Jón Jónsson is a male peculiar with the peculiarity of sunlight manipulation. He is the protagonist of the Tales of the Peculiar story The Man Who Bottled the Sun.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Jón was born into a family of shoemakers. When he was seven, he caught a flu, and this was when his mother discovered his peculiarity. Despite it being amazing, it didn't seem to have a good use, and Jón only sometimes used it in place of lanterns for his family to save money. His parents died when he was a young man.
Tales of the Peculiar[]
After his parents' deaths, Jón became homeless and penniless due to the family owing too much tax, worth more than their entire estate. He traveled from place to place, picking up on whatever work he could. One day, he met a strange man named Tyr, who appeared to have been looking for him to give him something, which turns out to be an obsidian box that is the sole container that can hold sunlight that Jón collects. Jón discovers this after unsuccessfully trying to sell the box, and is ecstatic. He decides to try to convince people to buy his boxed sunlight, but his display goes wrong and the people make him leave.
Jón travels around the countryside working, and when Tyr comes to check on him, Jón tells him the box is useless. However, Tyr tells him not to give up, and leaves. Jón decides to keep the box for a few more days, and hears of farmers in a town called Egilsstaðir that are in need of sunlight due to volcanic ash blocking the sun. Jón makes handsome profits until the volcanic ash clears up. Tyr, however, doesn't want him to stop, and convinces him that with the right advertising, Jón can still sell his sunlight to the farmers and make himself even richer. It works, but Jón has started being forced into overharvesting the light from his usual area. The farmer's negotiator Blood-Axe has Jón harvest from the nearby valley instead, even though there is a number of families living there.
The growing season ends and Jón decides to go on a vacation until his sunlight is needed again. Again, Tyr pops up and gives him a new strategy to keep selling, which Jón thinks is starting to go a bit far. Nevertheless, he goes through with it, and it changes the town as it can now be seen who had money and who didn't. Jón earns hatred from the poor part of the town, appelated "dark-dwellers," who begin protesting. Jón, finding that being the richest man in Iceland is not giving him any happiness, resolves to leave.
Playing on Jón's existing fear that the townspeople are not happy with him and could easily have the motivation to take him prisoner or kill him, Tyr tricks Jón into giving him most of the money Jón has made. Humiliated once he realizes that he'd been had, Jón takes on a fake name and abandons the town, going back to his very first home. With the gold that he has left, he buys back his childhood house and lives there for the rest of his life, earning his living as a shoemaker and never using his peculiarity again. In old age, he is visited one last time by Tyr, but Jón no longer wishes to be rich and tells Tyr that he owes him nothing.
Description[]
Personality[]
In his adulthood, Jón became very bitter after being driven from home due to his family's unpaid taxes and having to make himself a new living out of nothing. Drifting from place to place, he never stayed in one place for long and didn't make friends easily. He believed that he had been wronged, and the slightest provocation easily angered him. He was "as curmudgeonly and disagreeable as an old hermit."
During transactions, he likes to feel he has the upper hand, agreeing to give Tyr five percent of the money made with his obsidian box instead of ten, and wishing he'd demanded just two and a half percent after Tyr hands over the box speedily.
He does have a heart, even if just a small one, as a toddler afraid of the dark, refusing to be consoled, moved him enough so that he gave some of his light to the family for the boy. Jón is also not constantly greedy for more and more money, being contented with the wealth that he has accumulated until he can next honestly sell his sunlight- at least until Tyr arrives to convince him to keep selling even when others shouldn't really need the light. He also has some sense of morality, thinking that Tyr's final tactic for him to constantly sell sunlight is going a bit too far and is able to empathize with the farmers that are too poor to buy light during this tactic and are unable to make their living, due to the fact that Jón himself had once been just as poor. Despite this, Jón always gives in to Tyr and reacted angrily when he was told that to mollify the dark-dwellers, he would have to lower his prices and thus his profits.
From his departure from Egilsstaðir, to old age, Jón has learned his lesson and is very disinterested in being rich. He becomes a free and happy man.
Peculiarity[]
Jón is a light shaper, though his ability is limited to the manipulation of sunlight. He can hold sunlight in his hands, but has to tightly grip it to keep it from escaping. Though he tries to store light in different containers, most are not able to, the light always leaking out. Because of this, his peculiarity wasn't deemed to have a good practical use that didn't tire him from having to hold on to the light. The only container that can hold the light is the black obsidian box given to him by Tyr.
Trivia[]
- The actual town of Egilsstaðir is located in east Iceland, on the banks of Lagarfljót river.
- Jón is one of two peculiars in Tales of the Peculiar to, in the end, give up using their peculiarity, the other being Lavinia.