Iceland (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Fran Parnell [21]
As for Icelandic ghosts, they’re not like the wafting shadows found elsewhere in Europe but are strangely substantial beings. Írafell-Móri (móri and skotta are used for male and female ghosts respectively) needed to eat supper every night, and one of the country’s most famous spooks, Sel-Móri, got seasick when he stowed away in a boat. Even more strangely, two ghosts haunting the same area often join forces to double their trouble. And Icelandic ghosts can even age – one rather sad skotta claimed she was becoming so decrepit that she had to haul herself about on her knees.
Many folk stories explain away rock stacks and weird lava formations by saying that they’re trolls, caught out at sunrise and turned forever to stone. But we don’t know anyone who claims to have seen a troll – they’re more the stuff of children’s stories.
A quick word of warning – you might not be surprised to hear that many Icelanders get sick of visitors asking them whether they believe in supernatural beings. Their pride bristles at the ‘Those cute Icelanders! They all believe in pixies!’ attitude…and even if they don’t entirely disbelieve, they’re unlikely to admit it to a stranger!
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HALLDÓR LAXNESS – ICELAND’S FINEST AUTHOR
It’s frightening how we miss out on literary masterpieces from other countries, simply because no one bothers to translate them. Halldór Laxness (1902–98) is Iceland’s most celebrated author of the 20th century, and his genius was recognised when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Despite this, his greatest work took years to appear in English, and only a portion of his 51 novels and countless short stories, articles, plays and poems are currently available in translation.
The author was born as Halldór Guðjónsson, but he took the name of his family’s farm Laxnes (with an extra ‘s’) as his nom de plume. Laxness, a restless, inquisitive, prolific soul, had work published from the age of 14 and began travelling at the age of 17, wandering and writing around Scandinavia. Three years later he joined a monastery in Luxembourg and converted to Catholicism, studying Latin, praying fervently and writing his first proper novel, Undir Helgahnúk (Under the Holy Mountain). However, he soon became disillusioned with monastic life. After briefly returning to Iceland he went to Italy, where he wrote of his disaffection with the church and his increasingly leftist leanings in Vefarinn Mikli frá Kasmír (The Great Weaver from Kashmir). Laxness then set off for America to try his luck in the fledgling Hollywood film industry. There he wrote one of his best-known works, Salka Valka, as a screenplay. It was during this stay in America during the Great Depression of the 1930s that he became a communist sympathiser. Quickly finding himself facing deportation from the USA, he bought a ticket to Germany.
Laxness became so absorbed with the Communist Party that he attended the 1937 purge trials in Moscow and deliberately misrepresented them in his writings (by his own later admission) lest he in any way defame the system in which he had placed all hope and trust. Most of Laxness’ work during his communist days reflects everyday life in Iceland, often with thinly disguised autobiographical details. Independent People describes the harsh conditions under which the average Icelander lived in the early 20th century, focusing on the heartbreakingly bloody-minded farmer Bjartur of Summerhouses, one of the most perfectly drawn characters in world literature. His other major novels include Iceland’s Bell and The Atom Station. The former is a three-part work, a sagalike portrait of extreme poverty and skewed justice. Set in an Iceland subjugated by Danish rule, it revolves around the interweaving