Thor Vilhjálmsson

Et Cetera. On the Narrative Art of Thor Vilhjálmsson

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Already with his earliest works, Thor Vilhjálmsson showed that he was a bold innovator of Icelandic storytelling art. In fact it is difficult to place his first book, Maðurinn er alltaf einn (Man is Always Alone, 1950), within any single literary genre. It consists of 60 texts, most of them one or two pages long. Some are poems; some might be termed prose poems; and some might be called micro-stories, to use a term now used for very short short stories. However, some of the stories might be more appropriately called sketches, visual descriptions of moments on the journey of nameless individuals who are simultaneously foreign and familiar to the reader. The book also contains nine drawings by the author who has always been involved in the visual arts and has held exhibitions of his artwork.

Thor’s first book is thus a multimedia work in a sense, affording a glimpse into the changeable nature of many of the author’s later works, and the freedom he allows himself in his approach, not hampered much by the rules of literary genres and representation. But the book is also a child of its time. Thor’s earliest works have often been linked to French Existentialism, and he did spend some time in France in the post-war years. This was at a time when Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were thought to capture the spirit of the times and represent the only world picture which brought empowerment, even if their Existentialism did not offer any simple solace in a Godless world without any given purpose. „Our life runs in a circle from not being towards not being“, as Thor says in one of his stories, which may recall of Steinn Steinarr’s existential mood in Tíminn og vatnið (Time and Water). However, this particular narrator turns out to be strolling around Paris, observing others doing the same thing, and as a result the difference between himself and another is eliminated, „I“ becomes „he“.

And everything is so strange and incomprehensible that he does not dare to think about why and how everything is, no he walks around filled with dread of his own thoughts, it cannot escape, must tie it down, not think about how, not think about what, not think – only think little small and scattered, not release the thoughts, socks, socks socks think about socks think about those kind of grey clothes furs in Greenland dog weather mandarins visiting Timbuktu tomato juice in bed in the morning Ural Lake and Astrakhan the star Uranus and radioactive materials females – aha, there I have it finally: think about females not one many […] (Maðurinn er alltaf einn, p. 32)

The text ends as he continues to walk and he

[…] looks at the nameless crowd which has nothing to do with him and therefore looks at him surprised and therefore listens to him surprised and the crowd merges into one whole which is like a tent moving in the breeze, like a gust of wind through leaves or like something else that he does not bother to think about. And he walks on and thinks unnecessary worthless thoughts which combine to form a life of the mind on a weekday in the not-being and grey monotone of the everyday. Et cetera. (Et Cetera, 33)

This main character is a nameless individual and is referred to by his first name which only seems to reveal his sex: he. Such characters are typical for Thor’s stories and characterize for instance his novels from the sixties and seventies. The namelessness of „He“ is a double-edged sword; it highlights his solitude and „un-being“ (the word „un-being„ is in itself a nod to the most influential thinkers of Existentialist philosophy, particularly Heidegger and Sartre), but in a sense „he“ also merges with „the nameless masses“, the crowd which has often been used to symbolize the alienation of modern life. However, there is also an important difference here between the character and his medium, the story author, a difference crystallised in the narrator who stands between them and connects them at the same time. The above extract could have been: „and the crowd merges into one whole which he cannot be bothered to think about.“ But in between the narrator has inserted these words: „which is like a tent moving in the breeze, like a gust of wind through leaves or like something else“. These images (which may originate in the character’s mind, although it is difficult to tell) reveal that the nameless crowd concerns the story author a great deal, he throws himself into it to find there the creative force of life, creating from his environment a metaphorical web of meaning.

