ABSTRACT
Icelandic belongs to the Germanic branch (Scandinavian sub-division) 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 Scandinavian congeners have carried reductionism to extremes, Icelandic remains close to Old Norse. This is partly due to its geographical position as an outlier. M ore im portant, however, and the m ajor factor in its linguistic conservatism, was the presence in Iceland of the saga literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. W hat was kept alive was not merely a grammatical system but one of the world’s great literatures. The narrative sweep, the moral power, and the sheer human interest of the sagas clearly inform the genre in which modern Icelandic writers have excelled - the epic novel, as practised by Halldor Laxness, P. PorSarson, G. Hagalin, and O.J. SigurSsson. Modern Icelandic literature has also produced many outstanding poets.
