Wayward Heroes
by Halldor Laxness
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Pub Date Nov 01 2016 | Archive Date Sep 01 2016
Archipelago Books | Archipelago
Description
First published in 1952, Halldór Laxness’s Wayward Heroes offers an unlikely representation of modern literature. A reworking of medieval Icelandic sagas, the novel is set against the backdrop of the medieval Norse world. Laxness satirizes the spirit of sagas, criticizing the global militarism and belligerent national posturing rampant in the postwar buildup to the Cold War.
He does that through the novel’s main characters, the sworn brothers Þormóður Bessason and Þorgeir Hávarsson, warriors who blindly pursue ideals that lead to the imposition of power through violent means. The two see the world around them only through a veil of heroic illusion: kings are fit either to be praised in poetry or toppled from their thrones, other men only to kill or be killed, women only to be mythic fantasies. Replete with irony, absurdity, and pathos, the novel more than anything takes on the character of tragedy, as the sworn brothers’ quest to live out their ideals inevitably leaves them empty-handed and ruined.
Advance Praise
• "Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas' shadow...to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland--he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity." -- The Guardian
• "Science fiction. Table, fable, allegory. Philosophical novel. Dream novel. Visionary novel. Literature of fantasy. Wisdom lit. Spoof. Sexual turn-on. Convention dictates that we slot many of the last centuries' perdurable literary achievements into one or another of these categories. The only novel I know that fits into all of them is Halldór Laxness's wildly original, morose, uproarious Under the Glacier." -- Susan Sontag
• "The qualities of the sagas pervade his writing, and particularly a kind of humor--oblique, stylized and childlike--that can be found in no other contemporary writer." -- The Atlantic Monthly
• "Laxness habitually combines the magical and the mundane, writing with grace and a quiet humor that takes awhile to notice but, once detected, feels ever present...All his narratives...have a strange and mesmerizing power, moving almost imperceptibly at first, then with glacial force." -- LA Times
• "One of the world's most unusual, skilled and visionary novelists." -- Jane Smiley
"Laxness is a poet who writes at the edge of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot: He takes a Tolstoyan overview, he weaves in a Waugh-like humor: it is not possible to be unimpressed." -- Daily Telegraph
"More than any other novel I know, Iceland's Bell recreates a world Pieter Brueghel would have felt right at home, not merely in its fascination with bumblers (petty thieves, purblind watchmen) and grotesques (faceless lepers, hanging corpses), but also in its unearthly ability to find beauty in a landscape of destitution, wisdom in a congress of fools." --The New York Times Book Review
"One quality that makes Laxness's novels so morally uplifting is their air of tender but urgent gratitude. While his tone can vary widely from book to book...the reader consistently feels that the books are conceived in a spirit of homage; they are some of the world's most substantial thank-you notes." -- Brad Leithauser, The New York Review of Books
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780914671091 |
| PRICE | $20.00 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Elaine A, Reviewer
Wayward Heroes was one book in the body of work for which Haldor Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1955. Its inspiration came from the wonderful classic Icelandic Sagas. Wayward Heroes is a title which says it all, because it is the story of Thorgeir and Thormod, two blood brothers. Thorgeir, is obsessed with becoming a warrior, while the less bellicose Thormod aspires to be a great bard. The text begins in a very grand manner in the style of a storyteller enthralling his audience huddled around a roaring fire on a cold winter’s night.
The story is set in eleventh-century Iceland. Europe is not completely Christian. Yet the behaviour of the story’s characters shows that people are essentially the same, regardless of time or location.
Thorgeir witnesses his father’s death; a man who was far from popular in the local community. Fuelled by his father’s stories of Viking warmongering and traumatised by his father’s murder, Thorgeir sets about his own form of training to fulfil his obsession with becoming a Viking warrior and avenge his father’s death. He eventually meets frustrated bard Thormod, and the two set off on their adventures, Don Quixote style.
But there is no Sancho Panza to save them from themselves as the characters lurch from one misadventure to the next. They certainly do not seem to be the glorious heroes of the Sagas. Their brand of Viking prowess is little more than sordid and unnecessary violence, ensuring they soon wear out their welcome. Although eventually history shows they do manage to redeem themselves.
This is a book to savour and one that does feel epic, while at the same time feeling remarkably intimate. You are also left wondering whether you have just read a work of fiction, or something that really happened a long, long time ago in an unforgiving land far, far away.
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