But this web is also of a private nature, it is being spun in the depths of a mind which is far from wide open. It cannot be allowed to drown in the sea of people.Thor’s characters are always struggling with their thoughts, as the above excerpt shows, where the character is desperate to rule his mind, to not allow it to be scattered. In Thor’s stories the perception of reality, the existential role of the senses, and the mind in relationship to the world are debated directly and repeatedly. Man is alone and must be able to be alone with himself, to have a private place to escape to, but his reality is still largely woven from the life outside; he sees many things through external eyes. More than one voice is speaking within him, the text is often dealing with a split consciousness, thoughts or perception which can not be tied down, as they seem to arrive from different directions, and sometimes our relationships to others become so close that we can no longer view that mental interaction from a logical perspective. In this sense there is a fairly straight link from Thor’s first book to his first novel, Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn (Quick Quick Said the Bird) , published in 1968. Here is an excerpt on „him“:

Then he was cut in two and his perception took place in two realms but the voices rose and were going to drive him to their madness, it was as if his consciousness had gone above danger levels, and he wrapped around him the line which separated, and fumbled without getting a grip to save himself from the terrible plan of the voices which went into him and he was threaded upon the string and felt the voices go into him but still had a little left on the other side so they did not get all of him, and space opened up inside him and he was outside the world and felt space expand itself through new howling galaxies, and the voices rose and became a cosmic whirl, vertigo vision, he had to go there; but he came to his senses and saw a dog with his tail between its legs and its cold wet snout down by the ground gazing at him with its innocent eyes […]. (Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn, p. 257-258)

The sentence does not end here and my readers should have a look at the original text if they want to see it in its entirety; and I will refer again to this sentence later.

Interestingly, the titles and the epigraphs of both Maðurinn er alltaf einn and Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn, are taken from T.S. Eliot, that influential modernist. The aforementioned book has references to the poetic play The Cocktail Party, for instance this quote: „There is nothing to escape from / And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.“ The latter contains the following quote from Four Quartets: „Other echoes / Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?“, and Eliot continues: „Quick, said the bird, find them […]“.Four Quartets seems to be a favourite work of Thor’s, because he quotes it in his epigraph for Grámosinn glóir (The Grey Moss Glows, 1986) and the first part of Náttvíg (Night Killing, 1989). Eliot’s existential vision of solitude, time, repetition and the call of other voices has probably made a great impression on Thor (although he hardly takes Eliot’s line on political and religious issues). The call or the echo of mythical motifs which so strongly shapes Eliot’s group of poems The Waste Land, is also one of the main characteristics of Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn, albeit in a slightly different way.

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I hope I am forgiven here for making such a big leap from Thor’s first book to his first novel, which was not published until he was 43 years old, then with extensive experience and a diverse career behind him. When Maðurinn er alltaf einn was published, Thor was in his mid-twenties. He treaded slowly in his writing career at first. Four years later, Dagar mannsins (The Days of a Mortal,1954) was published, and it contained 40 short stories and 7 drawings. The title of the work and the number of stories may refer to the Bible and the epigraph seems to confirm this, and shows where the title is from: „The days of a mortal are as grass; he blossoms like a wild flower in the meadow: a wind passes over him, and he is gone“ (Psalms 103:15-16). This quote is followed by another from Goethe about the wanderer of the earth; together these references express a tension in Thor’s texts between quiet lives „in the field“ and restless the journeys of individual characters, some of which are kinds of outlaws.

His next book, Andlit í spegli dropans (Faces Reflected in a Drop, 1957), is in many ways a natural sequel to his first ones. It also, however, contains a few longer stories, and the short stories are combined in a group which spans over hundred pages, entitled „Hin“ („The Others“) and is subtitled „Nokkrar litlar myndir af manneskjunni í hinum stóra heimi“ („A couple of small pictures of the human out in the big world“). It may be a bit bold to call this group of stores a variation on the novel form, but the author clearly wants the reader to see a common thread in his themes and approach. The reader is certainly introduced to situations and human interactions which will repeatedly haunt the author in his later works. This book shows that Thor is gaining mastery of the art of character descriptions, a mastery which he will put to good use later. Descriptions of people, especially their faces, are dramatic, and they describe in a sense performances; these are people performing in the theatre of life. Thor often plays with the exaggeration of facial features and expressions, and this often makes these sketches quite comical; although other descriptions span the depth of human solitude and the turbulence of love.

