This volume organizes itself around the
thirteenth-century Icelandic literary work, Fóstbræðra
saga
[The Saga of the Sworn Brothers]. It is a case study in
medievalism, the reception of the Middle Ages in all its aspects, since it is
especially concerned with this saga’s “Afterlife.” It considers
both the scholarly and creative aspects of reception; as Oren Falk observes in
The Bare-Sarked Warrior: A Brief Cultural History of
Battlefield Exposure (2015), “the porous nature of the boundary between scholarly analysis and popular
retelling should itself be leveraged as a source of understanding” (5). In this case,
the post-medieval journey of a single saga involves the
work not only of textual scholars, editors, and philologists, but also of
translators, writers, and critics. Indeed, the boundary between scholarly and
creative engagement with the medieval sagas is difficult to draw in Halldór
Laxness’s postwar retelling of the sworn brothers’ story, the novel Gerpla (1952), recently translated by Philip Roughton as
Wayward Heroes (2016). One reviewer related, “I have heard from a leading historian that Gerpla is the best source he has read about the middle ages
in Iceland.” Interdisciplinary consideration of the
many-faceted reception of one medieval story may cast light on the meaning of
the legacy of medieval Iceland in the modern age, but this introduction has more
modest aims: first to survey the volume’s articles, and then to explore one
major episode as interpreted in Gerpla.
The articles examine the saga’s “Afterlife” in five sections,
an organization which is mythical in its inspiration and thus both chronological
and thematic. The present section, “Vision,” previews the
special issue’s concept, topics, and approaches, while the next section,
“Creation,” discusses the foundations of saga reception.
Any medieval literary work’s journey through modernity begins with
the work of textual scholars, as Susanne Arthur discusses in “From Manuscript(s) to
Print: Editorial Practices through the Ages and the
Case of Konráð Gíslason’s (Incomplete) Edition of Fóstbræðra saga.” Editions curate our understanding of
the sagas and generate possibilities for everything that follows. How have
scholars classified this saga, and how should we view its ideas of heroism?
Helga Kress considers the saga’s composition, narrative perspective, and genre
in “The Culture of the Grotesque in Old Icelandic Literature:
The Saga of the Sworn Brothers.” The
section closes by considering how sagas have been interpreted abroad. In “Old Norse
in Italy: From Francesco Saverio Quadrio to Fóstbræðra saga,” Fulvio Ferrari considers the
many boundaries that literature crosses through the often ideological process of
translation. I am pleased to note that this special volume itself contains three articles
making their first appearances in English translation, often with the active guidance
of the original authors.
The second section, “Preservation,” considers
twentieth-century engagement with the saga in question in Iceland. It focuses on
the figure of Halldór Laxness who, while perhaps best known internationally as
an author, was also a translator, critic, and editor. As Christopher Crocker
discusses in “Guardian of Memory: Halldór Laxness, Saga
Editor,” Halldór’s attitude toward Iceland’s literary legacy changed
significantly over the course of his life; and some argued that he was not
preserving the sagas but hastening the demise of his country’s culture. Moving
from producing saga editions to writing saga-inspired literary works introduces
metafictional considerations; Ástráður Eysteinsson’s article asks “Is Halldór
Laxness the Author of Fóstbræðra saga?” Its
subtitle lists key considerations: “On the Author Function,
Intertextuality, Translation, and a Modern Writer’s Relationship with the
Icelandic Sagas.” In his reinterpretation Halldór even blends
medieval narrative with modern cinema, as Bergljót Kristjánsdóttir discusses in
“Of Heroes and Cods’ Heads: Saga Meets Film in Gerpla.” Finally, Kristinn E.
Andrésson’s article, “A Modern-Day Saga in Fancy Dress:
Contemporary Social Critique in Halldór Laxness’s Gerpla” enshrines one of the appreciative responses Halldór
received. In this article, originally written shortly after the
novel’s publication and first published in 1972 on the occasion of Halldór’s
70th birthday, Kristinn welcomes Halldór’s unique contribution, but recognizes
that Gerpla’s stark and startling use of the past to
criticize the present will be provocative in a polarized world.
