The Old Gods Return Fiction from the land of the ice and snow A shirtless male figure appears to spring across the sky, with their left arm outstretched. "The North Wind goes over the sea" by Kay Nielsen. | Wikimedia Commons Word FactoryW

, July 7, 2026 The Old Gods Return Fiction from the land of the ice and snow A shirtless male figure appears to spring across the sky, with their left arm outstretched. "The North Wind goes over the sea" by Kay Nielsen. | Wikimedia Commons Word FactoryW o r d F a c t o r y Out of the Darkness: Classic Short Fiction from Sweden edited by Vendela Vida, David Katznelson, and Ulf Olsson. University of Minnesota Press. 184 pages. 2026. Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland edited by Helen Mitsios. University of Minnesota Press. 216 pages. 2026. In early December 1909, Selma Lagerlöf boarded a train in Varmland, in the west of Sweden, bound for Stockholm. The sun had just set, and snow and ice covered the lakes and forests of the remote Swedish region she had called home since birth. Lagerlöf was on her way to the capital city to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first woman, and the first Swede, to win the award since its inception. Stockholm was loud and busy and filled with people, and the journey was a distressing one for the author. From one vantage point, she was leaving the shadows of the tree-covered Varmland for the fast-paced, modern capital. Leaving behind the fairytales of the Swedish countryside for the continental sophistication of twentieth-century Stockholm. By the time Halldór Laxness made a similar journey nearly a half century later, arriving from Iceland to accept the same prize, Europe had endured two world wars and was in the midst of an identity crisis, with Scandinavia set squarely between the two political and cultural hegemonies of the United States and the Soviet Union. This crisis anchored the plot of Laxness’s novel, The Atom Station, earning the author the prestigious honor of being blacklisted in America. Like Lagerlöf, Laxness was the first of his nation—a country of only 150,000—to receive the honor of Nobel Laureate. Steeped in the long tradition of Icelandic poetry, Laxness, who published his first novel at the age of seventeen, carried the rhetorical genius of the sagas and the eddas into the novel. In books like The Fish Can Sing, impoverished countryfolk encounter and maneuver their way around bombastic businessmen and politicians in the rapidly commercializing Reykjavík. In his speech to the Nobel banquet, he acknowledged the privilege, like Lagerlöf before him, but wondered “what it would mean to a poor wanderer, a writer from one of the most remote islands in the world, to be suddenly singled out by an institution famous for its promotion of culture, and brought here to the platform by its command.” What did the ancient blood feuds and magical goats pulling a chariot across the sky have to offer postwar Europe? Laxness and Lagerlöf saw themselves as arriving from the margins. Lagerlöf from her rural estate, and Laxness from one of the farthest outposts of European culture and class. For them, this mainstream literary prominence was not an emergence from the shadows but a venture into them. The twentieth century would bring an industrialized modernity averse to the customs and traditions that informed their works, alienating them from the sources of their genius. Readers in Stockholm were more in tune with the continental realism of Zola and Ibsen than the traditional sagas. What did the ancient blood feuds and magical goats pulling a chariot across the sky have to offer postwar Europe? Out of the Darkness: Classic Short Fiction from Sweden is a new collection published by the University of Minnesota Press, spanning seven decades and the primary literary movements that defined the early twentieth century, from realism to modernism and surrealism. The collection encompasses both fairy tales and social criticism, moralism and satire. Edited by Ulf Olsson, Vendela Vida, and David Katznelson, the collection is both a celebration of great Swedish fiction and an attempt to right the wrong of keeping this work hidden from the rest of the world for so long. Among the collection’s featured authors are leading Swedish writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like August Strindberg, whose novel The Red Room is considered to be the first modern Swedish novel, and Hjalmar Söderberg, whose novel Doctor Glas is one of the greatest works of Swedish fiction of all time. The collection also features Lagerlöf and other female contemporaries: Karin Boye, Victoria Benedictsson, and Agnes von Krusenstjerna, who were at the forefront of gender and sexual advancement in Swedish literary and cultural circles at a time when the Swedish upper class still expected women to conform to conservative standards of sexless domesticity, long