Thor’s next books were travel books, three books in as many years: Undir gervitungli (Under a Satellite, 1959), Regn á rykið (Rain on the Dust, 1960) and Svipir dagsins, og nótt (The Phantoms of Day, and Night, 1961). The first is mostly an account of the author’s journey through the Soviet Union; in the other books he travels widely around a Europe still recovering from the Second World War, a continent at a crossroads, and this seem to inspire in the traveller thoughts of the present and the past of the continent — mediations on the humanist Erasmus from Rotterdam are for instance interwoven with travel descriptions in Svipir dagsins, og nótt. The writer travels by train between European cities and strolls through them „like a picture collector“ (Regn á rykið, p. 35); describing what he sees, people, environment and art, as well as his encounters with people with which he debates various issues. Sometimes his visual sense and imagination take off; the conscious mind is not contained by what it sees and sometimes the traveller suffers an inner conflict: „Do you not see the houses? Do you not see the water flow and flow? What do you want to see? But when he senses that the distant image from the depths of memory has come to a close and wants to flow over the other thing which is, then he recognizes the danger and is quick to escape from the past from the morning of this day“ (Svipir dagsins, og nótt, p. 143). But we must keep inside us this picture of a picture which is about to submerge a picture.

Thor’s travel books are in one sense descriptions of culture trips; chronicles of a man who absorbs art and literature from the past and the present. Sometimes the mind wanders back home, as when the writer sits on a hotel balcony in Yugoslavia: „and maybe he was checking if he could see a yacht with big sails carrying poetic promises between places out there in the mist, a glimpse of those sails like an unutterable secret in a small watercolour of the Eastern Fjords by Johannes Kjarval“ (Svipir dagsins, og nótt, p. 143). In fact Thor’s next book was Kjarval (1964), a book in which he wrote explanatory notes and discussion topics to the artist’s paintings, and they have clearly been very important to him. His travel books emphasise however a particular view of European culture that he wants to share with his Icelandic readers. Thor’s prose in this book bears a close resemblance to his contributions in the magazine Birtingur, which was in its heyday at the time. Thor served as one of the editors of the magazine with its founder Einar Bragi et al. Thor wrote various articles for Birtingur on art, literature and cultural matters, and was for instance one of the main contributors to film criticism in Iceland at the time. Birtingur also published a short play by Thor: „Ætlar blessuð manneskjan að gefa upp andann?“ (1963).

Thor continued to write columns and articles on art, culture and social issues — a selection of those appeared in Fiskur í sjó, fugl úr beini (1974) and Faldafeykir (Skirt Lifter 1979) — and he also continues his travels. His travels and culture discourse are in fact very closely interwoven biographical strands, as the books Hvað er San Marino? (What is San Marino? 1973) and Fley og fagrar árar (A Vessel and Fair Oars, 1996) show.

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Birtingur was an important platform for modernism and discourse on modernism in Iceland. Thor Vilhjálmsson and others who ran the magazine and wrote in it were generally spokesmen of a radical, cultured modernity and wanted to bring about innovation in literature and art, not least by channelling the currents of modernism to Iceland and keep an eye on how it was interpreted by their contemporaries in the West. At this point in time four decades had passed since some of the best known works of modernism had seen the light of day in Europe, yet that particular literary current had been met with great resistance in Iceland. But cracks were showing in some walls of the fortress, although not to speak of in the fortress of the novel. The current of modernism did not begin to flow in there until around and after the mid-sixties, in the novels of authors like Guðbergur Bergsson, Svava Jakobsdóttir, Steinar Sigurjónsson and Þorsteinn frá Hamri. Thor’s aforementioned first novel, Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn, which came out in 1968, was one of the key works in this wave, and marks the beginning of a continuous and very fertile period in Thor’s writing, which lasted for over a decade.

