Welcome!

Statement of Intent

This site is for people who have an interest in the works and life of Halldór Kiljan Laxness, the greatest Icelandic author of the 20th century. It is also maintained to counteract the effects of link-rot, recency bias, and commercial search engine optimization when searching for Laxness and his works. All the contributions here have been vetted or otherwise verified and the additional links in each section have also been examined for veracity. Recent developments in Artifical Intelligence and AI search engines have led to a tsunami of over-simplification and misinformation, scholasticus cave. All the entries here are written by real people!

How This Site Works

Each entry in the sidebar leads to a different Laxness novel or to some other aspect of his life. Laxness in Translation gathers, in one location, dozens of insightful essays about his novels with appropriate illustrations. This exploration of Laxness’ work is taken from many different cultural viewpoints. There are numerous additional links (at the bottom of each page) which are portals to worlds of additional information about Laxness and his work. Those of us without a fluency in Icelandic are limited the works listed in the sidebar. Most of them are readily obtainable although A Quire of Seven and The Honour of the House can be difficult to find in affordable English language editions. Far from being definitive statements on the selected works, these essays are presented in hope of spurring further interest to new readers. They have been carefully selected and all are used with permission. The images should all be fair use.

Problems and Promises of Translation

As I am not an expert in Icelandic to English translation, I will leave final judgment concerning the quality of the English versions of these books to experts (although you are welcome to state your opinion!) Icelandic is a very precise language, Old English has a lot of Icelandic “DNA” in its structure and vocabulary (from roots in Old Norse) which should allow for a good conversion. That said, however, the biggest problem with reading Laxness in translation is that his writing is so deeply steeped in Icelandic culture that those of us who are not native Icelanders miss many of the references; it has been written that Laxness has done more to shape the Icelandic sense of national identity than any other author has for any other culture. On the other hand, reading Laxness—even in translation—exposes those of us who are útlendir to new facets of Icelandic history, culture and psychology.

Solicitation for New Material

If you have any reviews, corrections, essays, appreciations, travel stories, etc., about Halldór Laxness or his books please feel free to leave a comment or email me directly. I regularly search for new Laxness content but might miss some—I am always eager to consider incorporating new work into these pages. On-topic commenters (anonymous is ok) are always welcome.

On behalf of all of the contributors and translators,

Stephen Cowdery, administrator, Laxness in Translation

stephencowdery@gmail.com