ABSTRACT
Gunnar Gunnarsson was determined to break out of the geographical and linguistic isolation of his native country, leaving Iceland at 18 and creating the largest part of his work in Danish to reach a larger public. He began with a family tetralogy under the collective name Af Borgslt:egtens Historie (1913-14; From the History of the Family at Borg). Salige er de enfoldige (1920; Seven Days' Darkness) is a disaster novel about the eruption of Mount Hekla and the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. After a fivevolume autobiographical suite, Gunnarsson entered a historical phase, choosing sensational or stirring episodes from Icelandic history, as in the tightly constructed Svartfugl (1929; The Black Cliffs), on a double murder that took place in 1802 amid the "pestilential atmosphere" of an inaccessible farm, and Jon Arason (1930), the dramatic story of the last Catholic bishop of Iceland, executed with his two sons in 155 o.
