Iceland, as it appears in Halldór Laxness’s fiction, is more than a northern setting: its austere landscapes give physical form to encounters with the Thing, while the country’s literary worlds hold poetic withdrawal and political injustice in unresolved tension. The glacier in Under the Glacier is at once a material presence and the center of an eccentric alternative community; in World Light, the icy Sun of the Glacier draws a poor poet toward a fatal end.

Iceland in Laxness’s fiction

In World Light, Laxness’s poor, second-rate local poet is wholly devoted to his art. At the novel’s end, he makes a suicidal march toward the icy Sun of the Glacier, a Nordic Thing whose attraction culminates in a deadly embrace. The landscape sharpens the novel’s conflict between two kinds of fascination: the poet’s relation to the poetic Thing, and the political sense of injustice that can generate revolutionary revolt.

Laxness’s treatment of the poet’s withdrawal is grounded in material deprivation rather than affluent spiritual experimentation. Poverty, pain, starvation, social exclusion, and humiliation press the hero away from external reality and toward a preontological, hallucinatory freedom. Iceland’s literary landscape thus joins bodily hardship to a retreat that does not resolve the political struggle surrounding it.

Vatnajökull and the Thing

In Under the Glacier, published in 1968, the glacier gives the Thing a striking physical presence. A visit to Vatnajökull in southeast Iceland brings the observer close to immense ribs of white-brown, thousands-of-years-old ice, exposed as surface snow gradually melts. The glacier resembles the carcass of a primordial animal, making proximity to it feel like an encounter with something vast and more-than-human.

The novel sends Embi, a young priest from Reykjavík, to a small town beneath the glacier to investigate reports of strange happenings in the local parish. There he finds an alternative community that has set aside traditional Christian rules and formed a utopian space of noninstitutionalized spirituality, with its own enchanted normality. Iceland’s remote glacial setting becomes the ground for a challenge to ordinary religious and social arrangements.

A landscape of unresolved tensions

The glacier community is not presented simply as a return to New Age neopaganism. Pastor Jon has stopped performing a minister’s duties and become a mechanic, but his renunciation of church authority accompanies a search for a larger mystical, cosmic, and galactic authority. The local world therefore unsettles the distinction between rejecting institutions and claiming access to a greater power.

The novel’s strangeness is concentrated in Ua, a shape-shifter who appears to embody eternity in human form. She gives her age as 52, twice Embi’s age, but has lived through numerous identities, including Pastor Jon’s wife, a Buenos Aires brothel madam, and a nun. She speaks the principal languages and knits mittens for fishermen in Peru; the account also describes her as having been dead, conjured into a fish, and preserved on the glacier until Pastor Jon resurrected her. She is about to become Embi’s lover. Through such transformations, Iceland’s glacier is not merely a remote natural feature: it anchors a fictional world in which death, spirituality, and ordinary life refuse to stay within settled boundaries.