A review by shoba
The Blue Fox by Sjón

4.0

Reverend Baldur Skuggason shots and kills the elusive blue fox and sets off an avalanche. He finds himself trapped in a cave and starts to hallucinate.

“The black one, the shy one, the dancer, and the yelper; they were all the same fox. It could not be otherwise.

‘They're all the same fox, all the same fox. They're all the same fox, all the same fox. They're all the same fox, all the same fox.…’

He repeated the words over and over like a man groping his way out of a nightmare, crying out in his mind.”

Reverend Skuggason’s servant, Halfdan Atlason, visits the herbist, Fridrik Fridjonsson. Atlason was there to pick up the coffin with Fridjonsson’s assistant, Abba, for the Reverend to bury later that day.

And all the while I was wondering why Fridjonsson was not attending Abba’s funeral and why he wrote the note to Reverend Skuggason about dreaming of a blue fox. 

“PS Last night I dreamed of a blue vixen.

She ran along the screes, heading up the valley. She was as fat as butter, with a pelt of prodigious thickness.”

Upon her death, Fridjonsson retrieves the canvas bundle Abba always kept with her. Opening it, he finds two identical packages of 24 wooden tablets. One tablet slides into the other and sentences by Ovid appear in Latin.

“Omnia mutantur- nihil interit. Fridrik laughs scornfully: ‘All things change- nothing perishes’”….and then the phrase “The burden that is well borne becomes light”….Fridjonsson thinks, “Yes, if the two halves of the puzzle were laid together they would form an artfully crafted, highly polished coffin.”

Fridjonsson buries Abba’s body in the copse of rowen trees they planted together, a fitting resting place.

“Abba deserved a different soul mate, fairer earth.”