Salka Valka

NOTE: There is a new 2022 translation of Salka Valka, see links below.

Fish Washing Indoors, Reykjavik, 1911, Magnús Ólafsson, Cornell University Library Collections

          “Should we not talk at all about love at all this time?” he asked.
          “I need to go out and spread fish,” she said.

Silja’s declaration of love to her favorite book:

It should be an impossible task for a person involved in Icelandic literature as a writer, critic and editor to decide on a favorite book - to choose one of thousands. But I am not in doubt. My favourite book, since I first read it at the age of 23, has been Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness. It was first published in two volumes in 1931 and 1932 and has been reprinted many times.

Salka Valka- A Political Love Story, as Halldór called the second half of the novel, tells the story of the headstrong pauper Salka Valka from the age of ten to twenty-five and is an excellent book for adolescents, girls especially. Why then did I not read it earlier? The answer is personal. My father was a male chauvinistic working class man, and he adored Laxness’ books, especially Independent People. But what he saw in the novels was what he wanted to see, and his endless quotes from Laxness were not tempting for a girl growing up. So although I loved my father dearly, I hated his idol and did not read his novels until I had to; at university. Then I read practically all of them during one winter, mostly aloud to my husband (we had no television but we did have a baby so we could not go out much.) I was deeply moved by the story this first time through, and the final unforgettable sentences of Salka Valka still make me cry. Yet there is no other end possible. If life is to go on for both of them, Arnaldur and Salka must part.

Salka Valka is a milestone in Laxness’ career but people do not agree as to whether it is his last juvenile novel or his first mature one. The very interesting thing about the novel is that it started out as a manuscript for a motion picture, written in Los Angeles, and it so happens that this manuscript was printed for the first time this year (2004), both in English and Icelandic, in the literary magazine Tímarit Mals og menningar. Halldór Laxness went to L.A. in 1927, determined to become a scriptwriter in Hollywood.

“The film life here is magnificently interesting and I have good hopes to get into that as soon as I have written something in English… ”

he writes to his fiancée in Iceland. He wanted Greta Garbo to play the main character in the film which was to be called Salka Valka, a Woman in Pants or The Icelandic Whip! Unfortunately, it all came to nothing.

But the novel lives and charms new readers constantly because Salka is such a fantastically real person. It is almost weird how much a young man of twenty-something in the late 1920s knows of the inner life of girls! If ever a novel convinced me that to be really outstanding, a writer has to be both man and woman, it is this wonderful book.

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Vintage Postcard, circa 1921

David’s essay on Salka Valka:

Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness: she needs to be alone

Born in Reykjavík in April 1902, Halldór Guðjónsson (he changed his name to Halldór Kiljan Laxness in 1923) lived through almost the entire twentieth century. Raised in an isolated and traditional society, he travelled widely and embraced cosmopolitan modernity, though retained an essentially Icelandic identity. In early life Laxness adhered to staunch revivalist Catholicism, then embraced socialism for thirty years. He subsequently espoused ecological and pacifist causes and addressed philosophical questions reflecting an interest in humanism and Taoism. But the principal achievement of Laxness was the authentic portrayal of sympathetic but struggling characters that symbolised the determined aspirations of the Icelandic nation and marked its long path towards eventual independence from colonialist Denmark.

Laxness traveled to America in the 1927 summer intending to become a Hollywood screenwriter. Writing to his then wife Inga at the end of that year, he described work on a film script provisionally titled Salka Valka (or, A Woman in Pants): the eponymous protagonist is described as ‘tall and strongly built’ with an expression encompassing ‘rustic virginity, dare-devilry, primitive charm’, and ‘dressed like a fisherman: wide pants, the boot-legs reaching up over her knees, a pipe in her mouth’. The script reflects contemporaneous Freudian concepts of human sexuality and is redolent with surrealist images, such as the final scene in a lover’s cottage where Salka lingeringly unfolds and kisses the leather straps of an Icelandic whip (often made from skin of bull penis) and Laxness imagined the cross-dressing Swedish actress Greta Garbo in the title role. Not surprisingly, negotiations with MGM floundered so the script was transformed into a two-part novel: the first manuscript was written whilst visiting isolated Icelandic fishing villages, the second was completed in cosmopolitan Weimar-era Leipzig. These were published a year apart with the support from the national Cultural Fund: the first (O Thou Pure Vine) was well received, but the second (The Bird on the Beach) was chastised by conservatives for its perceived lampoon of boorish ‘upper class’ motivations and criticised by progressives for its caricature of labour movement infighting – the Communist Party leader suggesting Laxness approached socialism as an idealist, with only a bourgeois understanding of the workers’ struggle.

