Iceland's Bell

Jón’s Case

Jón Hreggviðsson is a peasant — a fisherman-farmer in 17th-century Iceland, under Danish colonial administration. He is accused of murder, almost certainly falsely: the man he allegedly killed was already dead when Jón encountered him, a victim of the harsh conditions in which all Icelanders live under Danish rule. But the Danish legal system does not take much interest in the distinction between guilt and innocence when it comes to Icelandic peasants, and Jón is condemned.

What follows is one of the great comic-heroic narratives in Scandinavian literature: Jón’s decades-long fight through the Danish courts to clear his name. He travels to Copenhagen, is imprisoned, escapes, is recaptured, appeals to higher courts, is condemned again, appeals again. The Danish imperial system processes his case with the infinite slowness of an institution that cannot quite decide what to do with a peasant who refuses to accept its verdict. Jón, for his part, refuses to die, refuses to give up, refuses to acknowledge the authority of an institution he regards as fundamentally unjust.

He is recognizably Bjartur’s ancestor: the same absolute stubbornness, the same refusal to accept what the world insists is fixed, the same comic persistence in the face of conditions that should have defeated him long ago. But where Bjartur’s stubbornness operates against the landscape and against his family, Jón’s operates against an imperial legal system — and in this context, the same quality that is catastrophic in Independent People becomes something closer to heroic.

Colonial Iceland

The Danish colonial administration of 17th-century Iceland is Laxness’s historical subject, but it is always also his contemporary subject. Writing in the 1940s, when Iceland was negotiating its transition from Danish sovereignty to full independence (and then immediately to the complications of NATO membership), Laxness chose the historical period of Danish colonial rule to explore questions that were urgently present.

The Danes in Iceland’s Bell are not cartoonish villains — they are bureaucrats and officials of a colonial administration, doing what colonial administrations do: extracting value from the colony, adjudicating disputes according to the colonizer’s legal system, and maintaining a studied indifference to the actual conditions of the colonized population. The Icelandic scholars and officials who mediate between the empire and the Icelandic people are more complex: some have been captured by Danish culture and ambitions, others maintain a residual loyalty to Iceland that the Danish administration regards with suspicion.

The Bell of the title is a symbol of Icelandic sovereignty: a great bell that was sold to the Danish crown as part of the ongoing transaction by which Iceland traded its independence for dubious forms of protection. The bell’s fate — sold, lost, possibly recoverable — structures the novel’s meditation on what it means for a people to lose control of its own symbols and what it would take to get them back.

The Historical Trilogy

Iceland’s Bell is the first part of a trilogy that continues with The Happy Warriors and concludes with Fire in Copenhagen. The three novels together trace Icelandic history from the 17th century through the 18th century, following different characters but maintaining consistent thematic concerns: the relationship between Iceland and Denmark, the question of national identity under colonial rule, and the persistence of Icelandic character across historical pressures.

As a stand-alone novel, Iceland’s Bell is complete in itself — Jón’s story reaches a point of resolution, the main narrative threads are tied off — but readers who want to follow the broader historical arc will find the sequels rewarding. In the context of Laxness’s career, the trilogy connects to Independent People as his exploration of Icelandic national character across different historical periods: Bjartur’s 20th-century stubbornness and Jón’s 17th-century persistence are the same quality in different historical clothes, and Laxness’s lifelong project is to understand what that quality costs and what it is worth.

The Saga Inheritance and Laxness’s Style

What gives Iceland’s Bell its distinctive texture is the way Laxness writes in conscious dialogue with the medieval Icelandic sagas — the great prose narratives that are Iceland’s supreme contribution to world literature and the foundation of its national identity. The novel’s third strand, following the scholar Arnas Arnaeus, who scours the country for crumbling vellum manuscripts of those very sagas, makes this inheritance literal: Arnaeus is loosely modelled on Árni Magnússon, the historical collector who saved much of medieval Iceland’s literature from being used as patching for shoe-soles and clothing. The point is pointed and moving. The Danes have the bell, the courts, the political power; what Iceland keeps is its words, the manuscripts in which a defeated, impoverished people preserved the memory of when they were free. Laxness’s prose honours that tradition with its own laconic irony, its deadpan understatement, its refusal to sentimentalise suffering — a modern style deliberately rooted in the saga voice.

Laxness himself was the towering figure of twentieth-century Icelandic letters, the only Icelander ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1955 partly on the strength of the historical and social novels of which this is a central example. Written during the 1940s as Iceland finally severed its centuries-old constitutional tie to Denmark and declared full independence in 1944, Iceland’s Bell is at once a historical epic and an intervention in its own moment, asking what a small nation’s freedom is worth and what it has cost to keep the idea of that freedom alive across three hundred years of subjection.

How to Approach It

Newcomers to Laxness will find Iceland’s Bell the most welcoming door into his work. It is shorter than Independent People or World Light, more obviously plot-driven, and propelled by the sheer comic momentum of Jón Hreggviðsson’s refusal to stay condemned. Readers need not arrive with any knowledge of Danish-Icelandic history; Laxness supplies the necessary context through character and incident, though those willing to glance at the bare outline of the period — Iceland as a Danish dependency, governed at a distance, drained by trade monopolies and natural disaster — will catch more of the political resonance. It rewards patience with its large cast and its shifts between Jón’s earthy comedy, Arnaeus’s scholarly melancholy, and the suffering grace of Snæfríður, the proud noblewoman whose fate threads the three storylines together. Approached as the first movement of a larger work but enjoyed complete in itself, it stands among the most accessible masterpieces of Nordic literature.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Laxness’s most accessible historical epic: a peasant’s absurd battle against an empire becomes the story of a nation’s soul.