Elías Mar wrote Lullaby in the summer of 1949, when he was 25 years old. Lullaby has the unique position of being a contemporary story about teenagers in Reykjavík in the post-war years, and it does not have the tension between the countryside and the city that was so common in the literature of the time. Another characteristic of Lullaby is that it deals with rootless teenagers and the use of slang words is prominent, but Elías studied the language of Reykjavík teenagers. The story begins with a burglary on Thursday night and ends on Sunday evening when the protagonist Bambinó, a fourteen-year-old city boy who takes his name from a popular saying, lies outside the Independence Hall in Austurvellir. Elías' stories have been translated into Estonian , Esperanto , Faroese , Norwegian and German .
The manuscript of the Lullaby was given to the National Library of Iceland – University Library along with other manuscripts and documents by Elías after his death in 2007. The exhibition is part of a reading festival in Reykjavík. Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature is hosting a symposium dedicated to the Lullaby in the lecture hall of the National Library on Saturday 27 October in collaboration with the National Library of Iceland – University Library, the Institute of Literature of the University of Iceland, the Reading Room and the ReykjavíkurAkademíuna. See more at www.bokmenntaborgin.is