The Icelandic connection - 01.06.2010, Page 21

Vol. 63 #1
ICELANDIC CONNECTION
19
first mature work. He was surely taken
aback when the publication of his novel
The Great Weaver from Kashmir was wel-
comed with calls citing the work as
beyond reasonable and even pornograph-
ic. In this light, at a time when some of
those very same commentators began to
doubt the merits of parliamentary democ-
racy, and began to imagine, “the resurrec-
tion of a Viking-age society controlled by
priest chieftains,” it is easy to forgive the
young writer for turning his back on the
works that these cultural-philistines held
in such reverence. In the wake of the
backward looking status-quo, Halldor and
his contemporaries were compelled to
usher in modem Icelandic literature not as
a rehashing of the sagas and their rural
setting, “but rather as a reaction against
traditional prose fiction and a society
based on farming.” As difficult as this
may have been for Halldor at the time, it
is unimaginable that his successes would
have reached such heights had he been
able to rest his reputation on his early
works, had he been embraced so openly
by this as-yet modern society. As the
years progressed, Halldor began to see
the medieval literary heritage of Iceland,
less as something that he had to reject, but
rather as more of burden, or shadow, from
which the modern writer had to emerge.
In later years, after having written most of
his great novels, Halldor reflected upon
the restrictions that the saga-heritage
posed to the contemporary Icelandic
writer, he had “described ... the profound
extent to which the Icelandic ‘School of
Literature,’ with its strict rules, has
become second nature to his countrymen,
and how ‘the standard set by the Golden
Age’ still dominates today the literary
opinions of the public as well as of the
critics.” He was little surprised that,
“such poor wretches as myself and
people like me, engaged in the laborious
work of writing books, often feel down-
hearted in this country; any ordinary sim-
pleton can prove beyond dispute that we
are worse writers of prose than men who
fashioned Njals Saga or Hrafnkels Saga
or Heimskringla; and similarly, that as
poets we have declined considerably
since the tenth century, when the poet of
Vdluspd stood beneath this vast sky of
Iceland and could not spell his name.”
By this point, and even a few years
earlier, he had come to realize, that to suc-
cessfully navigate through the long shad-
ows of the Old Icelandic literary heritage
a writer was better served to engage with
the giants of the golden age , and a matur-
ing Halldor, by the 1940s, had entered
into a “multilayered contemporary dia-
logue with Icelandic tradition.” It was
during this period - the war years - that
Halldor wrote a great deal of literary
essays, stockpiling his ammunition for “a
larger cultural struggle: the conflict over
the control of Icelandic literature and
publishing.” In addition to his essays, in
1941 Halldor published a translation of A
Farewell to Arms, a novel by Ernest
Hemmingway, one of the few contempo-
rary novelists he openly admired , and in
whose leading characters Halldor finds,
“the carefree spirit of play and merri-
ment in the midst of misfortunes; the
naively sincere honesty coupled with the
cool insolence of the gangster; the real-
ist’s precise and objective appraisal of
facts despite the general state of turmoil
around him, together with a boundless
contempt for prolixity and emotional
rant; and finally the hidden certainty, ter-
rifying yet met without fear, that all is in
the process of being lost.”
It would not be a far stretch to apply