Take a guess what country has the most Nobel Prizes in the world? It’s Iceland!
Ok, let’s qualify that. Which country has the most Nobel Prizes per capita? Iceland has one Nobel Prize but on the other hand, it has a population the size of Camden, so that’s a pretty high ratio of Nobel Prizes to people.
Iceland has a Nobel Prize for Literature and it was won in 1955 by Halldór Laxness – man who did have a traditional Icelandic patronymic surname but changed it in the 1920s when he joined a monastery in Luxembourg. Halldór is up there with the Sagas in terms of Icelandic literature. I guess if the Sagas are their Shakespeare then Laxness is their Dickens? Now, full disclosure, I’ve never read any of his books. They don’t strike me as my sort of thing but then again, you might not have thought the Sagas were my thing either and I will rave about the Volsung Saga on the slightest provocation (you wait until 31st October when the A-Z of Iceland reaches V – yes, these have all been diarised since about October last year; I know what’s coming up when.) One day I’ll pick one of Halldór’s lighter ones and give it a go.
Halldór’s big book – big in terms of regard rather than pagecount – is Independent People, although you’ll also see English-language versions of The Fish Can Sing, The Atom Station and Under the Glacier on the shelf at the front of every bookshop in Iceland. Independent People is “among the foremost examples of social realism of Icelandic fiction” which doesn’t sell it to me and it’s about a sheep farmer who buys his own farm, his wife who is possessed by a demon, their daughter, his remarriage and the difficulties faced by farmers in Iceland during WWII. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.
His house has been turned into a museum. You can visit it. I haven’t but I’ve had plenty of tour guides point it out on the way to and from the Golden Circle because it’s virtually on the edge of Þingvellir. In fact, I named it to a tour guide once because I already knew everything else he was telling us. “Ok, whose house is this, then?” he said, stopping at the side of the road. “Halldór Laxness!” I said promptly.
Iceland’s really into books. You probably know about the Christmas Book Flood – a lot of new books are published in the run-up to Christmas and it’s a tradition for everyone to have a new book on Christmas Eve. One in ten Icelanders will have something published in their lifetime; people try to imply that this will be a book but in fact that statistic includes something as small as a letter published in the local newspaper. I think the Icelandic love of books comes from the very olden days. Icelanders were the ones who wrote down the Norse myths. We wouldn’t have Chris Hemsworth striding around waving a hammer if not for the Icelandic farmers. Tom Hiddleston wouldn’t have a career. If not for the Eddas, Thor and Odin and Loki and co would all have been lost in the sands of time. I picture long dark winters when the farmers went inside early and spent the miserable evenings telling tales and writing books and somehow that never really ended.
If you go into a bookshop in Iceland, you’ll be met with an Aladdin’s cave of tourist stuff. Mugs and keyrings and postcards, that sort of stuff, of course. But also books, primarily in English but also in a handful of other non-local languages. Guidebooks, Sagas, photo books full of glossy landscape pictures, novelty books about life in Iceland, things like The Traveller’s Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales that I mentioned in The A-Z of Iceland: M for Myths, Monsters & Magic, crime novels by Arnaldur Indriðason, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Ragnar Jónasson (the latter is my favourite of the three, I think), non-crime literature by Jón Gnarr, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and Hallgrímur Helgason and just so much more. I think if you don’t leave Iceland with at least one book, you’re doing it wrong. I have a little pile in my Kallax opposite; six books of which one is my own and the other five are all Icelandic.
That’s the huge Saga of Icelanders, which is beautiful but dense; Thermal Pools in Iceland; Egil’s Saga; A Traveller’s Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales; Minus Twelve: An Arctic Adventure and a mini version of Egil’s Saga. If you’re really interested, there’s also two photobooks from my first two trips to Iceland, a large Complete Norwegian textbook, a beautiful book of Volcano Discoveries and a lovely hardback illustrated Norse Myths book – none with any connection to Iceland but fit the theme well enough to live in that cube.
Then I’ve got another handful on the shelf in my office, which is my collection of Sagas (Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, Volsung Saga, Njal’s Saga, Saga of Grettir the Strong, Orkneyinga Saga, Sagas of Warrior-Poets, Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology [just read the Eddas, they’re the same stories but told with more character. Sorry Neil, I love you]), Joanne Harris’s Gospel of Loki, Tolkien’s version of the Volsung Saga which is The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, the rest of my Tolkiens and also Butterflies in November and Names for the Sea, which are not sagas.
Yeah, I got off the Nobel Prizes theme pretty quickly. Sorry. Not a lot to say about that whereas I have plenty of literature recommendations. May I recommend first and foremost the Volsung Saga and then the Prose Edda (both non-Amazon affiliate links)?