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Exploring the Land of Halldor Laxness

© Roxanne Nelson

When Icelandic author Halldor Laxness passed away in February, the world lost one of its great literary giants. A prolific writer, Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955. During his long life, he completed more than 60 novels, plays and other works. He is considered Iceland's foremost literary figure of the 20th century, and achieved popularity not only in his homeland but around the world, particularly in Scandinavia and the former Soviet Union and Communist bloc countries.

Iceland has produced a great number of fine writers, and in fact, they have been producing great authors for nearly one thousand years. Considered to be the most literate country on earth, Iceland publishes more books per capita than anyone else. The island has no illiteracy, their educational standards are very high, and overall, books and reading are held in high esteem. A nation of book lovers is bound to birth those who love to write them.

Icelandic literature is the only one of the Old Germanic languages that has preserved pre-Christian myths, heroic poetry, and - in the sagas - broad realistic descriptions of life as it was lived by the individual settlers and their descendants. First discovered by the Irish before 800 AD, Iceland remained uninhabited until immigrants arrived from Norway between 874 to 930. The first Norse settler in Iceland was Ingolfr Arnarson, who settled in Reykjavik in 874. Thanks to an extensive work known as the Landnámabok, written in the 12th century, Icelanders know the names of 400 of the original settlers, their ancestors in Norway, and their descendants. It is possible for an Icelander to trace genealogy back to the days of their nation's beginning.

The skadic poetry - poems written by court poets in the early middle ages - and the sagas have recorded much of Iceland's history, early culture and mythology. Yet even though they were written nearly a millennium ago, Icelanders today can easily read them - in the language in which they were written. Unlike other modern languages, Icelandic remains almost the same in 1998 as it was during the days of the Norse Vikings. This can't be said of English - the language of writers such as Chaucer or even Shakespeare is nearly incomprehensible to modern speakers.

Through his books, Halldor Laxness introduced Iceland to the rest of the world. Even so, the nation remained relatively remote and little visited until World War II, when it became a strategic location for the Allies (much to Iceland's chagrin!). With the increase in commercial airline travel, tourism increased; with the introduction of the Internet, Iceland is now very much part of the "cyberworld."

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