Stefán Hördur Grímsson was for the latter half of the twentieth century a prominent, prizewinning poet. Nonetheless, he remained throughout his life an anomaly, as both his life and his verse were often highly enigmatic. Even so, his themes of love and violence, the latter often expressed through images of war, have resonated tellingly with the Icelandic reading public since publication of his second volume of poetry in 1951.

Official records say Stefán Hördur Grímsson was born in 1919, but he himself maintains that he was born in 1920. In a private interview on 4 July 2001, he said that he had never been able to obtain a birth certificate; all he had received was a baptismal certificate dated 30 December 1920, and since Icelandic parents rarely wait almost two years before having their children christened, he could well be right about the...