Title: Independent People Author: Halldór Laxness Creation Date: 1934–35 Location: Reykjavík Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Sjálfstætt fólk appeared in two volumes in 1934 and 1935, making Halldór Kiljan Laxness (1902–1998) the defining voice of modern Icelandic literature — a position the Swedish Academy confirmed in 1955 with the Nobel Prize. He was thirty-two: a Catholic convert turned socialist whose fiction assaulted national mythology with the rigour of a man who loved his country too much to let it lie to itself.
The novel follows Bjartur of Summerhouses, a sheep farmer who spends eighteen years as a hired labourer to purchase the bleakest croft in the Icelandic highlands. He wants independence because every neighbour is a potential obligation, every debt a compromise of the sovereignty he has purchased at the cost of his best years. He composes rímur — traditional verse — and recites it to the wind with genuine feeling and no discernible talent.
The economic analysis is pitiless. The belief that owning one's land constitutes freedom is examined with Marxist clarity. Yet the novel refuses a single judgement. Bjartur is wrong, and he is magnificent.
The National Voice
Iceland built its national identity on the bóndi — the free farmer on his own land, heir to the Norse settlers who claimed the island in the ninth century and whose deeds fill the medieval sagas. Bjartur of Summerhouses is this figure taken to his logical extreme: a man who recites saga verse on the hillside while his family starves below, whose inner life is magnificent and whose outer life is a catastrophe of misplaced devotion.
The landscape is not backdrop but antagonist. Wind off the North Atlantic makes walking impossible; winter buries the croft, the sheep, and the distinction between indoors and outdoors. Laxness renders this with the specificity of someone who grew up inside it — understanding that the Icelandic relationship to landscape is not aesthetic but existential. You do not admire the glacier; you survive it.
What he captures is the particular Icelandic illusion — that a person can stand alone on their land and owe nothing — and follows it with devastating clarity, finding the belief simultaneously heroic and catastrophic.
The Historical Ground
Iceland in the novel's period — roughly 1900 to 1920 — was transforming from rural subsistence to modern capitalist economy. Under Danish sovereignty since the fourteenth century, it gained limited self-governance in 1874 and expanded home rule in 1904; full independence as a republic came only in 1944. The population in 1900 was approximately 78,000, overwhelmingly rural.
The bóndi was the social type around whom national identity was constructed. Bjartur sees himself as heir to the saga heroes, answerable to no one. Laxness shows that this self-image obscured reality: the independent farmer depended on credit from Danish and Icelandic merchants, on world prices for wool and lamb, and on a natural environment indifferent to his aspirations.
The First World War briefly inflated this economy. Wartime demand raised wool prices; farmers borrowed and expanded. When the boom ended, the debt remained. Post-war collapse drove many into insolvency — proof that the ideology of independence had blinded them to their dependence, and when the market turned, there was nothing to fall back on but the wind.
The Literary Landscape
Icelandic literature stretches from the Eddas and medieval sagas through the Reformation to twentieth-century modernism. The saga tradition — Njál's Saga, Laxdæla Saga, Egil's Saga — is read and internalised by Icelanders in a way comparable to Shakespeare in English, but more intimate, more directly connected to landscape and genealogies living readers still recognise.
Laxness wrote in explicit dialogue with this tradition. Bjartur's habit of reciting rímur while his sheep scatter and his family suffers comments on literary inheritance versus practical reality: the saga culture he carries is magnificent, and also a form of evasion. The novel's prose — ironic, oscillating between the high register of the sagas and deflating modern realism — is his formal answer to writing in a language weighted with medieval masterpieces.
Among modern competitors, Laxness's own The Fish Can Sing (1957) and World Light (1937–40) have their partisans. But Independent People, in J. A. Thompson's 1946 translation, most completely takes the measure of what Iceland tells itself about itself — and finds the telling both glorious and ruinous.
This post is part of the One Book Per Country series — 195 countries, one defining book each, working through the literary map of the world.
The Vintage International paperback of J. A. Thompson's translation, with an introduction by Brad Leithauser — the edition that brought Bjartur of Summerhouses to the Anglophone world and remains the standard English-language Independent People on most shelves.
The Reading
Summerhouses
Bjartur buys his croft at the beginning of the twentieth century, having saved his eighteen years of servitude into the down payment that makes him, in his own reckoning, a free man. The land is called Summerhouses — an ironic name for a place where summer is brief, the wind constant, and the soil thin over the lava fields. The nearest neighbour is a significant distance away. The nearest town is a day's journey on horseback. This is what Bjartur has chosen, and he has chosen it because independence requires distance: every neighbour is a potential obligation, every market a potential debt, every human connection a potential loss of the absolute sovereignty he has purchased at the cost of eighteen years of another man's time.
