The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.1981, Qupperneq 22

20
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
AUTUMN, 1981
built the Good Templars Hall in 1906, and,
to help with the costs of its operation, rented
it to various local organizations as a meeting
place. Ludvik Kristjansson commemorated
this fire in a poem ‘Brennubragur’, which he
published in a booklet, of 16 pages, early in
1925.
He published one other booklet, Vestur-
Heimsk, (11 pages) in 1940. On July 7,
1939, at a banquet in the Royal Alexandra
Hotel, in Winnipeg, a number of prominent
sons and daughters of Iceland, living in
Canada and the United States — and one
non-Icelander, W. W. Kennedy, Q.C., for
his part in arranging a scholarship grant
from Canada to Iceland at the time of the
1000th anniversary of the Althing, in 1930
— were invested with high degrees in the
Icelandic Order of the Falcon, by Thor
Thors, a member of the Althing, assisted by
Grettir L. Johannsson, honorary counsel of
Denmark and Iceland in Western Canada.
While these honors were being presented,
Kristjansson was sitting at the back of the
banquet hall. His pen was active. He wrote a
short verse on most of those who were
honoured. He was in good form. His pur-
pose was not to flatter. He presented things
exactly as they appeared to him. His verses
have a personal atmosphere. They mirror
the poet himself.
At the time of her death, in 1980, Krist-
jansson’s youngest daughter, Sigrun, was
bringing together her father’s fugitive
verses with a view of publishing them in a
book. Her husband, Dr. William Ewart, has
been carrying on the project. He has
gathered some 90 verses and is arranging for
their publication.
“Time”, says Laurance Sterne, “wastes
too fast”. It is nearly fifty years since Dr.
Watson Kirkconnell lamented: “It is the
experience of our Western schools and col-
leges that New Canadians of the third gen-
eration cannot speak any language other
than English”. And he predicted that unless
there is a continual flow of fresh settlers to
this country from Iceland, “the ancestral
tongue will have died out in Canada by the
end of the present century. ’ ’ Let us hope that
he was too pessimistic — that he was dis-
counting the Icelanders. Let us hope that
Kristjansson’s work will receive, from the
Canadian Icelandic community, the fit
audience that it richly deserves.
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