“People Do Not Give Each Other Shelter”: On Halldor Laxness’s Independent People
Photo by the Author
From the 9th century until the middle of the 20th, Iceland was a colony of Denmark, and there’s an old Danish fable that says that when God created the earth, the Devil was watching. As the creation progressed, he became increasingly agitated over the marvelous achievements he was made to witness, until finally, at the end of it all, the Devil turned to God, and said, ‘Now, watch this.’
And he created Iceland.
This story may be meant to explain the rigors of the Icelandic climate and landscape: its cold and long winter darkness; the winds that don’t scour the landscape so much as flay it, so that the traveler sometimes seems to be passing among the butchered carcasses of immense prehistoric animals overgrown with moss; the active volcanoes like the one that recently caused the evacuation of towns in the Reykjanes peninsula; the fields of black lava that stretch as far as the eye can see and from time to time give way beneath the traveler’s feet; the daunting numbers of sheep. For a long time nobody lived there. The first humans who came were Irish monks who wanted to mortify themselves. Having succeeded at that, they left and were followed in 870 by Norse exiles who had run afoul of King Harald Fine-Hair. Because of the country’s isolation, the Icelandic language is almost identical to Old Norse. To hear it spoken is as close as you can come to knowing what the Vikings sounded like. The two great works of Norse literature, the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, were composed in Iceland.
Gudbjartur Jonsson, the sheepherder protagonist of the towering Icelandic masterpiece Independent People (1934), sees himself as an heir to this legacy. He writes poems, using the complex internal-rhyme schemes of former epochs, end-rhymes being too basic. At a critical juncture, he keeps himself from freezing to death in a blizzard by reciting the rimur, heroic poems adapted from the sagas during the epic revival of the 14th-18th centuries. Actually, he bellows them into the gale. This may give the impression of an indomitable, moor-bestriding action hero with a literary bent, all the more so because Bjartur’s overarching ambition is to be independent (Sjálfstæður in Icelandic). He wants to not just have his own land and his own sheep, but to live unbeholden to any other person. Ayn Rand would have approved of him, and so did some of the American critics who read Independent People when it was translated into English in 1946. But Halldor Laxness, its author, was an avowed communist (along with being Iceland’s sole Nobelist, he was a recipient of the Stalin Prize) and he thought Bjartur was stupid.
I’m not sure stupid is accurate. Laxness’s protagonist knows everything there is to know about sheep, for starters, and he knows his literature. But he’s morally stupid, blind to the impact his actions have on those he is supposed to care about, or at least care for. In keeping with Derrida’s recognition that writing often has an effect opposite to what is expected, Bjartur’s wary and often belligerent guardianship of his independence proves disastrous for his dependents: it costs half of them their lives and estranges the others, including the only one Bjartur actually loves. Independent People can be read as a meditation on what it means to have dependents and what it is one owes them. It’s not coincidental that the householder’s greatest source of pride is that he owes nobody anything. That, at any rate, is what he thinks.
Laxness wrote more than twenty novels, along with a few dozen books of essays and memoirs and a dozen volumes of stories, poems and plays. Only a few have been translated into English, and to my knowledge, only Independent People is adjudged to be great. Its greatness is more modest than that of, say, War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time. It’s closer to the greatness of Lolita and The Blue Flower and One Hundred Years of Solitude and Song of Solomon: startling, idiosyncratic, arising from the conjunction of supple, sometimes heart-stopping prose rendered into strong and even incandescent English by J. A. Thompson; vibrant characterizations of people, animals, and landscapes; a range of feeling that encompasses humor, terror, sorrow and exaltation, sometimes occurring in such rapid succession that they come together in a single chord; and a tale that might be one of the fundamental stories identified by Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell, that of a dead man coming to life. In this case, Independent People is the story of a man who has deadened himself through his single-minded service of an ideal. He comes to life against his inclinations, against his will. Only the dead know how painful it can be to be brought back to life.
About halfway through Independent People, someone makes a reference to electricity, and you realize with a start that the novel takes place in the 20th century. Prior to this we might have been in the Middle Ages. The characters rarely leave their farmsteads except to drive their flocks, and when they do they travel by foot or horse and wagon. Bjartur’s croft is a single room with stalls for livestock below. He and his children fodder their sheep with grass that they mow with scythes, the wrenching effort of the mowing conveyed in a long set-piece whose beauty never disguises the work’s brutality. Their world has demons in it, notably Gunnvor, “a woman of a most forceful nature, reputed to be skilled in occult lore and capable of changing her form,” who, sometime in the remote past, developed a taste for human blood that she satisfied by eating her husband, her children, her neighbors, and eventually any stranger foolish enough to travel through the mountains. Her remains are said to be buried beneath a cairn not far from the farmstead. People who pass that way place a stone on it as an offering against misfortune. The novel’s action may be said to begin when Bjartur and his young wife are traveling nearby, and she asks to stop to lay a stone and he says no. It’s their wedding day.
