Gripla - 20.12.2016, Side 307

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the Hollywood western has largely faded, but lest you think it was a
minor phenomenon, I note that in the thirty years between 1930 and 1960
there were over 2000 westerns made, and that they featured some of the
biggest stars of the era. the similarities between westerns and Icelandic
sagas have been noted by others. I myself have neither written nor given
courses on the western, though I sometimes gave lectures on that subject
in colleagues’ courses; and in my undergraduate courses on old norse-
Icelandic Literature I routinely showed at least one western film in con-
nection with the Íslendingasögur.
It’s worth remembering that among the audiences for the movie west-
ern, which got going seriously in the 1930s, were the original settlers’
children and grandchildren. I’m one of the latter. My mother’s parents
came west (separately) as young people in 1909, via railroad for part of the
way and horse-drawn wagons the rest. they were homesteaders – people
to whom the federal government had given grants of free land. (Between
1852 and 1936, over 1.5 million such grants were given out.) the locations
and borders of these homesteads were of course recorded by hand and
deposited in the national archives in Washington, D.C. It’s hard not to
think of these manuscript records as a kind of latter-day Lándnámabók.
My grandparents’ grants were in the desert wilderness of eastern
oregon – pretty bad land. they didn’t know each other before they came
to oregon; they met there and soon married. they were followed out
west by several siblings and even my grandfather’s parents. So my own
grandparents (who died when I was in my late twenties) were first-settlers
in the wild west; and in later family gatherings, they and their siblings told
stories that my parents, my brothers and I, and even my children listened
to 50, 60, 70 years later. those stories had to do with happenings in their
area: property disputes, cattle-rustling, outlaws, a lynching, struggles over
water, and so on.
after five years they’d had enough of the desert. So they moved by
horse-and-wagon about a hundred kilometers south, over the border into
northeastern California – high-mountain country, but with fertile mead-
ows. the only problem there was Mt. Lassen, an active volcano that acted
up periodically, including the very next year, in 1915 (a century ago this
year), when there was a major eruption. When it happened, my grandfa-
ther was off working about 30 kilometers west and my grandmother was
SAME FRAME