In the works of the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, one can see a certain preoccupation with the issues of World War II, for instance an examination of the way in which the country negotiated the highly significant and politicised issues and ideologies at stake in the run up to the conflict and in its aftermath. This is evident for instance in his trilogy CoDex 1962 (2016, 2018), not least in the first two parts Augu þín sáu mig (Thine Eyes Did See My Substance) and Með titrandi tár (Iceland's Thousand Years), as well as in his most recent novel Korngult hár, grá augu (2019). The issues addressed in these texts are for instance the fate of the Jewish immigrant in Iceland in the pre-war years, and the peculiar circumstances of the rise of neo-Nazism in post-war Iceland and how young people could be drawn into that utterly bankrupt ideology. The memory of World War II in Iceland is in many ways at odds with the grand narratives established elsewhere in Europe. The particular circumstances of the country – occupied by allied forces from 1940 onwards, with its concomitant incursion of modernity, urbanization, and creation of wealth in what had historically been a very poor country – has greatly influenced how the war is memorialised, or more to the point, not memorialised in Iceland. This paper will look at commemorative practices of World War II in Iceland and contrast them with Sjón's novels, how they go against that memory loss by telling an alternative history of the war, focussing on marginalised histories and cultures, which historically have been ignored in Icelandic cultural memory.
