The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1963, Page 20

18
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Winter 1963
motherland and the noble tradition
that stretches back through more than
a millenium to the earliest wisdom of
the Havamal and the lusty power of
ThrymskviSa.
A summary of my publications in
this field may be forgiven as revealing
the background of my interests. A few
translations from Icelandic appear in
my European Elegies (1927) and Out-
line of European Poetry (1928) but in
1930 came my full-length North Am-
erican Book of Icelandic Verse (New
York, pp. 224), covering the whole
range of the nation’s poetry from the
Codex Regius down to poets still liv-
ing. In 1934 my essay on “Icelandic-
Canadian Poetry” was published in the
Dalhousie Review. In 1935 followed
Canadian Overtones, containing my
versions of 36 poems by 17 Icelandic-
Canadian poets. My full-length sketch
of “Canada’s Leading Poet, Stephan
G. Stephansson” was carried in 1936 in
the University of Toronto Quarterly.
Beginning with 1937, this same quar-
terly invited me to contribute to an an-
nual survey of Letters in Canada one
whole section devoted to all Canadian
book publications in languages other
than English or French, and through
the years this has averaged sixty-
volumes a year in nine or ten lan-
guages. My first instalment covered
the period 1935-37, and I have ever
since prepared an annual essay, in-
cluding books in Icelandic. To date,
I have supplied twenty-six of these an-
nual surveys and the end is not yet.
Still other ventures in the Icelandic
field have been “Icelandic Poetry To-
day” in Life and Letters Today (Lon-
don, 1936); a full-length study of Gut-
ormur J. Guttormsson, published in
1939 as “A Skald in Canada”, in the
Transactions of the Royal Society of
Canada; reviews of Icelandic literary
history in Scandinavian Studies and the
Journal of English and Germanic Phil-
ology; and two major articles, “Ice-
landic History in Icelandic Vocabu-
lary” and “Stephan G. Stephansson and
North America” in the Icelandic Can-
adian. My annual surveys have helped
to build up on my shelves an almost
complete library of Icelandic-Canadian
books, especially for the past three
decades.
It would be all too easy to wax
reminiscent over my contacts with Can-
adian Icelanders back in my Winnipeg
days. I cannot forget my first visit in
the scholarly study of Rognvaldur
Petursson, where shelf after shelf of
leather-bound volumes marched
around the walls, a noble regiment of
Icelandic books. Or I recall conver-
sations with Nikolas Ottenson at his
home near River Park, Winnipeg. The
flint-faced old fisherman had a ten-
aciously held theory that the Vatican
Library must be rich in Old Norse and
Latin documents bearing on the history
of Iceland and that my surest path to
fame would lie in dropping my college
work and devoting the rest of my life
to this historical research, a mole ram-
pant in a muddy field. I had a hard
job explaining to him that my Classic-
al Latin was not Mediaeval Latin, that
my Icelandic was rudimentary, that the
palaeography of mediaeval manuscripts
was an erudite discipline in itself, and
that I had a wife and several small
children to support. With Skuli John-
son I sat and marked Latin papers for
several years and with him 1 also play-
ed around the Deer Lodge golf course,
where, with only a putter and a mid-
iron and perfect equanimity, he stead-
ily outscored the rest of us with several
clubs apiece and a less imperturbable
style. There were memorable visits to
Icelandic occasions at Ginili, Riverton
and Lundar. There were Icelandic ban-
quets in Winnipeg, at one of which,