Gerpla was published in 1952, not long after the Second World War. While rewriting an ancient
heritage in a difficult and highly demanding act of medievalism, Halldór’s earlier
(and voluntary) conversion to Catholicism must have served him well, not to mention
his later close encounter with Stalin’s ideology and admiration of it—for a while. But how might these conversion experiences of Halldór’s inform the concept of heroic
vagabondry in a novel like
Wayward Heroes? First,
many have detected an intertextual relationship between Halldór’s novel and
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Halldór himself had no disagreement with the notion; however,
he did distinguish Spanish chivalric romanticism from the heroic worship in medieval
Icelandic literature. Perhaps what
Don Quixote provides, then, is a chivalric parallel to the passage from hero to vagabond in the
lives and travels of Þormóður and Þorgeir.
Don Quixote (1605-1615) emerges from the Spanish Golden Age, and is written in a picaresque style
of the late sixteenth century. Usually, Cervantes is said to have helped move beyond
the literary conventions of the chivalric romance, or from a straightforward retelling
of a series of acts to a “display” of the knightly virtue of the hero. However, less
has been written about the fact
that Cervantes was a contemporary of St. Teresa, the sixteenth-century Spanish nun,
and like Kafka, compelled by her ideas and writings. In his introduction to his renewed translation of Don Quixote, Guðbergur Bergsson considers how Teresa’s writings stood out at the time for her
passion toward the inner life of man. Don Quixote may carry a few of her seeds as did the lives of both Cervantes’ sister, who entered
the religious life and became a Carmelite nun, and his wife, who also sought Teresa’s
company. For Guðbergur, Don Quixote is literature’s knight in disguise and a symbol
for the writer, the theme of the book being by and large the nature of art, that is
to say, the art that is human life. In this light, Cervantes’ novel has been viewed as the romantic book par excellence.
Maurice Blanchot writes, “it reflects upon and unceasingly turns back upon itself
with the fantastic, agile,
ironic, and radiant mobility of a consciousness in which plentitude seizes itself
as a void, and seizes the void as the infinite excess of chaos” (354).
If there is a “radiant mobility of a consciousness” to speak of in the narrative of
the lives and travels of Þormóður and Þorgeir in
Wayward Heroes, however, it is a different one from that which readers encounter in
Don Quixote; it has a specifically Icelandic character. The sworn brothers’ inner life seems
to be fettered by what the Icelandic poet and scholar Grímur Thomsen (1820–1896) refers
to as the “shadow side” of the otherwise silent Nordic passion (1872, 50), on the
one hand, and a curiously fixed idea of poetry’s task in a displaced heroic
code, on the other. In the Icelandic context, the heroic worship in question manifests
in the Northern eddic poetry, which Halldór clearly draws on in his saga-inspired
novel. These mythological poems describe the magic and wisdom of everyday life, particularly
in the staggering “high sayings,” and this guidance seems to find its way into the lives and travels of the sworn brothers.
One of Þorgeir’s seemingly obscure (if not stubborn) remarks, which he makes while
in foreign lands, testifies to its own eddic-mythological origin:
Seint mun þau tíðendi að spyrja af Þorgeiri Hávarssyni að eg blaðra klútum fyrir mönnum,
að biðjast hjálpar. Þyki mér betra að gerast skernár manna en þurfalíngur. Var mér
því aldregi spáð að eg mynda í þá ógæfu hrata að þiggja grið að mönnum. Mun eg því
hér deya í skerinu heldren þola minkun. (172)
[It will never be reported of Þorgeir Hávarsson that he flapped a kerchief to plead
for help. I would rather be left to die on a skerry than live as a starveling. It
was never fortold to me that I would suffer the misfortune of having to live off another
man’s mercy. Therefore I will die here, rather than endure abasement.] (160–61)
A parallel perspective is expressed in the following stanza from
Hávamál [Sayings of the High One], one of the foremost mythological eddic poems in the
Poetic Edda:
Bú er betra,
þótt lítit sé,
halr er heima hverr;
blóðugt er hjarta
þeim er biðja skal
sér í mál hvert matar.
(329)
[A farm of your own is better, even if small,
everyone’s someone at home;
a man’s heart bleeds when he has to beg
for every single meal.]
(19)
As distinct from chivalric romantic literature, the tradition of heroic worship in
Icelandic literature already manifests what might be considered an earlier journey
from heroism to vagabondry, in the secularizing transition from eddic poetry to the
saga legacy. Indeed, both the eddic poetry’s mythological dimension (as above) and
the epic features of the saga world are present in
Wayward Heroes. Both are rich in complexity and thus highly challenging; the eddic heroic poetry
in particular is a slippery slope for modern interpreters, not the least in the domain
of morality. Surpassing all known structures of the concept of morality, the characters’ behaviour
in the pre-Christian eddic heroic lays cannot be valued on the basis of anything accepted
as exemplary morality, from medieval times to the present. Instead, the heroic worship encountered in
Wayward Heroes draws on Icelandic ideas of amorality that are mythographic; ideas that survived
from the eddic world into the world of the sagas.
