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From:
Literature Online [admin@proquest.co.uk]
Sent:
Mon 02/02/2009 22:21
To:
MacDonald, Graeme
Cc:
Subject:
Literature Online
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This mail has been sent by Graeme Macdonald.
Found in Literature Online, the home of literature and
criticism. Copyright © 1996-2009 ProQuest LLC. All
Rights Reserved.
http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk.
Article Text:
Laxness, Halldór (1902-)
Icelandic poet, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, was
born in Reykjavik. When he was three years old, his
parents moved to Laxnes, a farm in nearby Mosfellssveit
parish; in addition to his farming, the lather worked
as a road construction foreman. By his own account, in
his autobiographical Í túninu heima (1975; In the
Hayfields of Home), Laxness began to try his hand at
writing as a child. He first left home to study music,
then attended a special secondary school (gymnasium) in
Reykjavik but did not graduate. Instead, he dedicated
himself to writing, publishing his first novel, Barn
Náttúrunnar (1919; Child of Nature), at the age of 17.
Following this, he stayed for a time at the Benedictine
monastery of Saint Maurice de Clervaux in Luxembourg,
where he studied and led a life of religious devotion;
he was received into the Catholic Church in 1923.
Laxness spent the next year at a Jesuit-run school in
England---Champion House in Osterley, Middlesex---and
then alternately in Iceland and on the continent of
Europe, including Sicily, where he worked on Vefarinn
mikli frá Kasmír (1927; The Great Weaver from Kashmir).
A tour de force, this broadly based novel tells of the
struggle of a young man torn between his religious
faith and the pleasures of the world; although he
rejects the latter for his calling, he pays a high
price. The book is clearly influenced by most of the
artistic and cultural currents that placed their mark
on Western Europe in the years after World War I,
although Laxness's writings from this period
specifically bear the imprint of surrealism and
Catholic mysticism and, as for individual figures, the
influence of August Strindberg and Otto Weininger
(1880-1903). The style and narrative technique of
Verfarinn mikli frá Kasmír made a clean break with the
epic-realistic tradition of Icelandic fiction---a
tradition that Laxness, however, was to readopt in the
next phase of his literary career in which he wrote his
broad novels of social criticism. Because Laxness
abandoned the Catholic faith during the writing of this
first major effort of his, Vefarinn signals the end of
the first stage in his development, which might be
described as bourgeois psychological fiction.
In 1927, the year when Vefarinn appeared, Laxness, went
to the United States, where he stayed until 1929. This
experience caused a profound change in his ideological
outlook. He observed glaring social inequities and
turned to socialism, as he claims in the
autobiographical Skáldatími (1963; Poets' Time)---more
because he saw the unemployed poor in parks than from
reading socialist writings. While in the United States,
he, nevertheless, became acquainted with the novel of
social concern through the works of authors like Upton
Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. Laxness's newly adopted
socialist views soon found strong expression in a
collection of essays entitled Alþýðubókin (1929; The
Book of the Plain People). In the next year he
published of his only volume of verse: Kvoeðakver
(1930; A Sheaf of Poems), which evinced more pronounced
surrealist effects than any other book of Icelandic
poetry from this period.
Although Laxness has lived in Iceland since 1930, he
has also traveled extensively, and some of his many
stays in Europe have been of long duration, so that his
works have been written in foreign parts as well as at
home. His permanent residence is at Gljúfrasteinn in
Mosfellssveit, the parish of his youth.
Laxness's fiction dealing with social issues began with
Þú vínviður hreini (1931; You Pure Vine) and its
sequel, Fuglinn í fjörunni (1932; The Bird in the
Shore; Eng. tr. of both, Salka Valka, 1936). The scene
is a small Icelandic fishing village early in this
century, where an awakening labor movement is pitted
against merchants and fishing entrepreneurs. In
Sjálfstoett fólk I-II (1934-35; Eng. tr. Independent
People, 1945), Laxness turned to the life and condition
of Icelandic farmers; the central character is the
peasant Bjartur, who, although forever doomed to be the
slave of prosperous farmers and their commercial
interests, stubbornly views himself aa the most
independent person on earth. The author takes a still
another tack in a subsequent tetralogy comprised of
Ljós heimsins (1937; The Light of the World), Höll
summarlandsins (1938; The Palace of Summer Land), Hús
skáldsins (1939; The Poet's House), and Fegurð
himinsins (1940; The Beauty of the Sky; Eng. tr. of all
four vols., World Light, 1969). Here, the protagonist
is Ólafur Kárason, a hapless folk poet in Iceland,
whose obvious faults do not prevent him from winning
the reader's sympathy.