In their works, modernist authors challenge in one way or another the accepted pattern of interpretation and communication in the bourgeois societies of the West. Some do this by staging a discourse of modernity and myths in their works, or opening up a channel between the two which sidesteps logical Western thinking and its blindness towards the various forces which live inside man. They thus explore the relationship between man’s inner life and the basic elements of humanity and nature that exist within him and can be harmful to him but also play a big part in his will to live. Shortly before modernism broke through in force in the third decade of the twentieth century, a great anthropological study on ancient religion and myths, The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (fifteen volumes 1890-1915; combined into one volume in 1923), was published. Some key modernist authors, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce e.g., were inspired by Frazer and used his ideas and motifs in their works.

Thor’s novels always contain allusions to myths and the author clearly believes they can explain human behaviour to a no lesser degree than the explanatory systems dictated by modern logic. Thor has for instance been inspired by the aforementioned works of Frazer, e.g. when creating the character of the forest king, who embodies a lust for life, fertility and fear of death, and whose story forms one of the strands in Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn. The man, the traveller, who is at the centre of the work, while being in many ways an ambiguous character, has a certain parallel in the forest king. But this traveller finds himself in contemporary Europe, Southern Europe to be precise, at a party in a palace owned by a painter. This palace, which epitomizes European cultural heritage, also becomes a sort of a maze of modernity, where a traveller has an opportunity to worship Eros but also finds himself wandering through corridors where doors open into many realms, current horrors like the war in Vietnam for instance, but also deep into his own mind, memories, desires and fear.

 As mentioned before, one of the things the traveller fears, is that his consciousness becomes so restless that in it, voices and time zones become indistinguishable. The novel itself embodies in fact such restlessness. In many places there is a vague distinction between various characters, dialogue, thoughts, events and time zones. The flow of images does not follow logical narrative principles and the common understanding of time which seemed to be present in the previously quoted text — „et cetera“ — is derailed and now this turn of phrase seems to refer instead to an ambiguous unfolding of events. We pass along the corridor, the city street or the forest lane but do not know for sure what we will encounter at the next door, in the next clearing. The city and the forest does not seem to have much in common in modernity, apart from the fact that the city is sometimes likened to a jungle. But Thor creates many links between these realms of existence; the city is simultaneously the main reference and the natural realm of modern life but the forest is a reminder that man is a creature of nature in a deeper sense, which has its roots further back in time than any logical thinking can grasp.

Thor’s next novel, Óp bjöllunnar (The Cry of the Beetle, 1970), opens in a forest where a group of seven people are hiking. They go to an old palace which one of the men has inherited. In one sense the premise may seem to recall a familiar story structure: a small group of people travelling or staying in the same place for a while, entertaining each other with conversation and stories. And, like Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn, it features a familiar theme, the love triangle. But beyond these basic themes it can become difficult to figure out the plot development, not least since the line between the inner lives of the characters and the accounts of the events or situations they have experienced is so vague. The point of view is constantly shifting, as a result the reader is not always entirely sure who it is who is experiencing or thinking at any given time. The novel is woven out of the biographical strands of the characters, some more tangible than others, and their fantasies, as well as their painful memories. It seems that the smallest detail can change much, and the question remains whether something can be called a small detail if it brings back memories, visual sensations, or some form of thought, or as he says in one place: „The thought metamorphosed the stage“ — and he continues: „and took away the forest and put lava with leaf-wet scrub in its place […] (Óp bjöllunnar, p. 121). Here, as elsewhere in Thor’s stories it is as if the foreign story setting is pulled aside for a brief moment, replaced by an experience of Icelandic landscape. In fact it seems that the young girl, who remains close to the centre of this novel and plays a big part in the lives of at least two men, is Icelandic.

