A documentary film about the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, who received the Nobel Prize in 1955 for "... renewing the Icelandic tradition of saga-literature and the Icelandic language". The film gives a portrait of this great writer who was very much disliked as a young artist, when he was describing the situation in Iceland between the first and the second world wars. To date, he has written over 70 books, novels, essays, plays and memories which have been translated into more than 50 languages.