HELEN ANDERSON
My old paperback edition of Independent People, still bearing its price tag of 1475 Icelandic króna, sits high on a dark, northerly bookshelf among other Nordic authors, geographically in its place but utterly singular in my world view. Its shabby blue-and-white spine is lodged palely in the mountainside of books, like a shard of stubborn glacial ice in spring. I bought it many years ago from a bookshop in Reykjavik, plucked from a section otherwise devoted to the great Icelandic sagas, the swashbuckling struggles of Norse men and women with names such as Hallbjorn Half-troll and Erik Bloodaxe.
From Reykjavik I carried – but didn’t have time to read – the best known work by Halldór Laxness on a solo circumnavigation of Iceland. It was midsummer, the daylight eternal, and always late when I pulled in at spartan little guesthouses surrounded by fields of lava, set like gigantic pavlovas. Driving the national ring road was surprisingly challenging, better suited in parts to a four-wheel drive than my clapped-out hire car, and I was acutely aware of my solitude and the wildly unfamiliar elements: ice, steam, howling wind, boiling mud. Tourism to the island has boomed in the past five years – the Minister for Tourism has recently suggested limiting the number of travellers to some sites, such is the overuse and overcrowding – but I drove for days with only Björk on the radio and sheep for company.
In a lunar desert where Neil Armstrong once practised moonwalking, on an eerie, empty beach of black sand, on a knoll atop a glacier-fed waterfall, I rediscovered a sense of wonder I last felt during childhood. I came home with my copy of Independent People and only then did I discover Iceland’s most famous storyteller. In prose as stark and luminous as the topography I’d encountered, Laxness conjured the unforgettable Bjartur of Summerhouses, a sheep farmer who endures famine, sorcery and nightmarish blizzards, and loses everything – two wives, two sons and a beloved daughter – in his ferocious struggle for independence. Blighted by debt and bad luck, his herd infested with worms, Bjartur is an archetypal everyman raging against fate, but also an Icelander: a man who recites the sagas as he mucks out the sheep pen, as tough as the mutton he feeds his family at Christmas. “I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the Earth had no place outside storybooks and dreams,” Laxness said when accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. “Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child.”
As he strides across marsh and mountain, always thinly clad, always in freezing rain, Bjartur is both heroic and mockheroic – a hard-hearted fool who works his children like slaves, more concerned with his sheep’s diarrhoea than the welfare of his family. “It’s nothing but damn eccentricity to want to be dry,” he harangues his children as they toil in sleet. “I’ve been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.” And always there is Laxness’s unsentimental reverence for the land and the seasons, chiselled rather than written with haiku-like clarity.
Years later, I remember the bone-chill of midsummer nights in Iceland, the cry of a loon in a lava field, and a waterfall, long and slender, where “the south wind blows the spray up over the brink again, so that the waterfall flows backwards”.
But did I actually stand atop that gravity-defying waterfall, or have I since spirited myself into Bjartur’s holding on a sunlit evening? I’ve learnt the most reliable guide, on the road and in life, is the one who liberates the imagination.