Hans of Iceland

xxii, 530 pp. Three pages of publisher ads follow text. Blue cloth boards with elaborate gilt decorations on front board and spine. Includes frontispiece and one plate from drawings by A. Demarest. Han of Iceland (original French title: Han d'Islande ) is the first novel written by the French poet and novelist Victor Hugo . Published in 1823 , when the author was twenty-one years old, it is one of the works that establishes him as a great master of Romanticism . Although it is a mere melodrama , this novel already points to Hugo's wayand his taste for contrasts that reveal the perpetual struggle of good and evil. The novel takes place in 1699 , in a fictional kingdom of Iceland imagined by the author. Ordener Guldenlew, a knight, son of an important baron of the Scandinavian Kingdom, loves Ethel, a girl who lives in a prison with her father, Schumaker, who twenty years ago was a Chancellor of the Kingdom imprisoned on false accusations made by a rival, Ordener Guldenlew's father, who intended to usurp his position. Ethel, also in love with the knight, does not know the surname of her lover.