Lögberg-Heimskringla - 22.10.1993, Blaðsíða 5

Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 22. október 1993 • 5
So, who made the best cake?
EINAR'S ANECDOTES
Fund-raising
Fund-raising was one of the
duties our clergymen had to
perform in addition to preach-
ing the .gospel on Sundays to a
delinquent congregation. Rev G.
had a unique and effective way of
doing this. Amongst other methods
he devised a popular debating pro-
cedure. He had the ladies of the
congregation bake a layer cake in
the form of a tiered and authentic,
wedding cake.
His debating opponent was often
a clergyman or an aspiring politi-
cian. Then he selected a married and
a single woman from the communi-
ty: his opponent off-the-cuff speak-
er.
The cake was invariably a culi-
nary piece of art, produccd by thc
local women’s association. It would
be set on a parlour room typc of
table with the married and single
women sitting on each side. With
the drop of a coin they would decide
which speaker represented the mar-
ried woman and who spoke on

By Einar
Arnaeon
Those wére social gather-
ings, modest in their fund-
raising capabilities but an
opportunity to meet your
elder neighbours, watch the
people as they paired off, do
silly things as kids, causing
mothers to scold and shake
■ their dear little off spring by
the scruff of the neck.
behalf of the single repre,-
sentative.
The rules were to debate
which one of the women
was better qualified to cut
the cake. The time allocated
was generally 15 or 20 min-
utes each, with a rebuttal of
10 minutes for each speaker.
The Kick-Off speaker was
usually decided by the flip of a coin.
. It was a fun evening with all.»
kinds of conjectures and innuen-
does regarding the qualifications of
cake cutting on the part of the mar-
ried and single woman. After the
original presentation by each speak-
er, the hat was passed around, one
for the married woman and a sepa-
rate one for the singlé lady.
Then the money was counted and ertccs with girls. in Denmark while
the rebuttal launched. Here the ical acquiring an education. Then stop-
fun began, through berating tiglit- PinS off in England for five years,
fisted marricd men. The irresponsi- during which time he marncd an
bility of the single men was thor- English girl and left offspring some-
oughly discussed, connected to where in the U.K. Moving to
being tempted to spend recklessly Winnipeg to cohabit •with an
on automobiles, sliek clothing, gam- Icelandic woman, lic sent for two
bling and Demon Rum- more, one camé but the other
Reading iceiandic
void reading firstiy about
your forefathers. There is the
„danger you may come across
a forefather whorn you had learned
to admire only to find that he
behaved in a manner not known to
you, such as having youthful experi-
declined the offer. He died exhaust-
ed at the early age of 45.
Spitting
on the sidewalk
These were not Icelanders for
they could not afford chewing
tobacco. This pertains to the
'era when men were men, spoke
English and came from the British
Isles. Hairy chested, they chewed
tobacco and spat on the sidewalks
until a city ordinance made it illegal.
Signs could be found in the central
part of the city, prohibiting such
behaviour, stating it was subject to a
fine if convicted. The Icelanders
were more circumspect; they ground
the stuff into powder and sniffed it
up the nose, blowing into a large
handkerchief, which was usually red
with white polka dots. Shoving it
into their pocket thus avoiding
messing up the sidewalks. Needless
to say there was no ordinance
against carrying the mess in your
pocket. It just made the Icelandic
women mad on washday.
Ameríca
Letter Cont'd.
letters were printed in the local
newspapers, and so does Erik
Hélmer Pederson in the intro-
duction to the collection of
Danish America letters:
... in the fírst decades of the
19th centuiy the letters from rel-
atives and friends in America
were seen by many others than
the addressee. In the newspa-
pers from this time the letters
from immigrants were populár
reading matter. 8
The same thing happened in
Iceland, some of the earliest
letters from USA and Canada
were published. In his excellent
book about the Icelandic peo-
ple in Manitoba, Wilhelm
Kristjanson mentions such let-
ters, he says:
A letter from one of the
Wisconsin settlers, written
March, 1872, was published in
Iceland. The writer stated that
employment was available on
Washington Island at clearing
forest, with wages at one dollar
and a half a day, and that food
was abundant and in good vari-
ety.9
And later he adds:
Letters from the Icelanders
in America to the homeland in
the fall and winter of 1872 -
1873 added to the picture of
the New World.
Undoubtedly the earliest
America letters were read
by many others than the
addressee in Iceland too. But
this is hardly as often the case
with the Icelandic as opposed
to the mainland European let-
ters, at least not those I have
had the opportunity to read.
And this may have had its rea-
sons. The great majority of
European immigrants to
America were farmers and peo-
ple from the countiyside. The
land at home was totally uti-
lized, the population was too
big to be decently fed any more.
