The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1982, Page 27

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
25
RECENT TRENDS IN ICELANDIC
LITERATURE
by Loftur Bjarnason, Professor Emeritus
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California
Loftur Bjarnason editing the translation of A
Brattann at the home of Johannes Helgi, Dala-
land 7, Reykjavik, Iceland. From the picture it is
obvious that there are at least some days when
one can work in his shirt sleeves out of doors.
The art of story telling has a long tradi-
tion in Iceland, going back to the twelfth
and possibly even the eleventh centuries —
the age of the great and impressive family
sagas. Essentially the same can be said
about poetry. As everyone knows, for
generations the court poets (the skalds) of
Scandinavia generally, and Norway in par-
ticular, were mostly Icelanders. No one
who has read Egil’s Saga could possibly
forget how Egill bought his life by com-
posing during the course of a single night
that great poem hofudlausn eulogizing his
most implacable enemy, Erik Bloody-Axe.
During the last century or so there have
been so many Icelandic authors who have
shown great talent in writing good novels,
interesting short stories, and fine poetry
that it would be tedious to ennumerate
them. One form of literary art that has re-
ceived less attention, however, is biog-
raphy. To be sure, this form of art has not
been completely neglected, but still it has
received less attention than it deserves, and
has been practiced in Iceland less vigor-
ously than other forms of literature. Iceland
has not yet produced a Queen Victoria such
as was written by Lytton Strachey, and
certainly no Icelandic author has churned
out biographies with the speed and dex-
terity of Emil Ludwig who dashed off
almost one each year during the early and
middle thirties.
Left to right: Guttormur, Johannes Helgi, Jon
Gaud, Margret Guttormsdottir.
It is all the more interesting, then, to
encounter an author who, in addition to the
usual fields of writing, is devoting more
and more of his efforts to biography. Such
an author is Johannes Helgi.
Bom in Reykjavik on September 5,
1926, the son of Jon Matthiasson and his
wife Jonina Johannesdottir, the future
author graduated from the Icelandic School
of Commerce (Samvinnuskolinn) in Reyk-
javik in 1946. For three years he followed
the sea as a member of the crew on various
Icelandic fishing vessels. It is with some
authority, then, that he describes the
mountainous waves, the violent storms,
and the icy winds of the North Atlantic in
his stories and novels.
His busy life as a crew member did not
prevent him from reading and studying in
his spare time with the result that in 1949
he took and passed the test given by the