Article Text: LION
Icelandic literature
Icelandic literature represents a long, unbroken tradition hailing back to the
Middle Ages (13th and 14th centuries), when the Icelandic classics were
written. Ever since, Icelandic authors have built on that great cultural
heritage, which consists of Eddic and skaldic poetry as well as the sagas--a body of literature that is the actual beginning of the epic-realistic
convention characterizing Icelandic fiction. This medieval literary heritage,
it is agreed, played a large role in preserving the Icelandic language: the
native of today can still read the classics in the original. Icelandic verse is
notable for its retention of features from the earliest Germanic poetry
known, such as the use of alliteration as a structural device---a technique
that has been obligatory in Icelandic poetry until contemporary times.
Even when the Icelandic economy sank to its lowest ebb, in the 17th and
18th centuries, and despite the removal of most of the original manuscripts
to Denmark, literary life went on with occasional works of classical quality
emerging, both religious and secular, so that continuity was ensured.
Although the Enlightenment period, which began by the end of the 18th
century, heralded better days to come after a long time of absolute rule and
Danish trade monopoly, Icelandic letters made no immediate comeback. It
is true, however, that a foundation was then laid for a number of literary
developments that were to come into their own in the first half of the 19th
century with the advent of romanticism.
When considering trends in Icelandic literature it should be kept in mind
that ideological and artistic schools of thought---like enlightenment,
romanticism, realism, and so on---have never made themselves felt in
Iceland in as unadulterated and dogmatic form as in the European
countries of their origin---and this for a number of reasons. There is, for
one thing, the inevitable time lag: owing to slow communications, new
doctrines had always lost their keenest edge by the time they were
introduced in Iceland. Still more important, socioeconomic realities in
Iceland, namely, subsistence farming that had seen negligible change
since the Middle Ages, had few things in common with the urban cultural
settings of Western Europe, where the respective movements had come
into being in response to specific conditions.
An important precursor of romanticism in Iceland, the poet and scholar
Sveinbjörn Egilsson (1791-1852) researched poetic diction, compiling a
reference work entitled Lexicon poeticum (1860). He also acquainted his
countrymen with the Greek classics through his translations of The
Odyssey (1829-40) and The Iliad (1855). Egilsson prepared the ground for
the linguistic renewal of the romantic period, in part by his analysis of the
Icelandic classics, but also by paying attention to the purest idiom that he
could find among the common people of his own day.
Modern Icelandic literature began with romanticism, a movement that had
such a profound and long-lasting effect on Icelandic letters that traces of it
can be observed even today. It strengthened and deepened the Icelanders'
self-respect by placing emphasis on folk values, nationalism, and Nordic
antiquity, including the Icelandic classics---a cue deriving from the
Heidelberg school of romanticism. As a result, folktales were collected with
great vigor in Iceland, for instance, whereas the aesthetic and
philosophical concerns associated with the Jena branch of romanticism
found fewer adherent.
The first strong representation of romanticism in Iceland came with Fjölnir
(1835-47), a magazine published by four Icelandic students in
Copenhagen. One of them, Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807-45), ranks
indubitably among the greatest poetic geniuses of all time in Iceland. His
techniques were evolved from the lyrical aspect of Eddic versification,
classical European meters, and contemporary models like Heinrich Heine,
out of all of which he created his own unique synthesis. Jónas
Hallgrímsson holds a pivotal position in the development of Icelandic
verse, so much so that poets antedating him appear to belong to the
distant past, whereas his poems still have such freshness that they might
as well have been written yesterday. But Hallgrímsson was not only a
romantic aesthete, for his work is in many respects of a classical cast,
perhaps reminiscent of Goethe, and shows a good deal of social
awareness, which is, in fact, typical for romantic poets in Iceland. They
were on the whole more realistic and more concerned with social issues
than were their European counterparts, who were drawn to philosophical
and religious problems, even to the point of at times retreating from worldly
matters into a shell of conservative resignation.
