Reykjavík Grapevine - 23.09.2016, Qupperneq 42

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Kjartan Yngvi Björnsson is a lit-
erary critic and Master’s student
in Creative Writing at the Uni-
versity of Iceland. In 2012, he and
co-author Snæbjörn Brynjarsson
received the Icelandic Children’s
Prize and Icelandic Booksellers
Prize for ‘Raven’s Eye,’ the first
novel in their Three Worlds series.
Why do you think the fantasy genre
is taken less seriously in Iceland?
Iceland has a very strange and
special literary tradition. We were
writing narrative fiction and prose
long before the rest of Europe was
doing it, and then wrote epic po-
ems when the rest of Europe was
moving into narrative prose. We’re
a horrible nation of hipsters—we
can never just do what anyone else
is doing.
It wasn’t until the Romantics
that any serious new Icelandic
literature was being made. Then
people wrote mostly poetry, and
new types of stories weren’t seen
to be as important as a “good”
use of the language. We almost
fetishize the Icelandic language,
which does have a special relation-
ship to literature relative to many
other countries. Because modern
Icelandic is so similar to the Old
Norse of the Sagas, it’s kept on a
high pedestal—versus English,
which is evolving decade to de-
cade, and especially in prose.
Do you feel that you’ve had to
deviate from “correct” Icelandic
in order to write literature that
breaks from the existing tradition?
To write fantasy, Snæbjörn and I
have literally had to make up new
words. We simply don’t have the
vocabulary for several fantastical
elements. In turn, we also use the
“old language” to build new words,
so we do ground our vocabulary in
Icelandic. One of our motivations
for writing these novels came
from having read so much fantasy
and sci-fi and speculative fiction
in general; there was so little of it
in Icelandic that we read most of
it in English. It wasn’t really until
‘The Lord of the Rings’ was trans-
lated that we got any fantasy lit-
erature in Icelandic.
That was one of the reasons we
wrote the Three Worlds series: to
write classic high fantasy in Ice-
landic from an Icelandic perspec-
tive. Our purpose from the get-
go was to try and cultivate good
feelings for “proper” Icelandic
language in those that primar-
ily read in English. In addition,
Norse tropes are used quite a lot
in fantasy, so we wanted to take
it from the other way around. We
decided to start with a Norse view
of everything else, and from there,
explore other fantasy tropes from
a Norse and specifically Icelandic
perspective.
Your Three Worlds series grapples
with moral ambiguities and
sociopolitical questions. To what
extent is Icelandic literature
concerned with social issues?
Social realism overlooks the nar-
rative possibilities offered by spec-
ulative fiction, which can mirror
reality or set it up in a new way.
My view is similar to Marcel Du-
champ’s view of art, which is to
alienate the audience—to force
the audience to reevaluate what
it’s looking at. You have the free-
dom to alienate the audience when
you’re making up your own world,
because then you’re not limited
by existing connotations of real-
ity. If you’re always talking about
“Iceland,” then you’re stuck with
Iceland. But if you take some of
the themes that are going on in
Icelandic society and place these is-
sues into a new context, then you
can judge those ideas on their own.
In my opinion, this is the main
benefit of speculative fiction: the
possibility of mirroring reality
and asking “What if?”
This conversation has been excerpt-
ed from a series of interviews with
writers, publishers, and educators
based in Iceland. Full interview can
be viewed at voxtur.wordpress.com.
“We’re a horrible
nation of hipsters—
we can never just do
what anyone else is
doing.”
Fantasy
Mirrors
Reality
Words ARIEL CHU
Photo DANIEL CLAUS REUTER
Literature Wilmers Fellowship
Research Project
42The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2016
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