Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, Halldór Laxness remains unknown in Iceland. Yet he is considered Iceland's greatest modern writer.
Today, throughout Europe, to speak of the soul, let alone the soul of a nation, makes you sound old-fashioned or, worse still, fascist. And with good reason: soul and nation are terms that have had their day, and from which many of the evils of the 20th century have arisen.th century. There is one people in Europe who, at a time when the continent was going down in flames, raised to great heights the author who is today considered to have embodied and presented the grandiose soul of a tiny people. It's because this nation has had such difficulty reviving after the dark centuries of its past. It was necessary to restore its honor and dignity, and show the world that the Icelandic soul was also great.
While the island's autonomy had been slowly acquired since the very end of the 18th centuryth In 1904, Iceland was granted parliamentary rule, but still not independence from Denmark. In 1902, on a farm north of Reykjavik, Halldór Laxness, or just Halldór in Icelandic style, was born.
Back to our roots
Halldór was born at a time of profound upheaval for his country. Modernity was slowly taking hold and society was evolving. A man of passions and perpetual movement, he traveled the world, embracing the ideas of his contemporaries with enthusiasm, only to abandon them with a bang. He turned back to his homeland, where, almost naturally, he was destined to end up. In one of the letters he wrote to his fiancée while in the USA, he explained: «I have had many enriching adventures here, which have taught me to judge my own worth by my nationality. I'm an Icelander, the complete Icelander, that's what I've been able to learn over the last few months.» From then on, he rediscovered what would be his true inspirations and what would give him his stature for posterity: the almost thousand-year-old heritage of Icelandic literature.
One of his novels, Independent people (1934) would take him to the top, which he would not reach until shortly afterwards, with his masterpiece, The Icelandic Bell, published between 1943 and 1946. The first, in the style of family sagas, tells the story of Bjartur's struggle to become and remain independent at the beginning of the twentieth century.th century, as his country underwent profound changes. The second novel depicts life in Iceland during its dark centuries, particularly the 18th century.th, The story is told by three characters: Jón Hreggvidsson, the poor peasant turned brigand, the beautiful and noble Snaefrid Sun of Iceland, and the scholar Arnas Arnaeus, who is trying to save the treasures of Icelandic literature. Halldór has made these characters the bearers of the Icelandic soul, and thus of the entire ancient North.
The soul of Iceland
The question raised by Laxness is a simple one: how can one be Icelandic if not by always striving to be independent? In reality, this is the only way to live for his characters, who evolve in a miserable nation that foreigners and sometimes its elites scorn. Wasn't it said that the gates of hell lay in Iceland, at the foot of the Snæfell volcano? In Iceland, Jón has to fight against the whole world: the Danes, their king and his merchants, who refuse the Icelanders even hemp ropes. The ropes become the dramatic and ironic symbol of Jon's domination, when, after stealing one, he is condemned to death.
Everything is stacked against Jón and Bjartur. You have to fight to exist. Jón fights for his freedom and a rope; Bjartur for his material independence and his sheep. The two peasants, but also Arnas Arnaeus, embody the opposition to this succession of misfortunes. Bjartur wages «his world war» against nature, the rain, the cold, the local authorities who always want to take pity on him, and the worms that decimate his sheep. These characters are the heirs of the Vikingz will to live; that formidable dynamism that drives these men because, deep down, they know their value as a people. Jón is tortured, beaten, locked up, denied by all the powerful people. But in The Icelandic Bell, He's the only one to triumph and impose his presence from the beginning to the end of the story, while the governor and king die.
Bjartur also fights against fate and superstition. He's obviously heard that the land he's bought is cursed, but doesn't want to pay any attention to it. To believe in superstition is to lose his independence. He renames the place Sumarhus, the house of summer, and refuses to let anything but his destiny as an independent man be imposed on him. He believes in only one thing: his sheep. Bjartur pampers them and cares only for them. When the clouds appear on the horizon, they're the ones he thinks of, even if it means leaving his wife or family alone to face the dangers.
