ABSTRACT
Icelandic belongs to the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European family. It is the official language of Iceland, where it is spoken by about a quarter of a million people. While its main Scandinavian congeners have carried reductionism to extremes, Icelandic – like its close relative Faroese – remains close to Old Norse. This is perhaps at least partly due to its geographical position as an outlier. Equally important, however, and another major factor in its linguistic conservatism, was the presence in Iceland of the poetic and saga literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. What was kept alive was not merely a grammatical system but one of the world’s great literatures. The body of Old Icelandic poetry may be divided into two main categories: mythological works and cycles (the Eddas); and skaldic verse designed to eulogize kings and other high-status individuals. The sagas are prose works – though often with verse interpolations – frequently, though not exclusively, based on actual episodes and events in the history of the early North Germanic peoples at around the end of the first millennium. The narrative sweep, the moral power and the sheer human interest of this distinctive and compelling body of mediaeval literature clearly inform the genre in which modern Icelandic writers have excelled – the epic novel, as practised by Halldór Laxness, Ϸ. Ϸórðarson, G. Hagalín and O.J. Sigurðsson. Modern Icelandic literature has also produced many outstanding poets, including Davíð Stefánsson and Tómas Guðmundsson. Contemporary writers of note include the novelists Einar Kárason and Bragi Ólafsson, and the widely translated novelist and children’s author Yrsa Sigurðardóttir.