The immigrants often were
some kind of burden for thé
richer people due to their
poverty. There was therefore no
reason to make a fuss about the
emigration to America. Indeed
in Iceland too it was mainly
poor people without land and
money who moved from
Iceland to the New World, peo-
ple who actually didn’t have
any possibility in Iceland with-
in their own lifetime of becom-
ing their own masters. Yet in
Iceland people’s attitude to the
emmigration was different.
Wealthier farmers saw
cheap labour power disappear,
suddenly it became harder to
get farm labourers. And there
was a emotional reason too,
which turned people against
emigration to America and
made them tiy to bring it to an
end. The Icelanders had strug-
gled for a long time for inde-
pendence from Denmark. A
step towards this was made in
1874, when the Icelanders got
their own constitution and a
rudimentary legislative parlia-
ment. About the turn of the
century the most optimistic
ones could perceive the light of
full independence at the end of
the tunnel. It happened there-
fore, that the more fanatic
nationalists in Iceland consid-
ered it as some kind of betrayal
of the native land to emigrate to
America. This attitude appears
clearly both in newspapers and
in the literature from this time.
Famous, for instance, is the
poem: A letter to my friend
written by a well-known poet
named Guðmundur Friðjóns-
son, which he wrote to his
friend who was planning to
emigrate to the New World.
The poet gives full vent to his
feelings here:
Are you planning to go into
the blue, to abandon your little
farm, to throw all your belong-
ings into the ocean ?
Are you planning to slaugh-
ter your sheep, your outstand-
ing horse, your best friend, your
good breed of cattle, throw
your children to the feet of the
Englishman, the scoundrel
who bites the Boer, who
starves the people ofBuddha to
death, the despicable rascal
that starts speculating wherever
on the earth he spots a victim ?
This was of course not eveiy-
body’s attitude, many of the
more moderate and reasonable
politicians in Iceland saw the
freedom of a whole generation
in the emigration, a generation
that otherwise would have had
little ornothing to live on in the
home land. But anyhow it is
clear, that'for a time in Iceland
the emigration to America was
a sensitive issue. There might
therefore not have been any
special reason to hold up for
show the letters that the
Icelanders received from their
relatives in America. It was
obviously not too popular
among the patriotic Icelanders.
But there could be fu'rther
reasons. In the fifth decade of
the 19th century, when the
Icelanders started demanding
their own independence, they
had to support their demand
with arguments. One of the
most important political argu-
ments in 19th century Europe
for national independence was
that people speaking the same
language should form a com-
mon state. The language of the
nations demanding indepen-
dence suddenly became an
important political implement
and everything was done to
prove its special status. Iceland
had been a part of Denmark for
almost 400 years, and the
Danes had monopolized all
trade for more than 200 years.
And for 300 years almost eveiy
Icelander who studied at a uni-
versity, had been at the Univer-
sity of Copenhagen. And of
course this was perceptible in
the Icelandic which was writ-
ten and spoken in the 19th cen-
tury, and it became a very
important and sensitive part of
the independence movement to
purify the language of all
Danish influence. When Ice-
landers started emigrating to
the New World in a big way
after 1870 the cleaning of the
language and the-policy of
purification was in full swing in
Iceland, and it still increased
later on, when school atten-
darice became more common
and organized. In the New
World the Icelanders encoun-
tered many things that did not
exist in Iceland, things, tools,
political ideas and so on, which
the Icelandic language had no
words to describe. And every
foreign word in an Icelandic
text was unacceptable at home
due to the independence move-
ment. It is a matter of common
knowledge too, that English
very quickly coloured the
native language of the Euro-
peans who emigrated to Amer-
ica. One can find many exam-
ples for this in literature and
other places. The Swedish poet
Ruben Nilsson wrote a poem
he called Amerikabrevet. The
speaker in the poem is a young
man who writes to his old
sweetheart, the language of the
poem is an odd, comic mixture
of Swedish and English, he tells
her from himself, he has good
employment in Indiana, and he
says that it makes him sad to
hear that her new sweetheart, a
sailor, has been killed in a
booze-up in Liverpool. And he
finishes the letter by inviting his
old sweetheart to come to him
in Indiana, “Yes and his .little
boy may come with you”. The
Icelandic poet, Magnús
Ásgeirsson, translated this veiy
fine and a little sentimental
poem into Icelandic. There are
among others these verses:
Margt er umbreytt síðan
gamla Frónið lét mig líva sig, .
en ég lövva þig samt enn,
my dearest friend,
því þótt þú værir ótrú mér
og annar skemmdi þig
skal ég elska þig unto my
bitterend.
Það var soigarlegt að heyra
hvemig kærastinn þinn fór,
að þeir killuðu hann og
sendu beint to hell,
þó hann gengi í land og færi
eitt kvöld með gangsterum á
bjór,
en það gengur svona í
Liverpool, jú well.
Continued next issue -