By Halldor Laxness, Philip Roughton. One is a semi-literate peasant. who is the daughter of Iceland's Magistrate, and the learned and wordly aristocrat and scholar Arnas Arnaeus. Arnaeus and Snaefridur had fallen in love years earlier, only to find themselves years later on opposite sides of a political struggle, one in which rumors of their adulterous affair will spread through Iceland and reach the Danish court, with disastrous results.