Studia Islandica - 01.06.1970, Page 114

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with her lover, Ingólfur. His characterisation is very inadequate, which
naturally weakens the play’s impact.
In Hadda Padda there are folktale themes, dreams and symbols, and
the style is poetic and proverbial. It does not therefore conform fully to
Kamban’s theory of colloquial language as stated in the article on gram-
mar and style. The Danish critic Georg Brandes praised Hadda Padda
highly in the May number of Tilskueren, 1914, going so far as to say
that so profound and spiritual a female personality and so inflexible a
male character as in Hadda Padda had hardly been seen united on the
stage before. Brandes’ article is somewhat extravagant and not altogether
free from the romanticism of the past found in other Danish articles on
Icelandic authors. Hadda Padda was first performed at the Boyal Theatre
in Copenhagen towards the end of 1914, the playwright himself assisting
with the production. This was the beginning of Kamban’s work as a
director, which was later to become more important. The play was very
well received and a personal triumph for its author.
Kongeglimen is an altogether inferior work. Its construction is epi-
sodic and its theme and characters are unconvincing. The play is an
amalgam of melodrama and romanticism, clearly designed to impress
foreigners with a picture of what was supposed to be typical of the Ice-
landic scene: the Northern Lights, Twelfth-Night Elf-fires, hot springs
and hot-houses, and wrestling at the ancient place of assembly, Thing-
vellir. The heroine is named after the volcano Hekla and has a disposi-
tion appropriate to her name. The characters in Kongeglimen speak a
crude language, full of barbarisms, in sentences that are often inordinate-
ly long and clumsy. This careless style was to characterize Kamban’s
later work and it is questionable whether it is to be ascribed altogether
to deliberate colloquialism, rather than to a defective command of
language in the author.
Kongeglimen was clearly a more ambitious work than Hadda Padda,
and its reception in Denmark was therefore a great disappointment to
Kamban. He managed to get it published, but it was not performed until
several years later, after the play Vi Mordere had made a hit. In the
autumn of 1915 he turned his back on Denmark, crossing the ocean to
America, where he planned to conquer new and bigger worlds.
Kamban’s sojoum in the New World was shorter tlian he had in-
tended: only two years. Nevertheless it opened a new chapter in his
career as a writer.
About this time there was a great deal happening on the American
literary scene. Realistic writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sin-
clair, John dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis were creating a considerable
stir and controversy with their social satire. With them the slogan of art