Lögberg-Heimskringla - 01.09.2017, Page 5

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Lögberg-Heimskringla • 1. september 2017 • 5
They say that in Medieval times,
the weather was warm enough
that grain could ripen in Iceland.
The historians know this because they
found tax records that show grain being
imported from Iceland. It was probably
barley. That leaves all sorts of questions.
How was the soil tilled, the seed sown,
and the grain reaped? Barley was grown
in Scandinavia. Some rye was grown.
In Norway, oats were an important crop.
Beans, turnips, and flax were grown. In
Norway, apples were cultivated.
In Scandinavia, ploughs were
definitely used in medieval times. One
must assume that, since the settlers in
Iceland came largely from Norway but
also from other countries that grew grain,
Icelandic landholders would know about
ploughs and ploughing. There is some
evidence that the early settlers did try
ploughing but circumstances were against
it. It caused rapid erosion. Valuable land
washed away. These early settlers also had
goats and pigs but they disappeared and
that probably was because they destroyed
precious land. Then, to make matters
worse, there was the changing weather.
According to The Cambridge History
of Scandinavia, Volume 1, there had
been a long period of warm years. Warm
enough that Iceland remained largely
ice-free. Warm enough that grain could
ripen. That was going to change. The
Little Ice Age (1300-1850) began and
the temperatures and the frost-free days
needed for grain to ripen disappeared.
Harsh winters and cold summers meant
hay didn’t grow and without hay people
had to slaughter their sheep and horses.
Europe lived on cereal grains.
In Iceland that became impossible.
With the colder weather, the only crop
became hay. On it, all life, animal and
human, would depend.
So, with the Little Ice Age,
conditions changed but the Icelanders
were determined to stay where they
were. One percent of the land was
grazeable. Not arable. Not cultivatable.
Sheep, horses, and cows could graze
upon it. It was madness, of course. The
forests that had provided fuel, charcoal,
and wood for building got used up. The
sheep made sure the forests didn’t grow
back. Over time, the grazeable land
became smaller. Expanding glaciers,
volcanic eruptions, but most of all,
erosion, destroyed hay land.
The Icelanders doubled down. They
might have been great adventurers in
Viking times but by medieval times they
were herders. Their insistence on staying
in Iceland demanded that they find ways
to adapt to the harsh landscape and the
deteriorating weather. For example, salt
was expensive. They couldn’t make their
own in spite of all the seawater around
them. In Norway, the people had fuel so
they could boil seawater. In Iceland, fuel
was too precious, too scarce. They could
make black salt by burning seaweed.
Instead of salting cod, they dried it. They
learned to preserve meat in whey. They
figured out not to eat fresh deep-sea
shark but to bury it in the cold sand so
the uric acid would dissipate enough for
the flesh to be safe to eat. Who, I’ve often
asked myself, figured that out? Did some
Icelander say to himself, Fúsi, that friend
of mine, was starving and he ate a chunk of
a washed up shark half buried in the sand
and died. Six months later, I was starving
and I cut a chunk off the shark carcass.
It tasted terrible, but I didn’t die. Ergo,
we need to let it rot a bit before eating it.
Starvation always lurked. Otherwise, who
would have chosen to eat rotten shark?
The Danes get blamed for a lot of
things but they should get credit for
something really important, the Icelandic
potato. In 1758, a Swede working in
Iceland as an expert in sheep farming,
planted potatoes but nothing came of it.
In 1759, a minister, Björn Halldórsson,
got some potatoes from Denmark and
planted them. This time, some other
people also started growing potatoes.
Then, in 1808, the Danish merchant,
Hans Lever, planted potatoes in his back
yard in Akureyri and wrote a publication
called Instructions in potato cultivation
for the common people of Iceland. The
people of Akureyri started growing
potatoes. You never know where this sort
of radical innovation might lead and, in
this case, it led to other vegetables being
grown, and then flowers. You have to keep
in mind that there were quite a few Danes
in Akureyri. That may explain the potato
fields that developed. The Icelanders eyed
the potatoes suspiciously and spread the
rumour that eating them caused leprosy.
Given the Icelandic conservatism
regarding food, it is surprising that, by
1862, fifty-four years after Hans planted
potatoes in his garden, potatoes had
become so much a part of the Icelandic
diet that when the same potato blight
that had devastated Ireland appeared in
Iceland, five percent of the population
died.
The potato – that pile of red, white,
yellow, sometimes purple spuds in the
grocery store – is so common that we
never give it a second thought. We just
pick up a five-pound bag and place it in
the grocery cart. When I was young, we
didn’t buy our potatoes this way. Mostly,
we planted them in our backyard and, in
the fall, when the tops had died back, we
took a garden fork and turned over the soil.
We picked up the potatoes, rubbed the soil
off them, and put them into a gunnysack
that we then stored in the basement, out
of the light. They would last most of the
winter. We also celebrated this kitchen
garden harvest by my father building a
small fire in the back yard, adding wood to
it until there was a good bed of coals. Then
he would pack potatoes in Manitoba clay
and place them among the coals. When
the potatoes were cooked, we broke away
the hard clay shell, tapped open the now
stiff skins, piled on butter and salt, and
sitting around the fire, ate hot, steaming,
delicious potato to our heart’s content.