By 1940, and especially later, Iceland's independence
and its place in the world became a central theme in
Laxness's essays, a theme that also gave rise to a
trilogy of historical novels with a focus on a peasant
living around 1700: an archetypal Icelander locked in a
dubious contest with oppressive authorities and foreign
power. On one level, the work---consisting of
Íslandsklukkan (1943; Iceland's Bell), Hið ljósa man
(1944; The Bright Maiden), and Eldur i Kaupinhafn
(1946; Fire in Copenhagen)---symbolizes the eternal
struggle of the Icelandic nation for its existence in
the past. But it also points to the present and the
future, implying a warning concerning the fate of
Iceland in a world of conflict between large powers,
particularly in the context of foreign military bases.
The facilities made available to the United States
became an overriding issue in Icelandic politics soon
afterwards, and Laxness's Atómstöðin (1948; Eng. tr.
The Atom Station, 1961) assails bourgeois politicians
for having sold out to American interests.
Laxness wrote one more novel that belongs to the
social-issue phase of his career, Gerpla (1952; Eng.
tr., The Happy Warriors, 1958), a satirical work with a
setting in the Middle Ages and deriving from
Fóstbroeðra Saga and Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla,
among other sources. Still the author addresses himself
to contemporary realities: the Cold War and the worship
of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin. The
novel is specifically an attack on blind political
loyalties and on warfare and its atrocities. Imbued
with a pacifist spirit, Gerpla describes the tragic
fate of a poet victimized by his belief in the power
and glory of a worldly ruler.
Although all the major works of fiction written by
Laxness from 1930 to 1952 have a pervasive element of
sharp and alert social criticism, they also contain
various strands that foreshadow his later emphases,
such as folk wisdom molded by Icelandic tradition and
Oriental philosophy akin to the Taoism of Lao-tze, a
school of thought of crucial importance for him.
Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1955, an honor that led to a world tour in 1957 and
1958, at the invitation of the United States, China,
India, and others. In Laxness's writings since that
time, social criticism has yielded to philosophical
concerns and closer focusing on individual problems.
The first such work, Brekkukotsannáll (1957; Eng. tr.,
The Fish Can Sing, 1966), has as its themes the
destructive effect of faked renown and the danger
threatening the artist who serves any interest outside
his creation. On the other hand, the Taoist ideal---to
avoid aggression and to help all---is held up as a
means of salvation.
Paradisarheimt (1960; Eng. tr., Paradise Reclaimed,
1962) traces the experiences of a convert to a new
religion, who moves to another part of the world to
seek the paradise that has been promised him. Unable to
find it there, he returns to his abandoned farm in
Iceland, realizing that the most important human task
is to cultivate the place of one's own origin, a
conclusion recalling Voltaire's Candide, a work Laxness
translated into Icelandic. He has also translated
fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Gunnar Gunnarsson.
In his writings from the last two decades, Laxness has
persistently voiced his skepticism of all systematized
ideologies, glorifying instead undogmatic protagonists--his own mouthpieces, it seems; as a rule, they are
people who have separated themselves from the world by
refusing to participate in the mundane affairs of
ordinary human beings.
Laxness wrote little fiction during the 1960s but
turned to drama instead---a genre he had actually
worked in much earlier, although on a minor scale:
Straumrof (1934; Short Circuit) and Silfurtúnglið
(1954; The Silver Moon). But now the several plays
appeared in a rapid succession: Strompleikurinn (1961;
The Chimney Play), Prjónastofan Sólin (1962; The Sun
Knitting Shop), and Dúfnaveislan (1966; Eng. tr., The
Pigeon Banquet, 1973). His plays are typically humorous
and of satirical intent, showing obvious influences
from Bertolt Brecht and the theater of the absurd. They
have, however, not matched his fiction in popular
appeal.
Collections of essays by Laxness have appeared at a
steady rate throughout his entire career, and he has
been an enthusiastic proponent of intellectual debate
in Iceland. In his later years, he has published
numerous essays within the general sphere of medieval
studies and early Icelandic history. By the late 1960s,
he had resumed his writing of fiction. His recent novel
Kristnihald undir Jökli (1968; Eng. tr., Christianity
at Glacier, 1972) is heavily influenced by Taoism, as
is the documentary novel Innansveitarkronika (1970; A
Parish Chronicle). Guðsgjafarþula (1972; A Rhyme of
God's Gift) has a setting strongly resembling that of
Salka Valka ; the action is, however, seen from a
diametrically opposed vantage point, and the author's
attitude has changed from radical social criticism to
liberalism of a mildly conservative cast.