An English translation of the combined parts of Salka Valka was published in 1936. The English language version has been out of print for many years, but Guðny Halldórsdóttir kindly lent me her copy, which was published in 1973 following revision by her father. A previous review commended its saga-like objectivity and clarity, and the masterful portrayal of down-trodden characters whose local quotidian travails seem emblematic of wider persistent human suffering: another account praised its Christian symbolism and careful balance of honourable parishioners and devious villains on both sides of the class struggle. The themes reflect the author’s perennial concerns with the nature of love, position of women, role of the intellectual, and the lot of common people: many chapters are full of visceral emotions and disturbing sexual acts perpetrated against young women. In a notebook Laxness described his wish to provide ‘tragic perspectives on the incomprehensibility of human feelings’, perhaps drawing on his desolation, anguish and guilt at the end of an affair with an Icelandic woman whilst living in America. But neither review has considered how the progressive emancipation of Salvör Valgerður (‘Salka Valka’)—as she first becomes a prominent local activist, then distances herself from the competing attentions of aggressively preying or dependently needy men—may reflect a growing awareness of her own sexuality.

The novel starts with the mid-winter night-time arrival by boat of eleven-year old Salvör and her unmarried mother Sigurlína at the run-down fishing village of Óseyri. The daughter disembarks first and reassures her mother, ‘in a low deep voice’ which suggests that of a man. They are grudgingly offered a room for the night at the Salvation Army hostel, but the next day their destitute status is acknowledged but not addressed by the local storekeeper, rector or doctor. They return to the hostel and fall prey to the impulsive but persuasive drunkard Steinþor Steinsson, who leads them towards ‘Marbud’, the home of his elderly aunt Steinunn and almost-blind uncle Eyjolfur, where they are offered lodgings. That evening Salvör tells her mother that whilst she was outside Steinþor had ‘grabbed hold of me here and here, and here’, and ‘whispered some stuff in my ear’ but Sigurlína responds inadequately, by asking for mutual understanding between ‘two women’, a response which has a fatal consequence. During the night Salvör is woken by the sound of tussling in the bed, as Steinþor forces himself on Sigurlína: he is repulsed, but only after he whispers a proposition which makes her recoil ‘Almighty Jesus, no! You know you can’t ask me to do a thing like that’. Later, whilst lying awake, Salvör realises she had often lain alone at night whilst her mother was absent, and for the first time appreciates she will have to rely on herself for her future safety: the narrator commenting ‘perhaps one really had nobody but oneself’.

The first part ends at dawn on Easter Day, when Sigurlína is found drowned, ‘a little grey oblong piece of flotsam which had been washed up on the sand’. This suicide is the result of a long process which includes remorse for the relationship with a married man which led to pregnancy with Salvör, regret for a subsequent series of damaging sexual liaisons with exploitative men, persistent grief following the death of her two-year old son Sigurlinni from scrofula (tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis: it is later revealed that Steinunn lost many children at Marbud to the same illness), a demoralizing awareness that Steinþor had once again attempted to force Salka into a sexual relationship, and acute anguish following a second desertion by Steinþor, just a few days before their hastily-arranged ‘Hallelujah Wedding’ scheduled for Holy Saturday. Her fragile personality could not withstand such prolonged adversity, without unconditional support from her daughter for whom ‘her mother’s weeping no longer went so deep to the heart as it had done’. During her testimony on entry into the Salvation Army two years before, Sigurlína had told the Congregation of her intention to commit suicide whilst pregnant with Salvör, but attempts at spiritual consolation by vigilant fellow Congregationalists following this nuptial desertion had made no impact: and the position of the often-derided Sigurlína within the wider community had always been marginal. Salvör, just fourteen years old, guarantees the costs of the funeral and walks back to Marbud, alone.

