Read "Paradise Reclaimed" by Halldor Laxness online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In the early days of Kristian Wilhelmsson, who was the third last foreign king to wield power here in Iceland,* a farmer named Steinar lived at Hlíðar in the district known as Steinahlíðar. He had been so named by his father after the rubble of stones that cascaded down off the mountain in the spring when he was born. Steinar was a married man by the time this story opens, and had two young children, a daughter and a son; he had inherited the farm of Hlíðar from his father.
At this time, Icelanders were said to be the poorest people in Europe, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been, all the way back to the earliest settlers; but they believed that many long centuries ago there had been a Golden Age in Iceland, when Icelanders had not been mere farmers and fishermen as they were now, but royal-born heroes and poets who owned weapons, gold, and ships. Like other boys in Iceland, Steinar's son soon learned to be a viking and king'sman, and whittled axes and swords for himself out of pieces of wood.