before the country would become the bastion of openness and social democracy it is today. Something lurks around the corner in each of the stories in Out of the Darkness. Whether it be cosmic or commercial, the protagonists’ lives are about to be disrupted by something intangible and gothic. It often doesn’t have a face or a name, but it usually arrives to punish. Boye’s story “Streetcar and Paradise” effectively conveys this wariness in the form of paranoia. As Boye’s protagonist, an artist, thinks as he watches the city’s people move past him on their predetermined paths, like the electrified streetcar on its rails: Before, he had taken comfort in the thought that progress was inevitable . . . These were the people who owned the future. Had he ever once asked himself: Where were they going? The customary words had always sufficed, the words that just today he had tried to combine into an image: light—joy of life—justice—prosperity—reason. Now the words had been obscured by that horrific image that he couldn’t put out of his mind: the rails—the machine—the lifeless vanquishing the living. His own people, those beside him in the struggle, had taken on a ghostly new dimension. At the time of Boye’s writing, Swedish society had still yet to free itself from the antiquated social and religious binds of the previous century, and it would take until the very end of the twentieth century before the Church of Sweden was officially separated from the state. But even if antiquated, it was a stability that was soon to be disrupted, both by progress and the barbarism of the Second World War. Once through the other side, the lives of working-class Swedes, as well as the former nobles and upper classes, would be upended by the launch into secularism and the individuality of modernity. The new collection follows the University of Minnesota’s reissue of Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland. Originally published in 2017, the paperback edition was finally made available in February of this year and features some of Iceland’s most well-known authors, many available for the first time to American readers. Edited by Helen Mitsios, the collection includes a foreword by Sjón, the world-renowned poet known for his lyrical collaboration with Iceland’s most beloved export, Björk. Sjón traces the history of Icelandic fiction from the sagas to the introduction to western philosophy and the continental literature that befuddled the metric tradition of poetry on the island, to Laxness’s birth and the twenty-first century. According to Sjón, it wasn’t until the 1970s that philosophy made it to Iceland. Until then, poetry had been the chosen Icelandic medium for human inquiry, and philosophy was treated as indifferent to cosmogony. “Perhaps it is because philosophy reached these shores comparatively late that Icelandic writers have never felt bound by the truth,” Sjón writes. For those that didn’t read Out of the Blue upon its initial publication, the collection exhibits a coexistence between the Old Norse mystics with the post modernism of the present. As the classic Swedish writers of Out of the Darkness await the coming of modernity and post-modernity, the contemporary Icelandic authors are steeped in it, survivors of it, and documentarians of it. Like divorced children, they are split between thought and memory. In “The Secret Raven Service and Three Hens,” author Þórunn Erlu-Valdimarsdóttir places Odin’s ravens, Huginn and Muninn, in a contemporary context. The story’s narrator, a boy visiting a country cottage with his mother and her friends, discerns between the scientific and the supernatural explanation for death. Ravens gnaw at a dead cat and perch atop an old church on the cottage grounds. One of the birds watches them as Magnus, the owner of the cottage, takes the boy and his mother on a drunken tour of the old church, accompanied by the owner’s sad black dog. In the distance, a horse neighs. The horse is black too. Three black creatures forewarn the mystic rule that death comes in threes. “He scrutinizes us all,” the boy observes of the raven: I know he’s reading our auras, and since he’s paying so much attention to us going to church, someone, according to old legends, is doomed. It’s as though he can see carcasses-to-be, shells-to-be. It is like Magnus can hear my thoughts, because he says, “Someone will die,” then adds a deep ha ha ha. Ravens have the ability to predict death, the boy explains, due to their infrared eyesight. When the sad dog suffers a fatal stroke, the boy relishes the proof of scientific reason. The raven was watching the dog, awaiting its death with its enhanced vision developed over millennia through evolution and genetic mutations. But when the narrator’s younger brother is knocked out in a bicycle accident, he can’t help but revert to his superstitious anxieties, that his brother was a sacrificial