The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.1988, Side 19

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
17
He has not lost all of the oil of youth.
Indeed, all his faculties seem to be at their
peak. If I may make a bold judgment, I
will say that his best work lies ahead. His
potential is very far from exhausted.
FOOTNOTES
1. The Icelandic Canadian, Summer, 1980, p. 5
2. Country Guide, September, 1977, p. 52
3. “The Shot of Angus Stone,” 1966, p. 3
4. The Remarkable Morden Whiz-Bangs, 1985, p.
19
5. The Icelandic Canadian, Spring, 1970, p. 12
6. Petro Kolesnyk in Ivan Franko, A Biographical
Sketch, (Kiev), 1977, p. 140
7. Stephan G. Stephansson, Selected translations
from Andvokur, 1982, pp. 82-105
8. The Icelandic Canadian, 1970, p. 18
9. The Icelandic Canadian, Autumn, 1984, p. 31
10. The Icelandic Canadian, Winter, 1970, p. 15
11. Ibid
12. The Icelandic Canadian, Centennial Number
(Summer, 1967) p. 97
13. The Icelandic Canadian, Spring, 1985, p. 43
14. “The Poet Paul,” p. 322
15. “The Shot of Angus Stone,” Preface
16. The Icelandic Canadian, Winter, 1984, p. 32
17. The Icelandic Canadian, Spring, 1985, p. 36
18. The Icelandic Canadian, Spring, 1980, p. 7
19. The Icelandic Canadian, Summer, 1965, p. 45
A LOOK AT
JOHANN MAGNUS BJARNASON'S
MARKLAND YEARS
by Laurence Gillespie
About 50 miles north east of Halifax
there are some holes in the ground. They
are not the most imposing holes in the
world. Indeed, they are not even easy to
find among the dense underbrush and heavy
coniferous forests that cloak the Mooseland
hills. A hundred years ago, miners were
digging for gold nearby, but these holes
contain no gold. At best, they might yield a
few broken bits of glass or metal, or per-
haps the remains of a cast-iron stove that’s
rusted beneath the moss and leaves for a
long, long time.
These holes and rusted stoves are about
all that physically remains of the second
Markland, the ill-fated Icelandic settlement
near Mooseland on Nova Scotia’s eastern
shore. Yet meagre though its material legacy
may be, Markland has a more enduring
literary one. One hundred years after its
settlers abandoned it for good, it still lives
on in the works of Jdhann Magnus Bjarna-
son. Indeed, there is probably no other
community in Nova Scotia or in Canada
which inspired as much literature in so
short a time. For although it only lasted
seven years and had never more than 200
inhabitants, Markland was the setting for a