vividly, the hydrofluoric acid and sulfur dioxide that emerged from the fissure poisoned the soil. The livestock consuming the grass ingested the poisonous compounds and most crops failed. The fluoride poisoning and famine that followed led to the death of approximately 20 to 25% of Iceland’s population. The poisonous haze spread out from Iceland and caused at first an unusually hot summer in Europe before then bringing global temperatures down in the winter of 1783/1784. Crop failures, famine, and increased death rates followed in Europe and possibly as far as North Africa (Egypt specifically) and India. Observers in various countries noticed the haze – caused no doubt by Laki – through the summer of 1783, but few knew the cause. Benjamin Franklin came closest when he speculated that the haze and the subsequent harsh winter was due to an eruption of Mount Hekla.
Formal scientific study of volcanoes was lacking during Jón’s time, but he had plenty of first-hand experience with eruptions. Guðmundur E. Sigvaldson points out that Jón’s writing “includes observations and interpretations which did not become a part of scientific knowledge until much later, some of them not until this century” (Fires of the Earth, 7). After the 1755 eruption of Katla, Jón realizes that past volcanic events are visible in ash layers in soil. Thus, as Jón travels his district to rescue farmers, preserve the valuables of churches, or tend to the sick he notes the evidence of the volcanic history of Iceland and regularly comments on how Laki’s lava will permanently alter the landscape and tell the story of the catastrophe, at least until it too is augmented or covered up by future eruptions.
Jón wrote two accounts of the eruption of Laki and its devastating consequences for his parishioners, the animals living nearby, and the Icelandic landscape. Jón knew that the eruption’s story would be told by rocks, by ash layers, and by lava fields. His descriptions are clearly meant to supplement the observable – and his writings have been used in scientific study of the Laki eruption – but they continue to speak so intimately to readers because of Jón’s openness and skill in storytelling, and because his writings narrate the trauma of the catastrophe. Jón’s texts survive and continue to occupy the imaginations of returning and new readers because they represent one individual’s belief in writing as a gesture of survival.
Jón’s first narrative, Eldritið, is a detailed account of the day to day events associated with the eruption and a description of the progress of the lava flow; it is preserved in his own hand in Reykjavík, Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn (Lbs.) 1552 4to. In his introduction to the translation Guðmundur E. Sigvaldson classifies Jón’s Eldritið as a “scientific classic as well is a literary jewel.” His second telling of the fires of Laki is found in in his autobiography Ævisaga Jóns Steingrímssonar (Lbs. 182 4to), which Jón wrote for the edification of his daughters. According to his own preface, Jón penned Eldritið because he believed the human experience of the eruption would otherwise be forever forgotten: “I thought it would be unfortunate if these memories should be lost and forgotten upon my departure, as have so many other works of God which have, for lack of care, been lost forever” (Fires of the Earth, 14). Despite being preoccupied with the well-being of his parishioners, his family, his animals, and his own survival, Jón thought it vital to rescue the stories of the eruption from oblivion.
Jón’s Eldritið has been useful to volcanologists studying the Laki eruption, and his interest in accuracy and detailed description bestows significant value on the narrative as a report of findings. Yet, it is Jón’s vivid depiction of trauma – to human, animal, and landscape – caused by the eruption and chronicle of human kindness, achievement, selfishness, and failure that lives in Icelandic memory and continues to capture the imaginations of readers.
Near the end of his history of the fires, Jón records that his district had dwindled from 613 residents to 93 through either death or relocation. Livestock and crops were nearly totally obliterated. In late June there was so much “ash, volcanic hairs, rain full of sulphur and saltpetre,” and sand that the “snouts, nostrils and feet of livestock grazing or walking on the grass turned bright yellow and raw” (Fires of the Earth, 41). Cattle and sheep scattered due to fear and many drowned in the rivers and the ocean, succumbed to the fire, or were stolen and slaughtered by “dishonest men” (Fires of the Earth, 74). The poisonous compounds leaked out of the Laki craters caused, as Jón depicts so graphically, the skin to rot off the spines of horses, swelling in their heads, jaws, and joints, rotting insides, and shrinking bones. The sheep and cattle suffered similarly. The meat from these animals was “both foul-smelling and bitter and full of poison, so that many a person died as a result of eating it” (Fires of the Earth, 76). The trout which once teemed in the rivers Geirlandsá and Hörglandsá were choked out by flood diversion. Humans fared little better. Those who had not prepared for “times of pestilence” quickly showed the signs of starvation on their bodies and their gums swelled and cracked. Many suffered irregular heartbeats, dysentery, diarrhea, hair loss, and general sickness and weakness. These illnesses, Jón suspects, were caused by the consumption of contaminated water, meat, and poisoned food supplies as well as the inhalation of toxic air. Jón’s wife of 31 years Þórunn died from these complications and kidney disease in 1784. Jón’s grief, which he relates in detail in his autobiography, was delayed by the needs of community and by legal disputes over the financial aid provided by the Danish government. Jón’s parishioners died in such large numbers in 1784 he often had to bury multiple victims in a single grave (see A Very Present Help in Trouble, 183-184).