The second part of the novel charts the rise to prominence of Salvör within Óseyri. She establishes a local branch of the seamen’s union to defend workers against managerial exploitation; educates herself through reading political, evolutionist and philosophical texts; and assumes maternal responsibilities for four children once their mother dies. She is praised for being ‘a match for any man alive’. She is tall, erect and high-shouldered, her thick hair cut short with a side-parting; has courageous clear eyes, strong jaw and full lips, firm hands and a deep voice; and wears Alpine hiking-boots, woollen trousers and a roll-neck Jersey sweater which does not conceal the full curve of her firm breasts. She is commended by her childhood crush Arnaldur (by then a Communist agitator) for being a ‘tovarisch’ (Bolshevik comrade worker) icon, but current observers might recognise her portrait as iconographic of something else. She withstands the pleading entreaties and forcible sexual attentions of now-wealthy but still unscrupulous Steinþor, and leaves Marbud after she discovers it was Steinþor who had provided anonymous funds which enabled her to remain there after the death of Steinunn and Eyjolfur. Once aware of the feckless serial infidelity of the impractically idealistic Arnaldur (and despite some lingering affection for him), she reluctantly but determinedly ends their relationship by encouraging him to pursue his dreams in America. At the end of the novel, when the twenty-two year-old Salvör is finally free of unwanted male attention, the narrator compares her solitary precarious existence to the eggs of winter birds resting on narrow ledges on a high cliff-face: but contemporary readers might contend that having rid herself of both barbarous Steinþor and immature Arnaldur, Salvör may not want but certainly needs to be alone. Though with a typical twist, Laxness suggests she may be pregnant: for as Salvör walks past her most long-standing friend, he comments enigmatically, ‘cold weather to be born in’.

The novel therefore carefully illustrates the potentially damaging consequences of parentlessness, childhood abuse, unexpected bereavement and marital desertion; the corrosive effects of social and economic inequality; and the undermining of the aspirations of women by patriarchal institutions. Sigurlína succumbs after accumulated experiences of deprivation and loss, mediated through demoralisation and despair. It is argued that ‘resilience’ represents a process which allows the resumption of development following trauma or other adversity, and contends that ‘bonding’ and ‘meaning’ are important dynamic features which support this process. Those with only fragile affiliation or for whom life has lost its meaning (as depicted by Sigurlína) are less buffered against undermining challenges: but the active community engagement of Salvör provides a supportive network facilitating her eventual passage towards probable independence and emancipation.


Originally published in the Medical Humanities blog, used by permission.

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Dariens’s appreciation of Salka:

Salka Valka is the tale of a precocious little girl named Salvör Valgerdur. Salka’s mother, Sigurlina, has fled the north to seek a better life in the south of Iceland, but they stop off in the tiny town of Oseyri and never leave. Sigurlina is as weak as her daughter is strong. Sigurlina desires to be a good woman, but fate and love seem to conspire otherwise.

Unlike her mother, Salka learns: she learns how to read books, how to read people, and she learns from her mistakes. We meet Salka as a rough, uneducated, illegitimate girl, who speaks her mind with complete honesty even when it means being rude. She isn’t afraid of anyone, and her imposing looks and strength inspire admiration and yearning in those around her. Salka’s hard work and determination bring her out of poverty and earn her independence, and throughout her hard life she finds the resources to help others along the way, through friendship and material means. Her only weakness turns out to be her lifelong love for a weak man.

Laxness brings his familiar irony and humor, pathos and tenderness to this work. When Salka fears that her mother is dead, the old man they live with comforts her in the only way he can, with his honesty:

...it’s no use crying in this place; there's nobody to console one but oneself. I’ve lived in Oseyri now for over sixty years. Perhaps you young people will be able to become human beings, even if we older ones haven’t succeeded. But it’s late already. And there's nothing so good as sleep, both for those who are blind and for those who still have their sight. So we'll look after one another a little, so far as we can, if we should wake again to-morrow. There’s so little people can do for each other in this place. Good night.

Salka Valka’s story is the story of loneliness, despair, politics, power, compassion, lust, poverty, fish, and the Salvation Army. Most of all it is the story of a love strong enough to make the ultimate sacrifice; a noble, strong generosity of heroic proportions.

Image: The Herring Worker, Gunnlagur Blöndal, c.1935

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The Herring Packers, Gunnlagur Blöndal, 1935

Stephen’s thoughts on Salka Valka:

This is a novel about fish. And love. And, surprisingly to me, gender and feminism. Salka is an unlikely heroine, homely, coarse and ignorant; but not stupid. She is in possession of a vitality which cannot be defeated. Salka’s struggle to find her place in a hostile world—a fickle mother, faithless lovers and lack of any real friends—is the common thread woven throughout the work. The book has a complicated mix of sub-themes: illegitimacy, incest, class, domestic abuse, infant mortality, hypocrisy, poverty, Socialism, Capitalism, and Christianity. As a novel of Social Realism, it can be ranked with the finest of Dickens, or even Zola’s Germinal. Sprinkled throughout is Icelandic folk wisdom, dark humor, fatalism and a strong sense of the absurd.