In the novel Mánasigð (Crescent Moon, 1976) it seems at first that the reader will be allowed to stay with one character and therefore be less disoriented than in the aforementioned novels. But the quote from Alice in Wonderland should alert us with its „How puzzling all these changes are. I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute till another!“ A man, travelling on a train, is thinking about another man, who left the train after telling a story about his battle against forces which were persecuting him. It then becomes unclear if they are one and the same man or if the former is thinking about and inventing the story of the other. They become some kinds of doubles in the story, simultaneously he and they. The novel is a multi-layered journey, as Thor’s stories sometimes are; one plot grows out of another, and another one from that, so that an enormous web is gradually woven around this double; in a sense his journey is an escape from the radical forces of the day, political as well as religious. The crescent moon in the title could simultaneously refer to The Soviet Union, and the so-called „Moon“ sect; it features a certain „Doctor Luna“ character, who has a message for those seeking a „heavenly brotherhood on earth“ (p. 72). Love is however still a main strand in this web, and a woman or women who travel with the doubles and consort with them are never far away. Yet it sometimes appears that „he“ exists only in „her“ mind, equally the story may all take place inside the head of the traveller, whom we meet again on a train in the final pages of this largest of Thor’s novels.

Mánasigð repeatedly mentions eyes that look, and one of the story elements is an eye, perhaps an inner eye, which is located in Iceland, although the events in the story are clearly set in a foreign country. In Thor’s next novel, Turnleikhúsið (The Tower Theatre, 1979), our traveller appears to be in Iceland when the story begins, more precisely in the crowd outside the National Theatre of Iceland. He drifts into the theatre, where someone whispers to him: „Go up to the tower, and speak to Ólafur Davíðsson“ (9). It never becomes clear who this Ólafur Davíðsson is, or whether this is a reference to the famous collector of folklore in the second half of the 19th century — and possibly to the fact that the journey described in the novel is one man’s great mythical quest as he searches for himself and his stories. This journey is filled with adventure, because the theatre turns out to be a maze where various arts and the pleasures of the flesh are practiced. Thor has always explored encounters between men and women in his works and is one of few Icelandic authors who has approached erotic descriptions with artistic ambition, although probably never with the same fervour as here in Turnleikhúsið. As with Ulysses of old, this traveller’s journeys tend to get interrupted by women, and not always unpleasantly.

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The four works discussed above, Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn, Óp bjöllunnar, Mánasigð and Turnleikhúsið, all count among the major works of Icelandic modernism. It can be difficult to map out their setting and distinctions between characters are often vague. This is because the subject matter of these novels is so broad, in many ways covering in general terms the place of the individual in the West in a time of economic prosperity and the Cold War. What is the place of the human spirit in such a time, what is its freedom and what are the dangers which threaten it? Art is freed from many restraints but what does it mean in the world of materialism and a looming threat? And against this world picture Thor contrasts love, the search for it, the search for a companion — even for the companion who is travelling with you — and this journey, with its quick route between pleasure and despair, turns out to be closely linked to man’s striving for self-knowledge.

Yet these grand, „serious“ themes do not preclude humour, and humour is a constant element of Thor’s text. It sometimes comes out in descriptions of characters and their antics or in a quickly drawn narrative detours from the main story stream at any given time, and more often than not through puns, an electric and sometimes mischievous play with the language. Of all Thor’s novels, Fuglaskottís (Bird Schottische,1975) is relatively the most humorous, as the humour is more subtle in similar contexts in the other novels. In Fuglaskottís, he names Icelandic individuals who find themselves in Rome and describes a time they and others share there, in particular a grand party where the conversations range far and wide. Sometimes the story seems to be all over the place, with its exaggerations and absurdities, although it also touches on deep-lying existential matters and the story seems in places to turn in on itself and examine its own existence. Here, Thor satirizes a particular Icelandic personality type, the go-getting moneyman, who here goes by the name of „Ármann“. He is extroverted and loud, can hold forth on any subject and is a self-proclaimed representative of the everyman:

You should look at the bright side of life, says Ármann: therefore all music should be light and happy, and art should be for cheering people up and stimulating them; not dragging them down. And I want pictures where I can see what they are of, and this you can with this old art this city is so full of. Thank God. I want it to be upbeat. No gloom or pessimism. Or something incomprehensible; like with these newfangled artists who have nothing to do with us ordinary people that this world is full of. (Fuglaskottís, p. 93)

Thor had previously created a brilliant satire in Folda (Homeland, 1972) which contains three stories, each staging an Icelandic journey which is typical in some way: a story about battling through rough weather in the mountains, a group tour to an exotic country (China — via Copenhagen and Moscow), and a holiday to the southern part of the world. The travellers in these stories are quite different from the ones we encounter in most of Thor’s novels, as these people, in spite of being on the road, are so firmly stuck in their „homeland“ that they fail to open their minds much to a new and different reality.