In its Icelandic literary character, the heroic worship encountered in Halldór’s novel
determines the nature of the singular journey of the sworn brothers. These characters’
total devotion to heroic worship while on their passage from heroism to vagabondry
may seem unfathomable, but it can be illuminated by considering it as an aesthetic
transition comparable to the religious or political conversions (and perhaps also
deconversions and disillusionments) with which Halldór was familiar. In this context,
the Icelandic dimension of mythic amorality allows for an aesthetically spectacular
view of that which cannot be praised in human behaviour, as manifested in the actions
of the sworn brothers. They are allured by the amoral traditions of heroic worship
whose roots lie in ancient poetry. If anything, this poetry’s mythic amorality casts
light onto the characters’ “shadow side.” Here, at the bloody and demanding heart
of Western civilization, the shadow side
of literature itself comes to light.
The novel’s Greenland chapter is thus especially revealing, as it explores the limits
of Western civilization both culturally and geographically. What lies beyond these
limits and what drives Norsemen to go to Greenland? At that moment in the lives and
travels of the sworn brothers,
Þorgeir’s head has washed ashore in Iceland after the hero has completed (more or
less) unnoticed heroic deeds in the more civilized regions of Europe. The poet Þormóður
then awakens to the task of revenge, departs from everything he loves in Iceland and
travels to Greenland, where he suspects his sworn brother’s killer resides. The paths
of these two never cross, however, and there will be no glorified death to narrate
in Greenland. Regardless of the possibility of an alleged heroic encounter, the peaceful Greenlandic
fields—shrouded in icefog under a pitch dark sky—cannot respond to the spectacular
demands of the heroic passions. Halldór portrays the Greenland episode as taking place
at the very edge of Western civilization and finally past the limit when Þormóður’s
life is saved by the Inuit. As he lives among them he begins to learn their language,
but the mutual incomprehension runs far deeper than that:
En lítt skildu núítar af þessari ræðu; var þeim landskipunarbók eigi með öllu kunn
og höfðu aldregi heyrt getið konúnga né garpa, eða, spurðu þeir, hvort ekur Ólafur
þessi hundum betur en aðrir men? (312–13)
[The Inuit understood little of what he said. They were completely ignorant of the
customs and laws of other lands and had never heard of kings or warriors. “Does this
Olaf,” they asked, “drive dogs better than other men?”] (356–57)
It is not the only time that Þormóður, voicing his ideals abroad, is received as a
madman; the Inuit are focused on the practical necessities of survival while Þormóður is
obsessed, even at this extremity, with glorifying violence. With its exposure of the
faltering fringes of the medieval Norse society, the Greenland episode may signify
something profound on the front of Western civilization and its literature. According
to Halldór Guðmundsson, it suits Halldór Laxness well “to site Utopia in a place he
has never seen” (2008, 342). The Inuit certainly provide a peaceful alternative to
heroic worship; they moreover
demonstrate an entirely different perception of time, narration, and nature. Yet is
Utopia the right word for this episode?
From the writing of Wayward Heroes and onwards, Halldór appears to be departing from his conviction that a radical,
social reform here on earth is a cause worth fighting for, and aiming instead for
the possibilities within literature. Halldór’s remarks on this front were not clear
cut, though, as for example in a letter to Peter Hallberg, the Swedish literary scholar,
where he suggests that “when writing about a novel, it is advisable to keep to what’s
written in the novel.” Nevertheless, considering Halldór’s literary projects and comments leading up to
the writing of Gerpla, they can provide useful context for the Greenland chapter.
At this time Halldór was mostly occupied with the “Eldur í Kaupinhafn” [Fire in Copenhagen],
the final part of Íslandsklukkan (1943–1946) [Iceland’s Bell], where Snæfríður, the sun of Iceland, rides in black on her departure and casts
a shadow over the reader’s eyes. Apart from writing the last part of Iceland’s Bell, Halldór was also working on several other projects. This time saw the final acts
of the Second World War, and within the greater region of Western civilization other
books with comparable themes to Halldór’s works were written. Two important examples
are Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947) and Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, which was published in 1951, a year before Gerpla.
During this time, Halldór had also been keeping himself occupied with the publication
of editions of sagas that used modern Icelandic spelling (see Crocker in this volume).
In his Eftirmáli [Epilogue] to
Brennunjálssaga (1945) [
Njál’s saga], Halldór considers the fatalism of Norse heathendom as the saga’s main subject matter,
how it contradicts Christian religion in a fundamental way, and that there is a certain
“siðblinda” [psychopathology] involved in a doctrine of this sort (416). He also
writes about the saga’s unique style, thus linking aesthetics and amorality
in a way that seems to anticipate
Gerpla. According to the history of literature, Halldór writes, Dante Alighieri’s
Divina Commedia is believed to have invented the individual in European literature. Prior to the
arrival of Dante’s individual, however, the anonymous author of
Njála had already anticipated such ideas in what should be recognized as a European context.
Halldór argues that the author of
Njála demonstrated a unique stylistic enterprise by giving shape to the individual in the
description of characters (416–17). He then returns to the saga’s main subject matter
and discusses the “lífsspeki” [wisdom] of
Njála:
Þessi hugarstefna, óaðskiljanleg örlagakenningunni, er skilyrðislaus dýrkun hetjuskaparins
án tillits til, hvort málsstaður manns er góður eða illur, hún er lof þess manns,
sem bregður sér hvorki við sár né bana, þess manndóms, sem enginn ósigur fær snortið
og er sterkastur í dauðanum. (418)
[This idealism, inseperable from the idea of fate, is an unconditional worship of
the
heroic personality without reference to whether a character’s position is good or
evil; it is the praise of the man who reacts neither to pain nor death, the type of
manhood that no defeat can touch and who is strongest in his own death.] (Guðmundsson
2008, 300)
Within the context of Western civilization’s horrific achievements in the twentieth
century, and the way in which Halldór’s wayward heroes later enter the bleak scene,
this saga interpretation certainly illuminates the amoral nature of heroic worship.
