National History, Resistance, and Cultural Enclosure in <i>Iceland’s Bell</i>

Iceland offers a combination of spectacular natural beauty and Viking history that has made it a popular destination for tourists. The island, which has a population under 350,000, was visited by almost 700,000 tourists in 2021 (Icelandic Tourist Board) and tourism now accounts for nearly fifty percent of the country’s total export revenue (OECD). The island’s Viking heritage, recorded in the medieval Sagas and Eddas, has played an important role in attracting tourists, but is also central to Icelandic cultural and national identity. The history of the manuscripts themselves, however, reveals a contest over who lays claim to the sagas as cultural artefacts, as they were originally collected and stored in Copenhagen by antiquarians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and only partly returned to Iceland in 1971, almost two decades after Iceland gained independence from Denmark. The history of the saga texts is the subject of Halldór Laxness’s novel Iceland’s Bell, published in three volumes from 1943-1946 at the height of the Icelandic independence movement. Through a discussion of the novel, this article will show that the Icelandic sagas are central to Laxness’s articulation of an independent Icelandic identity and cultural nationalism that is resistant to Danish colonial domination. It will suggest that not only is Iceland’s Bell a novel concerned with the material history of the sagas, especially as tangible objects of cultural heritage, but that this history is intricately linked with the island’s seven centuries of colonial domination by the Kingdom of Denmark. It is thus a consciously anti-colonial novel that portrays the violence, in both cultural and material terms, of Danish rule in Iceland and aligns cultural enclosure with colonial domination.