Hallgrímsson was followed by a large number of late romantic figures in
Iceland: Grímur Thomsen (1820-96), Benedikt S. Gröndal (1826-1907),
Steingrímur Thorsteinsson (1831-1913) and Matthías Jochumsson (18351920), to name a few. Although none of them equaled the near-perfection
that Hallgrímsson had reached in his poetry, they collectively strengthened
the nationalistic-romantic mood and thus gave added momentum to the
stress on national values and Icelandic self-respect---a trend that was of
crucial importance during the struggle for political independence in the 19th
century. Romanticism and the quest for political autonomy are inseparable
strands in Icelandic history, jointly leading to the reestablishment of the
Althing (Parliament) as a consulting body in 1845 and an Icelandic
constitution as well as a legislative function for the Althing in 1874.
If Icelandic poetry took a leap across several centuries with the romantic
verse of Jónas Hallgrímsson, romanticism, in its late phase, also signaled
the return of fiction, a genre that had been in eclipse for several hundred
years. Jón Thoroddsen (1818-68) laid the groundwork with his two novels,
Piltur og stúlka (1850; Eng. tr., Lad and Lass, 1890) and Maður og kona
(1876; Man and Wife), both of them romantic works, yet giving realistic
pictures of everyday life among plain country people in Iceland. As a writer
of fiction, Thoroddsen was indebted to both the native saga tradition and
foreign models---in the latter case especially to Walter Scott.
Realism came to the fore on the Scandinavian literary scene after 1870,
not least because of the inspired writings and lecturing of Danish critic
Georg Brandes. Four Icelandic disciples of his, who had been studying in
Copenhagen, introduced realism to Icelandic readers with the publication
of Verðandi, a magazine they launched in 1882. Three of the original four
became notable literary figures in Iceland. Hannes Hafstein (1861-1922),
influenced by the verse of Holger Drachmann, is best known for his
masculine poems about love and other worldly pleasures, although he later
grew increasingly romantic and nationalistic; he turned to politics and was
appointed the first Icelandic minister when home rule came in 1904.
Two of Hafstein's companions left a much deeper imprint on Icelandic
literature. Gestur Pálsson (1852-91) was the truest Icelandic representative
of realism. Sympathy for the underprivileged runs deep in his stories,
which, as the formula expounded by Brandes demanded, take their subject
matter from the everyday lives of common people in Iceland and are bitter
satirical attacks on the social evils and the power structure of the author's
day.
The fourth member of the group, Einar H. Kvaran, however, was to exert
an even greater and more enduring influence. He began his literary career
by writing fiction of social criticism in the spirit of Georg Brandes, but after
the turn of the century his outlook evolved toward bourgeois liberalism. In
many of his works, Kvaran chose Reykjavík's emerging middle class as his
subject matter, and he may be regarded as the foremost chronicler of that
social stratum in his day. This emphasis aside, Kvaran sympathized with
society's outcasts and the oppressed, and his short stories, which are his
best works, often reveal profound psychological insights. An intellectual of
a philosophical and religious bent, he embraced spiritualism after 1900,
becoming quite influential as a leading proponent of that movement.
Although not included in the Verð andi group, Jón Trausti was the most
creative and most influential of all Icelandic writers of fiction taking their
artistic orientation from realism. Broad in scope and somewhat diffuse at
times, his works often deal with contemporary life in Iceland, whether on
farms or in small fishing villages, but he also wrote historical fiction. As for
writers of verse, realism was intrinsically less appealing than for those
working in fiction, but two major Icelandic poets, nevertheless, owe an
ideological debt to Georg Brandes as well as to socialism: Þorsteinn
Erlingsson and Stephan G. Stephansson.
Shortly after 1890, Icelandic literature had passed another watershed with
the advent of the so-called neoromantic poets, who were primarily
influenced by French symbolism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The foremost of these was Einar Benediktsson, a towering figure who
practically dominated Icelandic verse-making in the first three decades of
the 20th century. A world citizen, he lived for extended periods in England
and elsewhere in Western Europe, and although he wrote long descriptive
poems about foreign scenes and cultural phenomena, he was a deeply
religious mystic, forever struggling with philosophical problems. Many other
Icelandic poets were influenced by French symbolism, among whom were
Guðmundur Guðmundsson (1874-1919), Hulda, pseud. of Unnur
Benediktsdóttir Bjarklind (1881-1946), Sigurjón Friðjónsson (1867-1950),
Sigurður Sigurðsson (1879-1939), and Jónas Guðlaugsson (1887-1916),
although this is most pronounced in the case of Jóhann Sigurjónsson, a
lyrical genius, who is, however, best known as a dramatist writing in
Danish.