Halldór closes the epilogue by recognizing the aesthetic or literary power of this
vision, and how it finds followers quite apart from any of the moral implications
of glorifying violent men.
In
Wayward Heroes Halldór’s shattering Greenlandic revelation, in turn, highlights how the peaceful
Inuit see time differently, as something other than a list of glorious and tragic
battles, tailored to support the rise of this or that power. Thus, the fateful requirements
of Western narrative tradition and history-making form a key theme in
Gerpla, as Halldór himself highlights in the above-cited letter to Peter Hallberg:
[Í] Gerplu er umfram alt verið að tala um hetjur og skáld, og þar er einnig verið að tala um
stríðið og um þá menn sem stjórna herjum, löndum og ríkjum, og náttúrulega einnig
þjóðum; en þó framar öllu um þá sem stjórna hugmyndum manna. (Guðmundsson 2004, 569)
[The subject is first and foremost about heroes and poets. It is also about war and
those men who are in charge of armies, countries and states, and of course nations.
Most importantly, the novel is about those who control people’s ideas.]
How far can such amoral heroic ideas reach and still effectively impose their own
aesthetics on the world they encounter—impose literature on life—and at what cost?
In
Gerpla, Greenland represents the remote region where the heroic narrative, like the chivalric
romance narrative of Don Quixote, shimmers like a mirage.
When considering the character of the wayward heroes, Icelanders on the Continent,
the reflections of Grímur Thomsen can help to illuminate the scene. Grímur studied
at the University of Copenhagen and was the first Icelander to receive a master’s
degree in comparative literature, his subject being the poetry of Byron in a philosophical
context. A few modern poets, writers, and scholars have noted the profundity of Grímur’s
approach to literature, including his familiarity with the works of Søren Kierkegaard
(1813–1855), one of modernity’s major philosophers of life and literature. Grímur’s literary essays, which first appeared in Danish in the 1850s, consider medieval
Icelandic literature within the context of the Greeco-Roman cultural heritage. In “What Is Romanticism?” Þórir Óskarsson calls these essays “the most ambitious
literary scholarship of the nineteenth century” (112), yet they never became a model
for other Icelanders. Grímur considers the special
features of medieval Nordic literature by comparing its subject matter and form to
what is found in ancient Greek literature. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche would later
do, Grímur also inquires into the notion of specific features of literature as they
appear in relation to both religion and philosophy.
Grímur asserts that a belief in the individual’s power and importance is a mainstay
of Nordic people. For this reason, the Nordic person suffers alone and in silence,
and never wavers. Norse literature thus depicts an image of humanity enduring a “stoic
suffering,” a view that informs “the entirety of the Nordic man’s activity and life”
(1972, 67). Such an introverted way of being is, in Grímur’s view, proof of the spiritual
nature
of his ancestors: those who sensed the incompleteness of the word. What differentiates
the Nordic spirit from the Greek spirit is, therefore, not only the Nordic’s passion
for quiet fortitude (or a still, smouldering anger) but also a certain unflinching
and overriding will, which Grímur calls kyrrleiksástríða [passion for tranquility]. For him the main characteristic of Nordic passion is self-restraint:
“Nothing is wasted of that precious passion, and instead of squandering it with words
… words are much more likely to be irritants” (61). Yet the Nordic passion is not
always silent. And here Grímur points to a recognized
feature of the Icelandic sagas—the obligation to exact revenge. This is the “shadow
side of passion,” he says, “which even we Christian men must admit has artistic merit
when looked at apart from
moral law.” This “shadow side” acquires a more positive sheen when we remember that
“blood revenge was an obligation in the society of our forefathers” (61–62). In a
number of ways, Grímur’s deep-running approach to the challenge of the saga
heritage anticipates that later taken up by Halldór Laxness.
Grímur’s essay “On the Character of Old Northern Poetry” begins with a critique of
the philosophy of the universalist pretensions of both
religious systems and the aesthetics of Hegel: “It is remarkable that Hegel, who said
that the idea of a philosopher required that
he knew everything, and who pretended himself ‘to know everything,’ neither makes
any mention of the Northern mythology in his Philosophy of Religion, nor of Northern poetry in his Æsthetics” (45). Despite the fact that the poetry of the North has no place in Hegel’s “scientific
classification of poetry,” Grímur continues, the German philosopher describes all
its properties in an essay
on romantic poetry. According to Grímur, these properties are “the energetic overbearing
will” and the “deep reserved mind” (45). What Grímur sees are proud feelings of freedom
and independence, which have their
counterparts in romanticism: “Nordic literature is not, therefore, in any way rooted
in classical literature; quite
the contrary, it can in truth be called heathen romanticism” (85).
