The man Bjartur [protagonist of "Independent People" ("Sjálfstaett fólk")] is a magnificent and complex symbol of peasant independence, and this whole great novel might be considered a profoundly imaginative projection of Hardy's poem, "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'," Bjartur is the modern Icelandic counterpart of the figure Hardy saw harrowing clods, hidden in "thin smoke without flame from heaps of couch-grass," working without change though dynasties rise and fall….

Bjartur is a magnificent symbol because he is at once and so completely Icelander, peasant, man….

And in the Western world the culture of Icelandic peasants is uniquely high and pure. These are the descendants of Vikings who established in Iceland an independent, democratic republic, a government of laws under the Althing, long before the English Magna Carta. And they still speak the uncorrupted language of the great eddas and sagas of the North which...