Lögberg-Heimskringla - 22.10.1993, Síða 4

4 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Röstudagur 22. október 1993
The Ameríca
Letter
demand was made for a Gnan-
The children of lcelandic-Canadian poet, Stephan G. Stephansson,
of MarkerviUe, Alberta, who arrived in America in 1873 and lived in
Wisconsin and Dakota béfore homesteading in Alberta in 1890.
From the 1993 lcelandic Heritage Calendar.
Cont’d from last issue.
My own interest in
America letters as a
genre was kindled
three years ago. Then I taught
for some weeks at a summer
course at the University of
Victoria in British Columbia. I
myself have some relatives here
in the New World, it so hap-
pened that one of my great-
grandparents, you usually have
four of them, emigrated to
Canada at the end of the last
centuiy. Three of their children
moved with them too, two
were left in Iceland. These
great-grandparents of mine cor-
responded with their son in
Iceland, who happened to be
my grandfather. His two sisters
in Canada kept on writing to
my father after the death of
their father and my grandfather,
and one of the daughters of the
sister of my grandfather, she
was bom in Canada of course,
kept on writing to my father as
long as both of them were alive.
Fortunately most of these let-
ters are still extant, it is a good
custom never to throw letters
away, and when I went home
from Canada I begun reading
and copying these old letters.
They would fill a considerable
volume if published. Since then
I have in my leisure time tried
to copy and register all the
America letters I have found as
private property, and tried to
find out where to look for
America letters in public insti-
tutions. There are huge num-
bers of them. Many of the
Icelandic America letters are
private property, lots of them
are kept in the Handritadeild
Landsbókasafnsins, “Depart-
ment of Manuscripts in the
State Archive” and besides that
there are many America letters
in the so called Héraðs-
skjalasöfn, “The Local
Archives”, which are now as
many as 18. One in Reykjavik,
four in Western-Iceland, 7 in
Northem-Iceland, 3 in Eastem-
Iceland, one in the Vestmanna-
Islands and 2 in Southern-
Iceland. Now the fact is, that
the librarians register letters by
the name of the recipient so it
might take time to find out
what is an America letter and
what is not, but it is by no
means an impossible task. You
can especially expect to find
America letters in the Local
Archives in Akureyri as a large
number of people from the
Eyjafjörður-district moved to
Canada, also in the Local
Archives in Eastern-Iceland
and in the Local Archives in
the Vestmanna-Islands.
When I have finished the
four books I still want to write,
I hope to spend my old age dri-
ving in the summers from one
Local Archive-to another in
Iceland copying America letters
and preparing them for publi-
cation in the winters.
And then comes the ques-
tion about the America letters
as a literaiy genre. What are
their special characteristics? In
what respect are they different
from other letters?
By “America letter” you usu-
ally mean a letter which an
immigrant from some country
in Europe wrote to his or her
family or friends in the home-
land. The main wave of
European emigration to North-
America was in-the 18th and
19th century, and given the
communications available, an
emigration agross the Atlantic
Ocean actually m'eant that
those involved would never see
the relatives or friends they left
behind. We can try to imagine
that somewhere far away in our
solar system they suddenly
found a place with full employ-
ment. It would take long time
to move over there and there
would be no way back again.
This place would be the land of
opportunities, if not the land of
freedom, for the hundreds of
thousands or possibly millions
of unemployed people in the
big cities in Europe and
America. Of course many
would go, flee from the greatest
misfortune of our time, the
humiliation and destitution of
the unemployment, in the hope
of getting a house, a car and a
family of their own. To get a
decent life with a reasonable
day to day existence. But they
would have to face the fact that
they. would never again see
their relatives and friends, those
who were left behind. The tech-
nology we already master
would make it possible to send
telegrams to the earth, and they
would arrive in a relatively
short time.
Veiy similar to that were the
circumstances for the immi-
grants in the 18th and 19th cen-
tuiy. And this, of course, put its
mark on the America letter.
The postal service between
America and Europe was slow,
it took a long time for a letter to
travel between the continents,
and finally when the letter
came to the destined country it
still had a long way to go to the
right recipient. And even if the
recipient was found, there
might still remain an important
matter paying the postal rates.
