In the first week that I took over as editor of Iceland Review, the founding editor died at the age of 90. Not only was Heimir Hannesson the editor and co-publisher of this magazine from 1963 to 1975, he was also one of the first great believers in Iceland’s unique role in the world. He believed that his home, Iceland, a place I also call home, offered something special and worth sharing. This inspired me to look back at where this magazine began and what the original vision was–and maybe, just maybe, a way to pick up his torch and find our way forward in this new era.

I mean just look at the cover of the first edition in August/September 1963:

Not bad, right? Hand painted, expressive, and very, you know, real.

It wasn’t until I started going through our back catalogue and reading these old issues that I understood the responsibility I’ve undertaken. Iceland Review is the longest running English-language publication in Iceland and now, just as then, Iceland has something to offer.

I will be curating articles from our archive twice a week to give you, our readers, a chance to reflect on the past and see how it informs our present.

Enjoy and let me know what you think by emailing me at york@icelandreview.is

A Bird’s-Eye View of Icelandic Literature

By Sigurður A. Magnússon
Literary Editor of “Lesbók”, weekly supplement of “Morgunblaðið”

Originally published in Iceland Review, August–September 1963, pp. 11–12.

The Icelanders are intensely proud of their literary heritage, and understandably so, since it has been the mainstay of their national and cultural life from the dawn of their history. Without literature neither their language, their national culture, nor their strange and in many ways unique history would have been preserved.

Every culture has certain ideals, by which it distinguishes itself from other cultures, ideals which give substance and significance to human aspirations, and lend a certain pattern to the way of life and the thinking of a people. The ideals of Icelandic culture, most clearly expressed in the Medieval Sagas and Eddic poetry, were the warrior and the wise man. It is noteworthy that already in the heroic age of the Sagas the wise man was held in greater esteem than the warrior, and his stature in the following centuries was to increase after warfare and warlike conquests became a thing of the past. The man of learning and artistic ability was and still is the supreme ideal of Icelandic culture.

THE SAGAS AND THE LANGUAGE

The uniqueness of the literary tradition of Iceland manifests itself in at least two distinct ways:

1. The Sagas of Medieval Iceland (13th Century) were the first secular prose novels of Europe, written in the vernacular, dealing with the everyday life of the people in a manner at once quite realistic and supremely artistic. They are in fact only comparable with the European novel of the last 100 years or so.
2. The language used by present-day authors and the Icelanders in general is the language of the 13th Century Sagas with very slight modifications. No other nation in Europe has to that extent preserved its original language. Even the language of Shakespeare in England and that of Luther in Germany sound archaic to modern English and German readers. The strange fact of a largely unaltered language through six or seven hundred years is partly due to the isolation of the country, which was almost complete for many centuries, but the main reason was the continuous absorption of the old literature by the nation as a whole.

Modern Icelandic literature has consequently very deep roots in old traditions, especially the prose branch. The Sagas are still the unrivalled models of most Icelandic novelists, and epic style is the outstanding characteristic of the modern novel. Foreign influences have been remarkably meagre so far.

This has been a curse as well as a blessing, a curse in the sense that Icelandic novels tend to be rather uniform in choice of subject, approach and style, a blessing in the sense that the emphasis has been on the salient traits of the best Sagas, namely clear characterization and “story”.

IN MANY WAYS UNSURPASSED

The most accomplished example of the rejuvenation of the old epic style is presented by the novels of Halldor Laxness, the 1955 Nobel Prize Winner. His mastery of language and his creative imagination are in many ways unsurpassed, but he has chosen to remain faithful to the old traditions, with all kinds of personal deviations, in all of his major novels except the first, “The Great Weaver of Kashmir”, which was an exciting surrealistic exploration of the European scene after World War I, and a stylistic tour de force. Some people, including the present writer, deplore that Laxness did not make any further sojourns into the less familiar realms of modern literature.

Halldor Laxness — “… creative imagination …”

The short story is a much neglected form in Iceland and not very popular, but those few who have ventured into this field have on the whole been less restricted by tradition than the novelists. As a consequence, a considerable number of fine and original literary pieces have been produced in this limited field.

POETRY — MOST LIVELY

Icelandic poetry is by far the most lively and prolific of the literary arts. This is partly due to the fact that there was never any one continuous tradition prevalent in Icelandic poetry, but rather a number of parallel and successive currents. Also, Icelandic poets have been less wary of foreign influences, with the result that the poetry reflects a good deal more of what has been going on in Europe and America in this century, without therefore sacrificing what is specifically Icelandic in outlook, sensibility and language.

Traditional Icelandic poetry has some highly distinctive features, the most notable of which is alliteration, a poetic device dating back to the dawn of Icelandic history and even further back, as is indicated by Old English poetry, e.g. “Beowulf” and “The Ancient Mariner”. This device is such a natural part of the poetic heritage that it is still widely used by modern poets, even some of those who have abandoned rhyme and metre.

There were two main parallel currents in Medieval Icelandic poetry, the Eddic and the Skaldic one; the former simple in diction, direct and dramatic; the latter elaborate, artificial and factual. The Eddic tradition has had a more lasting influence on later poetry, which on the whole is simple and epic in style, while Skaldic poetry has to some degree survived in the peculiar and popular rímur, verses composed of alliterative four-line stanzas, whose rhyme-schemes have become so elaborate that over two thousand varieties have been recorded. The most elaborate varieties are those called hringhenda and sléttubönd. The latter variety can be read both backwards and forwards with full sense — sometimes they have the opposite meaning when read backwards. Indeed there are stanzas of this kind which can be read in ninety six different ways — making sense all the time and observing all the rules of alliteration and rhyme.

This popular art has been a favourite pastime among the general public for centuries and still is very popular, as may be seen in the newspapers of Reykjavík almost every day.

A FERTILE PERIOD

Modern Icelandic poetry of the last thirty years or so has moved away from the traditional outward excellence of metre and high-sounding diction, and endeavours to look inward to capture the more evasive qualities of intuition, sensibility and feeling which is the main business of all real poetry. This has in many cases resulted in a loosening-up of strict metric forms, freer modes of expression, but at the same time more precision in diction and in the use of imagery which has become much more daring, rich and variegated.

Icelandic poetry has had an extremely fertile period during the past twenty years. A fairly large number of young and very dissimilar poets is now writing good poetry, which has found its way to the world at large and is being translated into many languages.

The Grand Old Man of the modern trend in Icelandic poetry was Steinn Steinarr (1908–58), a very skillful verse-maker but above all a man of exquisite artistic sensibility and great courage. He established modern poetry in Iceland, against heavy odds, especially with his last collection of poems, a cycle called “Time and the Water” (1948).

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