As his new novella is published in English, Sjón talks about his illustrious career, which includes collaborations with Björk, Lars von Trier, and The Northman director Robert Eggers
In a German bookstore in the mid-90s, an old thesp reads lines from a new short story by Sjón, called Under the Wings of the Valkyrie. “I loved Gudrun Ensslin.” A collective intake of breath, a pause. “And Gudrun Ensslin loved me.” Ensslin, of course, was a founding member of the Baader-Meinhof gang that terrorised Germany in the late 1960s, blowing up two department stores in protest at the war in Vietnam and the influence of former high-ranking Nazis on government. She’d been found dead in her prison cell in 1977 but, nearly two decades on, taboos around her name were still powerful.
“I can tell you the audience were literally taken aback in their seats,” says Sjón, delighted at the memory. “Because just putting the words ‘love’ and ‘Gudrun Ensslin’ in the same sentence wasn’t possible. And so the story was read and people were totally, totally shocked and scandalised. But afterwards, there was this reception and three older guys came up to me and said, ‘Sjón, we just want to tell you one thing … We all thought Gudrun Ensslin was incredibly hot.’”
The Icelandic writer’s X-rated novella, Under the Wings of the Valkyrie, published for the first time in English this month, takes the shape of a love letter by an anonymous author, explaining his lifelong erotic fixation with the left-wing guerrilla by way of apology to his beloved. Sjón thinks the seeds for his story may have been sown on a retreat to the Swedish countryside, when the Danish poet Jørgen Nash showed him the bed he gave to Ensslin’s partner in crime, Ulrike Meinhof, while she was on the run from German police in the 70s.
Derided as “tasteless” by critics in the author’s home country, the story brought together Sjón’s still-coalescing fascinations with myth and surrealism, imparting a mythical dimension to Ensslin’s exploits through the title, a reference to the “amazing killer women” of Norse folklore who escort fallen warriors to Valhalla. “Today we might think of valkyries as something positive, like a strong, valiant woman, but really they are beyond good and evil,” says Sjón. “They are there for the battle; the battle is their life.”
On a basic level, Under the Wings of the Valkyrie captures the illicit thrill many Icelandic teens may have felt on learning about these style-conscious militants from their forgotten corner of the Atlantic. “We were all in our bedrooms plotting the revolution, you know?” says Sjón, who weaves these elements into a phantasmagorical narrative that explores how stories can sustain and even destroy us. 20 years on from its publication, the story piqued the interest of filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, who recommended Sjón to Isolarii, a radical New York publishing imprint which has worked with the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Spiegelman and Can Xue.
As one of Iceland’s most acclaimed contemporary figures from the literary sphere, Sjón’s CV to date spans screenplays and poems, librettos and novels, including his 2005 breakout The Blue Fox and From the Mouth of a Whale (2008). His work combines a surrealist’s abiding taste for transgression with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Icelandic folklore, which gripped the author from childhood. In a piece for the New York Review entitled A Magus of the North from 2013, the late AS Byatt credited him with “[changing] the whole map of literature inside my head”.
His artistic journey is entwined with that of his friend Björk, whom he met after founding the Medusa group, a surrealist collective formed in late-70s Reykjavik – “the most boring place on Earth”, by his own reckoning at the time. Inspired by the likes of Burroughs, Buñuel and the exploding UK punk scene, the group nurtured an anarchic spirit that briefly caused panic when a campaign to spoil ballots in a national election caught on with young people in the country.
Sjón made frequent cameos on stage with Björk’s band the Sugarcubes and later, when the singer embarked on a seismic solo career, he co-wrote the lyrics for many of her songs, including the career-high likes of Isobel and Bachelorette. The partnership reached its peak on Dancer in the Dark, Lars von Trier’s pitch-black musical starring Björk as a blind migrant factory worker condemned to death row. The film is perhaps best remembered now for the feud between Von Trier and Björk that saw the latter accuse an unnamed “Danish director” of sexual harassment in 2017. But it remains an extraordinary collaboration that took Björk and her writing partner all the way to the Oscars, and the ‘swan dress’ controversy, a moment Sjón remembers for the surreal feeling of “being on the other side of the television screen”.
“I think Björk felt safer having me by her side [on the project],” he says, “because she didn’t trust Lars from the beginning when it came to music, and she was absolutely right, you know? I mean, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but when we were working together, the music he would play was all Backstreet Boys and [cheesy soft-rockers] Dr Hook & the Medicine Show!” His fondest memory of the film is writing lyrics for Catherine Deneuve, whose iconic work with the likes of Buñuel and Roman Polanski were seared on his conscious from an early age. “I remember thinking, ‘I have moved the lips of Catherine Deneuve!’” he says with a laugh.
Sjón has since gone on to embark on a pair of high-profile screenwriting collaborations, including freaky A24 horror Lamb, which sees Noomi Rapace raise a half-human/half-lamb hybrid in stead of her recently deceased daughter, and Robert Eggers’ hallucinatory Viking epic The Northman. Sjón met Eggers through Björk, who shows up briefly in the film as a seeress, and The Witch filmmaker was impressed by his feeling for the Icelandic folklore at the heart of his project. One breathtaking sequence in the film, showing a Valkyrie in a silent battle cry midway to the stars, was included at Sjón’s suggestion – a return to a talismanic figure in a career which continues to go beyond good and evil even to this day.
Under the Wings of the Valkyrie by Sjón is published by Isolarii, and is out now.