Wayward Heroes: Vagabonds in World Literature

ABSTRACT: In Gerpla (1952), Halldór Laxness’s newly envisioned saga characters leave their native fjords and encounter different cultures on their travels abroad. They find themselves where the Greco-Roman cultural heritage meets the Northern legacy. Rewriting the saga heritage in times of civilization’s monumental decline, Halldór does not withdraw to the medieval and the remote but instead seeks the very roots of Western narrative and culture. Thus Gerpla, recently translated as Wayward Heroes (2016), can be located not only as a modern Icelandic response to the literature of the Old North, but also as a contribution to the European literature of exile; from The Odyssey to Ulysses, from Divina Commedia to Don Quixote.1 x1. This article is shaped by my years of teaching Icelandic literature at the University of Manitoba’s Department of Icelandic Language and Literature. While serving there as the Chair of Icelandic (2003–2015), I enjoyed the good fortune to reflect on the subject in the company of highly gifted students. One of them is the guest editor of this special volume, and I would like to thank Dr. Dustin Geeraert for his immense contribution to this article.