The career of Nonni (Jón Stefán Sveinsson or Svensson) is an anomaly among the working lives of Icelandic authors. Most of Nonni's books appeared in German (although they were widely translated) and reminisced about his poor but adventurous childhood and adolescence in Iceland and Denmark. Nonni's conversion to Roman Catholicism and subsequent vocation to the priesthood as a Jesuit father both removed him from the Icelandic context and assured his access to the world beyond Iceland, especially the large community of his coreligionists in Europe. His emigration from Iceland was, however, in religious, vocational, and physical senses only: as a memoirist and raconteur, he was manifestly Icelandic in spirit, and, more specifically, he manifested the romanticizing spirit of an Icelandic child.

Jón Stefán Sveinsson was born on 16 November 1857 near Akureyri, the largest town in northern Iceland, at the historic farmstead...