Pater Jón Sveinsson
- Sobriquet - Pater or Father
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- Background
Jón Sveinsson, better known as Nonni, was born on the farm Möðruvellir in northern Iceland on November 16, 1857. Eight years later, his family moved to the town of Akureyri, but in 1869 Sveinsson's father died, leaving his mother to support five children. A year later, a French nobleman offered to cover the expenses of educating two Icelandic boys, Sveinsson being one of them.
He stayed one year in Denmark, where he converted to Catholicism. He then traveled to the French city of Amiens, in order to matriculate at a Latin school. After graduating, Sveinsson joined the Jesuit order and studied theology and philosophy in France, the Netherlands and Belgium. From 1883 to 1912 he taught Latin in Copenhagen, aside from a brief spell during which he pursued further theology studies and was ordained as a priest in Liverpool, England in 1890, he was the first Icelandic priest since the Reformation.
After an bout of illness left him unable to teach, Sveinsson turned to writing. He spent a short period on a Dutch manor owned by Jesuits, diligently honing his German, and in 1913 the children's book Nonni appeared, drawing on his childhood memories of Iceland. More books in the series followed and gained great popularity around the world, especially Nonni und Manni / Nonni and Manni (1915). A prolific writer, Sveinsson was also an indefatigable public speaker who gave hundreds of talks around the world, mostly on the subject of Iceland, as well as an avid contributor to various journals and newspapers. In 1936, he embarked on a journey around the world, staying in Japan for a year and a half. He moved to the Netherlands in 1939, but the war drove him to Germany, where he died in 1944.
Sveinsson's books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and with the exception of Halldór Laxness, no 20th century Icelandic writer achieved the the same level of international popularity. He only returned twice to Iceland for short visits. His final book about his world travels in the late 1930s was finished posthumously from his diaries by his close friend and colleague Hermann Krose. His book "Manni and Nonni" was turned into a miniseries in 1988 on the German network ZDF.
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