Halldór Laxness is by far the most famous Icelandic
writer of the 20th century. His creative powers are
unequaled: no other author has dealt so imaginatively
with practically all aspects of human life in Iceland,
and he has at the same time, more than anyone else,
given direction to the self-understanding and the
general outlook of his countrymen of today. He is an
absolute master of style. His adaptability has few
parallels anywhere. Time and again he has shifted his
ideological position in drastic ways, and his entire
career as an author has been a restless search for
whatever it takes to create the ultimate text. But
despite the many facets of his art, all works by
Laxness carry one unchanging signature, namely, the
bantering wit of the true humanist.
See: P. Hallberg, Den store vävaren (1954), and
Skaldens hus (1956); Scandinavica: An International
Journal of Scandinavian Studies (special issue devoted
to the work of Halldár Laxness: supplement [May 1972]:
Sjö erindi um Halldór Laxness (1973);
P. Hallberg, Halldór Laxness (1971), and Halldór
Laxness (1975).
Sveinn Skorri Höskuldsson
View Preface for the Columbia Dictionary of Modern
European Literature
View List of Editors and Contributors for the Columbia
Dictionary of Modern European Literature
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From:
Literature Online [admin@proquest.co.uk]
Sent:
Fri 20/03/2009 12:49
To:
MacDonald, Graeme
Cc:
Subject:
Literature Online
Attachments:
View As Web Page
This mail has been sent by Graeme Macdonald.
Found in Literature Online, the home of literature and
criticism. Copyright © 1996-2009 ProQuest LLC. All
Rights Reserved.
http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk.
Article Text:
The bard of fire and ice
Brad Leithauser . Scandinavian Review . New York:
Autumn 2002. Vol. 90 , Iss. 2;
pg. 15 , 9 pgs
People: Laxness, Halldor Kiljan
Author(s): Brad Leithauser
Document types: Feature
Publication title: Scandinavian Review. New York:
Autumn 2002. Vol. 90, Iss. 2; pg. 15, 9 pgs
Source type: Periodical
ISSN/ISBN: 0098857X
Text Word Count 2642
Abstract (Document Summary)
The life of Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness is examined.
Laxness will long be remembered as one of the greatest
European novelists of the 20th century and the man who
renewed the great narrative art of Iceland.
Full Text (2642
words)
Copyright American Scandinavian Foundation Autumn 2002
[Headnote]
Merely four years after his death, we are celebrating
the 100th anniversary of his birth. Halldor Laxness, a
man apart yet always true to his origins, will long be
remembered as one of the greatest European novelists of
the 20th century and the man who renewed the great
narrative art of Iceland. The following article,
reprinted from The New York Review of Books, March 26,
1998, shortly after Laxness's death, hailed the "End of
an Era."
A STORY AT ONCE HEARTENING AND HAUNTING and voluminousit unfolded for nearly a century-recently reached its
close. It was the tale of the life of the great
Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness. He died on February 8
[1998], in a nursing home outside Reykjavik. He was
ninety-five.
It was, additionally, a story implausible as any fairy
tale. Its origins lay some twenty miles from Reykjavik,
in the valley of Mosfellsdalur, where Laxness grew up.
His name at birth was Halldor Gudjonsson. The pen name
under which he journeyed out into the world (his books
have been translated into more than thirty languages)
was a self-creating, self-embellishing stroke, like
many aspects of this singular, dandified man. He lived
restlessly. His passage through life led him to a
conversion to Catholicism and a sojourn as a
Benedictine acolyte in a monastery in Luxembourg; to
California and
Hollywood in the Twenties, and a friendship with Upton
Sinclair; to Russia in the Thirties, where to his
subsequent shame he embraced Stalinism; to Stockholm as
the Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1955; to Utah in
1957, where he researched a novel about the Mormons; to
India in 1958, as a guest of Prime Minister Nehru.
A few years ago, I picked up a tribute to Laxness in a
used bookstore in Reykjavik. The volume consisted
chiefly of photographs. Here's Laxness under a palm
tree in Uruguay. Laxness in tuxedo, surrounded by five
young women in sailor's caps who might be taken for
contestants in a beauty pageant but who turn out to be
auxiliaries of the Nobel festivities. Laxness eye to
eye with a camel in front of Cheops' tomb. Laxness
conferring with Pope John Paul II. He was a curiouslooking man, with ample nose and ears, slightly offcenter eyes, and a bristly little pushbroom of a
moustache. It's hardly surprising that in photographs
chronicling his accomplishments he has an exultant air.
But he emerges also as self-assured-confident that his
worldly triumphs come fully merited.
