Burial Rites

“‘Good Lord,’ he muttered ‘They pick a mouse to tame a cat.’”

As Toti accepts his mission to talk to Agnes, a servant expresses skepticism. Toti’s youth and inexperience are mentioned frequently and cause many issues, but it is his fresh approach that eventually encourages Agnes to open up to him.

“How can I say what it was like to breathe again? I felt newborn. I staggered in the light of the world and took deep gulps of fresh sea air. It was late in the day: the wet mouth of the afternoon was full on my face. My soul blossomed in that brief moment as they led me out of doors. I fell, my skirts in the mud, and I turned my face upwards as if in prayer. I could have wept from the relief of light.”

Agnes has been imprisoned in darkness, abused for months at a time. Although she is still a prisoner, she takes joy in the experience of sunlight and fresh air. She feels as if she is born again, the first sign we see of her gentler nature.

“Lauga had asked Margret whether she thought there would be an outward hint of the evil that drives a person to murder. Evidence of the Devil: a harelip, a snaggletooth, a birthmark; some small outer defect. There must be a warning, some way of knowing, so that honest people could keep their guard.”

As Margret and her daughters prepare for Agnes’s arrival, Lauga seeks comfort in the idea that evil is recognizable. This quote illustrates the way people—and children in particular—distance themselves from the evil humans are capable of. They look for something to set evil apart, when in fact criminals and murderers are as human as anyone else.

“Never be caught staring at someone. They'll think you want something from them.”

This quote is taken from early in Agnes’s time with the Jonsson family, and all parties are still deeply suspicious of each other. Due to her harsh upbringing, Agnes has found it useful to stay invisible as much as possible, and to avoid detection.

“Poverty scrapes these homes down until they all look the same, and they all have in common the absence of things that ought to be there. I might as well have been at one place all my life.”

Agnes is reflecting on the hard life she’s lived, and the way that the many places she has lived all bleed together in the form of their shared poverty. Like many others in Iceland, her life has been defined by lack and deprivation.

“She doesn’t look like a criminal, he thought. Not since she’s had a bath.”

Toti observes Agnes for the first time after she has been washed and dressed by Margret. While it shows his softening attitude towards Agnes, it also raises the question of what a criminal looks like. If a person is clean and well-dressed, it does not mean they are incapable of committing a crime. Conversely, someone who is unwashed and poorly dressed is not more likely to be a criminal. The politics of Icelandic society highlighted here—particularly as they relate to gender and class—are a recurrent theme throughout the novel.

“He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide.”

In an early reminiscence, Agnes thinks back to her life with Natan. While she is clearly nostalgic for the good times, there is also a tinge of menace to the line, as it is clear that Agnes’s and Natan’s relationship was interdependent in an unhealthy way.

“Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own.”

Agnes’s story has been told over and over again. However, that story is always filtered through the judgment of others, and she has never gotten the chance to tell her own story. It is only Toti, and later Margret, who care to hear her actual story.

“I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them.”

Agnes is finally free of her bonds, working as a servant in the Jonsson family fields. Despite her situation and her position as a servant, the simple fact of being outside and in the fresh air after months of confinement gives her the feeling of pure ecstasy.

“To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.”

Agnes is coming into the story prejudged by everyone she meets for the murders she supposedly committed. However, no one she knows is aware of her full story and the context behind her choices.

“If I believed everything everyone had ever told me about my family I’d be a sight more miserable than I am now”

Agnes is discussing her family history, particularly the rumors about her parentage. She’s become used to gossip surrounding her and her family, and views these rumors as a source of amusement more than anything else.

“No doves come from ravens’ eggs”

The subject of predestination comes into focus here, as Margret states that something that comes from a bad beginning could never evolve into something good and beautiful. This sums up people’s early prejudice against Agnes.

“I try to love God, Reverend. I do. But I cannot love these men. I... I hate them.”

Although Toti tries to help Agnes come to terms with her fate, she rages against the system. She considers Blondal and his men to be frauds, and refuses to give them the respect that she gives to God himself. She accepts her fate, but not the men who decree it.

“Death happened, and in the usual way it happens, and yet, not like anything else at all.”

Agnes has experienced plenty of loss in her life and it has made her numb to the horror of death. This is how she begins the story of the most harrowing incident of her life—the death of her foster mother in childbirth—yet she approaches it with a detached eye.

“She is not like me. She knows only the tree of life. She has not seen its twisted roots pawing stones and coffins.”

Although Agnes grows closer to the young, naive Steina, she views her with a detached pity. Having experienced life at its harshest, she sees Steina as hopelessly blind to the realities of life lurking below the surface.

“He had a lot of enemies. But whether those folks were wronged or just jealous is hard to say. Stories have a way of boiling over”

Agnes can now consider her relationship with Natan more objectively. However, she remains unsure about the source of the enmity towards him. She saw him at his best and his worst, and she is keenly aware that stories take on a life of their own and are not always trustworthy.

“And though the snow smothered the valley and the milk froze in the dairy, my soul thawed.”

This quote is taken from the early, idyllic days of Agnes’s relationship with Natan. Although the weather is harsh and endangers their material goods, Agnes is too enthralled by the passion of their relationship to care.

“Those who are not being dragged to their deaths cannot understand how the heart grows hard and sharp, until it is a nest of rocks with only an empty egg in it.”

These are Agnes’s thoughts as she is taken to the rock on which she will be put to death. Burial Rites explores the intimacy of mortality in her inner voice in the last moments of her life, as she is surrounded by people who have become like family to her, but feels more apart from them than ever.