Halldór Laxness

Halldór Kiljan Laxness was born in 1902 in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, but spent his youth in the country. From the age of seventeen on, he travelled and lived abroad, chiefly on the European continent. He was influenced by expressionism and other modern currents in Germany and France. In the mid-twenties he was converted to Catholicism; his spiritual experiences are reflected in several books of an autobiographical nature, chiefly Undir Helgahnúk (Under the Holy Mountain), 1924. In 1927, he published his first important novel, Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmir (The Great Weaver from Kashmir). Laxness's religious period did not last long; during a visit to America he became attracted to socialism. Althydubókin (The Book of the People), 1929, is evidence of a change toward a socialist outlook. In 1930, Laxness settled in Iceland.
Laxness's main achievement consists of three novel cycles written during the thirties, dealing with the people of Iceland. Þú vínviður hreini 1931, and Fuglinn í fjörunni, 1932, (both translated as Salka Valka), tell the story of a poor fisher girl; Sjalfstættfólk (Independent People), 1934-35, treats the fortunes of small farmers, whereas the tetralogy Heimsljós (World Light), 1937-40, has as its hero an Icelandic folk poet. Laxness's later works are frequently historical and influenced by the saga tradition: Islandsklukkan (The Bell of Iceland), 1943-46, Gerpla (The Happy Warriors), 1952, Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed), 1960, and Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing), 1963. Laxness is also the author of the topical and sharply polemical Atómstöðin (The Atom Station), 1948.
Halldór Laxness's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1955 (Translation):
"I was travelling in the south of Sweden a few weeks ago, when I heard the rumour that the choice of the Swedish Academy might possibly fall on me. Alone in my hotel room that night, I naturally began to ask myself what it would mean to a poor wanderer, a writer from one of the most remote islands in the world, to be suddenly singled out by an institution famous for its promotion of culture, and brought here to the platform by its command.
It is not so strange perhaps that my thoughts turned then - as they still do, not least at this solemn moment - to all my friends and relations, to those who had been the companions of my youth and are dead now and buried in oblivion. Even in their lifetime, they were known to few, and today they are remembered by fewer still. All the same they have formed and influenced me and, to this day, their effect on me is greater than that of any of the world's great masters or pioneers could possibly have been. I am thinking of all those wonderful men and women, the people among whom I grew up. My father and mother, but above all, my grandmother, who taught me hundreds of lines of old Icelandic poetry before I ever learned the alphabet.
In my hotel room that night, I thought - as I still do - of the moral principles she instilled in me: never to harm a living creature; throughout my life, to place the poor, the humble, the meek of this world above all others; never to forget those who were slighted or neglected or who had suffered injustice, because it was they who, above all others, deserved our love and respect, in Iceland or anywhere in the world. I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams. Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child.
I recall my friends whose names the world never knew but who, in my youth, and long into my adult life, guided my literary work. Though no writers themselves, they nevertheless possessed infallible literary judgment and were able, better than most of the masters, to open my eyes to what was essential in literature. Many of those gifted men are no longer with us, but they are so vivid in my mind and in my thoughts that, many a time, I would have been hard put to distinguish between which was the expression of my own self and which the voice of my friends within me.
I am thinking, too, of that community of one hundred and fifty thousand men and women who form the book-loving nation that we Icelanders are. From the very first, my countrymen have followed my literary career, now criticizing, now praising my work, but hardly ever letting a single word be buried in indifference. Like a sensitive instrument that records every sound, they have reacted with pleasure or displeasure to every word I have written. It is a great good fortune for an author to be born into a nation so steeped in centuries of poetry and literary tradition.

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity. They live in their immortal creations and are as much a part of Iceland as her landscape. For century upon dark century those nameless men and women sat in their mud huts writing books without so much as asking themselves what their wages would be, what prize or recognition would be theirs. There was no fire in their miserable dwellings at which to warm their stiff fingers as they sat up late at night over their stories. Yet they succeeded in creating not only a literary language which is among the most beautiful and subtlest there is, but a separate literary genre. While their hearts remained warm, they held on to their pens.