payment for their disrespect of both the Christian God and the god of the ravens. The tension between reason and myth transcends both collections. In Out of the Darkness, there’s a clear struggle between the rigid Protestant principles of good and evil that guided Sweden through the preceding centuries, and the social and secular changes of modernity. And if read chronologically by original publication date, that evolution of the collective consciousness of Sweden is easily charted. Seven stories by Söderberg appear in the collection, the longest of which is only just over four pages. The dichotomy of good versus evil is evident in each. A dog who finds freedom after his owner dies is lost and aimless without his master by the end in the aptly titled “A Dog without a Master.” He debates himself on the metaphysics of art in “The Sketch in India Ink,” and in “The Fur Coat,” Söderberg critiques the bourgeois morals of his contemporaries from the vantage point of a doctor who thinks his wife will love him again if he were to wear a fancy coat like the District Judge John Richardt. The moralism of Söderberg’s inclusions are a bit quaint and at times fabulist but capture a sense of the literary stylistics of the time. These stories serve as an antipode to Stig Dagerman’s “A Thousand Years with God,” which sees Sir Isaac Newton debate the laws of physics with God. Dagerman’s story originally debuted in 1954 and completes the progression of classic Swedish fiction from the staunch realism of the turn of the century to the more experimental and, in the face of predominant reason, surreal. “Out of the Darkness,” by Victoria Benedictsson, which lends the collection its name, lays bare the self-loathing induced by the male gaze and skewers the traditional gender dynamics of the time, all while yearning for and welcoming those same values Söderberg precautioned against. Published in 1888, it is the collection’s earliest publication and the only story by Benedictsson included. Benedictsson was an influential force in the modernist breakthrough in Scandinavian literature. She struggled throughout her short life with illness, an unhappy marriage to a man nearly thirty years her senior, and ambivalence toward her writing from leading literary critics of the time, who criticized her work for being both too conservative and too feminine. In “Out of the Darkness,” the protagonist has lived part of her life as a man, mirroring Benedictsson’s own pseudonymous publishing career as Ernst Ahlgren. Understanding the author’s tragic death, the story nearly reads as a suicide note: “Oh, let me speak out, for once . . . I’ve been silent, silent year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation,” the protagonist tells the man trying to calm her. “To be a woman is to be a pariah that can never rise out of her caste. That I’m a woman has been the curse of my life.” It’s easy to see how Benedictsson’s literary and intellectual frustration paved the way for writers like Agnes von Krusenstjerna, whose story “The Gates” depicts a woman reentering society after spending time in a mental hospital, only for her goodwill and offer to work as a nurse-in-training to be mistaken by the male doctor as instability, leading to her reinstitutionalization. Like her protagonist, von Krusenstjerna had been institutionalized several times throughout her life and was the source of significant scandal in Sweden due to her inclusion of sexual intercourse in her fiction and her advocacy of female expression of sexuality in her work. One of her defenders was Boye, a contemporary of the author’s, whose “Prelude” is among the collection’s more hopeful feminine perspectives. Rather than coming out from her hiding spot at the conclusion of a game of hide and seek, Boye’s young protagonist, Birgit, wanders through nature as dusk begins to set in: Disobedience and rebellion unfurl about her like a powerful, wafting wind. Self-delighting duskwings lift her into the duskair that smells of pine needles and dew and evening and delinquent enigma. She feels no misgivings, nothing to shrink from, no more than if it were a dream. She simply goes where she must go and wants to go. Of the three writers, von Krusenstjerna lived the longest, dying at the age of forty-five in 1940. Boye died a year later at the age of forty of a suspected suicide. The opening story from Out of the Blue picks up where Boye, von Krusenstjerna, and Benedictsson left off, stepping into the claustrophobia of the male gaze. “Self-Portrait” by Auður Jónsdóttir, a winner of both the Icelandic Literary Prize and Women’s Literature Award for Fiction, presents the gender inequities of the nuclear family in the twenty-first century. But Jónsdóttir is not skewering tradition in favor of progress, nor warning against the latter. Vacationing with her family in sun-soaked Sardinia near the sea, a mother is stranded in an