The Blue Tower - Softcover

Thorarinn Eldjarn

3.74

39 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1899197451 ISBN 13: 9781899197453

Publisher: Mare's Nest Pub, 1999

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Combining adventure with Scandinavian political and literary history, Eldjrn's gripping saga of 17th-century Iceland consists mostly of the fictional memoirs of its real-life hero, Gudmundur Andr�sson."" Publishers Weekly In 1649, Andr�sson is sitting apparently forgotten in Copenhagen's notorious Blue Tower, where he has been imprisoned for writing a pamphlet attacking the Great Edict, the morality law set by the Danish colonial authorities in Iceland. Interspersed with descriptions of his suffering and despair in the cell, he narrates the story of an extraordinary life. A bright but poor farmer's son, he was sponsored by a kindly scholar, but prefers a life with connections and a rich wife. The birth of a child out of wedlock, counter to the Great Edict, and his scurrilous tract seal his fate. ""A lively chronicle of impish, often sardonic resistance to tyranny in all forms."" Kirkus Reviews

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Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Icelandic

From Publishers Weekly:

Combining adventure with Scandinavian political and literary history, Eldj rn's gripping saga of 17th-century Iceland consists mostly of the fictional memoirs of its real-life hero, Gudmundur Andr?sson (who lived from 1615 to 1654). Confined to Copenhagen's fearsome Blue Tower for writing against the Great Edict (a puritanical, draconian legal code imposed on Iceland by the Danes), Gudmundur explains his unjust captivity by recording the story of his life. From his earliest years as a peasant's son, Gudmundur displays an "excessive tendency to ponder things that are better left untouched." Detecting his talent for learning, a clerical neighbor sends young Gudmundur to the Holar cathedral school, where he meets Einar Arnfinnsson, who becomes his best friend. Gudmundur also learns to use his gift for poetry to revenge himself on his enemies. Like the ancient Irish, 17th-century Icelanders believe that poets possess supernatural potency: when students from rich families play tricks on Gudmundur, he repays them with verse lampoons, encouraging them to believe in his magical powers. Einar secures Gudmundur a deaconship, but a cabal of Gudmundur's enemies, including relatives of class bully Thorkell Gudmundsson, eventually strips him of his station. After he writes an essay against the Great Edict defending extramarital sex, Thorkell circulates a garbled, malevolently revised manuscript under Gudmundur's name: the forgery leads to Gudmundur's arrest. As sketched here, Gudmundur is charming, intelligent, vain and ultimately na?ve, a peasant scholar crushed by the establishment. In Scudder's stately English translation, Eldj rn's narrative of an obscure period in a far, cold country goes beyond historical verisimilitude, rendering Gudmundur and his troubles insistently memorable and intensely real.
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