Icelandic Literature
This page covers Icelandic literature. McKee Library's collection includes numerous titles by Islandic authors.
Research and Reference
- Icelandic literature CEnterThe Icelandic Literature Center is a government-funded office. The role of the Center is to raise awareness of Icelandic literature, both in Iceland and abroad, and to promote its distribution.
- National Archives of IcelandNational Archives of Iceland website and information.
- National and University Library of IcelandThe National and University Library of Iceland is the national library of Iceland and the library of the University of Iceland. The library was established on December 1, 1994. It is the largest library in Iceland with one million items in various collections.
Streaming Media
- Noir and Beyond: Iceland’s LiteratureWhatever your flavor of literature (folkloric sagas, crime novels, poetry, literary fiction), Iceland has something for every type of reader. Discover how a combination of historical pride and rich storytelling skills make Icelandic literature, both past and present, so revered around the world.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Independent People
From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. * "A strange story, vibrant and alive.... There is a rare beauty in its telling." --Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.
The Sagas of the Icelanders
In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's great literary treasures - as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America. Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom.