Laxness and the Invisible Farm

Mosfellsdalur, Reykjavík Area, Iceland

Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness documented in his memoirs that his childhood farm in Mosfellsdalur was visited each winter solstice by what his grandmother called the old tenants — figures from before the farm's recorded history who walked through the house without acknowledging the living.

Halldór Laxness, Iceland's only Nobel laureate in literature (awarded 1955), grew up at Laxnes farm in Mosfellsdalur north of Reykjavík. His memoirs of childhood include material that was not incorporated into his fiction, including a specific family tradition about the winter solstice. According to Laxness's account, his grandmother maintained that the farm had been occupied before the family's recorded tenure by people who had not fully left. On the night of the winter solstice — not at any other time — she would become aware of movement in the house that was not attributable to the living inhabitants. Not sounds, exactly, but the sense of traffic: doors that were slightly different in position than they should have been, a warmth from the direction of the hearth that persisted after the fire had gone down, the feeling of being walked around. She called them the old tenants. She was not afraid of them — they were not there for the living. They were simply completing the routines of a farm life that had ended before any living person's memory. Laxness noted that he had experienced this himself on at least two occasions as a child. He treated it empirically — as a datum without an explanation, worth recording rather than dismissing or elaborating. The farm is now a museum. It is open to the public in summer.