The fourth section, “Destruction,” examines the troubled
reception of Gerpla, in which the cultural tensions of
postwar Iceland and the ideological clashes of civilization more generally led
to polemical interpretations. In “Cold-War Confrontations:
Gerpla and its Early Reviewers,” Shaun
F. D. Hughes discusses both the praise and the denunciation that Halldór
received from his fellow Icelanders—and examines the controversy that results
when rival visions of medieval heritage clash. In “‘In the
Shadow of Greater Events in the World’: The Northern Epic in the Wake of
World War II,” I consider Gerpla as part of
a wave of postwar medievalist novels that critically examine militant ideologies
for common features. How do Halldór’s observations on ideological justifications
for violence compare to those of medievalist writers of his generation in other
countries? Finally, Birna Bjarnadóttir’s “Wayward Heroes: Vagabonds in World Literature” considers
Halldór’s critique of western narrative traditions and the place of his work in
European literature. While some were shocked by the iconoclasm of Gerpla, it can also be said to belong to a living
tradition with deep roots: from the medieval period to the twentieth century,
many similarly provocative masterpieces have radically questioned the role
of literature in life and society, even if this makes their own foundations tremble.
The final section, “Rebirth,” assesses the current position of
saga literature and the inspiration that sagas continue to provide to writers.
In “Afterword: Whatever Happened to the Sagas?” Ármann
Jakobsson considers the ways in which contemporary writers have responded to the
saga legacy, including the cases of his own works Glæsir (2011) [Bull] and Síðasti
galdrameistarinn (2014) [The Last Magician]. Ryan Eric
Johnson’s “From the Westfjords to World Literature: A
Bibliography on Fóstbræðra saga” and Alex
Shaw’s “‘The Lore of Skalds, Warrior Ideals, and Tales of
Ancient Kings’: A Bibliography on Gerpla”
close the volume by summarizing research on the various versions of this
volume’s central story.
As this account makes clear, Halldór Laxness is an important figure in this
volume in many ways; he is relevant whether one is discussing editions of the
sagas, the place of the sagas in modern Icelandic culture, the global export of
Icelandic literature (both medieval and modern), or literary responses to the
saga legacy. In the remainder of this introduction I wish to consider a possible
representation of Halldór’s interaction with the saga legacy in Gerpla. Like many an author or compiler before him, from Snorri
Sturluson to William Shakespeare, Halldór looked on old Northern narratives with
new eyes.
Saga reception has often been mediated by literary comparisons and a search for
connections. As Ian Felce notes in “In Search of Amlóða saga: The Saga of Hamlet the Icelander”
(2016), interest in a potential saga source for Shakespeare’s famous play has
reflected enthusiasm out of proportion to the evidence available for examination
(203). There is, however, an important way in which Halldór’s literary project
with Gerpla is akin to Shakespeare’s with Hamlet (1602); both reinterpret a traditional Nordic
revenge story in light of a later genre with a quite different moral ethos and
narrative consciousness. What happens when one imports a saga hero into a
Renaissance play or a modern novel? Perhaps the clash of cultures will be
captured not only in the story, but also within the psychology of individual
characters. Felce distinguishes between the medieval version of Hamlet, a
ruthless avenger whose cunning manifests itself in riddles and grotesque
behaviour, and the early modern version of Hamlet, a “tormented Renaissance intellectual”
undergoing an existential crisis (119). In Gerpla, Halldór’s
“modern” version of the skald [poet]
Þormóður Bessason seems unwittingly to transform from the former to the latter.
Perhaps like Hamlet, Þormóður becomes a metafictional figure—one who reflects
Halldór’s troubled interaction with his literary predecessors in the saga
tradition.
Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, Halldór’s Skald Þormóður finds himself in dialogue
with a departed friend’s head at a very vexed point in his life. While Hamlet interrupts
the gravedigger by chance and thus discovers Yorick’s skull in the graveyard, Þormóður
finds himself the recipient of a sinister delivery when a malicious vagrant,
Lús-Oddi [Louse-Oddi], places his sworn brother Þorgeir’s rotting
head on a stake at Þormóður’s farm. Shakespeare’s memento mori scene certainly
captures a gothic atmosphere, but Halldór’s version is even more ominous. Hamlet
famously laments, “Alas, poor Yorick!” (V.i.10) and foresees
his own forthcoming death, but Halldór makes Þormóður’s morbid obsession clear by
extending the dialogue for months, indeed over the course of the entire process of
decay of the head in question. One might argue that there is a foreboding of this
process while Þorgeir’ is still alive when, as Andrew McGillivray discusses in the
Foreword,
Þorgeir asks Þormóður if he has ever considered beheading him—and thus creates great
discord between them. It is noteworthy that one of Þorgeir’s most gruesome and pointless
killings is a totally unprovoked beheading, and in time this does indeed prove to be
the manner of his own death.
