Erlingsson, Thorsteinn

▪ Icelandic poet

born September 27, 1858, Fljótshlíd, Iceland

died September 28, 1914, Reykjavík

      Icelandic poet whose satirical and rebellious writing was always softened by his own humanity.

      Erlingsson was a farmer's son. He attended the University of Copenhagen, where he spent 13 years dabbling in philology and Old Norse but never took a degree. This was a time of great poverty for him, and he finally went back to Iceland and worked as a provincial journalist. Later, he settled in Reykjavík, where he eked out a writer's pension by teaching privately. Living at a time when the Danish regime imposed great hardship on the Icelanders, Erlingsson rebelled against the establishment, both religious and secular. But while he was politically radical, he was essentially a gentle poet and a lover of both animals and humans.

      His two major publications were Thyrnar (1897; “Thorns”) and Eidurinn (1913; “The Oath”). Thyrnar is a collection of poems ranging from love lyrics to political satire. Eidurinn is a moving poem sequence that interprets the 17th-century tragic love story of Ragnheidur, the defiant daughter of Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson of Skálholt, who gives birth to the child of a lover whom she has been forced to forswear. (Another Icelandic author, Gudmundur Kamban (Kamban, Gudmundur), would later write a novel about the same subject.) As one critic has pointed out, Erlingsson made brilliant use of folk metres in his largely successful effort to appeal to common people.

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