He is also a poet — or rather, he composes rímur, the traditional Icelandic verse form that has been the literature of the common people for centuries, the long alliterative narrative poems about heroes and outlaws and supernatural encounters that farmers recited during the dark winter evenings when the wind howled outside and the darkness lasted eighteen hours and the only entertainment was the human voice and the stories it carried from generation to generation. His poetry is terrible by any sophisticated standard and entirely genuine, the authentic expression of a man whose inner life is richer than his behaviour suggests, who carries the saga tradition in his bones even as he stubbornly refuses to see himself in any saga except the one he is writing through his own determination. He recites his poems to the sheep, who are his best audience, and to the wind, which does not care.
The first wife, and Ásta Sóllilja
His first wife dies in childbirth during the first winter — while Bjartur is off in a blizzard searching for a lost ewe, which is where his attention will always go when forced to choose between the sheep and the human. She dies alone, attended only by the old woman of the croft, and gives birth to a daughter who may or may not be Bjartur's — her previous situation left some ambiguity, which Bjartur has swallowed without quite swallowing it. This daughter, Ásta Sóllilja, will be the other centre of everything that follows: her life against her father's, her need against his incapacity to meet need, his love for her against his absolute refusal to let love compromise his independence.
Rosa and the rhythms of the croft
His second wife is Rosa, a practical woman from a neighbouring district who is trying to survive rather than make a statement. She comes to Summerhouses because the alternatives available to a woman of her class in early twentieth-century Iceland are limited, and Bjartur represents, if not comfort, at least a roof and a functioning farm. She and Bjartur coexist rather than live together. She manages the domestic economy — the small garden, the cow, the sheep's milk and butter — with a competence Bjartur never quite acknowledges as skill, because acknowledging it would mean admitting that someone other than himself is contributing to the croft's maintenance. They have several sons together, and she loves Ásta Sóllilja with the specific warmth of a woman who understands the child's vulnerability and harbours no illusions about Bjartur's capacity to protect it.
The Icelandic landscape in these years is not beautiful in the conventional sense — or rather, it is beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with comfort. The lava fields extend in every direction. The glacier is visible from the high pasture on clear days, a white mass that says nothing about human scales. The rivers run cold and fast from the snowmelt. The sky does what it does without reference to what anyone needs. The relationship between this landscape and the human beings who try to live on it is one of indifferent toleration: it will permit them, in certain seasons, if they have the knowledge and the luck. It will kill them, in other seasons, without noticing.
The winters
The winters. The shortening of the days until the sun barely clears the southern mountains, the cold that is not merely cold but a presence with its own weight and character, the darkness that lasts months and does something to the human mind that no amount of preparation can fully prevent. Bjartur endures the winters with a satisfaction that approaches pleasure, because the winter is the truest test of independence: the man who survives alone, with his own stores, his own fuel, his own will, has proved something about himself that cannot be proved in summer. The Christmas season, when neighbouring farmers occasionally gather, has the bleak comedy of people who have been alone too long trying to be social — the drinking too enthusiastic, the conversation too loud, the old feuds surfacing with the old songs.
The sheep are everything — Bjartur's measure of success, his emotional centre, the objects of a devotion he cannot extend to people. He names them, tends them with ferocious competence, searches for them in blizzards at personal risk that would be called heroic if it were not so clearly compulsive, mourns their deaths from disease or predator with a grief he cannot express for the deaths of people he loves. They are the economy — their wool, their meat, their lambs representing the margin between debt and solvency — and they are the psychological economy, the one relationship in which his giving is proportional to the need.
Ásta Sóllilja
Ásta grows up, becomes beautiful, becomes a young woman, and the world notices. She is a beautiful, intelligent girl on an isolated croft, a girl who has read the few books available in the household and who carries inside her a longing for a larger world that the croft cannot contain, with a father incapable of protecting her and a stepmother doing her limited best. The men who want to take advantage of her situation are not villains in a melodramatic sense; they are simply men — a local official, a teacher, men with social authority and no particular malice — who see an opportunity in an isolated girl and take it, as men in patriarchal societies have always done, with the calm assumption that what they want is what matters. Bjartur, who loves her more than he loves anything, cannot prevent this because preventing it would require him to acknowledge that independence is not, in fact, total protection — that being free from obligation does not free your daughter from the calculations of men who have a different idea of what she is for.