When discussing romantic literature, Grímur finds it impossible to miss that it is grounded in something other than, but
of equal importance to, a Christian foundation. According to Grímur, one would have
to search long and hard to find a Christian spirit in Macbeth and Richard III—and Shakespeare was certainly more of a Northern poet than he was a Christian when
he conceived of and developed these and similar plays. Hamlet, for example, is “much more a product of Northern reserve, with all its passion and
taciturnity, with
all its eloquence, than of a Christian’s struggling self-reflection” (46).
Seen from the perspective of medieval European literature and culture, the saga characters’
inner lives are shaped by a sentiment that appears to co-exist with, rather than fully
belong to, the Christianized Europe. This separate poetic, religious, and aesthetic
tradition presents a formidable challenge to modern interpreters, to which Halldór
responds with both literary mastery and also some self-doubt. When rewriting Fóstbræðrasaga and Ólafs saga helga, Halldór questions not only the saga characters’ lack of sympathy on their passage
from hero to vagabond, but also his own. In Halldór’s medievalism the characters’ “heathen romanticism,” and vacillation between
the Icelandic and Continental traditions is not viewed as
a dilemma to be mastered once and for all. Instead, Halldór approaches the literary challenge of reconsidering the saga legacy
as a broad phenomenon in the region of European literature, which is related to the
crises of modern history. This can be seen in the treatment of geography in Gerpla, which is linked to power and ambition throughout the novel.
The dense opening paragraph of
Gerpla ferries the reader straight to the edge of Europe, in the West Fjords of Iceland,
where the stage is set for a medieval-modern spectacle:
Tveir eru garpar er einna hafa orðið nafnkunnastir á Vestfjörðum, þeir Þorgeir Hávarsson
og Þormóður Bessason svarabræður, og er að vonum mart í frásögnum af þeim við Djúp,
þar sem þeir hófust upp, svo og í Jökulsfjörðum og á Hornströndum; hafa þeir og í
þessum stöðum öllum frægðarverk unnin. (5)
[Two are the heroes from the Vestfirðir that have gained the greatest renown: Þorgeir
Hávarsson and Þormóður Bessason, sworn brothers, of whom, as we might expect, much
is told in Ísafjarðardjúp, where they grew up, as well as in the Jökulfirðir and Hornstrandir.
In all of these places they accomplished great feats.] (7)
In addition to
Fóstbræðrasaga and
Gerpla, the remote natural habitat of the sworn brothers has inspired several key works
of Icelandic literature throughout the centuries. There could be many different reasons
for the creative power of the Westfjords. Among the foremost may be the fact that
Ísafjarðardjúp [The Deep of Icefjord] is one of the deepest fjords in Iceland and
opens up into several other bays and
deep fjords, which often have a dome-like feel to them.
In other novels Halldór also begins with geographical realities, which make an immediate
claim on the reader’s perception and sense of orientation. In
Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (1927) [
The Great Weaver from Kashmir], for example, the story of the lives and travels of some other Icelandic characters
is framed thus:
Áðan flugu tveir svanir austryfir.
Veröldin er einsog svið þar sem alt er í haginn búið undir mikinn saungleik: bjarkarilmur
í Þíngvallarhrauni, kylja af Súlum, purpuralog á Esjuhimni, bláminn djúpur og kaldur
yfir Skjaldbreið; en það kvöldar ekki meir; náttleysa og andvaka í öllum áttum.
(7)
[Once two swans flew overhead, eastward.
The world is like a stage where everything has been set up for an extravagant musical:
the fragrance of birchwood in the lava fields at Þingvellir, cold gusts of wind from
Súlur, violet light in the Esja sky, the azure deep and cold over Skjaldbreiður, but
darkness no longer descends. Nightlessness and insomnia in all directions.]
(9)
The scene above feels very different from the encounter that opens
Wayward Heroes. Nevertheless, just as the region of the Westfjords is at some point replaced by
other regions (including monuments of civilization such as Rome) in the sworn brothers’
saga, in
The Great Weaver the wakeful lava fields of Þingvellir represent the edge of the world’s stage. By
its conclusion, the latter novel reveals a subtle passage from modernity’s newly established
secular order into a religious-based rejection of that order; this rejection takes
place in Rome, Europe’s capital of Catholicism. Thus, despite some differences in
their openings, there is a parallel movement to speak of in the two novels’ geographical
dimensions: before the Icelandic characters are ferried over to more civilized regions
of Europe, they are characterized by their natural habitat, the edge, which remains
an abstruse backdrop throughout.
In Halldór’s later novel
Kristnihald undir jökli (1968) [
Under the Glacier], the character Prof. Dr. Goodman Syngmann proposes a more cosmic view of geography:
“Við búum hér í útjaðri geimsins. Það er verið að gera tilraun til að lifa hér” [We
live at the edge of outer space here. An attempt is being made to live here] (162;
145). Considering cultures and their boundaries in such terms makes one reconsider what
literature ought to be considered central or marginal, major or minor; but I will
set aside the subtleties involved in any movement toward a minor literature. Exile is more of a state of being than a particular geographical location; this may
be why Halldór transposes one of the most famous exiles in literature, Dante Alighieri,
into Iceland in
The Great Weaver from Kashmir. In
The Great Weaver the geographical plot certainly thickens when readers encounter the presence of Dante
himself at the wakeful lava fields of Þingvellir, where continents meet. As it is,
Dante is right there with his
Divina Commedia to welcome the reader at the novel’s gate. As explained by the translator Philip
Roughton, the quotation included there is from the third part,
Paradiso, and is spoken by Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, who is giving Dante advice on how
to act in exile:
Ma nondimen, rimossa ogne menzogna,
tutta tua visïon fa manifesta;
e lascia pur grattar dov´ è la rogna.
Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta
nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento
lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta.
[But none the less, all falsehood
set aside, make manisfest all that you have
seen; and then let them scratch where the itch
is. For if at first taste your voice be grievous,
yet shall it leave thereafter vital nourishment
when digested.]
(XVII. 127‒32)
While Halldór himself obviously found this advice profoundly important, there is no
immediate sign of Dante in the sworn brothers’ cathedral, Icefjord’s Deep. Why should
there be? A couple of Icelandic characters who reveal the passage from hero to vagabond
in the newly Christianized Northern Europe, and who thereby cast some light on modernity’s
catastrophies, may not have much in common with the exiled Dante and his Florence
in the early thirteenth century. But what if Dante’s
Commedia (1308-1321) hovers over not only the “extravagant musical” which is staged in
Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír, but also the mythically amoral
Gerpla? At the very least, Dante’s poem is among the definitive Western literary works when
it comes to European ideas of the afterlife, of which the legendary glory sought by
the wayward heroes could be considered a variety. The
Commedia, of course, contains an imaginative and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife
that is often considered the culmination of the medieval worldview as developed in
the Western Church. Dante himself may well have contributed to this understanding
of the poem; as Joan M. Ferrante notes, it is Dante who writes in the
Letter to Can Grande that the poem “purports to be a description of the state of souls after death” (4).
Dante may not be directly present in nature’s cathedral to welcome readers at the
beginning of
Wayward Heroes. However, Halldór’s medievalism can certainly be better understood by considering
his reflections on Dante and on the author of
Njál’s Saga, including the timing of these reflections. In light of Halldór’s involvement with
socialism between the two world wars and his temporary approval of Stalin’s gospel
in particular, the reader of
Wayward Heroes may also want to explore a possible affinity between its author and Dante on the
matter of political disillusionement. Joan Ferante explains the way in which literature
informs the debate over an exile’s ongoing purpose in the case of Dante himself:
Dante, a politician who was unable to continue to act directly or effectively in the
political sphere, shifted his activity after his exile to the only other sphere in
which he might have considerable public influence, writing, and he chose the mode
in which he would have the greatest freedom and potentially the greatest force, poetry.
Because neither the empire not the church was functioning as the guide God intended
it to be, the poet had to fill the vacancy. To emphasize that point, Dante has himself
crowned emperor and pope over himself in the Earthly Paradise by Virgil, another poet,
one who had had the ear of an emperor for his political message, the only figure able
to bring Dante to the home divinely ordained for mankind, as Dante is the only one
who can begin to lead his audience there. (43)
Ferrante thus observes that political interests, religious sentiments, and poetry
all bleed into one another in Dante’s exile. A modern writer’s equivalent predicament
can be seen in the case of Halldór, although his secular circumstances are clearly
of a different nature. According to the encounter between the Icelandic poet Þormóður
Bessason and his Christian king Ólafur Haraldsson (who in this scene is said to resemble
the heathen god Ása-Þórr) at Stiklastaðir in Norway, Þormóður’s power seems nothing
like Virgil’s prophetic guidance either. It is worth quoting this encounter at length, in which political and poetic
expectations alike are defied:
Hér em eg kominn Þormóður skáld Bessason af Íslandi, svarabróðir kappa þíns Þorgeirs
Hávarssonar, og beiðumst eg af yður hljóðs, herra, að flytja yður kvæði.
Konúngur spyr hver sá ölmusumaður var er þar lauk munni sundur, og hafi troll íslensk
skáld, segir hann, hef eg í þeim verri haft flestum mönnum, og er mér leitt orðið
skrum íslendinga. Eða, segir konúngur, hvar er sá þeirra í nótt er jafnan tók mestan
af um trygð og fylgispekt við mig er eg þyrfta helst, Sigvatur apvetníngur Þórðarson?
Þau tíðendi færi eg þér konúngur, af Sigvati vin yðrum, að hann fór útí Róm að skemta
sér; þóttu honum vandséð úrslit orustu er nú eigu þér fyrir höndum. En eg em kominn
um brattar leiðir að ná fundi yðrum.
Konúngur sér til hans af bragði og spyr snögt: hverjar leiðir ertu kominn þa?
Þormóður segir: Eg hef, konúngur, því til kostað að ná yðrum fundi, að eg hef geingið
frá búi mínu á Íslandi og þar látinn minn varnað er eg mátta aungva stund dags né
nætur augum af líta fyrir ástar sakar, og hef alt í hendur lagið útlendum þræli í
vonum þeirrar frægðar er skáld ná af slíkum öðlíngi sem þú ert sagður, afli aukinn
að stýra heiminum; og því fór eg fyrst vestur á Grænland og síðan allar götur norður
fyrir mannheim í sjö misseri, að freista þess að hefna garps yðvars Þorgeirs Hávarssonar,
er þér hafið mestan áttan í yðru ríki.
Eigi verður mér ljóst í hvern heim sá maður skjalar, segir konúngur; og er firn og
endemi hve höfðingjadjarfir þér eruð íslenskir stafkarlar; eða hvern garp segir hann
oss áttan hafa bestan í voru ríki?
