[LINK] "Iceland's next saga: The wounded tiger's tale"

[rfmcdonald]

Writing for The Globe and Mail, Matthew Hart takes a look at how Icelanders see their nation in the light of the recent economic catastrophes and in relation to their ancient national literature. It's worth reading at length, but below's a particularly interesting excerpt.

The fact of the sagas seems to power the literary enterprise of Iceland, like a sort of psychic nuclear bundle pulsing away in its treasure room in Reykjavik and driving every pen. It is not that writers write in the saga tradition, or even mine the source, but they see themselves as part of a people formed by writing and powerfully connected to it.

“I think it's interesting,” says Sjon, “that on Oct. 9, when the whole financial structure of Iceland was crumbling, the main paper ran an editorial marking the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the poet Steinn Steinnar. What they said was that maybe at a time like this we should look to our poets for inspiration.”

We are drinking tea in the bar of a Reykjavik hotel. Sjon is an intense figure with extravagant sideburns. He stares boldly out of rectangular glasses and speaks in a rapid, confident manner. He is surfing the runaway success of his novel The Blue Fox, just translated into English but already a bestseller in Denmark and Germany, and also writes lyrics for Bjork. He acknowledges that everyone in Iceland benefited from the boom.

“And yet at the same time you felt that this was news of a different world. It was something you saw from far away. In the far distance were these people flaunting their money. The old Icelandic idea of a classless society – it was hard to keep it alive. I think the feeling in society now is that [the economic expansion] is a project that went horribly wrong, so let's return to what we were – a humanist society.”

If literature adorns the life of every nation, it seldom has the central place that the sagas had for early Icelanders, for whom they constituted a manual of conduct.

“In Iceland, we had courts, but no means to enforce them,” historian Gunnar Karlsson says. “It was up to the person who had been wronged to enforce any sanction. So the family sagas are studies of how Icelandic people handled disputes.

“They are packed with minor events – love, adultery, petty theft. They are studies of the limits of freedom on individual dealings between people.”

“If you have a society that's small and poor and far away, you wouldn't suppose that to be a good prescription for being highly literate,” says Vesteinn Olafson, director of the Arni Magnusson Institute, where the sagas are deposited.

“But I think that the smallness of the society contributed to the creation of literature. Because the audience was so small, writing in the vernacular made more sense than writing in Latin.”

If the sagas are a large achievement for a small, medieval people adrift in the North Atlantic, their descendants are trying to keep it up.

“We publish 1,500 titles a year in Icelandic,” says Thorbjorn Broddason, a sociologist at the University of Iceland. “Some of them will be reports and others translations, but there is also a large amount of original Icelandic composition – a much higher publishing rate per capita than any other country, with a single exception – the Faroes.”

(The Faroe islands are a semi-autonomous Danish protectorate in the North Atlantic, between Shetland and Iceland. The population, about 50,000, speaks a Nordic language distinct from Danish.) “I think this is worth considering,” Prof. Broddason says. “Iceland is a tiny country and Faroe is a micro-Iceland. What it says is that there is a floor you can't go through. Irrespective of the size of population, if you want to keep your society alive, you have to have a distinguishable culture. If we did not have a national theatre, a symphony orchestra and our own publishing, we would not be culturally sustainable.”

And so a geyser of output is spewed into the world by Iceland's literary geothermal. Bragi Olafsson and Sjon are just two of a score of writers translated into foreign languages and sold around the world.

Hallgrimur Helgason's 101 Reykjavik is now in 13 languages, and was made into a movie. Arnaldur Indridason's Reykjavik flatfoots have made him into an international crime-genre bestseller. Over all looms the titanic figure of Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness (1902-1998), an Icelandic volcano who wrote plays, poems, editorials, short stories and 51 novels.

All this from a country with a population smaller than Etobicoke's, with three airlines, four banks and an economy that went from slow walk to warp speed in a decade.