Jón also meticulously records the devastation to the Icelandic natural world and to the farms and other properties dotting the landscape. All the water in his district turned tepid and acrid to the taste, plants burned, and the air turned thick and bitter so that most found it difficult to breathe. The valuable angelica root along the canyons was decimated and the meadowlands turned barren and sandy. The once beautiful and fertile area Fljótshverfi is “now laid waste,” which causes Jón tremendous sadness. Churches and farms and all their material wealth, which Jón often calculates for posterity, fall to fire, water, or are abandoned.
As we are witnessing now, moments of crisis often elicit the best and worst traits. Jón documents kindness and generosity to community, but also greed, corruption, and indifference throughout the eruption and its aftermath.
Jón responded to calamity and personal adversity with generosity to community. On one occasion, his munificence landed him in trouble with local government officials. He was tasked with delivering 600 ríksdalir in a money box bearing a governmental seal to the district official in Lýður who was to distribute the funds. As he traveled Jón discovered that corrupt officials had already broken the seal on the box and pilfered some of the funds. After this discovery, Jón felt little guilt in distributing the funds to needy farmers he encountered on his travels. He was received with hostility by the district manager and later fined.
Jón also had some medical training and thus tended to the sick (2,000 patients in seventeen years by his own calculation), usually at no charge. Despite dwindling resources and weakening health, Jón housed patients at his farm or traveled long distances in poor conditions to administer aid. His friend Bjarni Pálsson (later the Physician General of Iceland) generously donated medicines and loaned tools to Jón. The fire-priest was not the only Icelander to act in generosity to others; he interrupts his narrative throughout Eldritið to name others who provided refuge, supplies, and comfort to the destitute.
Others in the Síða district, however, acted in self-interest or failed their community through indifference and incompetence and Jón is not sparing in his criticism of these individuals. He is especially biting towards the greedy who survived the ordeal through hoarding supplies, buying up available healthy livestock, and treating the needy “mercilessly” (Fires of the Earth, 81). When a stimulus finally arrived from the government in Copenhagen (far too late, Jón notes) the monies were both lifesaving and barely met the needs of the effected districts. Those who had healthy livestock to sell were able to set their own prices and decided to exploit the desperation of their fellow humans rather than sell at normal costs. Avarice was of little avail as many of those taking advantage eventually suffered misfortune and death. The money they earned through price-gouging on livestock perhaps could have helped them restore their farms if it weren’t for the fact that the government insisted on collecting rents and debts owed despite the economic crisis resulting from the devastating eruption. All of this, of course, reverberates in our current moment.
As Jón reminds throughout Eldritið, the eruption had a way of exposing the futility of human greed and pettiness, as it did when the valuable Seljalandsaurar flatlands, which had been the subject of litigation and feud between several parties as far back as 1717, were completely obliterated by lava. The greed and abuse Jón witnessed during the Laki fires revealed that the old proverb “Many will be friends in prosperity – until distress comes, and then no longer” was never truer (A Very Present Help in Trouble, 181).
Some failings were the result of arrogance and willful ignorance of reality. The newly constructed Hólmskirkja perished along with its ornaments, books, and the bell from Þykkvabæjarklaustur. Jón relates that many blamed the minister who, though he preserved his own property, failed to remove valuables form the church because he mistakenly assumed the lava would spare it. Jón likens this event to an example of a farmer who, having his fortunes increase recently, was ill-prepared for the encroaching lava and foolishly herded all his sheep on an island that was later consumed by the fires. Jón’s commentary on these examples is short: “Easy-gotten gains are some times just as easily lost” (Fires of the Earth, 38). Food supplies and funds that were donated to support the victims of the catastrophe were mishandled or appropriated. Those in charge of grain surpluses were too slow in providing instructions for rationing the supplies and caused further death in the famine that followed the poisonous ash clouds.