To anyone familiar at all with Iceland, Laxness's story
appears more implausible still. Mosfellsdalur is a
rural valley, where deep snows accumulate. I once
visited a new acquaintance out there on a February day,
stepping into a living room whose picture window
radiated a cloudy, indeterminate glow. It was snow,
piled against the glass, all the way up-the drifts must
have been eight feet deep. ("It's nothing," my host
remarked, with characteristic Icelandic disdain for
mere weather. "I'll be able to see out of it again in a
couple of weeks.") And of course the valley would have
been far more remote in the early decades of this
century, when Laxness was a boy. These days, it is
linked to Reykjavik by a paved road; back then, the
trip would have been a sizable pony-trek. Reykjavik
these days is a mini-metropolis, with an opera company
and tapas bars and indoor tennis courts; back then,
your pony would have deposited you in a haphazard
collection of patched-together houses, many hundreds of
miles from the real civilization of Copenhagen, that
royal city whose inhabitants seldom cast an over-theshoulder glance at their gray windswept colony in the
North Atlantic.
In perhaps his most tender and beautiful novel, The
Fish Can Sing, Laxness presents us with a grandmother
who "had learned to recognize the letters of the
alphabet from an old man who scratched them for her on
the ice when she had to watch over sheep during the
winter" and a starveling hero who sleeps cocooned in
copies of the London Times, "which in my young days was
called the greatest newspaper in the world and
sometimes reached Iceland as wrappings for goods from
England." Laxness's books are a persistent tribute to
those whose education was a tenacious victory over
indigence and insularity: a tribute, ultimately, to a
miniscule nation whose glittering literary heritage
stands as a global wonder. Laxness himself was born
into relative comfort-his father was foreman of a roadmaking crew-but there was no earthly reason to suppose
he might eventually go on to the sort of linguistic
prowess he achieved: a command not only of Icelandic
and Old Norse, but also of Danish and English and
French, with a good reading knowledge of German and
Latin besides. His mastery over various languages and
literatures was a task that asked of him more than
brilliance, although he had plenty of that: it required
the driving heart of a titan.
Unmistakably, he was a man apart, something he
established in various ways. There was his precocity
(he published his first novel at seventeen). And his
dapper dress, his lifelong fondness for three-piece
suits, homburgs, bowties, handkerchiefs (all of which
had to be imported, of course). And a painstakingly
finicky-an altogether bizarre-style of speech that for
decades made him the most impersonated and parodied man
in Iceland.
[Photograph]
Of John Chang McCurdy's portrait at the author's summer
home outside Reykjavik, Laxness said he saw himself in
"a genuine Rembrandt reddish brown color."
His peculiarities of speech carried over into English.
I met him on a few occasions, beginning in 1986, when
he was eighty-four. Unfortunately, he was already
revealing signs of the senility that would leave him
unable, in the murky final years of his life, to
recognize anyone. But if Alzheimer's had started to fog
his thinking, he remained a captivating storyteller
even in English (which would have been his third or
fourth language). I've never met anyone anywhere whose
conversational mannerisms made you so aware of his
mouth-of the sheer mechanics of speech. Laxness fussed
and fussed over his words: pursing his lips, baring and
concealing his teeth, rolling his jaw, and all the
while producing queer little hems and haws,
indescribable fluting noises, and the percussive
flurries of a voluntary stutter. There was something
almost sissified about this studied performance-a kind
of mandarin frailty in this endless fretting over
minute qualifications and gradations. And there was in
it something firm and forceful. He was staking an
implicit claim or boast: no one in his presence took
more seriously than he did the business of releasing a
sentence into the air.
A "small" language
Laxness drew strength from his country's literary
traditions, particularly its improbable "Golden Age"
(roughly 1230-1280 AD), when anonymous scribes, toiling
over calfskin, recorded those Sagas that have earned
Iceland a permanent place in world literature. The
Sagas lent credibility to what was, on the face of it,
a pretty shaky enterprise: Laxness's decision, in the
first quarter of this century, to build an
international career based in Modern Icelandic. For
writers of his generation, prevailing wisdom maintained
that any notable literary career should be conducted in
Danish, a Continental tongue that linked its writers to
a vigorous and sophisticated world. Icelandic, by
contrast, was a "small" language, spoken back then by
fewer than 200,000 people, most of them rural and
poverty-stricken.
[Photograph]
Dyrholaey, Iceland's southernmost point, typifies the
isolation and grandeur of a landscape that inspired
Laxness.
[Photograph]
"In a photograph by McCurdy," he said, "you perceive
the mysterious instantaneousness of the universe."
Write in Danish? Laxness would have none of it. Peering
disdainfully at his colonial masters (who, he delighted
in exclaiming, had no literature until the eighteenth
century!), he swore allegiance to a medieval nation and
image: to Iceland as Ultima Thule, island at the rim of
the known world. Laxness's ambition was to become a
major, truly modern Nordic writer-a legitimate heir to
Ibsen and Hamsun and Strindberg-rooted in a Viking
culture.