As I was sitting in my hotel room in Skåne, I asked myself: what can fame and success give to an author? A measure of material well-being brought about by money? Certainly. But if an Icelandic poet should forget his origin as a man of the people, if he should ever lose his sense of belonging with the humble of the earth, whom my old grandmother taught me to revere, and his duty toward them, then what is the good of fame and prosperity to him?
Your Majesties, ladies and gentlemen - It is a great event in my life that the Swedish Academy should have chosen to link my name with the nameless masters of sagas. The reasons the Academy has given for singling me out in so spectacular a manner will serve as an encouragement to me for the rest of my days, but they will also bring joy to those whose support has been responsible for all that my work may have of value. The distinction you have conferred on me fills me with pride and joy. I thank the Swedish Academy for all this with gratitude and respect. Though it was I who today received the Prize from Your Majesty's hands, nevertheless I feel that it has also been bestowed on my many mentors, the fathers of Iceland's literary tradition."
Prior to the speech, H. Bergstrand, former Rector of the Caroline Institute, addressed Mr. Laxness: "We know that Alfred Nobel regarded life with the eyes of a poet, and that his gaze was fixed on a far-off dreamland. Accordingly, literature should have an idealistic tendency. This is something else than the admission of the lad who later called himself Halldór Kiljan Laxness when he listened to the sayings of the pipe-player. He said that the player's talk hid no deeper meaning than an ordinary landscape or a finely painted picture, and they therefore had the same self-evident charm. ‹From the day I learned to read›, he continued, ‹I have been irritated by stories with a moral, a hidden pointer, in the guise of adventure. I immediately stopped reading or listening as soon as I thought I understood that the purpose of the story was to force on me some kind of wisdom which someone else considered noteworthy, a virtue that someone else found admirable, instead of telling me a story. For a story is still the best thing that one can tell."
I am convinced that the Swedish Academy was of the same opinion when it awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to a modern incarnation of an Icelandic teller of sagas. And no one can deny that his tales move the mind, a prerequisite that Horace demanded for the works of a poet, in the words: "et quocunque volent animum auditoris agunto"
Presentation Speech by E. Wessén, Member of the Swedish Academy at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1955 (Translation):
Iceland is the cradle of narrative art here in the North. This is ultimately due to the peculiar nature and development of the Icelandic community. In Iceland there were no conditions for the rise of the class society elsewhere so characteristic of the Middle Ages, with its sharp contrast between Church and people, between the learned and the peasants. There books were not, as in other lands, the privilege of a few priests versed in Latin. Even in the Middle Ages literacy was far more widespread among the common people in Iceland than in other parts of Europe. This fact created the basic conditions for the writing down in the native tongue of the old vernacular poetry which, in the rest of northern Europe, our country included, was despised and forgotten.
So it came about that the poor little nation on its remote island created world literature, producing prose tales which the other European countries were unable to match for hundreds of years. Snorre and the sagas will always stand out as peaks in the art of historical narrative, as models of style in their perspicuity, clarity, and vigour. The Icelandic saga, very largely anonymous, is the product of a whole nation's literary talent and independent creative power.
In Iceland the saga has always been held in great honour. To the Icelanders themselves it has given consolation and strength during dark centuries of poverty and hardship. To this very day Iceland stands out as the literary nation of the North par excellence, in relation to its population and its resources.
Enormous power is necessary to renew in our time a narrative art which has such traditions. In the book which Halldór Laxness has written about the peasant poet Olafur Ljósvíkíngur, he especially touches on the problems and the mission of poetry, making one of the characters say: "That poem is good which reaches the heart of the people. There is no other criterion". But in order to reach the people's heart, literary skill alone, however great, is not enough; the ability to depict events and exploits is not enough. If literature is to be a "light of the world", it must strive to give a true picture of human life and conditions. That goal runs like a continuous thread through most of what Halldór Laxness has written. And as he has an extraordinarily fine sense of the concrete things of human life and, at the same time, an inexhaustible gift of storytelling, he has come to rank as his people's greatest writer of the present age.