When people at Þormóður’s farm at Djúp discover Þorgeir’s head, Halldór says
that it is “mjög saurgað með gamalli blóðstorku” [filthy
with old, crusted blood and gore] and even “tröllslegt” [ogrish] (Gerpla 317; Wayward Heroes 296).
Halldór uses the “afterlife” of Þorgeir’s head as a ghastly symbol
of how the past haunts the present; it provokes Þormóður to recall his oath
to avenge Þorgeir, blood for blood. The heroic
ideology seems impervious to criticism no matter how catastrophic its failings prove
to be. By placing the rotting head in public sight, Lús-Oddi mocks Þormóður’s ideas
and challenges him to live up to them.
The first one to see the head, however, is the Irish slave Kolbakur, who realizes
that Þormóður will seek vengeance and that this will destroy his marriage with
Þórdís Kötludóttir. Since Kolbakur is devoted to Þórdís and wishes to please her,
he offers to bury Þorgeir’s head out of sight. Her response shows that she believes
this event has the significance of fate:
Húsfreyja [Þórdís] hlær við og segir að ef þetta var örlagahöfuð, þá var eigi hún
til sköpt að fyrirkoma slíku höfði, tjóar og lítt þótt eg grafa, enda skal manna hver
það höfuð fyrir hitta einhvern dag. (318)
[Þórdís laughs and says that if this is a head of destiny, then it is not for her
to
do away with it. “It is of little use for me to bury it, for some day, every man will
encounter that same head.”] (297)
The above description of the head as “tröllslegt” may be significant in this
context; indeed, a troll may be identified more with a haunting or an omen than with
any
particular unnatural creature. Þorgeir’s head does seem to haunt the farm
in a decidedly “trollish” manner. Þormóður tries to preserve his friend’s
head by salting it; it slowly captures his attention more and more, and he himself
begins
to withdraw from the living:
Hann reikar örendisleysu úti og inni en sinnir aungu starfi, og hefur upp
fyrir sér í hálfum hljóðum kveðskap myrkvan. Marga nátt þá er aðrir menn
sofa, rís hann úr rekkju hljóðlega og geingur til skemmu, og mælir við höfuð
Þorgeirs Hávarssonar leingi nætur. (325–26)
[He meanders aimlessly both outdoors and in and does no work, but
mutters dark verses to himself, in low tones. Many a night, while others sleep,
he rises quietly from his bed and goes to the storehouse, where he spends
hours speaking to Þorgeir Hávarsson’s head.] (305)
Although readers of
Gerpla are not provided with any
details of these dialogues, subsequent events in the novel make it clear that the
main subject under consideration was the obligation of blood vengeance. The
relationship between Þormóður and Þorgeir has this mutual vow, of each to avenge
the other’s death, at its core, and Halldór uses his retelling of Þormóður’s quest
for
vengeance for his sworn brother to reconsider the whole Northern warrior culture.
The inability to let go of the past takes Þormóður away from Þórdís of Djúp, who
is always associated with life and light in the novel, and to the ends of the earth
in the arctic wastes of Greenland, where the exiled witch Kolbrún, Þórdís’s rival
for the poet’s affections, dwells. This is actually a nickname which refers to her
dark looks, as she is known as Þórbjorg Kolbrún
[Thorbjorg Coal-brow] in The
Saga of the Sworn Brothers, but she is only ever referred to as Kolbrún
in Wayward Heroes. As in
Fóstbræðra saga, Þormóður receives the nickname
Kolbrúnarskáld [Kolbrún’s poet] after reciting rude verses about
her, but Halldór hugely expands on the meaning of this. Unlike Þorgeir’s head,
Kolbrún does not require proximity to haunt Þormóður. This Kolbrún is a seeress of
the
abyss; the fact that Þormóður simply is her poet whether he
wishes to be or not thus carries an almost metaphysical sense of darkness. The
monstrous “hero” Þorgeir, who still desolates farms even in
death, is perhaps only Kolbrún’s pawn; even the delivery of his head to Djúp may
be the result of her influence, which in Gerpla stretches
across the Northern world. Behind her is Nature’s abyss, a heartless lineage of
violent competition for survival stretching back beyond memory; in comparison
the domestic prosperity of the farm at Djúp is tiny, limited, and local. Although
from Þormóður’s perspective he is travelling to Greenland to avenge Þorgeir
(as in the original saga), there are other ways of interpreting the manner in which
this “Head of Destiny” lures him to Greenland; indeed, upon
his arrival he acknowledges that Kolbrún has in some way caused this situation.
