Reading Beyond Halldór Laxness: One U.S.-Based Writer’s take

Want to deepen your relationship with Icelandic literature in English translation but don’t know where to start? We’ve asked US-based professor of literature, Jenna Grace Sciuto, what she’d suggest, continuing here with what one should read beyond Halldór Laxness. Spending her summers in Iceland writing and researching with her collaborator at the University of Iceland, Jenna has a new book on the intersections between U.S. Southern and Icelandic literature that just hit the shelves, so she has lots of fresh thoughts on this matter.

Who else should you read beyond Halldór Laxness? If you have an interest in or familiarity with the sagas, Eddas, or Icelandic history in general, I’d next turn to Svava Jakobsdóttir (1930-2004), a feminist politician and writer who was the focus of my archival research at Árnastofnun last summer. The events of her novel Gunnlöth’s Tale (translated by Oliver Watts, 2011) occur on two planes: 1980s Copenhagen as an unnamed mother visits her daughter, Dís, who has been arrested for stealing a golden beaker from the National Museum of Denmark, which in Dís’s words she didn’t so much steal as “reclaim”, and the site of an ancient consecration ritual for a new king during the Bronze Age. On this second plane, the novel rewrites an important scene from Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. In Svava’s version, Gunnlöth is not a foolish giantess, keeper of the mead of poetry, who is easily seduced and tricked by Óðinn, but a priestess, embodying an earth goddess with power and agency over their ritualised encounter.

Svava’s collection The Lodger and Other Stories (translated by Julian Meldon D’Arcy, et al. 2000) is harder to track down, but also a great read that interrogates Iceland’s identity and experiences in the 20th century, including the US military presence, gender dynamics, consumer culture, and more. And born in the same year as Svava, Ásta Sigurðardóttir (1930-1971), a modernist active around the same time as the atómskálds or atom poets and similarly positioned as a bohemian on the fringes of society, wrote stories and poetry, created art, and modelled for artists. Nothing to be Rescued (translated by Meg Matich, 2023), a recent translation of her poetic, at times surreal, stories that focus on societal outsiders, was published alongside her original, haunting images. I also recommend Fríða Sigurðardóttir’s (1940-2010) Night Watch (translated by Katjana Edwardsen, 1995), a beautiful, layered book centring on the interconnected lives of multiple generations of women in remote Hornstrandir and the distance separating then from now. Night Watch, however, is out-of-print and a bit hard to find in English, which is also the fate of another great novel, Vigdís Grímsdóttir’s (1953-) Z: A Love Story (translated by Anne Jeeves, 1998), about two sisters and their relationships with themselves, each other, and those they love.

This is the second in a four-part guide to Icelandic literature available in English translations. In the next issue: Nordic Noir Interlude.

Jenna Grace Sciuto is a professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.