One of the key themes of the novel is the struggle of the working class against oppression and exploitation. Laxness portrays the plight of the fishing community in Iceland, showing how they are subjected to harsh living conditions and meager wages. Another important theme of the novel is the role of women in society, Laxness created a complex and nuanced character in Salka Valka. Through her story he shows the ways in which women are often marginalized and oppressed in male-dominated societies, and the struggles they face in asserting their rights and freedoms.

The novel's significance lies in its portrayal of the social and political realities of Iceland in the early 20th century, and its exploration of universal themes such as class struggle, poverty, and gender inequality. It also reflects Laxness's commitment to social justice and his advocacy for the working class, which was a defining feature of his writing throughout his career. Moreover, Salka Valka is an important work of modernist literature, breaking away from the traditional narrative structure of Icelandic literature of the time. It continues to be widely read and studied today, both in Iceland and internationally.

It is a tremendous book and certainly worthy of the new (2022) translation.

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Still from 1954 film version of Salka Valka

Eric expresses his love for Salka:

Originally subtitled A Woman in Pants and A Political Love Story, Salka Valka is a stunning book about an extremely strong-willed girl-cum-young-woman named, of course, Salka Valka. So far it’s probably my third favorite Laxness, after Independent People and World Light.

I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking over this book for weeks, since I finished, and I still cannot think of how to execute this review. This novel simply will not be contained in a few paragraphs; it will not be caged by trite responses and simplified feelings. It is a living, breathing creature, wild at times and tamed at others. But… here are a few attempts at half-descriptions of this masterly, spellbinding tome.

Salka is tough like no other. She begins saying at a young age that she doesn’t feel like a girl, and she soon begins wearing pants—a shocking thing in the early part of the 20th Century—and all the more shocking in a tiny fishing village in Iceland. Due to her mother’s newborn baby, she soon starts working for her own wages, helping with the fishermen and eventually owning a share in a boat.

Despite having a near-inflexible will, Salka also has a big heart and a definite soft spot, although she shows it to few. I find it astounding how easily and fully Laxness manages to get into the heads of young people in general, and here it’s even the more astounding how convincingly he creates and expresses this powerful woman. I’ve read reviews from a couple Icelandic women who half-jokingly wondered if Laxness might not be a woman in disguise… else, how could he know all the thoughts that go on in the heads of the fairer sex?

The scope and impact of this novel is so great that I really don’t even know where to begin. It’s an absolute epic. Laxness finished it in his late 20s, and I truly wonder how he could have lived so thoroughly and observantly to be able to write such varied and deep characters. He seems to know all about everyone, of all kinds of different people.

If there’s one flaw of this book, it’s that the 2nd half deals possibly a little too heavily (and in detail) about socialist ideals and fairly temporally-specific aspects of it. However, as always, Laxness fully illustrates both sides of the argument(s) and doesn’t clearly paint either party as heroes or villains. Indeed, he displays all the warts, pros and cons of the debate and shows what happens when foresight is forgotten.

Salka Valka is concrete proof that Laxness was 100% worthy of the Nobel and every other prize he won. In my opinion, he might be the greatest of the Nobel laureates.

UPDATE to new translation: Loved it even more than the first time. The new translation is great. Salka is one of my favorite characters in literature. She’s so complex, so human, and so (seemingly) strong. Brilliantly written. I’m still amazed by the depths of Laxness’ writing. I’m still not convinced he wasn’t transformed into a woman while writing this… Salka’s voice is so convincing.

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Reviews of the 2022 Philip Roughton translation:

Cornell University Library Collections

Tamara recommends Salka Valka:

Salka Valka is epic in scope. Written by the 1955 Nobel Prize winner for Literature Halldor Laxness, and translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton, it tells of the struggles of a small fishing village in Iceland. The central character is Salka Valka, the young, illegitimate daughter of a destitute mother.

Salka is eleven years old when we first meet her. Having run out of funds to get to Reykjavik, she and her mother arrive at the village of Óseyri in Axlarfjörður. The two seek shelter and end up at the Salvation Army building. Even at this young age, Salka is outspoken, headstrong, and independent. The two eventually find permanent lodging and young Salka begins working in the fishing industry to earn an income.