Upon his departure, Þorgeir’s head is the last thing Þormóður leaves to his family.
They find that it has been “fáða af mikilli list” [polished with
great art]; it becomes an heirloom of heroism and inspiration to
the community: “var það hinn besti gripur. Af höfði þessu feingu menn
allgóða skemtan við Djúp leingi síðan, og dróst úr hömlu að klerkar sýngi yfir” [it
was the finest of treasures. Folk in Djúp were much amused by this head
for a long time afterward, and a proper burial for it was constantly postponed] (339;
317). It is venerated for generations—until a fire destroys the entire settlement
(thus
the possible sense
of the object as a troll in the sense of an ill omen). One interpretation is that
Skald
Þormóður represents the author Halldór, and that polishing the skull represents a
kind of mad, aesthetic death-worship. Perhaps what the community takes for an
heirloom or even a tourist attraction, Þorgeir’s head, is actually an evil
talisman, a revenant that refuses to rest. For better or worse, every ideology
has its relics, notes the writer whose journey took him through Catholicism and
Communism.
In
Gerpla, polishing skulls does seem to represent the
creation of a curated version of the past, one thoroughly worked over so as to
shape or control the present. King Olaf Haraldsson, a silver-tongued opportunist
and master propagandist, takes on this task in a monastery in Kiev. In a speech
justifying his conquest, Olaf displays a distinct understanding of the prestige
value of relics:
Vér munum reisa kirkju Heilagri Visku í Niðarósi svo að hvergi bíði veglegri er sjálfa
Ægisif líður, og skulu þar á ölturum í gyldum skrínum dýrlíngshöfuð hebergð meiri
og betri en annarsstaðar í kristni. (488)
[We shall erect cathedrals of Holy Wisdom in Nidaros, as glorious as the Hagia Sophia
in Constantinople, and on its altars display golden shrines holding the skulls of
saints, bigger and better than elsewhere in Christendom.] (458)
Þormóður’s own attempt to enforce the heroic code, whose symbol he has left to
the community in Djúp, proves very different in Halldór’s version of the Greenland
episode. The difference between Þormóður’s demonstration of prowess and
dedication through his vengeance in Greenland in
Fóstbræðra saga
and his deluded journey in
Gerpla reveals Halldór’s interrogation
of the saga ethos. The medieval Skald Þormóður of
Fóstbræðra saga
avenges his sworn brother with a ruthlessness that would impress Macbeth: “I dare
do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none” (I.vii.47-48).
Grímur Thomsen, the Icelander in Denmark who wrote essays placing the sagas in a
European context, notes that even Shakespeare’s Hamlet still echoes the Northern hero
who “plays the fool, while he broods over revenge” (50).
Yet unlike the heroic medieval Þormóður, and indeed more like Shakespeare’s famous
depiction
of Hamlet as a man in the midst of a crisis of doubt, Halldór’s Þormóður finds himself
staring
straight into the abyss.
Like Hamlet, Skald Þormóður begins to wonder whether meaning can be found in any such
primitive notion as murdering one man to avenge the death of another, as his appetite
for
blood and glory wavers in the faltering Norse colony in Greenland. In
Fóstbræðra
saga Greenland is the home of powerful Norse settlers, and the same rules of honour
and kin obligation apply there as in Iceland or Scandinavia. In
Gerpla
the Norse settlements in Greenland are depicted with archaeological hindsight; they
are
dwindling outposts of sickness and starvation, foreshadowing the collapse of Norse
colonialism.
Yet Kolbrún seems well at home in this most abyss-like of landscapes. In the midst
of this vast
and indifferent wilderness, Þormóður’s belief in his mission dissipates. Detached
from his
previous ideals and even his own identity, he undergoes a profound disillusionment:
Hin skömmu sumur Grænalands virðast skemri orðin eða farast fyrir með öllu; og bóndi
sá
er áður bygði við Djúp þar sem hamínga þróast með blómi, heyrir rödd sína spyrja í
meðal
kaldra kletta í Ánavík, þar sem ekki blóm mun vaxa um aldur og ævi: hví em eg hér?
