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Colours, Colour Symbolism, and Social Critique in Halldór Laxness’s Salka Valka

ABSTRACT: Halldór Kiljan Laxness is one of the most successful and renowned authors
 in all of Iceland. The Nobel Laureate has written many well-known works, one of which
 is his early novel Salka Valka (1931-1932), a political romance that follows the life of a young girl in a remote
 Icelandic fishing village from age ten to age twenty-five. An interesting feature
 of Salka Valka is Laxness’s use of colours and colour symbolism. While Laxness employs a wide variety
 of basic and non-basic colour terms throughout the novel to describe various people,
 objects, and natural phenomena, most interesting is his use of grey as opposed to
 other colours. Laxness uses grey to portray the dreary life and destitute people in
 the desolate and remote Icelandic fishing village of Óseyri, which he juxtaposes against
 colourful descriptions of the vibrant and flourishing lives of wealthy individuals
 both within and outside the village. This article examines these and Laxness’s other
 uses of grey as opposed to other colours in Salka Valka, particularly as they relate to the social and economic critique that, as scholars
 have noted time and time again, define this novel.
 