Icelandic drama is, incidentally, the least developed genre of the national
literature. There is no reliable evidence that plays were staged in Iceland
until the 18th century, and then at the Latin school (Cathedral School) of
Skálholt in southern Iceland. "Leikfélag Reykjavíkur" (Reykjavik Theater
Company) was founded in 1897, and Icelandic drama, both playwriting and
performances, made a leap forward after the turn of the century, with
realism the dominant influence. The leading dramatists in Iceland at the
time were Kvaran and Indriði Einarsson (1851-1939); the latter wrote
historical plays and family dramas modeled on Henrik Ibsen's. Like
Sigurjónsson, Guðmundur Kamban wrote plays in Danish; Kamban's best
drama works constitute attacks on what the author claims are pathological
aspects of Western culture.
A National Theater was opened in Reykjavík in 1950, and the dramatic arts
are immensely popular in Iceland today. In the last few decades, various
new playwrights have appeared. Drama is, for example, a separate
chapter in the literary career of Halldór Laxness and Jökull Jakobsson is
unsurpassed in Iceland to date in technical mastery of effects for the stage.
Still another noteworthy recent author of plays is Oddur Björnsson, whose
work contains a strong element derived from the theater of the absurd, a
drama movement for which he is Iceland's leading champion.
A socioeconomic transformation got under way in Iceland after 1900: towns
and villages started to grow, attracting people from the countryside. The
ancient agricultural economy gradually gave way to a new order that had
its base in urban centers, a development giving rise to polarities that had
never been experienced in Iceland: an emerging class of domestic
merchants and fishery entrepreneurs on the one hand and a working class
on the other, although the latter was at first impoverished and without
political leverage. World War I saw the origin of the three-party lineup that
has since characterized political life in Iceland: (l) a strong Conservative
Party backed by people with interests in commerce, fisheries, and
manufacturing; (2) a Socialist Labor Party (which split in the 1930s into
Social-Democrats and Radical Socialists); and (3) a moderate, left-ofcenter party supported by farmer and middle-class city dwellers as well as
by the cooperative movement. In 1918 at the end of World War I, Iceland
became an independent state, a constitutional monarchy recognizing the
Danish king as its sovereign and with foreign affairs entrusted to Denmark.
At this point in Icelandic history, three men of letters were of paramount
importance: (l) Stephan G. Stephansson, a poet living in Canada, a
socialist, and a pacifist, but also influenced by atheism and naturalism; (2)
Einar H. Kvaran, originally a realist, but subsequently a bourgeois
humanist with an overriding interest in spiritualism; and (3) Einar
Benediktsson, a symbolist with strong overtones from Nietzschean hero
worship and admiration for human willpower, as well as a religious mystic
and philosopher. Regardless of their vast differences, all three had one
thing in common: an intellectual outlook on the problems of human
existence. Meanwhile, Gunnar Gunnarsson resided in Denmark and was
rapidly gaining European recognition for his fiction on Icelandic subjects,
written in Danish; he was chiefly concerned with probing religious,
philosophical, and ethical questions.
As World War I ended, four authors made their debuts, all young men
whose works initiated a new epoch in Icelandic literature. Stefán frá
Hvítadal (1887-1933) published in 1918 a book of verse: Söngvar
förumannsins (The Songs of the Vagabond); he had lived in Norway and
was influenced by Norwegian poetry. Davíð Stefánsson published Svartar
Fjaðrir (1919: Black Feathers). Both of these poets used lighter, more
lyrical forms than their predecessors. And, departing from the intellectual
outlook of their elders, they celebrated instead untrammeled emotional
response and, above all, worship of life and its pleasures. As for fiction,
Sigurður Nordal attracted attention for his Fornar ástir (1919; Old Loves), a
collection of short stories written in neoromantic and expressionistic style,
including one bordering on a prose poem. And in 1919, too, the first novel
of Halldór Laxness appeared: Barn náttúrunnar (Child of Nature), a
romantic tale of country life imbued with sentimentality and religious
feeling.
