The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Qupperneq 65

SPRING/SUMMER 1995
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
175
BOOKS
ISLENSK BOKMENNTASAGA
By Gudrun Nordal, Sverrir Tomasson
and Vesteinn Olason. Reykjavik:
Mdl og menning, 1992. Pp. 625.
Reviewed by Vidar Hreinsson.
For most nations it is a matter of pride to
present good literary histories for the gen-
eral public. Considering the flourishing lit-
erary traditions in Iceland, a literary his-
tory is something one would take for
granted. But this is not so. There are a few,
mostly dated, histories of the Old Icelan-
dic literature. The only complete history
of Icelandic literature was written around
1960, in both Icelandic and English by
Stefan Einarsson who is well known to Ice-
landic North Americans. Stefan Einarsson’s
work consists only of one volume which
although it is entertaining and to some
extent informative reading, it is outdated
and not too reliable. It is in fact rather
embarrassing to see innovative non-Icelan-
dic scholars relying upon outdated literary
histories. Therefore it was most welcome
when one of the largest and best publish-
ing houses in Iceland undertook to pub-
lish a four volume literary history, the first
of which is reviewed here. It is written by a
team of three Icelandic scholars.
The first volume is handsome and
printed on good paper. The illustrations
are of tremendous variety and support the
text very well. They consist of archaeologi-
cal findings, ancient art, buildings, manu-
script illuminations, places and modern
pieces of art and are either directly con-
nected to the literature, or thematically
related. One would perhaps have preferred
a somewhat larger format allowing for
larger pictures, and even colour plates as
some of the illustrations do not reproduce
well in black and white. However, what is
more important is that they got the text it-
self out to the public for a reasonable price.
Volume one covers a large part of the
Old Icelandic literature. There are various
ways to write a literary history, and perhaps
no method is the perfect one. In recent
years, although dating back to Arnold
Hauser’s Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und
Literatur (Social History of Art and Litera-
ture) from 1953, the tendency has been to
establish large syntheses, contexts and con-
tinuities, i.e. social, sociological and politi-