Ice & Fire

Christian X, King of Denmark and Iceland, inspected with interest last fortnight at Copenhagen, the first Year Book of Iceland, published at the Icelandic Capital, Reykjavik, and ably edited by Snaebjorn. Jonsson, blond, curly-haired, strapping, virile, industrious Icelandic clerk and translator to the Danish Ministry of Industries.

Thumbing the slender volume, King Christian may well have reflected with warmth in his heart that he receives as King of Iceland some 60,000 kroner a year ($16,000) from his Icelandic subjects who thus retain their actual freedom while united, through the person of the King, with Denmark, their potent protectress.

Iceland, as extensive as Ohio, as populous as Schenectady, has its own Parliament (Althing),* its own Premier, its own Lutheran Bishop. Fifty flourishing savings banks, universal old age pensions and the University of Reykjavik attest the prosperity of Icelanders who export 58,000,000 kroner worth of fish, horses, sheep, hides, oils, tallow, and expend only 50,000,000 kroner annually on imports.

Modest, the new Year Book admits that "from an architectural point of view Reykjavik naturally falls behind other European capitals," but calls attention to the Icelandic scenery, admired by many a tourist yearly, and lyrically described by Professor Willard Fiske as follow:

"There is no country traveled by man which combines as Iceland does the antagonistic marvels of frost and steam, of ice and fire, of bloom and color, of darkness and light. It is, on the whole, unequaled in all Europe for its gushing fountains of seething water, for its stupendous streams of lava, for its vast volume of milk-white torrents plunging over grim and swarthy rocks, for the varied, weird and fantastic forms of its mountains, for the intense green of its meads and lowlands, and often of its climbing slopes, for the luminous tints of its peaks, for the splendor of its heavens and for the gray, overawing desolation poured out by its volcanoes.

*Its 1,000th anniversary will be celebrated in 1930.