Modern Icelandic Plays / Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm

E-text prepared by Louise Hope, David Starner, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Variation between ö (Introduction and Advertising sections, including all references to Björnstjerne Björnson ) and ø (names within the plays) is unchanged. The letters á and æ do not occur in the translations.
This series of Scandinavian Classics is published by The American-Scandinavian Foundation in the belief that greater familiarity with the chief literary monuments of the North will help Americans to a better understanding of Scandinavians, and thus serve to stimulate their sympathetic coöperation to good ends.
BOTH volumes of the Scandinavian Classics selected to appear in 1916 are by natives of Iceland. They belong, however, to periods of time and to modes of writing remote from each other. Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of Icelandic historians, was born in 1179. His Prose Edda , the companion-piece of the present volume, is a Christian's account of Old Norse myths and poetic conceptions thus happily preserved as they were about to pass into oblivion. More than seven hundred years separate Jóhann Sigurjónsson from Snorri, and his work is in dramatic, not saga form. But even as in outward appearance modern Iceland is not unlike ancient Iceland, so the Icelandic writers of the present have marked kinship with the past. Despite many centuries of relative neglect, the old traditions lived on, cherished by scholars, until now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Icelandic mind appears to be again renascent and creative. Einar Jónsson, the sculptor, has his counterpart in the domain of letters in such recent writers as Jónas Jónasson, Emar Hjörleifsson, Gudmundur Magnússon, Jónas Gudlaugsson, Gunnar Gunnarson, and Gudmundur Kamban, while every important fjord and valley can claim its own poet or novelist. As yet, the most distinguished performance of these younger authors is the play printed in this volume, Eyvind of the Hills ( Bjærg-Ejvind og hans Hustru ), by Jóhann Sigurjónsson. Among literary phenomena Eyvind of the Hills is a surprise, almost as though Iceland woke to find her naked mountains clothed in forest in a night.