In the process, he transformed his country's cultural
conception of itself. If his effect on modern Iceland
is something only his countrymen can adequately assess,
the critic Kristjan Karlsson sounds convincing when he
writes: "It would be difficult to guess what our
literary situation now would be like without Laxness
but there is much indication that we would be facing an
irreparable disruption between the old and the new."
And: "He has created a new novelistic literature with
deep roots in the Icelandic tradition at a time when
there was great danger that our literature might become
dissociated from the past." And: "He has deprived us, a
small nation much sinned against by God and men, of the
vice of self-pity."
But Laxness's influence extends beyond his country's
borders-and beyond the expansive terrain he created in
his own books. Those who spend time with his novels
henceforth will read his forebears differently. To see
Laxness making fresh and resourceful use of the old
Saga themes and conventions (the titanic feuds and
brooding grudges; the offhand credulity toward the
supernatural; the abrupt narrative veerings and
dismissals; the terseness and understatement; the
occasional bloodthirstiness and grotesquerie) is to see
new nuances in the great classics-Njal's Saga,
Hrafnkel's Saga, Egil's Saga-of Icelandic literature.
In the last decades of his life, Laxness grew
increasingly troubled, perplexed, and-it seems-annoyed
that he was little known in America. His books, his
travels, his occasional pronouncements continued to
make news and to stir controversy in Scandinavia, in
France, in Germany. But in America, after a big initial
success-his novel Independent People was a Main
Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1946-he
dropped largely out of sight.
His long neglect in this country seems partly a matter
of simple bad luck; partly a result of confusion and
carelessness among agents and translators; partly a
product of Laxness's own ambivalence toward the United
States, whose NATO base on Icelandic soil struck him as
a neocolonialist affront; and partly a question of
differences in national temperament and literary
traditions. Those books which his own books sprang from
and commented upon and at times rebelled against-the
Sagas, Norse folktales, Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun-lay
some distance from American interests. And his dark
sense of humor, rooted in an Icelandic tradition of
deadpan endurance, was (as old American book reviews
make clear) often misunderstood or overlooked.
Or perhaps it's a case of evolving American tastes only
gradually coming around to his work. A year ago,
Vintage paperbacks republished Independent People,
which had long dropped out of print. (An earlier essay
of mine on Laxness was adopted as its introduction.[*])
And somehow this big, slow-- stepping novel about
Icelandic sheep farmers has already marched through
eight printings. Perhaps a new generation of American
readers, reared on Latin American fiction, is
connecting with a novel closer in spirit to the "magic
realism" of Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of
Solitude than to any American novel I can think of.
Fans of Marquez will feel at home, certainly, with
someone like Laxness's Reverend Snorri, about whom it
was "reliably reported that he once threw an ogress on
Holtavord Heath; he felled her with a special crutch-
throw known as the ogress-throw."
A gorgeous prose-pastoral
For thirteen years-from 1985, when I first picked up
one of his books, until Haldor Laxness died a few weeks
ago-there was never a question in my mind about which
living writer meant the most to me. Salka Valka and
World Light, two of his mammoth novels from the
Thirties, are wonderfully spacious creations,
especially admirable for the insight and compassion
they bring to their female characters (a quality for
which Laxness has been justly celebrated). Paradise
Reclaimed, his novel about the Mormons, in which an
Icelandic farmer wanders from Copenhagen to Utah on a
spiritual journey, sustains over three hundred pages
the airiness-the loosened gravity-of true fairy-tale
enchantment. But perhaps better still is The Fish Can
Sing, a gorgeous prose-pastoral about a young orphan's
growing up in turn-of-the-century Reykjavik. Until I
came upon this novel, I'd always thought Willa Cather's
The Lost Lady had the most inviting first sentence of
any novel I knew: "Thirty or forty years ago, in one of
those grey towns along the Burlington Railroad, which
are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there
was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its
hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere." But
the opening of The Fish Can Sing seems to me its equal:
"A wise man once said that next to losing its mother,
there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose
its father." The tone is witty, lyrical, benign. From
the outset, The Fish Can Sing is a book weighted with
mortality-and lightened by a sense of poetic gaiety.
It's the sort of book which does full justice to the
heavy casket in the parlor, yet does not fail to notice
how jubilantly the sun plays on the ceramic dog
standing beside it.
But better than all the rest-a book to beggar praise-is
Independent People. This is a novel that lives up to
its subtitle: An Epic. The landscape it evokes is
gargantuan-storms that overpower the heavens, raging
glacier-- swollen rivers, wind-ripped heaths that
stretch for lifeless miles-upon which Laxness places
characters so outsize they are not lost or diminished
within it. On one level, the domestic struggle at the
book's core is a minor battle of wills between a
stubborn, ignorant man and his dreamy-headed ignorant
daughter; on another, it's a clash of Olympians.
