As an Icelander and a member of a very small Scandinavian nation with an ancient and unique literary culture, Halldór Laxness has rather special qualifications as a writer. Throughout the period of his literary achievement, which has now continued for almost half a century, the Icelandic heritage has constantly been a living force in his work, contrasting or combining in various ways with his modernism and preoccupation with the problems of his time. The tension between the native and the foreign, the national and the cosmopolitan, has formed one of the fruitful contrasts which run through all his writing. (p. 5)

Three stages in his development may be fairly clearly distinguished. The first is characterized by his attempts as a young man to find his way among conceptions of life and literary trends in Europe after the First World War. It is a period of vehement and restless...