Lögberg-Heimskringla - 17.03.1995, Side 1

í Lðgberg 1
neimsKrmgia
The lcelandic Weeldy
Lögberg Stofnaö 14. janúar 1888 Heimskringla Stofnaö 9. september 1886
Inside this week:
lceland, Manitoba's
Interlake and New lceland
are highlighted in this
special travel issue of
Lögberg-Heimskringla.
109. Árgangur
109th Year
jstudagur 17. mars 1995
Friday, 17 March 1995
Númer 10
Number 10
Publications Mail Registration No. 1667
Women in lcelandic dress look down on the plains of Þingvellir on the 50th anniversary of independence.
Mseov@riníf ISnw
PHOTO COURTESYEIMSKIP
By Tom Oleson
Under the bright and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie,
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I lay me down with a will.
Let this be the grave you carve for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
as they did in the Viking raids on the
British Isles and Europe, but they also
travelled for adventure, for knowledge
and for their honour and their souls.
The death of Grettir the Strong was
avenged by his brother half-way across
the world, in Constantinople, giving
him the distinction of being the
Icelander avenged furthest from home,
and the sagas record several examples
of Icelanders making the pilgrimage to
Rome to ease the burden on their souls,
a burden which, in some cases, was
considerable.
And we should not forget the great-
est travellers of all, the Icelanders who
sailed West to discover and settle
Greenland and North America.
Greenland became a thriving settlement
that lasted for several hundred years
before the people mysteriously vanished
in what Vilhjálmur Stefanson called one
of the great unsolved mysteries of the
Arctic. Attempts to settle North
America appear to have been unsuc-
cessful. I say “appear” because we do
not know for certain what exactly hap-
pened in those centuries. The Vínland
settlements we know from the sagas
ultimately failed, but there was a vast
Arctic, a whole continent, beckoning to
the Greenlanders, and Norse ruins have
been found in Ungava and may have
been found elsewhere in the Canadian
Arctic.
Cont’d p. 3
here Robert Louis
Stevenson “longed
to be” was in
Samoa, where he
had gone in the
hopes of curing his tuberculosis and
where he died in 1894 at the age of 44.
Stevenson was a Scot, a fíne writer
and a much-travelled man. Scots in gen-
eral are a much-travelled people having
spread out all overthe world in the 19th
centuiy and this one, but they are noto-
rious for feeling a longing for “home”.
Nevertheless, Stevenson’s grave is in
Samoa, where it has become a shrine
for lovers of his novels and poems and a
tourist attraction.
Icelanders, too, are great travellers
and their peregrinations have a long
and colourful history. They also experi-
ence that longing for home. At one time
they were not the most welcome of
tourists, with the young men joining up
CONTEST FRENZY
Who, what, where,
when and why.
Those are the basic
questions that, accor-
ding to tradition,
journalism is supposed to
ask and answer. We here at
Lögberg-Heimskringla
would like to give you a
chance to answer them in a
new contest for readers.
The who, of course, is
who are you? The what is
what are you reading
(Lögberg-Heimskringla, of
course)? The where is
where are you reading it?
The when is when do you
read it (every week, we
hope)? And the why is why
do you read it, a question to
which we anticipate some
interesting answers.
To make it a little more
clear, what we propose is
this. You have a picture
taken of yourself reading
the newspaper. You send it
to us telling us who you are
and where you are in this
picture. It can be a place
you would normally read
the paper, or you can pick
somewhere unusual. The
why is optional, but we
enjoy hearing those com-
ments, too.
We will publish the pic-
ture and your stoiy — it can
be short or long — in the
paper and in our special
Travel Issue next March we
will pick a winner, who will
receive a free subscription
to Lögberg-Heimskríngla.
We think that this will be
fun and useful too, allowing
readers to know who else is
out there, where they are
and what they are doing. It
will also help us in putting
out the paper, as your com-
ments always do. So use
your imagination, have
some fun and get in touch.
Let everybody know where
says 4-year-oid Katie
you are and what you’re
reading. Send your entriés
to L-H/W-5, care of
Lögberg-Heimskríngla.
Cont’d p. 24