A clock? An etymological klukka? A passing wild surmise: Íslands klukkan? A chime? It was not the nearby tower; I know the sound of that carillion. It was not any of the nearby chapels either, and this invisible bell was not always a Sunday sound, though today it was.
At Lund in December, where a monstrous molar of Starkaðr the Old once hung from a klukkustrengr, a great curiousity, I thought again of how inconceivably loud the tolling of churchbells must have been in the medieval mind. In the age long before screeching brakes, internal combustion, and the jet, settlements still clustered within earshot of the church tower, the bell tower, and the clang of the bronze was proof against night trolls. Collections of later legends are full of stories of this or that jøtul who hated the newfangled bells that had been hoisted into the steeple and who had moved house, grumpily, into the higher hills and mountains, further away from the haunts of men.
What bell was this, what manner of being was it meant to drive away, or in whose honor was it ringing? Some newly-dead patriarch? I could think of more than one who might qualify.
Today I solved the mystery. The bell chimes in the rain, often but not regularly, as if it were tolling in time with someone of uneven and hestitant gait. It is, I realize, raindrops driven by the force of the wind against the metal flanges of the gas heater that extends through the wall, venting to the outside:
peng peng peng pang peng
Engin ummæli:
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