In Independent People Laxness assembled his implacable,
raw landscape with an extraordinary eye for nicety of
construction. The book brims with fine stylistic
touches-understated ironies, delicately inter-woven
motifs, pretty symmetries. With each reading and
rereading (I'm up to seven), I've been struck by some
new felicity. One of these, subtly spun across many
hundreds of pages, involves variations on the question
Is it you? It seems every character in the book, at one
point or another, wonders, "Is it you? "-meaning, Are
you my soul mate, are you the one for me? And the
answer to the question is invariably "No"-until, in the
book's final few pages, a deliverance is achieved even
in the midst of bloody, uncompromising tragedy.
Is it you? is likewise a question the inveterate reader
constantly finds himself or herself asking, in that
ongoing search for a book that will satisfy the hungers
within. It's the question we bring to the shelves of
the library, impatiently taking down one volume after
another, and it's the one we ask as we poke into the
box in the used bookstore: Are you my soul mate, are
you the book for me?
The obituaries tell us that Halldor Laxness, the great
Icelandic writer, died on February 8, 1998, in a
nursing home outside Reykjavik. But the story hardly
ends there. With a writer of such ferocity and mercy,
such pluck and compassion, I have no doubt that in
places far from Reykjavik-in Tokyo or Nairobi or Quito
or Canberra-readers in decades to come will pick up a
Laxness novel, in one of those thirty-plus languages in
which he has appeared, and will ask, Is it you? And the
book will answer, in a voice as idiosyncratic and as
strong as ever, Yes, it's me.
[Photograph]
Laxness "was a curious-looking man, with ample nose and
ears, slightly off-center eyes and [at times] a bristly
pushbroom of a moustache."
[Sidebar]
Unmistakably, he was a man apart, something he
established in various ways
[Sidebar]
Fans of Marquez will feel at home, certainly, with
someone like Laxness's Reverend Snorri
[Sidebar]
Better than all the rest is Independent People ... a
novel that lives up to its subtitle: an Epic
[Author Affiliation]
By Brad Leithauser
[Author Affiliation]
Brad Leithauser is a writer, poet and critic and
frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of
Books. Copyright (c) 1998 NYREV Inc.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited
without permission.
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Fri 20/03/2009 12:47
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MacDonald, Graeme
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This mail has been sent by Graeme Macdonald.
Found in Literature Online, the home of literature and
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http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk.
Article Text:
The bread of life
Scandinavian Review ; New York; Autumn 1998; Halldor
Laxness
Volume: 86
Issue: 2
Start Page: 35-40
ISSN: 0098857X
Subject Terms: Short stories
Abstract:
A short story is presented.
Full Text:
Copyright American Scandinavian Foundation Autumn 1998
My church was Mosfell Church in Mosfellsdale. This
particular church was dismantled in 1888, however,
fourteen years before I was born, because of a new law
that decreed that all small churches, abandoned
churches, oratories, chapels and the like in small
parishes were to be pulled down, and be replaced by
large churches built only for large parishes.
On June 29 of the summer that Mosfell Church was pulled
down, a story appeared in the weekly newspaper The
Century, headlined "Precious Loaf of Bread"; it can be
found by anyone who can be bothered to go to the
library and look up old newspaper files: ...In
Mosfellsdale recently a 20-year-old girl called Gudrun
Jonsdottir was lost on the moors of Mosfell Heath above
the church for three nights after being sent to fetch a
loaf of bread. Gudrun, who works as a maidservant in
the vicarage at Mosfell (although of course the church
no longer has an incumbent, since it has just been
pulled down), was sent to fetch a 6-lb loaf of black
pot-bread that was being baked at a hotspring on church
land to the south of the river; it was the custom to
bake the pastor's bread in the hot sand there. As
usual, the girl had with her a wooden box containing
unbaked rye dough with which to replace the loaf that
had been baked.
There was a thick fog at the time, although the weather
was otherwise bright that spring evening. When the girl
had replaced the loaf with the unbaked dough, and was
on her way back to the vicarage as usual with the baked
loaf in the box, she lost her bearings in the fog,
although she must have made the same journey hundreds
of times before. Instead of going north, as she should
have done, she went due south, and found herself in
unfamiliar surroundings in a marshy depression between
two mountains. She made her way along brooks, always
going upstream, until she reached the vast and desolate
moorlands of Mosfell Heath; the moors belong to the
church, and are used by many parishes for summer
pasturage, but are devoid of human habitation.
For a long time the girl thought she was on the right
way home to the vicarage at Mosfell; there were various
features she half-felt she recognized. But then she
realized that she was going past things she had already
passed-the same boulder, the same bend in the stream,
the same hummock of grass; and with that she began to
grow uneasy. To cut a long story short, she wandered
around all night up on the moors, utterly lost and far
from human habitation.
