{"id":255,"date":"2014-01-28T07:54:45","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T07:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/?p=255"},"modified":"2016-03-30T21:35:53","modified_gmt":"2016-03-30T21:35:53","slug":"thorlakur-axel-jonsson-dagur-austan-aevintyramadhurinn-vernhardhur-eggertsson-akureyri-voeluspa-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/09-1\/c61-book-review\/thorlakur-axel-jonsson-dagur-austan-aevintyramadhurinn-vernhardhur-eggertsson-akureyri-voeluspa-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00deorl\u00e1kur Axel J\u00f3nsson, Dagur Austan. \u00c6vint\u00fdrama\u00f0urinn Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson (Akureyri: V\u00f6lusp\u00e1, 2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\t
\n\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> <\/a>\n\n\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u00deorl\u00e1kur Axel J\u00f3nsson\u2019s slender volume (104 pages in total) is written in Icelandic and inaugurates a book series devoted to the history of northern Iceland\u2019s Eyjafj\u00f6r\u00f0ur and its inhabitants: <\/span>Safn til s\u00f6gu Eyjafjar\u00f0ar og Eyfir\u00f0inga<\/i>. Yet, in a way that is commented upon in the following paragraphs, this book is relevant to Nordic and Mediterranean studies and it has therefore been decided that <\/span>Nordicum-Mediterraneum<\/i> should carry a belated review of it, given the book\u2019s relatively old year of publication, i.e. 2009.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson (1909-1952) was known also as Dagur Austan, a marginal contributor to 20th<\/sup>-century Icelandic literature, to whom serious critics and well-established literary reviewers have paid hardly any attention. Despite his vivid depiction of police callousness, or his groundbreaking references to homosexuality and child abuse by Catholic priests (79), the author\u2019s little fame between the 1930s and the 1950s was due primarily to infamy or, to put it more correctly, to notoriety. Before and during the years in which Dagur Austan published one book (An Icelandic Adventurer in the Spanish War<\/i>, 1938), one booklet and a handful of short stories (including the 1950 \u201cThe Dog and I\u201d, perhaps the most successful of them), the name \u201cVernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson\u201d appeared repeatedly in Iceland\u2019s newspapers and even more frequently in the official records of Iceland\u2019s police, courts of law and prisons for a long string of petty crimes, often related to alcoholic beverages.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Since at least 1931, when he experienced a stint in a Canadian jail for a somewhat mythical case of prohibition-era smuggling (24-7), Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson\u2019s life was marked by the homelessness, poverty, instability, mendacity, proneness to self-harm and the erratic behaviour that are often associated with excessive drinking amongst working-class men. On top of that, his professed adherence to communism made him a target of exemplary toughness by Iceland\u2019s police authorities (60-3). During a remarkable dry spell facilitated by the Salvation Army in the early 1940s, Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson did succeed in finding a wife and fathering a host of children, from whom he was eventually separated by his overwhelming propensity for the bottle (see esp. 64-70). What is more, before and after this spell, he worked in the family brewery (9-18), travelled the world as a sailor (21-3, 82-7), witnessed and probably fought in the Civil War in Spain (44-59), walked rarely trodden paths in his native country after a jail break (35-43) and managed to charm and befriend many fellow Icelanders, including young artists, journalists and literati (78-81, 101).<\/span><\/p>\n

In the end, Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson suffered a tragic death in a shipwreck off Caithness\u2019 perilous coasts, probably after sailing in the treacherous Pentland Firth (87), crowning a tempestuous existence with the kind of salt-water tragedy that fate reserves to the true adventurer, which is the way chosen by the book\u2019s author to refer to Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson, i.e. <\/span>\u00c6vint\u00fdrama\u00f0urinn <\/i>(\u201cthe adventurer\u201d), and possibly the one in which Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson liked thinking of himself as well.<\/span><\/p>\n

Certainly, the gritty tales that Dagur Austan recounts in his book on the Spanish Civil War\u2014passages of which are included in \u00deorl\u00e1kur Axel J\u00f3nsson\u2019s text\u2014are worthy of the most audacious adventurer, if not of a hero, which is the term used by the Swedish communists\u2019 journal <\/span>Ny Dag<\/i> to salute in 1936 the brave Icelander that was reported to have fought for the Republic in the International Brigades (57). Besides, Dagur Austan\u2019s matter-of-fact, adventure-centred outlook on the bloody fights between Republicans and Monarchists, as well as between Anarchists and other Republicans, offers an unusually fresh, ideologically uncompromising and little-known account of the Civil War itself. Historians that are interested in what happened in Spain during those terrible years may well find it a valuable integration of more commonly cited sources.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The author of the volume hereby reviewed is a historian and social scientist. His style is dry, unadorned and non-evaluative. He is careful in the selection of, and the references to, the sources utilised for his biography of Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson aka Dagur Austan. Photographs (mid-book insert, 1-8), a thorough critical apparatus (88-94), a poem (2) and a short story penned by Dagur Austan himself (95-100), plus a 1952 obituary by Sverrir \u00de\u00f3r\u00f0arson (101) complement it effectively, giving a concrete sense of the times and the lives that are touched upon. The resulting volume is not big, its short chapters offering a dozen of highly effective sketches, rather than a lengthy account, of salient moments in the life of Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson and of his family. If neorealism were a literary style, rather than a cinematographic one, \u00deorl\u00e1kur Axel J\u00f3nsson\u2019s book would be an instantiation of it. <\/span><\/p>\n

One may wonder why such a peculiar citizen of northern Iceland should have been chosen to launch the book series on Eyjafj\u00f6r\u00f0ur and its inhabitants. Though unquestionably exciting and romantically eccentric, Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson\u2019s story is neither enviable nor edifying. As Sverrir \u00de\u00f3r\u00f0arson wrote, he was \u201ca son of the street\u201d (73). Yet, it is true that Icelandic literature has never eschewed the darker margins of the island\u2019s society, whether by devoting entire sagas to famous outlaws or by celebrating the most poetically talented psychotic murderer of the Viking age, Egill Skallagr\u00edmsson. If divine wisdom informs the entirety of God\u2019s creation, then lessons can be learnt from all walks of life. Thus, pondering upon Vernhar\u00f0ur Eggertsson\u2019s tribulations may remind the reader of how healthily insignificant is a comfortable middle-class life.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many a token of Nordic and Mediterranean scholarship are lost or pass unnoticed because of enduring linguistic barriers. Many more share the same fate because they are conceived of, marketed or received as \u2018mere\u2019 local history. The book reviewed hereby has been affected by both issues.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":254,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[723,724],"coauthors":[990],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c61-book-review","tag-alcoholism-dagur-austan-civil-war-iceland","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1278,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/1278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nome.unak.is\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}