We follow the trials of these two individuals, their interaction with the villagers, her mother’s involvement with the Salvation Army, and their gradual estrangement from each other. Salka becomes increasingly independent and self-reliant. Deemed an anomaly among the village women, she is outspoken, strong, hard-working, and has the audacity to wear men’s trousers. Her hard work pays off, enabling her to own a share of a fishing boat. She becomes a union organizer for the fishermen and advocates for their rights. All the while she contends with sexual abuse and harassment. And on more than one occasion, she acknowledges her lack of femininity, perceiving herself as a boy.

Salka is courted by two men. She falls in love with her childhood sweetheart who exploits her love for him; she is simultaneously attracted and repelled by her mother’s former fiancé, a drunken, bedraggled boor who transforms himself into a successful, sober tycoon and claims her as his muse.

The second half of the novel is embroiled in politics as the villagers are courted by the “Bolshies” on one side and the “Independents” on the other. Laxness presents both sides of the debate at length. The villagers fluctuate from one side to the other at the slightest whim and without fully comprehending the ramifications of their choice. This section gets too bogged down in the pros and cons of political discourse, slowing the narrative down unnecessarily. Salka Valka gets tossed around in the political turmoil. She tries to maintain independence, focusing on the path she thinks will best help the fishing industry, but she eventually sides with her lover, a spokesperson for the Bolshie cause.

Laxness’ diction is sparse and realistic. Against the backdrop of a bleak landscape are the villagers struggles with Iceland’s weather, isolation, poverty, and meagre existence. The novel can be unwieldy at times, especially during the drawn-out political fracas. However, Laxness sustains reader interest through his keen eye for detailing the topography, the harshness of village life, the scruffy children, and the chorus-like villagers. They are a bedraggled, lice-ridden, smelly, rough, impoverished, and gossipy lot. They are also undeniably real and depicted with sensitivity and compassion. His greatest success lies in his depiction of Salka Valka. He captures the tortured spirit and complexity of this extraordinary young girl with tenderness and honesty—a remarkable achievement since he was only in his late twenties when he composed the novel.

An epic novel, wide in scope, and immersive in detail. Highly recommended.

First posted by Tamara Agha-Jaffar on her website. Used by permission.

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Philip and Doug discuss Halldór, Salka, and translation in general in a Zoom setting:



Another Zoom interview with Philip:



Sean’s YouTube review of SV:



Heather reads Laxness’ Salka Valka…

Salvatore on Laxness and Salka Valka in The New Yorker…

Archipelago Books review excerpts of Roughton’s translation…

Sarah‘s ‘No other God but fish’ review in The Oxonian…

Claire‘s Medium essay on Salka Valka…

Jane rediscovers a masterpiece…

Larissa comments on the rediscovery of Salka in Iceland Review…

Radhika looks at SV…

Patrica looks at “a gutsy Icelandic girl” in her Washington Independent review…

Brad’s WSJ review…

Charlie examines the misunderstood political novels of Laxness…

Jack writes about Laxness’ betrayal of an ongoing religious aesthetic in The Nation…

Ben’s “Wisdom Accumulates” essay about SV in New Left Review…

Ruth writes about “Village People” in The New York Review…

Hannah’s extended Words Without Borders review of Salka Valka…

Michael’s Complete Review of Salka Valka…

Reviews of the F. H. Lyon translation (1936):

Daisy’s appraisal of Salka…

Nils-Petter on Salka and The Salvation Army (Google translated)…

Stanley’s 1936 NYT review of SV (paywall)…

Phillips’ original 1936 Saturday Review article…

Margaret’s original 1936 New Masses review…

Kirkus Reviews 1936 look at Salka…

Reviews of Icelandic or non-English translations:

Krístan’s original 1932 review (Google translated)…

Liselotte’s appreciation (Google translated)…

Sabine’s look at Salka Valka… (Google translated)…

Eiríkur reports on a modern edition of SV for young people…

Article about Laxness and Greta Garbo re: Salka Valka… (Google translated…)

Internet Archive on-line full text…

Berta’s video monologue (in English)…

1929 Screenplay Synopsis…

More from Silja on Salka Valka’s influence…

Finnish TV movie of Salka made in 1979…

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Publishing history:

Þú vínviður hreini, Bókadeild, Reykjavík, 1931
Fuglinnn í fjörunni, Bókadeild, Reykjavík, 1932

Translated from the Danish by F.H. Lyon:

Salka Valka

George Allen & Unwin, London 1936,
Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York, 1936
George Allen & Unwin, London, 1963, Reset (with revisions by the author)
Verry, Mystic, CT, 1965
George Allen & Unwin, London, 1973

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton:

Archipelago Books, 2022
Penguin paperback, 2022, eBook, 2022