In 1977 the collection of stories Skuggar af skýjum (Shadows of Clouds) came out, a fine showcase for Thor’s versatile narrative talents. Some of the stories have a satirical edge, but some are in the same spirit as the aforementioned novels, and some even recall moods from his stories from the fifties, from Thor’s first books.

As mentioned before, the publication of the novel Fljótt fljótt sagði fuglinn marked the beginning of a particularly productive and successful period in Thor’s writing career. He published five novels in twelve years, two collections of shorter stories and three collections of articles. Turnleikhúsið marks in some ways the end of that period. A period of meditation seems to have followed. Lyricism is a big part of Thor’s fiction and it often seems that his prose is written as if it was poetry. As mentioned earlier, his first book contained a few poems, and now he returns to poetry as a form. In 1981 a collection of poems written by Thor in English was published in the United States: The Deep Blue Sea, Pardon the Ocean, and the next year a small book, Ljóð Mynd (Poem Picture) was published. It contains a interplay of pictures by Örn Þorsteinsson and poems by Thor, including this one:

On a spring
a spark
glitters moves wind wave quick
duck
strings
bind not allows play for a while

Thor and Örn went on to create two more similar book works: Spor í spori (Step in a Step, 1986) and Sporrækt (Step Culture, 1988). Thor’s close links to visual art became even more apparent in the years which followed, an example of this is his book about the artist Svavar Guðnason (1991) and his collaboration with another visual artist, Páll Guðmundsson á Húsafelli, in which Thor wrote poems to accompany Páll’s artwork.

The poem above has alliteration, assonance and rhyme play, which Thor also uses in his prose, and his poems contain moments and images which appear multiple times in various forms in the stories. The beach and the bird, phenomena which form a part of the complex tapestry of the stories, appear for instance in a clear and simple form in the following poem from the poetry book Snöggfærðar sýnir (Quick Visions, 1995):

A beach

a footprint
of a bird
inside the footprint
of the man

ocean

It is debatable whether „a quick vision“ is a more apt description of a poem like this — which is equally a quiet, carefully contemplated vision — or Thor’s tapestry-like novels, where each quick vision connects to another, often akin to the fast flight of the bird which for a moment has touched down its foot in a man’s footprint.

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During Thor’s hiatus from writing fiction after 1979 he not only wrote poetry, but began to try his hand at translating as well. He already had some previous experience as a translator, mostly of plays (he translated for instance John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger in 1959) and in 1982 he translated Eugene O’Neill’s famous play A Long Day’s Journey into Night, for the Icelandic National Theatre. The translation of O’Neill’s play was published in 1983 and in the same year Thor’s translation of another world famous work, the novel Man’s Fate [La Condition Humaine] by the French author André Malraux. For this translation Thor received Menningarverðlaun DV [The DV Cultural Prize] for literature. Even more celebrated was Thor’s translation the following year of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, then already a big international success.

This translation introduced many readers for the first time to Thor’s virtuoso style and magical use of language, and were therefore perhaps more ready to embrace his next original novel which was published in 1986, entitled Grámosinn glóir (The Grey Moss Glows). Its success was phenomenal and the novel topped the best selling charts; until then Thor’s novels had generally not sold well and he was thought to be a rather difficult and inaccessible author. A view frequently heard was that Thor had now at last returned to his native soil, both in his choice of subject matter and his story setting, and that the plot was clearer than in his earlier novels. For this novel Thor received the DV Cultural Prize in 1987 and the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 1988.

