On the glacier

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Am Gletscher (actually: Pastoral care on the glacier , Icelandic : Kristnihald undir Jökli ) is a novel by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness . It was written in 1968. The first German-language edition was published in 1974 by the Aufbau-Verlag in the GDR under the title Seelsorge am Gletscher .

construction

The novel is about 250 pages divided into 45 chapters. Each chapter has its own, sometimes longer heading. There is a first-person narrator , a theologian, who almost always describes himself in the third person.

action

At the request of the Bishop of Iceland, a 25-year-old theologian and teacher is supposed to investigate the conditions in a Protestant community in western Iceland. The community is located on Snæfellsjökull , a glacial volcano.

The pastor there is called Sira Jon Jonsson, known as Sira Jon Primus. The church is locked; Services are not held. There are also no baptisms or funerals there. Sira Jon hasn't picked up his salary for 20 years. Instead, he has manual skills. He repairs numerous objects in his community and is familiar with keeping farm animals. So he is very popular with his church members and can earn a living. His wife is missing; instead, a woman named “Stößeldora” lives with him.

During his stay on the glacier, the representative of the bishop, called "Vebi" for short, is drawn into a series of unusual events. This is how some bizarre people appear. This includes Professor Dr. Godman Syngmann alias Gudmundur Sigmundsson, who once had a wooden box about one meter long brought onto the glacier. He has three assistants, called "shepherds," who apparently come from distant lands and conduct obscure studies. The Vebi only wanted to stay in the community for three days, but postponed his departure several times due to a series of incidents.

The professor dies suddenly, so a memorial service has to be held. At the insistence of Vebi, the pastor struggles to hold a celebration in the makeshift church. Later the wooden box is fetched from the glacier and ceremoniously opened. A frozen salmon is in it, which is soon eaten by birds. Subsequently, Ua appears, also Gudrun or Ursula, who is obviously the missing, allegedly deceased pastor's wife. She also appears obscure: she has worked as a nun, as director of a cathouse in Buenos Aires and as a glove knitter in Peru . Since Sira Jon is called to repair a quick freezer, he hardly notices that Ua is back. Instead, he offers the Vebi his wife. Among other things, seduces the Vebi and drives him in her car to a house "at the end of the world". The car gets stuck in a swamp hole. After they have reached the house and Ua has disappeared there, the Vebi flees.

background

Laxness wrote the novel in 1968, 13 years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature , at the age of 66. Although the novel is set in the Icelandic province, numerous ironically funny references to philosophical currents and a large number of foreign-language passages show that the Icelandic province stands as pars pro toto . In the foreground is the partly farmer's cunning, partly philosophically well-founded attitude of Sira Jon, while Vebi observes as instructed, but is also capable of amazement.

Text output

  • 1968: Kristnihald undir Jökli , Helgafell, Reykjavík
  • 1974: Pastoral care on the glacier , construction, East Berlin
  • 1982: Pastoral care on the glacier , Frauenfeld, Stuttgart
  • 1989: Am Gletscher , Steidl, Göttingen

All German-language editions are based on the 1974 translation by Bruno Kress .

Adaptations of the novel

  • The novel was filmed in 1989 by Laxness' daughter Guðný Halldórsdóttir under the title Kristnihald undir Jökli in Iceland. The production company was called Umbi-Films . umbi is the Icelandic equivalent of Vebi . A German dubbed version with the title Am Gletscher is available.
  • Two radio plays were produced in Germany based on the novel . The WDR broadcast Christianity on the Glacier in 1982 after translation and editing from the Icelandic by Franz Seewald. The MDR produced Am Gletscher in 1992 .
  • The band Samsas Traum published the song Auf den Spiralnebeln based on themes from the book in 2007 . The focus of the text is Sira Jon.

Individual evidence

  1. a b search result from the southwest association
  2. Christianity on the Glacier, broadcast on Deutschlandfunk on December 22, 2001.