The boom and the debt
The political world enters in the second half, as the First World War reshapes the global economy in ways that reach even to the highland sheep farms. The war creates a brief boom in agricultural prices — suddenly there is a market for everything Iceland can produce, the wool and meat commanding prices that seem miraculous to men who have calculated their lives in fractions of a króna. Bjartur expands. He takes on debt — the first debt of his life, the thing he swore he would never do, the compromise of the principle that defined him. He improves the croft, adds rooms, buys better stock. For a brief period he is prosperous, or something that looks like prosperity from the outside, and his satisfaction has the particular quality of a man who does not see what is coming.
Then the boom ends. The war ends, the prices collapse, the demand returns to its prewar level, and the debt remains. The merchants and bankers who extended the credit are patient but inflexible, and Bjartur discovers what every small farmer in every country discovers when the market turns: that independence purchased with borrowed money is not independence but its opposite.
The independent small farmer is not actually independent in any meaningful sense. He is a unit in a global commodity economy whose price signals he receives without being able to influence, whose interest rates he pays without being able to negotiate, and the ideology of independence — the saga-hero individualism that Bjartur has made his religion — blinds him to his actual vulnerability. The tragedy is structural, not personal, and it is all the more painful because Bjartur experiences it as personal failure, as a failure of will rather than a consequence of a system he never understood.
The loss of Summerhouses
The croft is lost. Bjartur loses Summerhouses to the creditors — the man who defined himself through ownership of this particular piece of inhospitable ground watching as the legal machinery transfers it to people who have never worked it, who will never work it, who hold it as a line in an account book. The eighteen years of servitude, the decades of wind and cold and dead sheep and dead wives and children who grew up half-loved — all of it reduced to a balance that does not balance, a signature on a document that unmakes everything.
Beginning again
Bjartur must begin again, which he does, in his sixties, on the worst piece of land available — a croft called Úthérað, exposed to the full fury of the Atlantic, a place where a lesser man would not attempt to farm anything. He begins again because he is Bjartur and the alternative is acknowledging that something has defeated him, which he cannot do, which his constitution will not permit any more than the Icelandic bedrock beneath his feet will permit the grass to grow in January.
His sons have mostly left — scattered by the centrifugal force of a father who could not hold them because holding would have meant bending, and Bjartur does not bend. Nonni has gone to America, sending back letters that describe a different kind of life, a life of wages and cities and bewildering abundance. Gvendur has become politically radicalised, involved with the labour movement and the cooperative societies — the collective solution to the problems that individualism cannot solve, the recognition that a man alone on a heath is not free but merely alone.
Ásta Sóllilja has lived her own difficult life — shaped by beauty and poverty and the absence of a father's protection. She has been used by men. She has had a child. She has known the specific hardships of a woman in rural Iceland without resources or family support. And yet she has survived, which is what the women in this world do — they survive the men who cannot protect them and the landscape that does not care, with a tenacity that is less dramatic than Bjartur's but more genuinely heroic because it is exercised on behalf of others rather than in defence of an ideology.
Father and daughter
The final encounter between Ásta and her father is love and incomprehension and grief and stubbornness all present simultaneously in a conversation that does not say what it means and does not need to, because both speakers have known each other long enough that the words are merely the surface of a communication that has been happening, or failing to happen, for decades.
The final word on Bjartur is not contempt and not celebration — it is something harder than either, something that requires holding two contradictory assessments at the same time and refusing to choose. He is wrong — wrong in his ideology of self-sufficiency, wrong in his refusal to let love compromise his independence, wrong in his belief that individual will can overcome structural conditions, wrong in his treatment of every person who tried to love him. The Icelandic peasant individualism he embodies is a form of false consciousness that serves the interests of the merchant class by keeping the rural population atomised and unable to organise collectively.
And he is magnificent. His refusal to be broken is its own form of greatness, the greatness of a man who will not submit to circumstances that would justify submission a hundred times over. The Iceland he inhabits would not have been settled, would not have survived the centuries of Norwegian and Danish domination, the eruptions and famines and plagues, without the willingness of people like him to endure conditions that would destroy anyone with a more comfortable relationship to the idea of reasonable expectation. The saga heroes whose names he carries in his rímur were men like him — stubborn, proud, wrong in specific ways, magnificent in their wrongness. Both truths held simultaneously, the political critique and the human admiration, the refusal of a single judgement, the insistence on the full complexity of what it means to be human in a world that does not reward complexity.
This post is part of One Book Per Country, a literary atlas selecting one defining book for every nation on earth. See the full collection →
The Vintage International paperback of J. A. Thompson's translation — the brick of a book that waits patiently on the shelf until the reader is ready for an Icelandic winter, a man who will not bend, and a piece of wind that cost eighteen years of another man's time.
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