Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Some links to quotes from the book and the author are below:

• Independent and Free, a quote from the book about how Asta Sollilja felt about her father, Bjartur of Summerhouses, the principle character of the book
• The Scandalous Tyranny Of Mankind, about Asta Sollilja talking to herself in the fields
• Her Keen Eyes Reminded Him Both of the Sky and of Its Hawks, a quote about a boy seeing an incredibly beautiful girl
• A Drunken, Despairing, Loafish Lot, which features a quote by Brad Leithauser, who wrote the introduction to Independent People, though the quote is about Laxness and his book, Iceland's Bell.

Halldór Laxness, as translated from the Icelandic by J.A. Thompson, describing how Asta Sollilja saw her father, Bjartur of Summerhouses: “She peeped out from under the blanket, and there he was, still sitting on the edge of his bed, when all the others had gone to sleep, mending some implement or other. No one stirred any longer, the living-room fast asleep; he alone was awake, alone was chanting, sitting there in his shirt, thickset and high-shouldered, with strong arms and tangled hair. His eyebrows were shaggy, steep and beetling like the crags in the mountain, but on his thick throat there was a soft place under the roots of his beard. She watched him awhile without his knowing: the strongest man in the world and the greatest poet, knew the answer to everything, understood all ballads, was afraid of nothing and nobody, fought all of them on a distant strand, independent and free, one against all.”