The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1982, Page 24

22
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SUMMER, 1982
articulate or worse. It is the glory of the
Icelandic settlers that in their first genera-
tion among us they have created a poetry
based on Canada and their experience of it,
that is worthy of challenging comparison
with the best that three centuries have
produced in their foster-country.”
Dr. Kirkconnell was a towering figure in
two worlds — the academic world and the
world in which the original mind reigns
supreme. During his lifetime, he garnered a
whole trunkful of honours of various sorts,
several from Iceland, but full justice has
yet to be done to him. He came to Win-
nipeg in 1922 to join the teaching staff of
United College. Soon after his arrival, he
became interested in what he calls
Canada’s unseen literature. He discovered
that twenty-four major volumes of poetry
had been published by Icelandic-Canadian
poets. For many years, he contributed a
review of ‘New-Canadian Letters’ to the
annual survey of Letters in Canada pub-
lished by the University of Toronto Quar-
terly. He reports that between 1936 and
1940 some ninety Icelandic-Canadian poets
achieved publication. How do we account
for this great poetic activity among the
Icelandic-Canadians? This question has a
simple answer. They regarded poetry as an
indispensable part of daily living, like eat-
ing and drinking. In their judgment the
writing of poetry is a natural activity of
civilized man.
One night in India, where I spent some
time during World War II, I heard a speech
by a woman, who was a leader of the
women’s liberation movement in that
country. I do not remember her name but I
shall never forget these words from her
speech: “Educate a man and you educate
an individual, educate a woman and you
educate a family.” This thought would
have appealed to the early Icelanders. In
those long winter nights of long ago, when
an Icelandic family gathered around the
home fire to recite, or to read the Sagas,
women had their part to play as well as
men. “In the light of the Sagas,” asserts
Magnus Magnusson, in his absorbing book
‘Vikings’, “it is clear that women played
an unusually positive role in society for
those mediaeval days. They were fron-
tierswomen in action and spirit; they also
had ‘liberated’ legal rights far in advance of
their times, like the right to divorce and a
claim to half the marital property. They
made their presence felt — at times, quite
literally, with a vengeance.”
What exactly did the Indian woman
mean? To begin with, educated women
want educated children. They want edu-
cated children because they know that
education will enable them to lead richer
and fuller lives, that education will open
more doors for them on the wonders of the
world. In Iceland there was a tradition of
home education. Children were taught to
read and write by their mothers; and, of
course, when a child is taught to read and
write, if there is pressure from inner desire,
he is on the way to the only education that
counts in the long run — self-education,
education which is prompted by the desire
to learn. Icelanders have always believed
that most of what we leam, we learn by
ourselves. In support of this belief, may be
cited the careers of those two mighty men
of the pen — Stephan G. Stephanson and
Guttormur J. Guttormsson.
But there is a wider meaning to the In-
dian woman’s words. Mothers are the
natural messengers of cultural values. They
transmit them to their children by a process
which is not always a conscious one. Per-
haps, Antonin Dvorak was thinking of this
process, when he wrote ‘Songs My Mother
Taught Me’:
Songs my mother taught me
In the days long vanished
Now I teach my children
Each melodious measure.