The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1954, Síða 29

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
27
the toil of the day. When this is all
considered, it can scarcely be that the
master should assign scantier rations
than that after 40 years of labour with-
out payment his workman should be
given a trip to the land which treasures
his own history and memories as well
as those of all Icelanders. If the nation
does not owe you as much as this, if
she does not owe you more, then she
has not during her 1042 years of exist-
ence owed a penny to any man.”
If Stephansson ever had any doubts
about himself and the success on the
trip, he was wrong. His journey was a
procession of triumph, which brought
him still closer to his old admirers in
Iceland and acquired for him many
new ones. Some of the poems he com-
posed on the trip rank among his best.
He received many fine presents, of
which we have one good example, a
desk set, given to him by SkagafirSing-
ar or the people of the county of Skaga-
fjorSur in the north of Iceland,
where he was born. The set was made
by the artist, Stefan Eiriksson, in
Reykjavik. The stand, the pen-holder,
and the ruler are of ebony, the vessels
or the askar, as we call them, are of Ice-
landic birch; and the paper cutter of
whale-bone with a gold shield upon
which appears the following inscrip-
tion:
St. G. Stephansson,
SkagfirSingur
1917
As I said we call these vessels askar.
The big one is used as an inkwell, but
the others for pens, stamps, etc. But
what strikes us, at least as Icelanders,
is this, that the askar were in earlier
days used as vessels for food. And it is
an old saying in Icelandic, aS bokvitiS
verSi ekki latiS i askana: that book
learning will not fill the eating ves-
sels. However that may be, the Ice-
landers never lived up to it, and that
is perhaps one of the main reasons
why they survived as a nation. As soon
as they had felt that they could not
afford the luxury of books, their spirit
would have been daunted and the bat-
tle lost. Therefore, I think that the
artist’s idea of using the askar as he did,
in making tilre desk set here under dis-
cussion, was a fitting challenge to the
Icelanders on both sides of the ocean,
a challenge at the dawn of the most
materialistic age that the world has
seen.
Of the three pictures you see on the
wall, the one in the middle is of the
poet himself, taken when he was about
seventy and first published in the 4th
volume of Andvokur in 1923. The one
to the right (above the bookcase) is a
composite picture, which used to hang
beside Stephansson’s desk, showing
some Icelandic brother-poets and
statesmen.
The third frame contains a half
century old sprig of heather, from a
place in Iceland where Stephansson
stayed as a young lad. On receiving the
heather (in a letter from a friend in
Iceland) he composed a very fine
poem entitled ‘Lyng fra auffum aesku-
stoSvum’ (Heather from Abandoned
Haunts of Childhood) which has here
been beautifully written out and
framed by Gissur Eliasson.
In the bookcase we have the greater
part of Stephansson’s books. He never
had many, especially not in his earlier
years. But he was an avid reader all
his life and possessed a memory which
was phenomenal. Much of the Iceland-
ic literature that he had read as a
young man in Iceland stayed with him
all through his life. He was well
versed in English as well as in Scandin-
avian literature, although there is in
his poems little evidence of direct in-