unfamiliar part of town with her young son after her arrogant and condescending husband rushes ahead to catch a bus back to their rental. It’s up to her to get them home now, she realizes, without the self-bestowed genius of her husband. There is not the driving morals of the earlier Swedish works. Jónsdóttir’s fiction is more inquisitive, less binary in right and wrong, and insecure. The same frustration exuded by Benedictsson more than 120 years prior is simmering in Jónsdóttir’s prose, but the protagonist expresses as much doubt in her abilities to shepherd her and her son to safety as she does confidence in her own agency. Tradition and progress are not in contrast but in coexistence and undefined. Like Boye’s Birgit, however, there is a freedom in being lost: She inhales the sea air along with the highway pollution and smiles to herself. Despite everything, it all feels just about bearable. All around are mountains and the sea and nature. Like in the Westfjords when she was a teenage girl, wandering around with older boys and sneaking off to light a cigarette and sip on something stronger, something that made her love one of them in a whole new way. Norse mythology plays a prominent role in Out of the Blue, affecting the plot of some of the stories more profoundly than the Protestant subtext in Darkness. In “Scorn Pole,” by Þórarinn Eldjárn, a film crew takes drunken retribution against a magistrate and his family by erecting a pagan curse, a scorn pole, adorned with the prosthetic head of a horse. And in Kristín Eiríksdóttir’s “One Hundred Fifty Square Meters,” an apartment’s new occupant, Dani, takes on the identity of its former, consumed by the books and the sweaters left behind, taking on the persona of a leftist academic and abandoning his ambitions as an artist to the chagrin of his partner: He found diaries in which all the entries were about U.S. military spying in Iceland, but once he read through them, what stayed with him was a cool, logical tone that in no way indicated a man deep in psychosis. Sometimes he went to a coffeehouse or to the bar with his friends, but he liked staying home in the study best, drinking beer and reading or drafting possible versions of his project: the Cold War in the vanished man’s head. There’s a wit to the Icelandic prose, addressing each side of the shadow, the light and the dark, with humor. Dry and sober and accepting of the complexities of reality, tradition, and modernity. As Dani gradually becomes the apartment’s former tenant, he answers every question with a question of his own in the style of a pseudo-inquisitive, self-serious academic like the one he has begun to embody, puffing on a tobacco pipe for additional effect—a parody of the modernist archetype celebrated a century before. Classic Swedish fiction evolved from the staunch realism of the turn of the century to the more experimental and, in the face of predominant reason, surreal. These Norse influences fill in what was weeded out in the generation of writers anthologized in Out of the Darkness. Combined with the surrealist minimalism of the Icelandic prose, the pagan tradition serves as a bulwark against modernity’s erasure of tradition. This difference in the two collections mirrors each of the country’s religious affiliations. Sweden is considered one the world’s most secular nations, with some studies showing up to 80 percent of its population identifying as non-religious. Almost all of the stories in Out of the Darkness were published before Sweden’s Freedom of Religion Act in 1951, which gave Swedes the right to religious unaffiliation; the separation from the Protestant ideals of Söderberg is all but complete by the time of Dagerman’s publications. Although Iceland has seen a steady decrease in affiliation with the Church of Iceland, it has seen a gradual increase in Catholicism and, most notably, in paganism. Out of the Blue is comprised of fiction published following a century of progress since the contents of Darkness, but mysticism pervades its contemporary settings. Norse symbols are prevalent throughout—ravens and scorn poles and even a scene where Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe read Egil’s Saga on the floor of Monroe’s California home. Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s “Afternoon by the Pacific Ocean” imagines the two starlets as friends bonded by their shared Scandinavian ancestry: “They were at the part where Egil wants to marry Asgerdur after returning from a successful raid. Greta started reading with Marilyn watching her. The sun over the Pacific pierced through the curtains of the big window and bathed the actresses’ feet in golden rays.” The old gods have returned to live with the gods of technology and commerce, either in conflict or confluence. A reversal of what modernism promised and what it hoped to leave in the past. Reality welcomes the arcane.