Hans of Iceland (original: Han d’Islande) was written by Victor Hugo. Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-1885) is seen as France’s greatest lyric poet and the giant of nineteenth century French letters. Today he is known for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Misérables, and La Légende des Siècle, his masterpiece.

Hans of Iceland is a love story between Ordener, the son of the viceroy of Norway, and Ethel, the daughter of a former minister to the King. Ethel’s father is in prison on treason charges, and Ethel keeps him company there. Ordener, investigating a murder, goes on a quest to find the dreaded Han d’Islande, a fearsome bandit with a sizable death count to his name. Ethel’s father, meanwhile, is framed, to blame him for a revolt of local miners. Despite plot twists and various complications there is a happy ending: Hans sets his prison on fire and either dies in the fire or ascends into the heavens; Ethel’s father is cleared of wrongdoing; and Ethel and Ordener marry and produce the counts of Danneskiold.

Hans of Iceland is not one of Hugo’s better works. The novel was Hugo’s first, and in later years he described it in harsh but accurate terms:

with its disjoined and breathless action, its lack of individuality in character, its barbarous infelicities, its haughty and awkward bearing, its artless intervals of revelry, its inharmonious collocation of color, its dry, acrid, unshaded and ungraceful crudeness of style; with all the myriad defects of thoughtless over-action that attend its course....¹

Hugo perhaps overstates the case, but Hans of Iceland certainly is not very good. The prose and dialogue style (“That’s where you deceive yourself, my beneficent and hospitable keeper. My comrade will not have the pleasure of being received in your cheerful six-bedded tavern”²) are dated. While a certain amount of plot convolution is to be expected in a Gothic, which Hans of Iceland certainly is, Hugo stretches and pads the basic story far beyond what is necessary or desirable. The characterization is lacking in depth and Hugo indulges himself in violence to a surprising degree. Hugo was influenced by the roman frénétique (see: “Smarra”) in the writing of the novel, but he lacked the ability to create the right atmosphere and heighten the power of the frénétique elements. The history and culture of the novel (Norway, 1699) are more than just window dressing, however, and the attitudes of the characters are relatively historically accurate.

The novel also has Hans d’Islande, who does not redeem the novel but does make it occasionally interesting. Villains who relish their jobs are always enjoyable, and Hans certainly enjoys his work. Hans, the descendant of “Ingolphus, the Exterminator”³ and the sorceress Thoarka, is a dwarf, with a shaggy red beard, shaggy red hair, pointed white teeth, ferocious gray-blue eyes, and long claw-like nails. He wields a sword, a dagger, and a stone axe, and has superhuman strength. His problem is that his son was killed thanks to the deception of his wife, who was the mistress of a soldier of the Munckholm garrison. (The son was begotten when Hans raped a woman, who Hans went on to torment and mock after their son’s death). For this Hans swears vengeance on the Munckholm garrison: “The whole regiment shall perish at my hands.”⁴ Hans keeps his son’s skull with him as he does this, and drinks blood from it. (At times Hans of Iceland leans not so much toward the Gothic as to Grand Guignol). Hans fires churches, floods mines, sends boulders crashing down on villages, sabotages bridges, snuffs out coast signals on stormy nights, and does it all with a murderous glee. It is a shame Hugo couldn’t come up with a better vehicle for Hans than Hans of Iceland, since in a (much) shorter novel Hans could have been really memorable.

Hans of Iceland, though Hugo’s first novel and certainly lesser work compared to his later successes, still—understandably—attracts critical attention, with academics and critics vying to properly analyze it. Some critics see it as a work of horror, and though it is undoubtedly horrifying at points is better understood as a work of French Romanticism displaying the dark side of the movement. To place it in the history of French horror, however, is to err drastically. Qualitatively there is no comparison between Hans of Iceland and “Smarra,” nor was Hans of Iceland influential on later writers of horror and works of horror the way “Smarra” was.

His first romantic novel, “Hans of Iceland”¼is a slightly concealed allegory of the unconscious conflict he waged, now, as he imagined, with his father, now with his father-in-law, M. Foucher, or with others. He pictured himself as the young Danish knight, Ordener, and Adèle as Ethel—even the names were similar. The hero, setting himself against his own family, overcomes Gothic horrors and perils of all sorts to win the hand of his lady and be united with her in a transcendent love. It was a theme that often returned to him: youth at war with age and its authority.⁵

Theoreticians and academics of the grotesque state that the grotesque “confers an aesthetic dimension to a typically Hugolian type of characters such as Hans (of Hans of Iceland), Quasimodo, Gwynplaine (of The Man Who Laughs) and Gilliatt (in Toilers of the Sea).”⁶

And so on. Modern readers will find Hans of Iceland less interesting than these academics, however.

¹ Victor Hugo, “Author’s Introduction,” in Victor Hugo and Huntington Smith, The Works of Victor Hugo: Hans of Iceland, Bug-Jargal, Claude Gueux (London: The Chesterfield Society, 1896), 6.

² Victor Hugo and Huntington Smith, Hans of Iceland (London: The Chesterfield Society, 1896), 24.

³ Hugo and Smith, Hans of Iceland, 59.

⁴ Hugo and Smith, Hans of Iceland, 165.

⁵ Matthew Josephson, Victor Hugo: A Realistic Biography of the Great Romantic (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2005), 85-86.

⁶ Sylvie Jeannert, “The Grotesque and the ‘Drama of the Body’ in Notre-Dame de Paris and The Man Who Laughs by Victor Hugo,” in Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar and Max Vega-Ritter, eds., The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19^th-century European Novelists (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 28.