Grámosinn glóir is about a sheriff and a poet’s journey through the north counties of Iceland and his stay at a farm where he sets up a trial in a criminal case involving incest and the fate of the child which was the fruit of that relationship. However, there are more people on „trial“ than the siblings involved; faced with this case, the sheriff begins to struggle with himself as a human being and a poet (it is worth noting that the story is partly based on a similar case which Einar Benediktsson prosecuted during his brief time as a sheriff). In the end the sheriff cannot escape being a „condemned“ man, and we see „the pain in the face of a broken man who had fallen from the summit of power, with nowhere to turn in his troubles“ (p. 212). The whole community described in the story turns out to depend on questions of responsibility and sympathy, of guilt and innocence of actions as well as emotions. But the community and the state of mind of the characters are luminous, not at least because of how they are reflected in the country’s landscape. It is given a language which is at once a rich landscape painting and a text, and its music and imagery have references beyond any concrete meaning.

The criminal case and the journey through an Icelandic landscape form an epic leitmotif in this work, although the author could hardly be said to have revolutionized his previous storytelling method. One might in fact say that Grámosinn gives readers an important insight into his older works, as we again must meet the great challenge which is always inherent in Thor’s syntax and style, in a text where any clear narrative is constantly interrupted. Those who can delight in the complex nature descriptions of Grámosinn will also understand the „image-seeking eye“ which roams from one story setting to another in the earlier books. In fact some of the older works can serve as such an „introduction“ to Thor’s narrative method, albeit in a different way; for example Folda and Fuglaskottís.

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When Grámosinn glóir came out, Thor was in his sixties. His productivity did not cease there, and he has been prolific and has worked on very diverse projects since. Besides his aforementioned poetry-writing, he has continued to translate literature. He has translated stories from Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese: Hús Andanna [The House of the Spirits] by Isabel Allende (1987), Austurlenzkar sögur [Oriental Tales] by Marguerite Yourcenar (1991), Lát hjartað ráða för [Follow Your Heart] by Susanna Tamaro (1995) and Alkemistinn [The Alchemist] by Paulo Coelho (2000). Equally, he has continued to write about culture, social issues and his travels around the world, and his childhood in the book Raddir í garðinum (Voices in the Garden, 1992).

During this period he also wrote three novels, in a variety of content and styles. Náttvíg (Night Killing, 1989) is a contemporary story set in Reykjavík. The narrator is a taxi driver who becomes an unwilling participant in a criminal mission and afterwards helps with the search for the criminals in the underbelly of city. The story is shot through with the narrator’s recollections of his time as a seaman, of the affairs of the heart and the closeness of death. The novel is a fairly bold effort to play the tightly knit and distinctive style Thor generally uses to describe thoughts and perception on one hand, against a raw modern environment and a rough vernacular on the other. At times the different registers of the work seem to live uncomfortably close to one another, but elsewhere the author has found a convincing happy median to make them intersect: „My head was all in tatters, like a tremendously long worm cut into countless writhing parts, each with its own colour and lighting display, squirming in the air in front of my eyes under not being able to connect again into its original form or another final one“ (p. 133).

In his next novel, Tvílýsi (Dual Light,1994), subtitled Myndir á sýningu (Pictures in an Exhibition), the author finds himself on a more familiar ground, both in terms of the exotic setting and the style. This modernist story recalls Thor’s novels from the sixties and seventies; this time a multi-layered love story is woven on a frame marked by an image of death: a drowned man is lifted from the sea in a harbour. Inside the frame of that image (which its simultaneous reference to death and an ascent to heaven) a diverse community thrives, the natural world of a city where Thor introduces to the story various minor characters who are all outsiders: a clown, a dwarf, a deaf man and another one who is blind, but above all there is a man and a woman, all exploring the most complex form of communication in the world called love.

