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of his fate. Laxness’s description captures, yet again, the poet’s fundamental innocence and unworldliness, not to mention his susceptibility to beauty: “She was wearing a light coat, bareheaded, with quite a large suitcase by her side. What attracted his attention before anything else was the youthful freshness of her skin, the unbelievable wholesomeness of her coloring; yet she was closer to being pale than ruddy. Although something in the skin was related to the creaminess of summer growth, she was nonetheless closer to the plants, especially those which bear so tender a flower that the lightest touch leaves a mark. To protect her, Nature had covered her with a sort of magic helmet of invisibility . . .” (564). Making her acquaintance, Ólafur insists that her name is Bera, though she denies it.
    Ólafur’s spiritual longing has become tyrannical in him. Nothing will sway him from the conviction that this girl is his destiny. What is remarkable is that she seems willing enough to accept the intensity of his attentions:
    “Don’t you think it funny that we should be alone here in a strange place?” he asked.
    “No,” she replied. “What about you?”
    “In reality we have never existed until this moment,” he said.
    “I don’t understand you,” she said.
    “You and I were somewhere else before, certainly; but not We,” he said. “Nor the place, either. Today the world was born.”
    “Now you’re trying to frighten me again,” she said, but looked at him and smiled a little, so that he would not think she was angry (574).
    Their shipboard relationship, erotically charged but Platonic—if this is not a contradiction—is magical. Knowing that they must soon part, Ólafur nonetheless draws closer and closer to what feels to him like the purpose of his life. Meeting the girl on the deck one night, he realizes: “With one glance the eyes of beauty, wiser than all books, could wipe away all the anxiety, guilt and remorse of a whole lifetime. She had come to see him in the secrecy of this night to rehabilitate him, to give him the right to live a new life where beauty would reign alone” (583).
    But of course a love like this cannot survive. The two part, as they must. And when he returns to Bervík, heartsick with longing, Ólafur tries to resume his old life as best he can. He is consumed by longing for his Bera. Then one day he hears from his old messenger friend, Reimar, now a traveling postman, that his beloved is dead. He refuses the information: It cannot be.
    The last two chapters of the book take us out of the known world, the world that has caused Ólafur so much confusion and suffering, and in two great lurches lifts us free. Chapter 24 presents without commentary a fourteen-line poem, Ólafur’s deep response to the news he has received. Denying the ultimate reality of death, he writes:
    And though the hands that freed me now are dust
And death’s cold handshake holds them in its grip,
    It doesn’t harm my song; my memory of thee
Has taken root forever in my mind,
Of tenderness and love and mercy kind,
Just as you were when first you came to me;
(595)
    Typical romantic sentiments, one might say, expressions of the common conceit that love is deathless and memory prevails over the eroding action of circumstance. But the short final chapter brings together the poet’s artistic faith and his deepest resolve, the resolve which turns sentiment into the most profound resolution. Ólafur, having followed the peculiarly twisting path of his fate, can now set forth to embrace his death. He sets off on an undefined journey across the great glacier that has loomed over his home; in a short while he has left the familiar coordinates of the old world behind:
    “Over the ocean, black clouds started gathering. He continued on, onto the glacier, towards the dawn, from ridge to ridge, in deep, new-fallen snow, paying no heed to the storms that might pursue him. As a child he had stood by the seashore at