His shortcomings as a husband are further evidenced by his refusal to butcher a sheep to provide Rosa with some of the meat she craves—he tells her, “Independence is better than meat”—and the way he taunts her about her suspected infidelity:
“Was it that fellow at Tindstathir?”
“Ask him.”
“Or that half-wit from the coast who did the ploughing?”
“Maybe.”
“Surely you weren’t mad enough to do it with that whoremonger of a teacher who gave Steinka of Gilteig hers?”
“Why don’t you count up all the whoremongers in the country?”
“And find you’d had them all? The cat that creeps is craftier than the one that leaps.”
Then she rose in her wrath and cried passionately:
“God knows, and Jesus Christ, that if there’s anything I regret it’s not having had them all instead of marrying a man that worships dogs and sets more store on sheep than he does on the human soul.”
This may give the impression that Independent People is a comic novel, and it sometimes is, but its humor often gives way to grotesquery and outright horror. After some months of marriage, Bjartur leaves for the roundup of the flocks that have summered on the mountainside. With uncharacteristic solicitude, he leaves Rosa with a ewe so she won’t be too lonely. The ewe is his favorite, Gullbra, a “pearl among animals.” Pearl or not, a ewe is customarily left out in the home-field, but Rosa succumbs to the mood of the day, which is damp and windy, and goes out to coax the ewe into the stalls.
During the long night that follows, Rosa is driven half-mad by the sheep’s bleating, its spasmodic scrambling in the dark below, the thump of its head bashing against the walls. At times it sounds terrified, and she becomes convinced that someone or something has stolen inside and is cutting its throat. At other times she hears a note of madness, “a hoarse, almost expiring rattle,” as if the ewe had been possessed by a malign spirit. The woman is dragged into a tunnel of infantile dread that a few bends later becomes the dread of a cornered animal. It’s only with morning that she becomes a human being once more, by doing what human beings have always done to animals, and later she makes a feast of the creature’s offal. She’s helping herself to the sustenance her husband refused her. And in a way she’s taking vengeance on him for refusing it. Bjartur is none the wiser. At supper, Rosa feeds him one Gullbra’s ribs without him questioning where it came from.
But the sheep’s disappearance preys on him, and as winter approaches he sets off to find it, even though his wife is now far along in pregnancy and afraid of being left alone in the isolated croft. Her misgivings prove correct. Bjartur is caught in a blizzard and nearly freezes to death in the mounting snow. This is where the poetry recitation comes in. The scene is heroic, but the poems themselves aren’t overly impressive, at least not in translation. Witness this description of the troll Grimur:
The monster lived on moor or fen;
The sea was in his power.
He’d shamelessly drink the blood of men,
The steaming flesh devour.
The crags before him split apart,
The rivers ran in spate;
He cleft the rocks by magic art,
His cunning was so great.
After surviving his night of roaring verse in a blizzard, Bjartur staggers home to find that Rosa has died in childbirth. The only reason the baby—a girl—is still alive is that Bjartur’s lousy, worm-eaten dog is lying protectively on top of her. Heroism and mock heroism give way to tragedy. tragedy. This oscillation is emblematic of the novel’s genius. Its emotional palette is almost as big and multihued as Dickens’s, but its moods shift more quickly, sometimes suddenly enough to give you whiplash.
The tone swerves yet again when Bjartur goes to the house of the local bailiff and his genteel wife and slowly, shamefacedly, because he is asking for a favor, with endless hemming and hawing, informs them that his wife is dead and their baby at death’s door. A midwife is sent for, and she restores the child to life by whipping her over her head like an Olympic hammer-thrower, then plunging her into a vat of scalding water. Bjartur names the girl Asta Sollilja. He calls her the flower of his life. In the whole of this long novel, she is the only being toward whom he is consistently tender, though it must be said, tender in a brusque and offhand way. Much of the novel’s emotional brutality derives from the way he eventually betrays his love for Asta Sollilja and her love for him.
Independent People is a pastoral novel, a novel of farm life. Considering that I have spent most of my life in cities, I’ve read an unusual number of these in the past year, including Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat, a devastating portrayal of the poisoned legacy of South African racism, and John Berger’s Pig Earth. Reading them raises the question of why anyone should care about farm life in the U. S. in the 21st century, when only two percent of the population lives on farms or ranches, and many, many young children—and probably most adults—have no idea of where their food comes from. For hundreds, thousands of years, throughout the earth, most of our ancestors lived with the land. So even when a pastoral novel is set in the present, it recalls our past. The text recreates the slowness with which time elapsed when humans were bound by the seasons, as they are on farms. This is especially true in Independent People, in which a sudden spring snowfall destroys a family’s fortunes, entombing its members inside for weeks at a time and driving one of them to orgiastic violence.