One of the most remarkable testimonies of the conflicts in modern cultural life - not only in Iceland but in the whole of the West - is Laxness's early work, Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmir (The Great Weaver from Kashmir), 1927. Despite a certain youthful immaturity, it carries weight as a contemporary document and as a personal confession. The main character is a young Icelander, a writer with an artistic temperament, who, during a roving life in Europe, experiences to the full the chaotic perplexity following the First World War. Like Hans Alienus at one time, he tries to get his bearings and to find a firm footing in life - but what a difference in situation! Far more than a generation in time separates them. On the one hand, peace, unshakable faith in progress, dreams of beauty; on the other, a shattered, bleeding world, moral laxity, anguish, and impotence. Steinn Ellioi finally throws himself into the arms of the Catholic Church. Since Strindberg, few books in the literature of northern Europe have bared inner conflicts with such uncompromising candour and shown how the individual comes to terms with the forces of the age.
Halldór Laxness did not attain artistic balance until, toward the end of the twenties, he returned to Iceland and found his calling as bard of the Icelandic people. All his important books have Icelandic themes.
He is an excellent painter of Icelandic scenery and settings. Yet this is not what he has conceived as his chief mission. "Compassion is the source of the highest poetry. Compassion with Ásta Sóllilja on earth", he says in one of his best books. Art must be supported by sympathy and love for humanity; otherwise it is worth very little. And a social passion underlies everything Halldór Laxness has written. His personal championship of contemporary social and political questions is always very strong, sometimes so strong that it threatens to hamper the artistic side of his work. His safeguard then is the astringent humour which enables him to see even people he dislikes in a redeeming light, and which also permits him to gaze far down into the labyrinths of the human soul.
Individual people and their destinies always move us most deeply in Halldór Laxness's novels. Against the dark background of poverty, strikes, and strife in the little Icelandic fishing village, the shining, girlish figure of Salka Valka stands out, resolute, capable, and pure of heart.
Even more affecting, perhaps, is the story of Bjartur, the man with the indomitable will for freedom and independence, Geijer's yeoman farmer in an Icelandic setting and, with monumental, epic proportions, the settler, the landnámsman of Iceland's thousand-year-old history. Bjartur remains the same in sickness and misfortune, in poverty and starvation, in raging snowstorms and face to face with the frightening monsters of the moors, and pathetic to the last in his helplessness and his touching love for his foster daughter, Ásta Sóllilja.
The story of the peasant poet Olafur Ljósvíkíngur, Ljós heimsins (The Light of the World), 1937-40, is possibly his greatest work. It is based on the contrast between a miserable environment and the heaven-born dreams of one who is a friend and servant of beauty.

In Islandsklukkan (The Bell of Iceland), 1943-46, Laxness for the first time sets the scene in a bygone age. And he indeed succeeds in giving the atmosphere of the period both of Iceland and of Denmark. Stylistically, it is a masterpiece. But even here it is chiefly individuals and their destinies that one remembers: the wretched tatterdemalion Jón Hreggviosson; "the fair maid" Snaefriour Eydalín; and above all, the learned collector of manuscripts, Arnas Arnaeus, in whom Iceland lives more robustly than in anyone else.
Halldór Laxness has guided literary development back to common and traditional ground. That is his great achievement. He has a vivid and personal style, easy and natural, and one gets a strong impression of how well and how flexibly it serves his ends.
One more thing must be emphasized if Laxness's position is to be properly understood. There was a time when the Icelandic authors chose another Scandinavian language for their art, not merely for economic reasons, but because they despaired of the Icelandic language as an instrument for artistic creation. Halldór Laxness has, in the field of prose, renewed the Icelandic language as an artistic means of expression for a modern content, and by his example he has given the Icelandic writers courage to use their native tongue. Broadly speaking, therein lies his greatest significance, and this is what has given him a strong and very respected position in his own land.