Þormóður svarar: Höfuðgarp þinn Þorgeir Hávarsson, þann er eingi maður hefur á Norðurlöndum
borinn verið með svo óskelfdu hjarta.
Sá mun ær, armínginn, er þar klifar, segir konúngur; og rekur oss víst eigi minni
til að hafa áður heyrt þetta nafn; en þó má vera að nokkur íslenskur afglapi með því
nafni hafi rekist í lið vort endur, þá er vér lágum í víkingu.
Að svo mæltu snýr konúngur í braut að sinna skyldari störfum.
(399–400)
[“I am the skald Þormóður Besssason from Iceland, your champion Þorgeir Hávarsson’s
sworn brother. Pray listen, my lord, while I sing you a lay.”
The king asks what beggar this is, daring to open his mouth in his presence. “Trolls
take you Icelandic skalds!” says he. “Few have done me worse then they. I have had
more than enough of these Icelandersʼ boasting. Where is that man tonight,” says the
king, “who always boasted so highly of his loyalty and devotion to me when I needed
them most—Sigvatur Þórðarson of Apavatn?”
“Of your friend Sigvatur, my king, I can inform you that he has gone to Rome to pass
the time, out of pessimism about the outcome of the battle awaiting you. But I have
traveled treacherous paths to stand before you.”
The king casts him a glance and asks curtly: “What paths have you traveled, then?”
Þormóður says: “In order to stand before you, sire, I have given these things of myself:
I abandoned my farm in Iceland and left behind the treasures of mine that I could
not, for love of them, take my eyes off at any hour of day or night, and placed them
all in the hands of a foreign slave, in hope of the glory that skalds reap from such
noble lords as you are reputed to be, endowed with the might to rule the world. That
being done, I went westward to Greenland, and then far north of the world of men for
three-and-a-half years, intending to avenge Þorgeir Hávarsson, the greatest warrior
you had in your kingdom.”
“I cannot comprehend what this man is prattling about,” says the king. “The impertinence
of you Icelander starvelings toward your lords is an unparalleled abomination. What
warrior does he claim to have been best in our kingdom?”
Þormóður replies: “Your glorious champion, Þorgeir Hávarsson. No man has ever been
born in the North with such an unwavering heart.”
“This wretch must be mad,” says the king. “We certainly do not recall having ever
heard that name—though some Icelandic imbicile by that name may have stumbled his
way into our band back in our Viking days.”
These things being said, the king departs to attend to more pressing concerns.]
(452–54)
Despite the abrupt dissimilarity this holds when compared with the genuine prestige
that Dante gives to poetry, some interpreters of religious ideas in modern Europe,
including key writers and poets in the first half of the twentieth century, do construct
in their works a path where the lost inheritance appears in the secular ruins. Often
this involves relentless travels in the history of Christianity and Western narrative
traditions more generally. This transformative act has been referred to as the making
of modernist cathedrals, as Clare Cavanagh terms it in
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (66–102). Halldór has not been referred to as a modernist, and the perceivable transformative
act within the passage from hero to vagabond in
Wayward Heroes can hardly be termed a modernist cathedral. Yet his act of rewriting the saga heritage
within the wider context of European literature is nevertheless reminiscent of the
mythio-poetic or religious transformative act of poets like T. S. Eliot and writers
like James Joyce. Halldór’s wayward heroes manifest a transformation, the nature of
which can be charted by considering
Gerpla as a work in which the European tradition of Homer, Dante, and Cervantes meets the
Icelandic tradition of the sagas and eddic poetry, in the context of modernist reconsideration
of religious ideas and also ideas about the nature of literature. The sworn brothers’ displacement in foreign lands relates to their “conversion” in
aesthetics and consciousness; these northern heroes stumble onto the well-trodden
and bitter path of Dante, that of exile in European literature.
The Russian modernist poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) considers the theme of vagabondry
and Dante’s
Commedia in “Conversation about Dante.” He writes of literature itself as exile: “What distinguishes
poetry from automatic speech,” is that it “rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness
in the middle of a word. Then it turns out
that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means
to be forever on the road” (407). On the road to exile, Dante was not only on foot;
contrary to what modern readers
believe, he was poor.
The Divine Comedy is an act of performance by a displaced man. Mandelstam explains,
Courtesy is not at all characteristic of him, rather something distinctly the opposite.
One would have to be a blind mole not to notice that throughout the Divina Commedia Dante does not know how to behave, does not know how to act, what to say, how to
bow. I am not imagining this; I take it from the numerous admissions of Alighieri
himself, scattered throughout the Divina Commedia.
The inner anxiety and painful, troubled gaucheries which accompany each step of the
diffident man, as if his upbringing were somehow insufficient, the man untutored in
the ways of applying his inner experience or of objectifying it in etiquette, the
tormented and downtrodden man—such are the qualities which both provide the poem with
all its charm, with all its drama, and serve as its background source, its psychological
foundation.
(404)
Dante’s circumstances are not Halldór’s, it is true. Yet the common element of displacement
certainly does relate to the notion of exile as a transition from hero to vagabond.
As this relates to the far-ranging travels of the sworn brothers of
Gerpla, their encounters with cultures that possess different philosophical and psychological
alignments, whether the Inuit of Greenland or the empires of Christian Europe, is
related to the challenge to their identity.