The old church at Mosfell was being dismantled at the
time, the story in The Century went on. The carpenters
arrived early in the morning and there was a lot going
on; the pastor's wife had already left, and the pastor
himself was preparing to leave, and no one seems to
have noticed that there was no bread. When it was
discovered that there was no girl either, no one
suspected that she might have gone up on to the moors.
At first it was supposed that she had gone to visit
relatives farther down the valley. However, enquiries
revealed that this was not the case. And since the fog
in the mountains did not lift, it became evident that
the girl must have got lost. On the third day a searchparty was sent out to look for the girl. On the morning
of the fourth day the searchers came across her tracks
on a stretch of bare soil high in the moors; and at
around mid-day the girl herself was found asleep on a
heathery hillock near the so-called Henglafells. On a
bare patch of earth nearby she had scratched her
initials with her finger, "G.J"; some say she had also
scratched part of a last will and testament.
The fog was beginning to clear a little at about the
time she was found. Two farmers, neighbors and friends
of the girl, came upon her lying asleep on the hillock;
one of her hands was tightly clasped round the handle
of the bread-box. When the men managed to rouse the
girl from her sleep she did not recognize them; she
jumped to her feet with a scream and took to her heels
as fast she could, still clutching the bread-box. So
confused was she that not only did she think she had
never set eyes on these neighbors and friends of hers
before-she was convinced that they were outlaws and
robbers intent on stealing her bread and killing her.
When they finally caught up with her and got hold of
her she fought like a wildcat, with a strength that was
undiminished by three days and nights in the open. It
should be said here that Gudrun Jonsdottir is reckoned
to be as strong as any man in Mosfellsdale, or even
stronger, and indeed she had both of them down twice
before they finally managed to overpower her up there
on the moors. After that they brought the girl, in
tears, down from Mosfell Heath to Bringur, the first
farm on the edge of the moors. The fog was beginning to
lift by then, but the sky was still hidden.
The girl refused to answer any questions about what had
happened. Nor would she accept anything to eat; she
said she had had plenty of rainwater to drink from
stones on the moor for three days and three nights, and
had no need of anything.
"Do you think that it may have done some good?" I
asked. "Done some good? It didn't do the slightest bit
of good! Obviously the church at Mosfell wasn't so
stupid as to do a deal with me over a lamb. The next
night I promised the church another lamb as well,
without requiring anything in exchange, not even my
life. After that I sort of began to realize that I
might not get back home at all; so how was the blessed
church to know that I had given the lambs.? And if
there was nothing in writing, and I never got back
home, who would then get the wretched creatures? I had
no heir. So on the last night I had the idea of writing
with my finger in a patch of earth, "Mosfell Church
owns the lambs." And underneath I put my initials-'G.J'
After that I climbed on to a little hillock covered
with moss and heather, and I felt very happy, because I
had now given away all my lambs in writing without
expecting anything in return. I was glad that the
church at Mosfell would be getting the blessed lambs,
for it is and always will be my church. And after that
I went to sleep."
I then wanted to know why she had taken to her heels
and fled when the people came and woke her.
"Ach, I was sleeping so soundly," said the woman.
"Never in my life have I slept so well, absolutely dead
to this world and the next, my boy. They weren't doing
me a favor at all by waking me up again." "Was there
any truth in the story that you fought with these two
good friends and neighbors of yours when they found you
at last and wanted to take you home?"
"...I climbed on to a little hillock covered with moss
and heather.... And after that I went to sleep."
(Snorri Sveinn Fridriksson. Reproduced by permission of
Vaka-Helgafell Publishers.)
"I dare say I was a bit strange when I woke up," said
the woman. "I didn't know the poor fellows from Adam.
I've heard it said that I flew at them and knocked them
down. They'll no doubt remember that better than I do,
poor fellows. Where did you get that story anyway, my
lad? Who had been running off at the mouth about these
things in front of the children?"
"And you wouldn't even accept a coffee and a bite from
them? I've heard that too."
"Fiddlesticks!"
"Weren't you terribly hungry by then?"
"You don't have to be eating all the time," said the
woman. "It's a bad habit."
Finally I asked her about the thing that many people
have found strangest of all in this story: why, for all
the time she was lost, had she never taken a piece of
the large loaf of pot-bread she had been clutching
throughout her long wanderings over hill and dale? A
loaf like that, weighing 6 Ibs, would have lasted
someone for a whole week, or even a fortnight or more
if it were carefully rationed.