Morgunþula í stráum (Morning Verse in the Grass, 1998), which earned Thor the Icelandic Literature Prize (Íslensku bókmenntaverðlaunin), is a historical novel based on the life and fate of one of the most famous members of the 13th century Sturlunga family, the much-lauded Sturla Sighvatsson. In Thor’s re-creation of this hero, he becomes like a link to the present day. Readers who expect Thor to mainly trace the Sturlungar’s steps in Iceland may be surprised by the fact that a large part of the story is devoted to Sturla’s pilgrimage to Rome. Sturla tells his wife Solveig that he needs to leave and receive an absolution from the pope. „You do not deceive me“ she says, asking him if he is not merely feeding his own vanity (p. 86). Why does Sturla go on this great journey; why does he embark on a journey which is so long and difficult that we, technologically advanced modern people can hardly imagine the effort it required? Maybe he has lost himself in Iceland, and needs to go to come to terms with himself and his experiences. Which he does, and his journey takes him deep into his own self. Travelling through Europe, it is as if he can see to the bottom of the abyss which is the civil war he is a part of at home. The tragedy of the story is that Sturla’s journey does still not give him sufficient wisdom, it is not enough of a baptism by fire. But the journey is capable of opening the reader’s eyes and may also bring the reader to a greater understanding of the importance of the many and various journeys in Thor Vilhjálmsson’s works.

© Ástráður Eysteinsson 2001

Translated by Vera Júlíusdóttir

Criticism

Matthías Viðar Sæmundsson: “Thor Vilhjálmsson (1925- )”
Icelandic Writers. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 293, ed. Patrick J. Stevens, Detroit, Gale 2004, pp. 349-355

See also: Neijmann, Daisy L., ed. A History of Icelandic Literature
University of Nebraska Press, 2007, pp. 418-19, 421-22, 423, 427-30, 439, 440, 448, 462, 478

On individual works

Morgunþula í stráum

Torfi H. tulinius: “Snorri og hans slægt i moderne nordisk litteratur”
Ordenes slotte: om sprog og litteratur i Norden (ritstjórar: Auður Hauksdóttir, Jørn Lund og Erik Skyum-Nielsen), pp. 31-38.

Þorleifur Hauksson: “Om tre nordiske historiske romaner : nye billeder af Snorri Sturluson = Three Nordic historical novels : new portraits of Snorri Sturluson”
Nordisk litteratur 2003, pp. 148-53.

Náttvíg

Gunilla Byrman: “Nattligt dråp. En roman av Thor Vilhjalmsson : i övers. av Kristján Hallberg och Peter Hallberg” (critique)
Gardar 1992, pp. 48-9.

Fljótt fljótt, sagði fuglinn

Artur Lundkvist: “Thor Vilhjálmsson. Fort fort, sa fågeln ; : Berättelser från Island” (critique)
Gardar 1977, pp. 93-5.

Honorary lifetime artist’s stipend, bestowed by parliament

Honorary member of the Reykjavík Judo Federation

Honorary citizen of Rocamadour, France

1999 - Karen Blixen-medaljen

1998 - Named Officier de l´Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (A Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government

1998 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Morgunþula í stráum (Morning’s Song in Blades of Grass)

1992 - The Swedish Academy Nordic Literature Prize

1989 - Grande Ufficiale del Ordo Merito de la Republica d'Italia. For his work in service of Italian culture in Iceland.

1989 - Named Chevalier de l´Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (A Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government

1988 - Honorary member of the Icelandic Writers’ Union

1988 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Grámosinn glóir (The Grey Moss Glows)

1987 - The DV Cultural Prize for literature: Grámosinn glóir

1984 - The DV Cultural Prize for literature: for his translation of La condition humaine (Hlutskipti manns) by André Malraux

1968 - The National Broadcasting Service’s Authors’ Fund

Tilnefningar

1994 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Tvílýsi (Dual Light)

1989 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Náttvíg (A Killing at Night)

1978 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Mánasigð (Moon’s Sicle)

1977 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Fuglaskottís (A Birds’ Schottische)

1971 - The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize: Fljótt, fljótt sagði fuglinn (Quickly, Quickly Said the Bird)