New Icelandic literature in the 1920s developed along similar lines. Poetry
was dominated by light lyrical forms, and traditional Icelandic features of
versification, such as alliteration and rhyme, were retained. Romantic life
worship, sentimentality, and self-expression were the order of the day,
qualities well represented by, for instance, Tómas Guðmundsson and
Johannes úr Kötlum as well as by Jóhann Jónsson (1896-1932); the latter
was considered a poetic genius by his generation, but he died young from
tuberculosis.
The novels written immediately after 1920 deal in the main with
psychological, ethical, theological, and philosophical problems. Some of
the authors wrote in an epic-realistic style and based their works on liberal
bourgeois ideology, for example, Einar H. Kvaran and Guðmundur
Kamban. The fiction of others as best described as Heimat Dichtung, as in
the case of Guðmundur G. Hagalín, who took his subjects from the lives of
the farmers and fishermen of his home region in the western fjords. The
most mature novel within the category of bourgeois realism, however, is
Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (1927; The Great Weaver from Kashmir) by
Halldór Laxness, a book also notable for the author's experimentation with
surrealist effects as a narrative technique.
A radical change in the attitude of fiction writers was heralded by the
epoch-making Bréf til Láru (1924; A Letter to Laura) by Þorbergur
Þórðarson. In its wake came a wave of fiction of social criticism, often
colored by socialist ideology, that was to dominate Icelandic fiction of the
1930s. Shortly after 1930, Laxness, an author dwarfing all others in Iceland
since then, joined the new trend, and younger prose writers with socialist
convictions, like Ólafur Jóhann Sigurðdsson, came along to swell the
ranks. Many poets, too, were caught up by the same development, and the
first book of verse strongly suggesting this was Hamar og sigð (1930;
Hammer and Sickle) by Sigurður Einarsson (1898-1967). Other poets of a
socialist stripe soon followed: Jóhannes úr Kötlum, Guðmundur
Böðvarsson, Steinn Steinarr, and Jón úr Vör. This literary preoccupation
with social issues grew in part out of domestic circumstances---economic
depression, stronger labor organizations, and more pronounced class
conflicts---but also from alarms over foreign events such as the rise of
Nazism and fascism in Europe and the drift toward war. The master
ideologue of the radical writers was Kristinn E. Andrésson (1901-74), a
brilliant literary critic and book publisher; in 1937 he organized the book
club Mál og menning (Word and Culture); its magazine, Tímarit Máls og
menningar ( tímarit means "periodical"), was for a long time the chief organ
of leftist-leaning authors in Iceland.
The isolation of Iceland was suddenly terminated in the spring of 1940 with
British occupation of the country, and American troops replaced British
forces a year later. Since that time, the United States has maintained a
presence of some sort in Iceland, whether as service facilities for military
aircraft or military installations. With Allied forces in Iceland and the
German's occupying Denmark, all political contact between the two
countries was severed; in 1940, Iceland took charge of its own foreign
affairs, which up to that time had been controlled by the Danish
government. What is more important, however, the occupation of Iceland
led to a socioeconomic revolution: the final demise of the old agricultural
society. Unemployment was wiped out overnight, and people flocked to
urban centers, with the result that more than half of Iceland's inhabitants
today live in an urban environment, which, if not fully formed, resembles
the city-based societies of Western Europe.
This transformation brought about a corollary development in Icelandic
literature: with the eradication of unemployment and growing general
prosperity, social criticism entered a decline. Authors like Laxness and
Steinarr, among others, abandoned protest for concerns of a more
philosophical and individualistic kind. At the same time, a foreign military
presence acted to strengthen nationalistic sentiment; especially on the part
of leftist writers, who saw that presence and Icelandic involvement in a
foreign military alliance as evidence of moral degradation and political
corruption.
