Jón Trausti was the pen name of Gudmundur Magnússon, one of a small host of Icelandic writers who were precursors to such authors as Halldór Laxness and Gunnar Gunnarsson. Jón Trausti's importance rests in his ability to step out of the remote and rugged Icelandic hinterlands with no formal education and narrate life there in a succession of novels that are fully in the mainstream of Western literature in their structure and development. Moreover, he was able to demonstrate repeatedly in historical novels (as Matthías Jochumsson, his older contemporary, had done in historical dramas and poems) the richness of early modern Icelandic history (from the Reformation onward) as a source for modern fiction.

Gudmundur Magnússon was born 12 February 1873 at Rif á Sléttu in Nordur-Þingeyjarsysla, then the northernmost farmstead in Iceland. Rif's location...