I never questioned how it came about
that in Gimli, Manitoba, on an early fall
day, there was a garden full of potatoes.
I thought when I was a youngster that
potatoes might have come with the
Ukrainians when they arrived in 1891 or
1892. After all, it was the Ukrainians who
were the gardeners, who grew turnips and
parsley and onions, who filled perogies
(inconceivable food in Iceland) with
potato and cheese. But I was wrong. Our
potato patch had a more direct lineage.
In 1878, only three years after the
Large Group arrived, a survey was
conducted of people living on Hecla
Island. They have built log houses; many
had a cow and a calf, a boat; they caught
fish. Few people tried to grow grain and,
of those who did try, the results ranged
from mostly disappointing to disastrous.
What wasn’t disastrous was the good old
potato. This is critical because the potato
crop from a single acre plus the milk from
a cow will provide a family with a boring
but a nutritious diet.
In Nelson Gerrard’s Hecla Island
Pioneers and Placenames, a document
you can find on line with a Google search,
the story of the Icelandic pioneers and the
potato is told.
At Nýibær in 1878, seven bushels
of potatoes are planted and 95 bushels
harvested. At Fagriskógur, four bushels
are planted and 43 bushels harvested,
plus three bushels of vegetables and
one-sixth of a bushel of flatbeans. At
Grund, four bushels of potatoes sown, 15
bushels harvested. At Kirkjuból, Halldór
Thorgilsson has two cows and a calf and
150 “weights” of hay, but amazingly, from
nine bushels of planted potatoes, he has
harvested 120 bushels.
At Furubrekka, Tryggvi Ingimundsson
Hjaltalín and Kristín Jonatansdóttir
harvested 35 bushels of potatoes and three
bushels of root corps. They had a cow,
calf, and 20 chickens. Eggs go well with
potatoes. At Sandnes, Páll Bjarnason and
Sigríður Jónsdóttir harvested 90 bushels
of potatoes and five bushels of root
crops. They also had a cow, two calves,
and 25 chickens. At Birkiland, Friðbjörn
Stefánsson and Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir
had cleared three acres and broken two,
harvesting 100 bushels of potatoes.
At Fagurhóll, Hjálmar Hjálmarsson
and Jófríður Jósefsdóttir had 2½ acres
cleared from solid bush with 1½ acres
were under cultivation. Over 110 bushels
of potatoes were harvested along with
17 bushels of root crops. With the help
of neighbours, they cleared a total of six
acres of bush at Fagurhóll. In 1880, they
harvested 150 bushels of potatoes.
At Egilsstaðir, Egill Guðbrandsson
and Salóme Thórhalladóttir had four acres
cleared by 1878, two under cultivation.
From that they harvested 180 bushels of
potatoes and 36 bushels of root crops. At
Ingólfsvík, Magnús Hallgrímsson and
Sesselja Daníelsdóttir, who had emigrated
from Akureyri in 1874, had 4½ acres
cleared and 3½ acres under cultivation.
Harvest that year included 90 bushels of
potatoes, 60 bushels of wheat, 10 bushels
of barley, and 10 bushels of root crops.
They owned two cows and an ox.
On their immigration forms, the
Icelanders said they were farmers. They
weren’t, of course. They were herders.
They did not plough or sow or reap. They
did not cut down forests, nor break virgin
land. They faced what would seem to
most of us insurmountable problems. New
Iceland was not suitable for grain farming.
It was heavily forested and flooding in
the near future would drive people away.
Much of the land was covered in rocks
from the retreating glaciers. Much of
the land was swamp that needed to be
drained. In spite of all these problems,
by 1878 houses had been built, boats had
been built, nets sewn, land cleared and
tilled, the first tentative crops planted.
The settlers came from various places
in Iceland, but contemplating the potato,
I wondered if some of the settlers such
as Magnús Hallgrímsson and Sesselja
Daníelsdóttir, who came from Akureyri
with its potato history, brought with them
knowledge of planting and harvesting.
Of course, by 1873, potato-growing in
Iceland had spread so others would have
known about potatoes. Richard Burton in
his book, Ultima Thule, says the potato
is grown all over Iceland. He says it is
small but satisfactory.
Van Gogh painted a brilliant painting
called The Potato Eaters. In it, a poor
family is gathered around a table, having
a meal of potatoes. That scene was
replicated a million times in real life; more
than a million times, in Europe. It was
repeated on Hecla Island, in New Iceland,
in the Icelandic communities beyond the
borders of New Iceland. It was a scene
that may have represented difficult times
but, more, it represented the ability of the
Icelandic settlers to adapt, to make the
best from what was available. They did
not have centuries to change from being
herders to being farmers. They had to
make that change right now. The potato
helped them make that transition.
As my father, mother, brother, and I
crouched around a fire in our backyard
on cool September Sunday afternoons,
eating our roasted potatoes, we did not
feel poor but wealthy. And if we had
smoked goldeye to eat with our potatoes,
we envied no rich man his fancy dinner.
Author’s note: The Seed Saver’s
Exchange has a seed potato available
called the Purple Viking. You can order it.
Thanks to the potato
W.D. Valgardson
Victoria, BC
IMAGE COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA - PUBLIC DOMAIN
Vincent van Gogh's painting, The Potato Eaters, 1885