Gerpla illuminates the migration of literature and ideas, which it also contributes to.
The step from poetry to vagabondry is a small one — or it was, before so much of the
poetry world was institutionalized by competitions and universities.
A couple of decades prior to the composition of
Gerpla, Halldór Laxness expressed deep-seated doubts regarding modern Icelandic literature’s
chance to cross over into “foreign” minds and souls. This was at least the case with
the poetry of Stephan G. Stephansson
(1853–1927), a farmer who emigrated from Iceland to Canada at the end of the nineteenth
century and taught himself to travel in world literature and the philosophy of both
man and nature, also becoming a notable disciple of Emerson in the ranks of North
American poets. When Stephan passed away, Halldór was in Manitoba and was asked by members of the
Icelandic community there to write a eulogy for the Icelandic newspaper
Heimskringla in Winnipeg. It was titled “Landneminn mikli” [The great settler], and appeared on
September 7, 1927. The eulogy later appeared in Halldór’s
Af skáldum, a collection of essays on Icelandic poets and novelists. Here are its opening lines:
Með Stephani G. Stephanssyni er í val hniginn einn efldasti andi þeirra tíma sem vér
lifum. Hvort útheimurinn muni nokkru sinni fá skygnst inní þær veraldir sem ljóð hans
opna hugskotssjónum íslensks lesanda læt ég ósagt, því reynsla hefur þrásannað að
hnoss íslenskrar túngu eru lítt miðlanleg erlendum huga. Hvort sem oss tekst nokkru
sinni að deila gleði vorri yfir Stephani með öðrum þjóðum, þá hefur hann látið eftir
sig auðæfi sem nægja mundu til framdráttar miljónum sálna. Hann hefur arfleitt okkur
að stóru ríki, ýmist með hrjóstrugum fjöllum og hrikalegum eða gróðursælum sléttum
og fögrum borgum. Og uppaf borgum hans gnæfa háir turnar. Yfir þetta mikla land hvelfist
víður himinn fullur af spám og teiknum. Sem sagt ef erlendum sálum tekst ekki að nema
land í þessum víðáttumikla ljóðheimi Stephans G. Stephanssonar, þá eigum vér hann
einir íslendingar. (7‒8)
[With the death of Stephan G. Stephansson, one of the most powerful spirits of our
times has passed away. I don’t know if the outer world will ever become aware of the
universes this poet has created in the minds of Icelandic readers. If we are to rely
on our experience, the treasures of our language are not easily translateable. Regardless
of the possibility to be able to share our joy with other nations, Stephan has handed
down to us a fortune that could be shared by millions of souls. We have inherited
a kingdom: On the one hand, there are the barren heaths and majestic mountains, and
on the other, vast and prosperous prairies and beautiful cities. And towers rise from
his cities. Above all of this, a vast sky, full of prophecy and signs. Thus, if foreign
souls cannot settle in Stephan G. Stephansson’s vast poetic world, it can only mean
that it is ours to keep.]
Stephan G. only wrote in Icelandic, and the language he ferried across the Atlantic Ocean does not offer his poetry much
chance of crossing over into “foreign” minds and souls. Different from some of Halldór’s
early novels, it took a while for
Stephan’s poetry to appear in English translation. Even existing translations of some
of his most profound poems have only filtered through the sturdy barriers of the cultural
hierarchy of the English-speaking world in small numbers and far between.
Whereas Stephan G.’s poetry continues to testify to the seemingly untranslatable aspect
of some of the world’s modern poetic treasures, Halldór was still a young author when
he witnessed the travels of his novels across linguistic regions. According to the
aforementioned eulogy, however, there are other kinds of barriers, and these appear
to be universal:
Stephan G. Stephansson er einn þeirra fáu sem bera gæfu til þess að vera velgerðarmenn
heillar þjóðar. Hann er einn þeirra manna sem gefa þjóð sinni tilveruréttinn, því
þrátt fyrir ágæti þau er kunna að felast í verslun og vélgeingi þá er þó enn þakkarverðara
hitt sem gert er fyrir mannlegar sálir, enda mat sögunnar menníngarlegt á þjóðum og
sú vegin og létttvæg fundin sem ekki eignaðist snillínga í heimi andans. Það er í
mikilúð snillínga sinna sem þjóðirnar sækja upphefð … í verkum þeirra skynjar hvert
brjóst bergmál síns eigin andvarps og veit um leið að það var ekki ófyrirsynju. Þessir
menn lyfta úr grasi mensku vorri og smæð. Fyrir tilverknað þeirra stækkum vér og eflumst.
… Og vér förum að lyfta höfðinu í virðulegri reisn en áður gagnvart alheiminum. (8)
[Stephan G. Stephansson is one of the very few who becomes a benefactor for entire
nations. He is one of those who provide their nations with the right to exist. Despite
the significance of trade and worldly success, the goods that are allocated to the
human soul are more worthy. History measures nations by their culture, if they do
not foster geniuses in the world of the spirit, they do not score. Nations rise and
fall with their geniuses … in their work every heart perceives the echo of existence
and realizes that all is not lost. Our humanity and fragility gravitates towards these
human beings, and we grow and prosper because of them … And we begin to move around
in the world in a more dignified manner than before.]
