The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1982, Blaðsíða 25

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
23
There is some evidence that the present
generation of Icelandic-Canadian mothers
are not teaching their children the songs
that their mothers taught to them. In this
regard Dr. Richard Beck offers testimony.
“But the thing is, you know,” he said, “I
think the question is now we are in the third
and fourth generation and you’re up against
this problem that the parents of Icelandic
origin; excepting a very few exceptions,
they’re not teaching their children the lan-
guage.” It is the language, as Dr. Beck
pointed out, that is the golden key that
opens the treasure chest of the literary
heritage of Iceland.
When Lord Dufferin, then Governor-
General of Canada, visited New Iceland, in
the fall of 1877, he told an audience of
Icelandic settlers in Gimli . . . “you
possess in a far greater degree than is
probably imagined, what which is the
essence and foundation of all superiority,
namely intelligence, education, and intel-
lectual activity. In fact, I have not entered a
single hut or cottage in the settlement
which did not contain, no matter how bare
the walls, or scanty its furniture, a library
of twenty or thirty volumes; and I am in-
formed that there is scarcely a child
amongst you who cannot read and write.”
One wonders if the present Governor-
General of Canada could make a similar
comment after making a similar visit today.
Would he find in many homes that that
modem symbol of our anti-intellectual
civilization — that mindless instrument
which exercises the eyes more than it does
the grey cells — the television set — has
replaced the libraiy? We are living in an
age when there is a great deal of anti-
cultural fall-out in the air that we breathe. It
has affected all of us. Icelandic-Canadians
are not exempt from its paralyzing in-
fluence.
Elva Simundsson tells us, in her book, to
which I have already referred, that the Ice-
landic settlers in America were determined
from the first to establish their own news-
paper. “They felt this would be a way of
informing the Icelanders,” she says,
“about affairs in their own communities
and happenings around the world. A
newspaper in the Icelandic language would
be another link with the motherland and
would help to preserve the Icelandic lan-
guage and culture in the younger genera-
tion.”
The Icelanders in Manitoba soon achieved
this ambition. They established a news-
paper which was published in Icelandic. In
fact, they established two — and, for a
short period, there was even a third. But as
the years passed, they had increasing dif-
ficulties in maintaining these papers. In his
Memoirs, ‘A Slice of Canada’, published
in 1967, Dr. Watson Kirkconnell reports
sadly: “In the Icelandic community . . .
there were once two healthy weeklies: at
last they were forced to amalgamate in
order to survive; and now the combined
Logberg-Heimskringla is a small eight-
page sheet that may well be on its death
bed.”
The Logberg-Heimskringla has refused
to die. It lives on but not in a condition of
vigorous health. It has made concessions to
those Icelandic Canadians whose hold on
their ancestral tongue is slipping: it is
printed partly in English.
The other day I was talking with Kris
Kristjanson. He told me something that
made me think that the fight has not been
lost, that the time has not yet come to throw
in the sponge. He said that there is a farmer
living between the lakes, who is prepared
to establish a scholarship in the amount of
$50,000. The purpose of this scholarship
would be to send students to Iceland for
study in the hope that they would become
newspaper editors. The name of this
farmer, who seeks to preserve the values
that his forefathers prized, who wants to
save the old culture and intellectual tradi-
tions of Iceland, is Edward Gislason. In his