When he’d finished Jon said, “Do you think they’ll really fall for that?”

Tyr shrugged. “Would it hurt you to find out?”

Armed with Tyr’s advice, Jón made a secret arrangement with a few of the farmers. He paid them to continue using his sunshine even after the ash clouds dissipated, and to tell their friends how much they loved it. To make sure their sales pitches were effective, Jón hired Snorri Sturluson, a young writer who was just getting started in his career, to pen some convincing lines. Here are a few:

“Nothing outshines Jón Jónsson’s boxed sunshine. It’s even better than the real thing!”

“My crops have never been so healthy, and their yield is through the roof! Why, my vegetables almost look good enough to eat. Ha-ha-ha!”

“The trouble with natural sunshine is that it never seems to fall when you need it to. But with Jón Jónsson’s boxed sunshine, I’ve made nature my slave!”

The campaign worked like a charm, and even after the ash clouds disappeared, the farmers of Egilsstaðir were still clamoring for Jón’s sunlight. They used it even when the sun was shining, convinced that the additional brightness infused their crops with extra nutrients. Whether or not it was true, enough people believed it so that the farmers who used Jón’s sunshine were able to charge a premium for their crops at market, while the reputations of those who didn’t suffered. Their vegetables were eaten only by those who could not afford the more expensive “double-sunshine-fortified” ones.

Demand was so high that Jón began to have supply problems. In exchange for an even higher percentage of Jón’s profits, Tyr gave him a third obsidian box, but now he was harvesting the highlands’ sunshine faster than it would grow back. The places he’d grown accustomed to collecting it from had gone permanently dim, which forced Jón to venture deeper and deeper into the barren wilderness in search of light. He tried to use the increasing difficulty of harvest as a pretense for raising his prices again, but this time the farmers pushed back.

“Why are you going so deep into the highlands to make your harvest?” said Grettir “Blood-Axe” Thorsson, the farmers’ designated negotiator. “If it’s expensive for you to travel so far, why not make your harvest closer to Egilsstaðir? Then you won’t have to raise your prices.”

“Because the highlands are the only place I can go that’re completely uninhabited,” said Jón. “I can’t take sunshine from where people live.”

“Nonsense,” said Blood-Axe. “There’s a valley near Seyðisfjörður that’s uninhabited, or nearly so, and it’s only a half-day’s ride from here.”

“Nearly uninhabited isn’t the same thing as uninhabited,” said Jón. “I don’t want to make enemies over this.”

“You won’t,” Blood-Axe said. “It’s only a couple of families, and if they have complaints, they can come talk to me. They know which side of the toast their halibut paste is smeared on, if you take my meaning.”

Jón didn’t take his meaning, but he gave up arguing regardless. He didn’t want to make those exhausting trips into the highlands any more than the farmers wanted to pay more for their sunlight, and he didn’t really care about the families—he just didn’t want trouble. To make certain there was none, Blood-Axe went along with Jón for the harvest.