The fight against oblivion
Iceland's soul would be incomplete without its treasure, preserved for centuries: its literature. The Icelandic Bell and, to a lesser extent, Independent people refer to it as a rock to hold on to in the hardest of times. When the misery of the Icelandic people, in The Icelandic Bell, The only thing left to be proud of is their literature, the sole mark of their glory. Jón and Bjartur draw their pride and vitality from the sagas of their heroes. But the treasure is lost as poverty strikes the island. The ancient texts are torn to shreds, and the scraps of parchment and cloth on which they were held are more often found in the stuffing of mattresses or comforters. This is the story of Arnas Arnaeus's fight against oblivion, inspired by Arni Magnússon the manuscript collector, all over the island and in Copenhagen, where he lives. Arnas Arnaeus is the embodiment of the knowledge and memory of a glorious past Iceland. In another way, the scholar says no to the domination and misery of his people. He spends his entire fortune to buy back and preserve the books of ancient times. Seemingly defeated in the end, he nonetheless preserves the soul of the North in his manuscripts, and triumphs through Jón the brigand, whose honor he has upheld, and thus that of his country.
Literature is also an everyday experience. Halldór shows us, without romanticism, a people who compose poems in the fields, and who have known splendid or scabrous poems by heart for generations. Even the lousy brigand Jon, a caustic and proud character, knows all the Rímur of Pontus the Elder, which he tells to himself and backs up with verse. Bjartur doesn't like new poetry, having learned the old, obscure poems. In fact, he composes them in his head, in the middle of the harvest, and recites them to his friends or keeps them to himself when he's working in the meadows. It may sound like an ideal of the society Halldór describes, but this everyday poetry was a reality in Iceland.
Northern lights
Nature is of course omnipresent in Iceland, and thus in Halldór's stories. The magical light of the North, the deserted moors and blue mountains are the focus of all his stories. He magnifies the vision of the ancient Nordics, still present today in Scandinavia, who see no sense in separating the landscape from its inhabitants. Nature is their rhythm, imposing, giving and taking. They live with her all the time, singing her songs and cursing her when the rain soaks the sheep's hay. While those who sing of life in nature, of its benefits to man, are mocked. In Independent people, Halldór presents the Beadle's wife in this way. She becomes a caricature of the city woman, assuring the peasants that nature is wonderful and that the people who live there should be happy. The fiery romantic tirades about the beauty of nature become ridiculous in the face of these peasants who put the interests of their sheep above all else. It's a theme that's still very relevant today.
These works mark a revival of the great tradition of Icelandic storytelling, which Halldór marked in Icelandic literature since the time of the sagas. The dialogues are astonishingly lively, no matter in what register they evolve: airy, noble and subtle in Snæfried, or harsh, pragmatic, even vulgar in Bjartur and Jón. Whatever the characters« message, the dialogues are always parodic, as when Bjartur and the guests at his wedding talk about the worms that infest sheep in spring and discuss the best remedy like scientists. »Variety of tones, turns of phrase, genres and modes of writing", as Régis Boyer sums it up.
A country and its writer
Halldór Laxness's work, though historically situated, does not require encyclopedic knowledge to sympathize with such a people. International recognition, despite the Nobel Prize he received in 1955, has been a long time coming; even so, Halldór Laxness remains an unknown in our own country. But the most important thing for him was Iceland, for which he had dedicated his work. In the port of Reykjavik, from the boat that brought him back after his Nobel Prize, Halldór gave this speech: «And I want to thank the Icelandic people by once again making a very short quotation to which I have already had occasion to refer. It's about a poet who sent a poem to his beloved. When she thanked him, he replied: ‘Don't thank me, you gave me all the poems. This reality is irreducible, even if this distinction, which I did not expect, was granted to me by an eminent foreign foundation, I want to thank my people, to thank the Icelandic people here, on this hopeful autumn morning, and I want to wish them success for the times to come.‘
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