Before the days of the stamp, it
often happened that it was the
recipient of the letter who paid
the postal rates. It even hap-
pened sometimes that the
'recipient was too poor to be
able to pay for the letter at the
post office. In the big Nor-
wegian collection of America
letters, Orm Overland explains
this problem in the introduc-
tion:
In the first four or five
decades of the history of the
America letters (That is the
Norwegian America letters,
BG’s interpolation) a very strict
cial guarantee; someone who
wanted to post a letter or get a
letter out of the local post
office, had to be able to pay a
considerable amount in cash
before the days of the stamp
and the general international
improvement of the'postal ser-
vice at the end of the 7th
decade ofthe I9th century... For
instance Ole Narverud had to
pay 1 specia and 27 shillings to
get the letter that Ole
Herbrandsen Asland wrote in
Kendall, New York on
September 2nd 1845, out ofthe
post office. And when
Narverud went to the post
office in Kongsberg the 3th day
of Christmas 1847 he had to
pay 1 specia and 68 shillings to
get the letter from his friend in
America. 2 Men of business, of
course, could afford this, but it
is more doubtful that a tenant’s
widow or some mountain cot-
tagers always thought it conve-
nient to receive such an expen-
sive letter.3
In spite of these and many
other difficulties, the immi-
grants kept on writing letters.
Tremendous amounts of letters,
never before in the histoiy of
man had such a flood of letters
travelled between places so far
away from each other, and it is
easy to understand, considering
the fact that almost none of the
letter writers had the faintest
hope of seeing the recipient of
the letter again in their lifetime.
It is almost impossible to assess
the quantity of the America let-
ters. In the introduction to the
new English translation of
German America letters: News
from the Land ofFreedom4 the
editors estimate that the num-
ber of letters from USA to
Germany in the years 1820 -
1914 was about 250 and 300
million. Their conclusion is
based on figures from the
German postal service, which
of course works in the spirit of
the well known German exacti-
tude, and they believe that
about 100 million. of these let-
ters are private letters.5
Between 1860 and 1870 the
number of the German
America letters was about 2
million per year, from 1870 to
1890 about 4 million per year,
and about 7 million per year
from 1900 to 1914. According
to American sources nearly 28
million people emigrated from
Europe to North-America in
the years from 1820 and 1910.
19% of them came from
Germany, or about 5,300,000.
The number of letters
approaches 20 per person.
Now it is difficult to get a pre-
cise picture by parallels, but it is
always fun to play with figures.
Nearly 20,000 Icelanders are
supposed to have emigrated to
USA and Canada during the
period from 1855 - 1920, and if
they were as diligent letter writ-
ers as the Germans, and there
is no reason to doubt that, then
the amount of Icelandic
America letters should be close
to some 400,000.
But whether the German
America letters are 100 million
or not, and the Icelandic
America letters are 400,000 or
not, then one thing is certain,
that all these letters have some-
thing in common. As different
as they are in language and
style it is mainly their topics
that make it possible to consid-
er them as a particular genre,
and the obvious fact that they
are all written by immigrants in
America (or their descendants).
Like other letters they can be
divided into littéræ aperte and
littéræ clausa, open letters and
closed or private letters. Many *
America letters were directly
written with the intention that
as many relatives and friends as
possible at home could get
some news from the writer they
would never see again, and also
with the intention to inform the
people at home about the pop-
ulation and circumstances in
the New World, even to tempt
relatives and friends to emigrate
too. Orm Overland discusses
this kind of letter in the intro-
duction to the collection of the
Norwegian America letters:
The fact that so many of the
oldest letters still exist is due to
the copies that were made of
them in order to be distributed
almost simultaneously as they
arrived to the destination, or
because they were printed in a
newspaper. The America letter
was intended to be read in thé
neighbourhood, and it hap-
pened too that a copy of an
America letter travelled across
the border ofthe district.6
This characteristic appears in
the oldest known Ice-
landic-America letters from the
Mormons in Utah. They emi-
grated to America primarily to
find freedom of religion, and
like all strongly pious men they
wanted their friends and rela-
tives to have the same religion
as they had. And for this pur-
pose the letter to home was a
good forum, just because it
would be read by many. It is,
for example, in this spirit that
Loftur Jónsson writes from
Spanish Fork on Februaiy 21st
1862 to his friend Páll
Sigurðsson, whom he address-
es at the beginning of the letter,
but immediately after that
addresses his countrýmen in
plural:
My dear Páll Sigurðsson, my
most amiable greetings. Now,
once again, I take pen in hand
to send you, my honourable
countrymen, who might desire
to listen, some news from me
and us, your countiymen, how
we are getting on here in the
valleys ofthe Salt Lake. We are
quite well. Here we live in
peace and tranquillity while
söme others in America, that is
to say in the United States, are
killing and destroying each
other. We please ourselves in
the etemal Evangelium of sal-
vation, which we have received
through the grace of qur good
God, and I still can’t thank my
God as heartily as I wish, for
allowing me to be here. It is
good to be here. Here you can
worship your Creator when
you wish, learn about his
ways... 7
Orm Overland mentions
that some of the America
Continued on page 5