When Halldór wrote this eulogy the wounds of the First World War were soon to be made
fresh again, and the Western world was about to experience its first modern economic
crash. All the more reason to take notice of Halldór’s ideas on the role of poetry,
literature, and culture in the gloomy context of the interwar years: Individuals like
Stephan G. Stephansson (who was a pacifist on a world’s scale and seemingly immune
to the all-inclusive temptations of capitalism), provide their nations with “the right to exist.” Nations are not only “measured by
their culture.” Nations are measured by what Halldór refers to as “geniuses,” for
if they do not “foster geniuses in the world of the spirit,” no trade agreement, it
seems, can save them from a bad report. It is with the geniuses
that “nations rise and fall”; it is in their work where “every heart” perceives the
“echo of existence and realizes that all is not lost.”
Halldór’s eulogy expresses ideas both universal and tradition-specific, directed to
his fellow Icelanders on both sides of the Atlantic. A sentence like “[Stephan] is
one of those who provide their nations with the right to exist” has an insular air,
and alludes to some of the geographical and political realites
of modern migration of Icelandic literature in the wider European context. As such,
Halldór’s eulogy for Stephan, like many of his writings on key modern Icelandic poets
and writers, seems to anticipate Milan Kundera’s seven part essay on European literature
Le Rideau (2005), translated in 2007 as The Curtain, particularly the one titled “Die Weltliteratur” [World Literature].
Setting other continents aside, including North America, Kundera reflects on the travels
of European literature. After stating that the “dynamism and long life span of the
history of the European arts are inconceivable
without the existence of all [European] nations” and that these “diverse experiences
constitute an inexhaustible reservoir of inspiration” (32), he reflects on Iceland
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the saga legacy:
“We should certainly ponder this thoroughly: the first great prose treasure of Europe
was created in its smallest land, which even today numbers fewer than three hundred
thousand inhabitants” (32).
Since the publication of Kundera’s essay, the numbers of the inhabitants of Iceland
have increased a bit. Other more significant aspects of his reflections remain intact,
not the least within the context of the travels of both medieval and modern Icelandic
literature in Europe alone. Iceland is of course not the only European country that
can rely on the experience of seclusion in matters of existence and literature. In
the mind of Kundera, what distinguishes the small nations from the large is something
deeper than the “quantitative criterion of the number of their inhabitants” (33).
For the small nations, Kundera writes, their “existence is not a self-evident certainty
but always a question, a wager, a risk;
they are on the defensive against History, that force which is bigger than they, that
does not take them into consideration, that does not even notice them” (33). He then
wonders about what the travels of the heroes of the sagas might have been
like, had they been written in English:
Let’s try to imagine that the Icelandic sagas had been written in English: Their heroes’
names would be as familiar to us as Tristan or Don Quixote; their singular aesthetic
character, oscillating between chronicle and fiction, would have provoked all sorts
of theories; people would have argued over whether they should or should not be considered
the first European novels. I don’t mean to say that they have been forgotten; after
centuries of indifference they are now being studied in universities throughout the
world; but they belong to the “archeology of letters,” they do not influence living
literature. (34)
Kundera’s interpretation of the whereabouts of the sagas and their characters in what
he refers to as the “large context” of world literature thus emphasizes the sense
of isolation. Of course, this notion
does not exclude works like
Gerpla from being recognized as a major modern testament to the living influence of the
sagas. The same is true of a few other novels by modern Icelandic writers, the latest being
Guðbergur Bergsson’s (1932–)
Þrír sneru aftur [Three returned], a novel published in 2015 and nominated for the Nordic Council’s
Literature Award
in 2016. In “The Secret of the Ages of Life,” his review of Guðbergur’s novel
Svanurinn (1991) [
The Swan], Kundera gives the following advice: “Please do not read it as an ‘Icelandic novel,’
and an exotic oddity. Guðbergur Bergsson
is a great European novelist” (28).
As noted also by Kundera in “World Literature,” there is something about the way in
which universities across the globe go about
the subject of world literature that demands attention. Different from the art of
music, for example, which moves freely in the large context among musicologists, the art of the novel is bound up with its language and in “nearly
every university in the world it is studied almost exclusively in the small—national—context”
(2007, 34). And what of the professors of foreign literatures? Is it not their “very
natural mission to study works in the context of world literature?” Kundera asks.
This is his reply: “Not a chance. In order to demonstrate their competence as experts,
they make a great
point of identifying with the small—national—context of whichever literature they
teach” (34).
Seen from the large context of world literature, the region where the Greco-Roman cultural heritage meets the
Northern tradition can appear remote. If Þorgeir’s and Þormóður’s postwar medieval-modern
passage from hero to vagabond is challenging for readers to understand here and now,
the input of the secular age and its fanfare in academia should not be underestimated
as possible causes. Even Adorno could not have foreseen rapidly expanding fields such
as online media, blogging, and the digital humanites that reveal the thrilling and
profitable machinery of mass-culture at work in the former headquarters of perception
and reflection. But thanks to Philip Roughton’s English translation of Gerpla, readers of literature in the English-speaking world have been given an opportunity
to approach the heart of Western narrative tradition through the passage of a saga-hero
and saga-poet, and to recognize Þorgeir and Þórmóður from the Vestfirðir as Northern
versions of vagabond-figures in their larger context of home and exile in European
and world literature.