(358)
[Greenland’s short summers appear to have grown shorter or even to have dwindled to
nothing, and the farmer who once lived in Djúp, where good fortune grows with the
flowers, hears his own voice ask amidst the cold crags of Ánavík, where no flower
will ever grow: “Why am I here?”] (335–36)
Prominent critics asked this very question of medievalist literary works throughout
the twentieth
century, with varying degrees of hostility. But within such works the question has to do with larger
themes of meaning and emptiness, life and death. Þormóður can no longer give himself
an answer
he believes in, and Nature provides only a silent witness.
Nevertheless Halldór may have been mistaken about one thing: as a matter of fact,
flowers may one day grow “amidst the cold crags of Ánavík,” as the
Danish explorers in Greenland point out in Daniel Dencik’s stunning ecological
documentary Expedition to the End of the World (2014).
Marine biologist Katrine Worsaae explains the changing conditions in Greenland
thus: “It’s so beautiful here, and it may become even more beautiful. There
will be a lot of trees on the coastline. But that will be change, and many of us dislike
that. It’s like getting back to your childhood home, and someone else lives
there” (1:59).
Few places on earth are simultaneously so beautiful and so inhospitable to human
habitation as Greenland; the ruins of the Norse colony there offer a poignant
reminder of the fragility of civilization. Jared Diamond, author of Guns,
Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (1997), uses the colony as an
example of “Why Societies Collapse” (2003). He points out that over-exploitation
of natural resources and the behaviour of political elites according to short-term
interests
that conflict with the long-term interests of the society are common elements between
the
Norse colony in Greenland and many industrialized societies today (11:48).
In “The Lost Norse: Why did Greenland’s Vikings disappear?” (2016),
Eli Kintisch points out that climate change, which contributed to the original colony’s
collapse,
now poses a threat to the evidence of that collapse: “Organic artifacts
like clothing and animal bones, preserved for centuries in the deep freeze of the
permafrost,
are decaying rapidly as rising temperatures thaw the soil” (1). Newer
research suggests that the settlements were driven by the search for ivory rather
than
farmland, an element which plays a significant role in Gerpla, as
it gives Kolbrún power and allows her to travel from Greenland to Norway in order
to be close
by for Þormóður’s last battle and ensure his fate. In fact, while the Norse sought ivory from
walruses rather than elephants, one could read the Greenland section of
Gerpla as a sort of Heart of Darkness (1899)
for the atomic age, with Kolbrún in the role of the rogue ivory trader Kurtz.
Like Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz, she takes on some of the ways of the local peoples, in
this
case the Inuit (
Gerpla 356–57;
Wayward Heroes
335), yet also manifests a sinister persona of colonial conquest. Conrad’s Marlowe
tries
to
understand the paradoxes of Kurtz thus:
I think it [the wilderness] had whispered to him things about himself which he did
not
know, things of which he had no conception until he took counsel with this great
solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within
him because he was hollow at the core. (95)
In spite of himself, Þormóður similarly finds himself drawn to Kolbrún’s foreboding
wisdom:
Fúsari hlýðir Þormóður hennar merkilegum orðræðum sem hann býr við hana
leingur, og koma honum rúnar hennar á Grænalandi hinu myrkva í gæsku stað
flestrar er hann áður naut, sælumaður hjá hinu bjarta Djúpi. (357)
[The longer Þormóður dwelt with her, the more eager he was to learn her
wondrous discourses—for him, her runic lore in Greenland the Dark filled the
place of the bounties he formerly enjoyed as a man blessed by kind fortune in
bright Djúp.] (334–35)
Marlowe considers colonialism a “sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth”
(30), a description that could equally apply to
Gerpla. By contrasting the Norse and Inuit cultures in Greenland, Halldór exposes the madness
of war and genocide, of humans slaughtering one another when Nature already presents
continual threats to human survival. For Conrad, organized violence in the pursuit
of wealth, land, and resources, in the context of a clash of cultures and worldviews,
must be viewed in an evolutionary context that is profoundly amoral, and even more
destructive than it is creative, as extinction is its invariable result. Conrad’s
Marlowe sees the Congo River as like the beginning and the end of the world (59),
and speaking to Þormóður, Kolbrún similarly takes upon herself an apocalyptic mantle:
Em eg fyrir víst sú kona er byggir undirjúpin: skulu fyrir mér ekkjur verða allar
skjaldmeyar yðar bjartar, og falla konúngar þeir er þér trúðuð best; og þóttú farir
á endi heims skaltu mig hitta eina. (361)
[I am the woman who inhabits the Abyss. Through me, all your bright
shieldmaidens shall be made widows, and the kings in whom you placed
greatest faith shall fall. Though you were to journey to the world’s end, there
you would meet only me.] (339)
Kolbrún’s vision of Greenland as a place prophetic of the world’s end receives a
compelling visual parallel in
Expedition to End of the World, with
its striking imagery of tiny human figures wandering vast fjords. Conrad placed the
“scramble for loot” (xxiii) of the ivory
trade in the larger context of Nature, in which it is tiny: settlements are “no
bigger than pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background” (29), and even
the life-cycles of empires are as ephemeral as candle-light:
“We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!
