Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1931, Síða 31

The Cultural Value of Icelandic
By WATSON KIRKCONNELL
Popular critics of our provincial system of education
sometimes make acrimonious attacks upon the inclusion of
Icelandic studies in the curricula of our high schools and
colleges. This status, they say, was given to Icelandic as a
concession to the vanity of an active racial minority some
years ago; it is not justified by any inherent excellence or
utility in the language itself; and as a matter of fact the pre-
scribed courses have already fallen into well-deserved neglect.
What shall we say to these aspersions upon the educational
value of Icelandic? How shall we, who have faith in it, give
reasoned justification for that faith?
To begin with, anyone who has a wide knowledge of lan-
guage studies in general will realize the disciplinary value of
so rational and straightforward an inflected speech. So far
as concerns the sharpening of the linguistic sense and the ac-
quisition of copious and precise diction through the inter-
relating of two distinct tongues, there is no advantage in
German, French, or Latin studies that cannot be derived with
like effectiveness from class-work in Icelandic.
Language study must, however, go farther than that, and
must serve some end beyond itself that ministers more fully
and directly to life. So considered, Icelandic cannot open
doors for commerce, as Spanish does; nor for science, as does
German; nor for both, as with French. It is today the speech
of a nation with one-third the population of Winnipeg, lying
far off the beaten tracks of the world’s trade and almost de-
void of industries and international relationships. To the hard-
minded utilitarian, the Philistine with a monetary scale of
values, the deliberate cultivation of such a language must
seem a piece of egregious folly.
Nevertheless there is much in life that is undreamt of in
the philosophies of commerce and applied science. In all ages
there have been those to whom the economic activities of man
are not the end of existence but the mere animal basis for a
richer and more significant growth of mind and spirit. To
such persons, a new language may offer a key to some strange
and inspiring tradition in human experience, opening doors
upon a fuller comprehension of their own destinies in time
and space.
The Icelandic language is one of the noblest of these keys.
By it we unlock one of the great treasure-houses of the world’s
literature—a treasury enclosing a rich poetic inheritance from
29