By the time they reached the edge of the moor the sun
was shining brightly, and the view was clear all the
way out to the sea. The girl now began to recognize the
men who had captured her, and to realize that they were
her neighbors. The girl had not got a dry stitch of
clothing after three days and nights out in the
drenching mist, and she had lost her shoes and
stockings. But the bread she had been sent to fetch was
still intact in its container.
That, then, is the gist of the story carried by The
Century fourteen years before the undersigned was born.
I understand that this story was reprinted in other
newspapers at the time, and that the aforementioned
loaf of bread became famous throughout Iceland and even
farther afield.
The present writer happened to get to know this woman,
Gudrun Jonsdottir, when he lived in Mosfellsdale as a
boy, taking milkchurns to market in Reykjavik and
trying to earn his place in the church choir on
Sundays. Gudrun Jonsdottir was a middle-aged woman by
then.
On one occasion I asked her, "Didn't things seem pretty
black, Gudrun, when it looked as if you would be
spending the rest of your days going round in circles
on Mosfell Heath?"
The woman replied, "Well, isn't that what poor old
pastor Johann was always going on about in his
preaching-that the wicked man wandereth about for bread
all his life? I lost my way in the fog down in the
valley on the Wednesday evening-went south instead of
going north, then turned east instead of going west."
"Hadn't you given up all hope?" I asked.
"The very idea!" said the woman. "The worst I feared
was that I'd not be in time for the evening blessing in
Mosfell Church on the Sunday." "Were you in time?" I
asked.
"No," said the woman. "Nobody was in time, neither the
living nor the dead. You see, the church at Mosfell was
pulled down during the time I was lost."
"Weren't you a little frightened?"
"Why should I have been frightened? There wasn't much
to be afraid of, really. It couldn't get any darker, at
least not at midsummer. I was a little cold the first
night because I was soaking wet. But next day I warmed
up and I laughed at myself for always going round in
circles. That night I thought I might be going mad. But
at sunrise next morning a faint glimmer of light showed
through the fog, though it soon disappeared. So I kept
on going round in circles all that day too. I've never
known such an idiot!"
"What did you think about?" I asked.
"What d'you think such an idiot would be thinking
about?" She was only thinking about what an idiot she
was, and nothing else."
Next question: "Is it true that you made your will in
the fog?" "There wasn't much of a will to make," said
Gudrun Jonsdottir. "I owned three lambs. That was all.
Well, on the first night I vowed to give the Mosfell
Church a lamb if I didn't disgrace myself before God
and men by dying of exposure up on the moors at
midsummer."
The woman was dumbfounded at the absurd notions that
this slip of a boy could think up. She almost became
angry. "One doesn't eat what one has been entrusted
with, child! I should think not, indeed!"
"Did you not care whether you lived or died, just so
long as the bread was saved?" I asked.
"What one has been entrusted with one has been
entrusted with," said the woman.
"But can't one ever be too faithful to one's employer?"
The woman replied, "Can one ever be faithful to anyone
if not to oneself?"
"All the same, weren't you glad to be alive when you
saw the sun again, Gudrun?"
The woman said that of course one was grateful for
being allowed to hang on to one's life; but one was
also grateful for being allowed to be rid of it. "My
great-grandmother had great difficulty in dying," she
said. "In the end they had to put a pot over her head,
as they used to do for people like that in those days"
But when they had found their way again, and reached
the edge of the moor, the fog was gone and there was
the world again with the sunshine and everything.
I asked if it had not all been "amazing"; but I'm
afraid she didn't understand the word. While the fog
had been clearing, she said, she hadn't known where she
was for a long time: what on earth was she doing,
wandering about with these two fellows? Then suddenly
the world was lit up. The fog was gone. The first thing
the girl recognized was the sky. Then she saw the sea
away in the distance, and knew what it was. Then she
saw Mosfellsdale, her home district, stretching out
before her below the moors, as always. And finally she
recognized the faces of the two fellows with her. "And
the next thing I knew," said the woman, "I was
beginning to want some coffee."
The undersigned has often thought about that bread
since then: the sort of bread that many a man would
want to have. "What became of the bread?" I asked.
"Oh, I can't remember, really," said Gudrun Jonsdottir,
the maidservant from the vicarage who was now an old
woman with faded cheeks. "I suppose it was fed to the
pack-horses. They were standing in the yard, hungry and
restless, waiting to be loaded with the timbers from
Mosfell Church."
Halldor Laxness (1902-1998) won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1955 for his novel, Independent People
(reissued by Vantage Press, 1997) During his long
lifetime he authored more than 60 novels, plays, and
other literary works. This story first appeared in
Innansveitarkronika (A Country Chronicle, VakaHelgafell hf, 1970). Reprinted by permission of the
publisher from the 1987 English translation by Sir
Magnus Magnusson, a television broadcaster, writer and
translator long resident in Great Britain.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited
without permission.