In 1957 Sigurdur Nordal, an influential professor of literature at the University of Iceland from 1918 to 1951, wrote in a letter to Gudmundur Bödvarsson that he considered the farmer and poet a milestone in the country's literary history. No poet, Sigurdur Nordal said (according to Silja Adalsteinsdóttir's biography of Gudmundur, Skáldid sem sólin kyssti [The Poet Who Was Kissed by the Sun; 1994]), had succeeded before in being simultaneously a self-educated farmer and a cosmopolitan poet. "Skáldþroski hans er því eitt af æfintyrunum í íslenskum bókmenntum" (His poetic maturity is, therefore, one of the fairy tales in Icelandic literature), stated another of Iceland's leading critics, Kristinn E. Andrésson, in his literary history Íslenskar nútímabókmenntir 1918-1948 (1949).

Gudmundur Bödvarsson was born on 1 September 1904 on...