The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1964, Side 21

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
19
the sea. When the Israelites (Hebrews)
came to the Red Sea, with Pharoah’s
hosts in hot pursuit, they panicked.
The Vikings under similar circum-
stance would have built boats in
prompt order. The two lakes in Pales-
tine were called Seas—the Sea of Gal-
ilee and the Dead Sea. The Vikings
would not have dignified them by
calling them seas. When the author
of the last book of the N. T.
visions “a new heaven and a new
earth” he adds “And there was no more
sea.” A desirable place to Hebrews but
not to Icelanders.
The Bible speaks of the Promised
Land as “land flowing with milk and
honey”, and so it seemed to the exiles
having spent 40 years in the Sinai
peninsula, where life was so destitute
that even God Himself had to feed
them, to enable them to survive. Pal-
estine is a rocky country. It was an old
custom to stone people to death—for
stones were always at hand. There is an
old legend that tells of God sending
two angels, each flying with a sack fill-
ed with rocks, to scatter over the whole
earth. When flying over Palestine one
of the sacks ripped open. Thus the
the stones which were meant for half
of the world, fell on Palestine. (One
wonders if the other sack opened while
flying over Iceland). At home or
among the nations of the world, the
Jews have had to fight hard to exist.
In Iceland, the Vikings found life
good at first. They lived off the land.
The total population was small and
if the cupboard was bare at times, the
young men could always go abroad and
earn fame and fortune by their
superior fighting ability and the larder
was full again. Then evil days fell
upon them, adverse weather, Arctic ice,
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, near
starvation. “Only the strong survive.”
Such hardship as these two nations
have endured is likely to deepen char-
acter and the quality of manhood
which will show itself and bear fruit
in time. If “the Northwind made the
Vikings”, then struggle and want has
made the Icelanders for they have
truly seen dark and dismal days and
triumphed. It is not so much what we
meet in life that matters. It is what
life meets in us that really counts.
A by-product of the two nations’
disastrous adversities is a relentless na-
tural selection.*
For 1900 years and more the Jews
have roamed the earth, constantly dis-
criminated against, frequently pers-
ecuted, often made the scapegoat for
the evil and the failures of others.
Adolph Hitler is not the first who
thought he could eliminate the Jews.
They live to bury their adversaries, but
the cost is high. Said a Jewish Rabbi,
“for every one Jew who survives, a
hundred must die.”
In a similar way disasters and ad-
versities in Iceland have produced
Darwinian natural selection. There
have been earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions causing very heavy losses of
human, animal and plant life. In the
past Iceland has lost a frightful num-
ber of its good men into the sea. For-
tunately this is now kept down to a
* Here the author is using the words “natural
selection” in their Darwinian meaning. “Dar-
win considered natural selection, operating
by means of small fortuitous individual vari-
ations, as the most important factor in organ-
ic evolution” (Webster Int. Diet.). Viewed in
that light persecution and mass murders,
irownings at sea and deaths through volcanic
sruptions, may produce those “small fortu-
itous individual variations” in the survivors
which build up compensatory qualities. Put
in another way it may be said that to the
natural law of “survival of the fittest” must
be added “those who survive become the
more fit”.—Ed.