The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

From time immemorial it has been the custom in all sizeable farms in Iceland to have a good reader available to read sagas aloud or recite rímur for the household in the evenings; this was the national pastime. These evening sessions have been called the Icelanders' University. Old people who had attended this university for eighty years or more came to know the curriculum pretty well, not surprisingly. Saga-readings and rímur-recitations at Brekkukot were for the most part performed by visitors who stayed with us from time to time, or even just overnight, for my grandfather Björn of Brekkukot, as I have said already, was no more of a bookman than he had to be. Visitors from distant parts of the country often proved to be excellent entertainers. The best were those from the north, particularly from Skagafjörur; they were heroic-looking men who wore thigh-boots, whereas the people from the south contented themselves with thin-shoes. They were bursting with all sorts of poetry, good and bad alike, and their speech was much more vigorous than ours; and when someone from Skagafjörur was settled comfortably against our gable-wall and was launched on to the Úlfar-rímur set to a Skagafjörur chant, with that obligatory opening about King Cyrus, there opened up before us the whole wide world of heroic poetry all the way to the Orient, fitfully lit by strange flashes of illumination.

The sprinkling of books we had at Brekkukot was mostly a motley collection of strays, as I said earlier. And yet it was easier than one might think to arrange them into literary order. It bore witness above all to the nature of our visitors, in particular to the fact that there had been more of those who were fond of champions, knights, and sea-epics than of those who preferred Danish novels – this was the name which was applied in our house to modern literature in general, but particularly anything to do with hysteria.