But darkness was here yesterday” (19). Similarly, in Dencik’s
film one of the explorers makes the following observation on humanity’s place in
nature: “We will only rule for a short time, and then it’s back to the spider.
But as far as we know, the spider doesn’t write poems” (40:25).
What sets us homo sapiens apart from other life forms, then, may be our imaginative
capacity, even though this often involves self-deception. As Robert Trivers notes
in The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in
Human Life (2011), our minds are systemically biased because
self-deception offers an evolutionary advantage in the arms race between
deception and deception-detection; it is thus a Sisyphean task to disentangle
ourselves from the web of delusions within which we dwell (1).
Conrad’s Marlowe refers to instincts and passions that drive people to
self-destruction as devils, noting that none is so dangerous as the
“devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” (34).
Perhaps this is the devil that Þormóður is truly beguiled by.
For Halldór’s Þormóður there will be no vengeance for Þorgeir in Greenland; the
situation is in fact much better described as Kolbrún’s vengeance
upon him. Perhaps what is true of Þormóður and Kolbrún is true
of Halldór and the saga tradition as well: “Skaltu æ og ævinlega í
minn stað koma, hverja för sem þú fer, og þó aldrei nær mér en þá er þú stefndir
mér first” [you shall ever and always be drawn to me, wherever you
go, yet shall never be nearer than when you set your course farthest] (23; 21). Gerpla presents Kolbrún’s
ivory-trading hut in Greenland as a place where mythologies meet in the context
of Norse colonization in the West Atlantic, taking into account a vast
geographical scope including not only Iceland and Scandinavia, but also Europe and
the wider Northern and Atlantic worlds. Throughout his long journey Þormóður has
always found a way to adapt his craft to the needs of the moment, yet the world is
too small for him to escape Kolbrún’s influence; he is her poet, and when he finally
refuses to recite poetry, he is not far from death.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet dies upon completing his mission of vengeance and wants
his story to live on; Conrad’s Marlowe tells Kurtz’s story to his fellow sailors but
refuses to tell the truth to Kurtz’s beloved. Halldór’s Þormóður dies for nothing
and deliberately falls silent. Thus despite its wry humour and ingenious sense
of absurdity,
Gerpla presents a story that seems at times
radically pessimistic: the cycle of killings only pauses long enough for deluded
propagandists to praise its heroism. This broken poet finally regrets glorifying
Þorgeir as a hero, realizing that the one cannot exist without the other. In
Frygt og Bæven (1843) [
Fear and
Trembling] the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, writing
as the fictional author Johannes de silentio [John of the Silence], interprets
the respective roles of the hero and the poet in terms of mythic transfiguration:
Dersom der ingen evig Bevidsthed var i et Menneske, dersom der til Grund for Alt
kun laae en vildt gjærende Magt, der vridende sig i dunkle Lidenskaber frembragte
Alt, hvad der var stort og hvad der var ubetydeligt, dersom en bundløs Tomhed, aldrig
mættet, skjulte sig under Alt, hvad var da Livet Andet end Fortvivlelse? Dersom det
forholdt sig saaledes, dersom der intet helligt Baand var, der sammenknyttede
Menneskeheden, dersom den ene Slægt stod op efter den anden som Løvet i Skoven,
dersom den ene Slægt afløste den anden som Fuglesangen i Skoven, dersom Slægten
gik gjennem Verden, som Skibet gaaer gjennem Havet, som Veiret gjennem Ørkenen,
en tankeløs og ufrugtbar Gjerning, dersom en evig Glemsel altid hungrig lurede paa
sit Bytte, og der var ingen Magt stærk nok til at frarive den det – hvor var da Livet
tomt og trøstesløst! Men derfor er det ikke saaledes, og som Gud skabte Mand og
Qvinde, saa dannede han Helten og Digteren eller Taleren. Denne kan Intet gjøre af
hvad hiin gjør, han kan kun beundre, elske, glæde sig ved Helten. Dog er ogsaa han
lykkelig, ikke mindre end denne; thi Helten er ligesom hans bedre Væsen, i hvilket
han er forelsket, glad ved, at det dog ikke er ham selv at hans Kjærlighed kan være
Beundring. Han er Erindringens Genius, kan Intet gjøre uden minde om, hvad der er
gjort, Intet gjøre uden beundre, hvad der er gjort. (35)
[If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of
everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark
passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable,
insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what then would life be but
despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one
generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation
succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the forest, if the human race passed
through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a
thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for
its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches –
how empty and devoid of comfort life would be! But for that reason it is not so,
and as God created man and woman, so too he shaped the hero and the poet or
speech-maker. The latter has none of the skills of the former, he can only admire,
love, take pleasure in the hero. Yet he, too, no less than the hero, is happy; for
the
hero is so to speak that better nature of his in which he is enamoured, though
happy that it is not himself, that his love can indeed be admiration. He is the
spirit of remembrance, can only bring to mind what has been done, do nothing
but admire what has been done.] (49)
While admitting that misunderstanding may threaten the legacy of poets and heroes,
Kierkegaard’s rhapsody over the poet’s transfiguration of the hero employs religious
language; and indeed Kierkegaard seems to see in this transfiguration a means of
transcending death, so that “Derfor skal Ingen være glemt” [Therefore no one who was
great will be forgotten] (36; 50). A skeptic might object to Kierkegaard’s “leap of
faith” in the phrase
for that reason, but whether we
accept this reasoning or not, this passage makes it clear that the hero-worship of
romantic interpreters like Kierkegaard himself, Grímur Thomsen, and Thomas
Carlyle—author of
On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in
History (1841)—was really an attempt to find in literary traditions a
replacement for the loss of religious faith so deeply felt by many nineteenth-century
thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche famously predicted that in the twentieth century this
search for a replacement metaphysics and mythology would lead to drastic cultural
shifts, radical political revolutions, and unprecedented wars. Reading Halldor’s novel
in this way, whether we take the writer’s religion to be Catholicism, Communism, or
literature itself, it is especially important to be careful with what one worships;
attempts to transcend oblivion may in the end only hasten it. Discussing the divisive
nature of political ideology in a Cold War context, James Baldwin observed in
The Fire Next Time (1963):
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and
sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice
all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses,
blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny
the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. (90–91)
Ideological narratives, which often appeal to human aesthetic and psychological
sensibilities, including desires for certainty, moral status, and identity, can have
devastating consequences. In this way they can become more dangerous than
the starkest realities. In
Gerpla, those with extravagant
beliefs (or unhealthy imaginations) chase phantoms and risk everything on foolish
crusades. As Halldór Guðmundsson notes, “since his Catholic period Halldór
had often expressed the opinion that ideals were of greater significance than
people” (180). In Þormóður’s misguided quest, and particularly
in his realization of how he has been a fool only when it is too late, we can perhaps
see Halldór’s guilt over his defense of the “heroes” of communist
totalitarianism. Even Kierkegaard, with his leap of faith, admits that the hero-worship
of poets could, as a kind of replacement religion, be replete with all the same
dangers; and elsewhere in
Fear and Trembling he quotes
the French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux to the following effect:
“Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot, qui l’admire” [A fool
can always find a greater fool who admires him].
Halldór does not give readers a single word of Þormóður’s dialogues with the
“Head of Destiny,” the skull he polishes when he prefers
the company of the dead. The contents of this dialogue have to be inferred from
the context, and from the disastrous journey on which these dialogues send
Þormóður. However we diagnose this disaster, Þormóður’s self-examination
proves too little, too late. Perhaps what is truly timeless about
Gerpla is its critical concern with how our ideals themselves
can lure us away from the light of Djúp and toward the outer darkness of Anavík.
Gerpla’s parodic medievalism, which mocks apparently
archaic delusions, may be why from the first appearance of Halldór’s novel to
the present, it has been compared to Miguel de Cervantes’
Don Quixote (1605-1615). Yet the connection may run much
deeper than that; whatever else it may be, in the case of
Gerpla, medievalism is also a kind of confession.