Elías Mar wrote Vögguvísa (Lullaby) in the summer of 1949, when he was 25. Vögguvísa is unusual in being a contemporary story about teenagers in post-war Reykjavík, without the tension between country and town that was so common in the fiction of the time. Another feature of Vögguvísa is that it deals with rootless teenagers and makes striking use of slang, as Elías studied the speech of Reykjavík teenagers. The story begins with a burglary in the small hours of a Thursday and ends on a Sunday evening, when the character Bambínó, a fourteen-year-old city child who takes his name from a popular song, lies outside Sjálfstæðishúsið (the Independence House) on Austurvöllur. Elías’s stories have been translated into Estonian, Esperanto, Faroese, Norwegian and German.
The manuscript of Vögguvísa came to the National and University Library of Iceland with Elías’s other manuscripts and papers after his death in 2007. The exhibition is part of the Reykjavík Reading Festival. Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature is holding a symposium on Vögguvísa in the lecture hall of Þjóðarbókhlaða, the library building at Arngrímsgata 3, on Saturday 27 October, in cooperation with the National and University Library of Iceland, the Institute for Literary Research at the University of Iceland, Lesstofan and the Reykjavík Academy. For more, see www.bokmenntaborgin.is
Exhibition catalogue (PDF, in Icelandic)
Panels (PDF, in Icelandic)