ABSTRACT
I study closely one specific individual – Magnús Hj. Magnússon – who himFself created a remarkable oeuvre of egodocuments, and seek an understanding both of how his story has been told, and how it can give us insight into such matters and gender relations and sexual life; the history of emotions in the 19th century. As these subjects are addressed, they are placed in the context of everyday life and the story of the poverty of this group, at the bottom of the social pyramid. The Icelander Magnús Hj. Magnússon left his boyhood home at the farm of Hestur in 1892, at the age of 19. His possessions comprised a bundle of clothes, books, a portable writing desk and sheets of writing. For the 20 years or so that remained to him, he lived a peripatetic existence in an unstinting struggle with poor health, together with a ceaseless quest for a space to pursue writing and scholarship in accord with his dreams.
His first dwelling-place was the farm of Fremri-Breiðdalur, where he received poor relief from the district of his birth, as in the preceding years. It was there that Magnús began to keep a regular diary, and he kept it up for the rest of his life. From his teenage years onwards, he composed a vast number of poems every year, and before he was 20 he had earned a reputation as a folk poet in the West Fjords and farther afield. Magnús continued writing verse until his death in 1916 – for a total of 24 years
