Halldór Laxness

Halldór Laxness: The Man Who Rewrote Iceland

In 1923 a twenty-one-year-old Icelander knelt in a Benedictine abbey at Clervaux, in Luxembourg, accepted Catholic baptism, and issued himself a new name: Kiljan, for an Irish martyr, and Laxness, for the farm where his grandmother had raised him. Six years later the would-be monk was in Los Angeles, chasing screenwriting work and turning socialist. Thirty-two years after that he collected the Nobel Prize in Literature. The name was the only thing about him that stayed fixed.

The Grandmother's Archive

He was born Halldór Guðjónsson in Reykjavík on 23 April 1902. At three the family moved to the farm at Laxnes, in the parish of Mosfellssveit, and the decisive figure of his childhood turned out to be his grandmother, Guðný Klængsdóttir, who sang him ancient songs and stories from the heathen and Catholic pasts alike. He attended a technical school in Reykjavík in 1915–16 and graduated from the Reykjavík Lyceum in 1918. By seventeen he had published a novel, *Barn náttúrunnar* (Child of Nature, 1919), and left the island for Europe, where he ran headlong into expressionism and the modernist ferment of Germany and France.

Clervaux, and a Cliff Above the Flatland

In 1922 Laxness moved into the Abbaye Saint-Maurice et Saint-Maur at Clervaux and set about teaching himself French, Latin, theology and philosophy. Baptism and confirmation followed in 1923, along with the new name and a spell in prayer groups agitating for the reconversion of the Nordic countries. Devotional books came out of it — *Undir Helgahnúk* (1924), *Kaþólsk viðhorf* (1925) — but so did the novel that ended his apprenticeship. *Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír* (The Great Weaver from Kashmir, 1927) drew from the critic Kristján Albertsson a review that now reads like prophecy: "Finally, finally, a grand novel which towers like a cliff above the flatland of contemporary Icelandic poetry and fiction! Iceland has gained a new literary giant — it is our duty to celebrate the fact with joy!"

Hollywood, Hunger, and the Turn Left

He spent 1927 to 1929 in the United States, lecturing on Iceland and trying, without success, to sell himself to Hollywood as a screenwriter. What he took home instead was a politics. He did not, as he put it, become a socialist in America from studying manuals of socialism but from watching the starving unemployed in the parks. The conversion cost him. In 1929 an article of his attacking America appeared in the Canadian paper *Heimskringla*; he was detained and his passport taken, and it took Upton Sinclair and the American Civil Liberties Union to get the charges dropped. *Alþýðubókin* (The Book of the People, 1929) carried the new creed. In 1930 he went home and began the twenty years of work on which everything else rests.

Twenty Years at Full Power

*Salka Valka* (1931–32) followed a fisher girl through a coastal village; no beauty in it is allowed to exist as ornamentation, the *Evening Standard* noted in 1936, yet the book is "replete from cover to cover with the beauty of its perfection." *Sjálfstætt fólk* (Independent People, 1934–35) put a sheep farmer's ruinous pride at the centre of a national epic and has since been called one of the best books of the twentieth century. The four parts of *Heimsljós* (World Light, 1937–40), built around an Icelandic folk poet, remain many critics' choice as his most important work. *Íslandsklukkan* (Iceland's Bell, 1943–46) is probably the most significant Icelandic novel of its decade, a tale of colonial exploitation and the obdurate will of a suffering people. *Atómstöðin* (The Atom Station, 1948) turned on the American base at Keflavík and a Reykjavík torn from its moorings by an avalanche of foreign gold; it may have earned his books a quiet blacklisting in America.

The Sagas, the Spelling, and the Courtroom

No modern writer worked closer to the Icelandic sagas, and none picked more fights over them. From the late 1930s he wrote in an idiosyncratic spelling of his own, closer to how Icelandic is spoken than standard orthography allows — a layer of his prose that vanishes in translation. He then reissued the sagas themselves in modern spelling, complete with neologisms: *Laxdæla* in 1941, *Hrafnkatla* in 1942, *Brennunjáls saga* and *Alexanders saga* in 1945, *Grettis saga* in 1946. Purists were appalled, and *Hrafnkatla* brought a prosecution for copyright violation; he was acquitted when the law itself was held to offend against freedom of the press. *Gerpla* (1952) was the summit of the argument — an unusually powerful achievement precisely because he refused to transpose the saga into a modern key, keeping a close link to the ancient style.

The Politics He Could Not Quite Escape

Laxness went to the Soviet Union in 1938, sat through the Trial of the Twenty-One, and wrote approvingly of Soviet culture in *Gerska ævintýrið*. He chaired MÍR, the Iceland–USSR cultural society, and took the World Peace Council's literary prize in 1952. The suppression of Hungary in 1956 broke the spell; he never attached himself permanently to any dogma. The Nobel came in 1955, "for his vivid epic power, which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland." Presenting it, Elias Wessén called him an excellent painter of Icelandic scenery and found the source of the work in compassion, while noting that his zeal for social questions sometimes threatened the art. Laxness answered with his grandmother's instruction: never to harm a living creature, and to place the poor, the humble and the meek of this world above all others. In 1957 he toured the world as Iceland's unofficial ambassador; the Sonning Prize followed in 1969.

Why Halldór Is Called a Genius

The claim is fundamentally linguistic. Laxness's gift was for pitch — holding saga syntax, peasant speech, ecclesiastical learning and modernist irony inside a single sentence without the seams showing, and doing it across novels, poems, plays, essays and translations for sixty years. The Nobel committee's phrase, "vivid epic power, which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland," names the feat exactly: not invention from nothing but a live graft of the thirteenth century onto the twentieth. Kristján Albertsson called him a literary giant at twenty-five, and the unbroken run from 1931 to 1951 is the evidence.

The counter-case is real, and part of it was spoken at the prize ceremony, where Wessén said aloud that the political passion sometimes hampered the artistic side of the work. The 1938 book praising the Moscow show trials is not a failure of talent but of judgment, made in person, with the evidence in front of him. His phonetic spelling reform persuaded nobody and died with him. And some of his stature is structural: he was the single channel through which a language of a few hundred thousand speakers reached world literature, which magnifies whoever stands in it. What he was not was a systematic thinker. The genius here is verbal and assimilative — ear, range and stamina — not doctrinal, and he changed doctrines roughly the way other men change addresses.

Gljúfrasteinn

In 1945 he and his second wife, Auður Sveinsdóttir, moved into a newly built house called Gljúfrasteinn near Mosfellsbær; she ran the household, the secretarial work and the business affairs; he wrote there for the rest of his life. He worked into the 1980s, producing memoirs and the ecological essay *Hernaðurinn gegn landinu* (The War Against the Land, 1970). Alzheimer's disease took him at the end; he died in a nursing home on 8 February 1998, aged ninety-five. Gljúfrasteinn is now a state museum, and Reykjavík's literary festival awards a biennial prize in his name. The English-language revival — *Iceland's Bell* (2003), *The Great Weaver from Kashmir* (2008), *Wayward Heroes* (2016), a new *Salka Valka* (2022) — suggests the cliff Albertsson saw is still standing.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1955
• Genres: narrative poetry