The pastoral novel also restores humanity’s old, discarded relationship with animals, including the animals it kills and eats. The noblest character in Independent People is the lousy dog that spreads herself over a half-frozen baby. The most loved may be the cow that the bailiff donates to Bjartur’s family, though Bjartur views the gift as a nefarious humiliation and kills it, out of expediency and spite. The most precious are sheep, the living measure of his independence.
Above this, the novel returns us to the materiality of labor. This is another thing most of us who get paid for manipulating symbols, including the symbols that are money, have forgotten. Laxness’s characters would probably be astonished that such forgetting was even possible, and sick with envy. The author is unsentimental about what that labor is like and what it costs the laborer, as in this scene of Bjartur’s children joining their elders to mow the grass that will be dried into hay to fodder the animals through winter:
Thus they stood in bogs and pools, in water and in mud, the close-packed clouds above them interminable, the wet grass whistling drearily under the scythe. The scythe grew heavier and heavier, the hours refused to pass, the moments seemed to stick to them as soggily as their sodden garments. . . . and for hours on end the children heard no sign of life other than the rumbling in their own stomachs, for not only were they soaking wet and infinitely tired, they were also famished, and with no comforting hopes of the possibility of communion with the elves.
In much of literature, the farm is the place a character longs to escape, even if only through the imagination. Maybe this is because there are few places where reality is more present, more pressing, inescapable and demanding. Even the open fields hem one in. Hence the stereotype of the farmer as someone ignorant of the wider world, a hayseed, hick, or yokel. A critical turning point in Independent People comes when Bjartur takes his daughter with him on his yearly trip into town to sell his wool and buy supplies. The journey will end with the first of the betrayals I spoke of earlier, but it begins in hope, with Asta Sollilja surveying the world from atop the sacks of wool in the horse-cart:
“Father,” she said in a perplexed and hesitating voice, “where are we?”
“We’ve crossed the heath,” he replied. “That’s the ocean.”
“The ocean,” she repeated in an awe-stricken whisper. She went on staring out to the east, and a cold shiver of joy passed through her at the thought of being fortunate enough to stand on the eastern margin of the moors and see where the land ends and the ocean begins, the sea of the world.
Halldor Laxness himself grew up on a farm, at a time when the windows of Iceland’s farmhouses had panes made of the collagen from fish’s swimming bladders. Novels were so alien an art form that people called them “Danish novels.” It is likely he knew what the shuttered girl in his masterwork felt getting her first glimpse of the true immensity of the world beyond her country, understanding that that world is the one books and stories are written about. Iceland wasn’t part of that world. Laxness changed that. “It is unlucky for a writer to be born in a tiny isolated country, condemned to a language that no one understands,’ he wrote. “But one day I hope that the stones in Iceland will speak to the whole world through me.”
All pastoral literature reckons with husbandry. The word is usually used in relation to domestic animals, with connotations of care and conservation. It shares a root with “husband,” that root being Norse. Bjartur is a diligent husbandman of sheep but a dreadful husband to two unloved wives, and he’s scarcely better as a father. One of his children goes mad. One goes off to America. The third boy squanders his chance of joining his brother and throws himself at a young woman of privilege who laughs in his face. The cherished Asta Sollilja falls for a one-legged wretch of an itinerant schoolteacher who gets her pregnant. Bjartur greets the news by slapping her face and driving her out of the house. As for his property, at the end of the novel Bjartur falls back into debt and loses his farmstead to the bank.
It’s not wholly his fault. In the lulls of this family saga, Laxness follows the machinations by which various players, including the bailiff and his son, manipulate hayseeds like Bjartur into dependency. Debt is the universal condition of the husbandman: debt to the bailiff and the bank, to the farmers’ cooperative and the dealers of seed and farm equipment, debt to the children who give you unpaid labor on the unspoken promise that in time what is yours will become theirs, debt to the wife who bears those children and gives them the love you can’t, debt to the creatures you keep alive in a world that wants to kill them so that when the time comes you can kill and eat them yourself. Under the laws of Bjartur’s time, only one’s debts to the first four creditors were subject to enforcement. Much of the power of Independent People arises from its unflinching examination of the other debts, about who owes them, and to whom. Between the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, a quarter of Iceland’s people left the country, as if trudging away from a battle they knew they could never win. Most of them were farmers.
Peter Trachtenberg is a nonfiction writer whose books include 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, The Book of Calamities, and Another Insane Devotion. His honors include Whiting and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His new book, The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York, will be published by Black Sparrow Press in Spring 2025.