Jón’s writings are at once reflective of their age and yet universally appealing as a record of human trauma amid catastrophe. His writings are at times uplifting when we witness generosity and yet depressing when we observe greed and indifference towards suffering. Some of his writings he never intended for public consumption, but he was convinced of the importance of writing down his experiences and of the power of language to convey them. His description of the fires and autobiography have long helped readers imagine the Laki eruption and life in rural eighteenth-century Icelandic society, but occasionally Jón was painfully aware of the limitations of language to capture a moment. Jón’s description of one experience is worth quoting in full:
On the 2nd of November I held a service at Kálfafell for the people who still remained at Núpstaður and Kálfafellskot. There was a light wind from the north, and so great were the showers of ash and sand which blew down from every ridge, that we could just make out the outlines of the farm and church, even though they stand on high ground, when we arrived on the flats in front of the cowshed (this could be called a day of swirling sands and tribulations). In the evening the wind died down until it was only a gentle sea breeze. The area was one continuous sea of flame from Dalsfjall to the edge of the new lava. I was to stay the night at Kálfafellskot. The fire cast my shadow as if I were walking in bright moonlight. Furthermore, trustworthy men reported there was almost as much light in the Öræfi region, which lay spread out in the opposite direction a good day’s journey away, as the fires reached so high into the air at that time. Here in Síða we set out on a wood-gathering expedition down to the tidal flats, where we had light from this fire to guide us over the difficult patches in the night darkness. But no description can equal the sight (Fires of the Earth, 62-63).
Throughout Eldritið Jón relies on the imaginative power of language to place readers in the shadow of Laki and its ash clouds, but some sights, Jón admits, will be lost forever.
There are and will continue to be numerous narratives from a variety of perspectives describing 2020 and the Coronavirus crisis. What will we look for in writing about the COVID-19 pandemic? What lessons will be taken? What will my son – born in February amidst the growing epidemic – learn about this moment of international crisis? Will this global calamity encourage preparation for future pandemics and crises? Necessity and prudence require that those in the future consult coverage not only detailing the genetic composition of the virus, the testing, the options for treatment but also the obscuring of facts, the corruption, and multiple governmental failures that led to preventable death after the virus began to spread.
I have been reading Jón’s accounts of the Laki eruption more than 200 years since the catastrophe ravaged Iceland and infected much of the globe with a poisonous cloud. If some form of civilization continues for the next 200 years, will future readers have access to narratives of the trauma – in all its forms – of living in the COVID-19 era? Will they be able to learn about the lives lost? Will they read about who protected community, even if that meant simply staying at home, and who exploited their fellow human beings or selfishly put others at risk because of misinformation and ideological motivation? Stories set humanity apart as a species. Jón felt a deep urge to use the power of narrative to allow others to imagine what it was like to live in the shadow of the volcano and its ash clouds in 1783 and 1784. The sense of loss, Jón thought, would have been much greater if the complete story of the eruption had not been preserved. For Jón, writing was an act of survival and an attempt to salvage cultural memory.
Some institutions have created forums for the stories of the COVID-19 crisis. At my former institution Arizona State University, for example, the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies has created a curated archive of stories about the pandemic. The archive, A Journal of the Plague Year, is hosted on the open-source publishing platform Omeka and curated by professors and graduate students. The Washington Post is compiling a collection of narratives about Americans who have died. The archive, Faces of the Dead, records how the victims of the virus lived and what their families and communities have lost with their passing. Users of social media across the globe have also documented life during this pandemic. These kinds of archives, I hope, will continue to be read alongside reports of the mechanics of the virus, investigations into governmental failures, and summaries of the economic and societal consequences. These histories, like Jón’s Eldritið and Ævisaga, will offer future readers a glimpse of what it was like to live through the COVID-19 era and why and how it changed the world.
Further Reading:
Ćirić, Jelena. “New Study Gives Insight into Effects of 1783 Laki Eruption.” Iceland Review. 2019. https://www.icelandreview.com/news/new-study-gives-insight-into-effects-of-1783-laki-eruption/
Jón Steingrímsson. Fires of the Earth: The Laki Eruption: 1783-1784. Trans. Keneva Kunz with an introduction by Guðmundur E. Sigvaldson. Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press and the Nordic Volcanological Institude, 1998.
Jón Steingrímsson. A Very Present Help in Trouble: The Autobiography of the Fire-Priest. Trans. Michael Fell. NY: Peter Lang, 2002.
Klemetti, Erik. “Local and Global Impacts of the 1783-84 Laki Eruption in Iceland.” Wired. 2013. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/local-and-global-impacts-1793-laki-eruption-iceland/
Lord, Victoria M. “The Eruption of Laki: An Icelandic Volcano in 1783.” The Ultimate History Project. https://ultimatehistoryproject.com/the-eruption-of-laki.html
McCallam, David. Volcanoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Essay in Environmental Humanities. Oxford: Publisshed by the Liverpool University Press on Behalf of the Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2019. See chapter 6: “Volcanic Iceland: Conquering Hekla and Surviving Laki,” p. 197-232.
Witze, Alexandra and Jeff Kanipe. Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World. NY: Pegasus Books: 2014.
