Juvenilia

Landsbókasafn

I wrote thousands of pages at home in Laxnes and had trunks full of finished notebooks - novels, stories, poems, magazines and newspapers (which I “published” for myself), essays about religion, politics, philosophy - everything between heaven and earth, and finally diaries. ~ Halldór Laxness

Barn náttúrunnar (Child of Nature) by Halldór frá Laxnesi, was Halldór’s first novel. Published in 1919 (when he was seventeen), it was subtitled A Love Story, quite a heady declaration coming from a teenager. Halldór wrote about it:

The book is at the same time the précis, the conclusion and sum of all that I wrote later; all my later books were simple expositions of the conclusions that I had come to in Child of Nature.

It had a favorably reception: the People’s Paper the reviewer admired “… the dedication and daring of the youngster; and I think that we can expect the best from him when he matures in age and wisdom.” Morgunblaðid criticized the work as “childish” but it also said “And yet… this young man might write something of more artistic value.”

This was not Halldór’s first published work, however. In 1916 he had published poems in the newspaper Morgunblaðid, under the name Snær the Wise. He published the short story Ingólfur in the journal Skinfaxi in September of 1918 which also included the short story The Maggot that was taken from the first chapter of Child of Nature. In October of that year another excerpt from Child was published on the front page of the short-lived newspaper Fréttir, a poem called The Sea Wave.

Before any of this had happened he had written ‘letters’ to children of Icelandic descent living in Canada in 1916. Recently Dr. Christopher Crocker kindly sent me the links to two of these letters, taken from his book Hin Kindin (Sunshine Children) (scroll down for translations):

June 15, 1916
November 9, 1916

The novel Barn náttúrunnar remains unavailable in English, as does the bulk of whatever Laxness juvenilia may still exist.

Information on the early years of Laxness can be found in The Islander by Halldór Guðmundsson and Halldór Laxness by Peter Hallberg.

This page prepared by Stephen.