The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Blaðsíða 17

Vol. 62 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
15
Halldo'r Laxness's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall
in Stockholm, December 10, 1955
(Translated from Icelandic)
I was travelling in the south of Sweden a few weeks ago, when I heard the rumour
that the choice of the Swedish Academy might possibly fall on me. Alone in my hotel
room that night, I naturally began to ask myself what it would mean to a poor wander-
er, a writer from one of the most remote islands in the world, to be suddenly singled
out by an institution famous for its promotion of culture, and brought here to the plat-
form by its command.
It is not so strange perhaps that my thoughts turned then - as they still do, not least
at this solemn moment - to all my friends and relations, to those who had been the
companions of my youth and are dead now and buried in oblivion. Even in their life-
time, they were known to few, and today they are remembered by fewer still. All the
same they have formed and influenced me and, to this day, their effect on me is greater
than that of any of the world's great masters or pioneers could possibly have been. I
am thinking of all those wonderful men and women, the people among whom I grew
up. My father and mother, but above all, my grandmother, who taught me hundreds of
lines of old Icelandic poetry before I ever learned the alphabet.
In my hotel room that night, I thought - as I still do - of the moral principles she
instilled in me: never to harm a living creature; throughout my life, to place the poor,
the humble, the meek of this world above all others; never to forget those who were
slighted or neglected or who had suffered injustice, because it was they who, above all
others, deserved our love and respect, in Iceland or anywhere in the world. I spent my
entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place out-
side story books and dreams. Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday
life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when
I was a child.
I recall my friends whose names the world never knew but who, in my youth, and
long into my adult life, guided my literary work. Though no writers themselves, they
nevertheless possessed infallible literary judgment and were able, better than most of
the masters, to open my eyes to what was essential in literature. Many of those gifted
men are no longer with us, but they are so vivid in my mind and in my thoughts that,
many a time, I would have been hard put to distinguish between which was the expres-
sion of my own self and which the voice of my friends within me.
I am thinking, too, of that community of one hundred and fifty thousand men and
women who form the book-loving nation that we Icelanders are. From the very first,
my countrymen have followed my literary career, now criticizing, now praising my
work, but hardly ever letting a single word be buried in indifference. Like a sensitive
instrument that records every sound, they have reacted with pleasure or displeasure to
every word I have written. It is a great good fortune for an author to be born into a
nation so steeped in centuries of poetry and literary tradition.
My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose
personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives'
work, have not been preserved for posterity. They live in their immortal creations and
are as much a part of Iceland as her landscape. For century upon dark century those
nameless men and women sat in their mud huts writing books without so much as ask-
ing themselves what their wages would be, what prize or recognition would be theirs.
There was no fire in their miserable dwellings at which to warm their stiff fingers as