Independent People

Bjartur of Summerhouses

Bjartur of Summerhouses is one of the most extraordinary characters in twentieth-century literature. He is a crofter — a subsistence sheep farmer — who has spent eighteen years in bonded labor on another man’s farm to pay for the right to work his own land. Now free, he builds his croft on a patch of Icelandic moorland and commits himself to a single, absolute value: independence.

Not comfort. Not happiness. Not love. Independence. Bjartur will owe nothing to no one and be dependent on no one for anything. He will raise his sheep and his children and manage his debt and face the Icelandic winter on these terms, and if people suffer as a result — if his wife dies in childbirth because he refused to borrow a neighbor’s horse to fetch the midwife, if his daughter Ásta Sóllilja grows up unloved and eventually destroyed — well, that is the price of independence, and the price is worth paying.

Laxness’s genius is that he makes this man simultaneously heroic and monstrous, ridiculous and magnificent. Bjartur is not a villain. He is a man with a single, total commitment to a value, and that commitment is, in its way, admirable — it is what makes him capable of surviving what the novel puts him through. But it is also what makes him incapable of giving or receiving the love that would make survival worthwhile. By the novel’s end, stripped of everything — wife, children, farm, animals — he is still Bjartur of Summerhouses, still himself, still walking forward. It is both terrible and, somehow, magnificent.

Iceland’s Landscape

Laxness uses the Icelandic landscape — the moor, the bog, the river in flood, the mountain passes in winter, the particular quality of the northern light — as an extension of Bjartur’s character. The land is as implacable as the man: it offers nothing, takes everything, and does not care about the people who work it. The sheep’s diseases, the failed harvests, the snowstorms that kill animals and occasionally people — these are not dramatic devices but the literal conditions of Icelandic subsistence farming rendered with documentary precision.

At the same time, the landscape has a mythological dimension. Iceland’s ancient literary culture — the sagas, the Eddas, the poetry that Bjartur loves and recites — runs through the novel as a counterpoint to the realist surface. When Bjartur recites Icelandic poetry to himself while digging sheep out of snowdrifts, Laxness is showing us a man who lives simultaneously in the mythological heroic tradition and in the brutal material conditions of early twentieth-century rural poverty. The combination is what makes Independent People something other than regional realism: it is an epic in the strict sense, concerned with heroes and their relationship to fate.

The landscape also makes the political argument. Bjartur’s independence is not merely personal stubbornness: it is the defining Icelandic value, the national character in concentrated form. The novel asks, with devastating patience, what that value costs when it is taken to its logical extreme.

The Nobel Prize in Iceland

Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, and Independent People (originally published in Icelandic in two volumes in 1934 and 1935) was the primary reason. The prize’s reception in Iceland was complicated. Laxness was a communist sympathizer, and his novel can be read as a critique of Icelandic peasant culture’s most celebrated value — the independence that Bjartur embodies to such devastating effect. Some Icelanders felt the portrait was an attack on national character; others recognized it as the greatest portrait of that character ever made.

The controversy is itself revealing: Independent People is simultaneously a love letter to Icelandic stubbornness and a merciless examination of its costs. Laxness clearly loves Bjartur — you cannot write 512 pages about a man without some profound identification — and equally clearly sees him as catastrophic. This dual vision is what makes the novel great: it refuses to resolve into either celebration or condemnation, holding both responses in productive tension across five hundred pages.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the great novels of the twentieth century: Bjartur of Summerhouses is among literature’s unforgettable characters, and his story is as large and as unsparing as the Icelandic moor.

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