In addition to the general ideological shift from social issues to
psychological, religious, and philosophical concerns, Icelandic poetry
entered a new phase, called the form revolution, in the 1940s. This drastic
change meant, broadly speaking, that the Icelandic verse tradition, with its
obligatory rhyme and alliteration, was replaced by much freer forms. The
poetical language itself underwent a metamorphosis: there was a largescale increase in the use of imagery as well as the introduction of fresh,
often nonlogical associations. Outward-looking narrative poetry gave way
to nondiscursive and concise verse focusing on inner reality, whether the
author's own or the universal personal problems of human life. The
undisputed pioneer of this new verse style was Steinn Steinarr, especially
in his Ljóð (1937; Poems) and in Tíminn og vatnið (1948; Eng. tr., Time and
Water, 1972). His lead was followed by many established poets who had
previously written in traditional form, for instance, Jóhannes úr Kötlum,
Guðmundur Böðvarsson, and Jón úr Vör, as well as by the great majority of
younger poets who appeared after World War II, such as Hannes
Sigfússon and Einar Bragi (1921-), the author of refined lyrical verse and
the founder and editor of Birtingur (1953-68), the chief organ of the
modernists.
Icelandic poetry from the period after World War II falls into three main
categories: works by authors like Davíð Stefánsson and Tómas
Guðmundsson, who more or less adhere to the old Icelandic convention;
modernists; and poets seeking a compromise between tradition and free
form, such as Snorri Hjartarson, Hannes Pétursson and Þorsteinn frá
Hamri. After 1960 outward-looking poetry of social concern began to
reassert itself, and the main direction of Icelandic verse in the last few
years appears to be toward even greater openness and more social
involvement.
In the sphere of fiction, innovative techniques caught on more slowly than
had been the case with poetry. One conceivable reason for this is that the
epic-realistic tradition, the hallmark of Icelandic prose from saga times,
may have been inherently more powerful than even the original Germanic
features of Icelandic verse. It is, however, no doubt of significance that
Halldór Laxness, a towering literary figure in Iceland in the year following
World War II, had written most of his works in that style, as had a number
of other established authors, like Guðmundur G. Hagalín and Ólafur
Jóhann Sigurðdsson. For whatever reason, it was not until after 1950, with
the prose works of Thor Vilhjálmsson, that a totally new way of writing
fiction emerged in Iceland, a technique dispensing with all the conventional
props, including a definite time, setting, and methods of characterization. In
the wake of Vilhjálmsson came such writers as Guðbergur Bergsson
(1932-), whose absurd-realistic novel Tómas Jónsson---metsölubók (1966;
Tómas Jónsson, Best-Seller) was a tour de force, and Svava Jakobsdóttir
(1930-). The latter is best known for her novel entitled Leigjandinn (1969;
The Renter), an absurd-symbolic work about the fate of an individual or a
nation involved with an alien financial power; the book has been
interpreted as a comment on Iceland-United States relations.
Like poetry, Icelandic fiction has in recent years moved toward a higher
degree of realism and increasing concern with social issues. Notable
authors representing this trend are þorgeir þorgeirsson (1933-), a radical
essayist who has published historical fiction, and Vésteinn Lúðvígsson
(1944-). who sees himself as a disciple of the Russian 19th-century
novelists and who has written fiction that is a broad mapping of middleclass society in Reykjavik since World War II.
The publishing of books and newspapers has flourished in Iceland during
the last few decades, so, despite the competition from new media like
movies and television, it is safe to say that the printed word, the lifeblood of
Icelandic culture for centuries, is still holding its own as the principal
cultural feature in Iceland of today.
See: S. Einarsson, History of Icelandic Prose Writers 1800-1940 (1948);
K. E. Andrésson, Íslenzkar nutímabókmenntir 1918-48 (1949);
R. Beck, History of Icelandic Poets 1800-1940 (1950);
S. Einarsson, A History of Icelandic Literature (1957);
S. S. Höskuldsson, Að yrkja á atómöld (1970).
Sveinn Skorri Höskuldsson
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