The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Side 5

SPRING/SUMMER 1995
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
115
Iceland & North America:
Keeping the Link Alive
Editorial by John S. Matthiasson
It seems to me that the North American
descendants of pioneers from Iceland,
along with more recent immigrants, form
organizations and associations, hold festi-
vals and publish a newspaper and a maga-
zine for two primary reasons. The first is to
foster the preservation of Icelandic tradi-
tions and an Icelandic presence on this
continent and to maintain through net-
working a sense of comradeship and conti-
nuity throughout the broader community
and across generations. A second reason
for these activities is to keep alive the con-
nections between Iceland and North
America. And so, at Islendingadagurinn,
the annual gathering in Gimli, there is the
toast to Canada, but also the toast to Ice-
land. I expect that something like that hap-
pens at the annual festival in Minot, North
Dakota. We western Icelanders have devel-
oped our own traditions and myths and tell
our own story, but the lifeline is to the root
of it all — Iceland. It is critical for our sur-
vival that ties with the homeland be both
nurtured and enhanced. This issue of The
Icelandic Canadian is dedicated to the ex-
amination and strengthening of those ties.
It is, in a way, a literary celebration of two
forms of Icelandicness — those of Iceland
and North America — and the continuing
relationship between them.
Today charter flights to and from Ice-
land are frequent, and Icelanders visit
North America while western Icelanders
return to the place where it all began. The
early Icelandic settlers in the United States
and Canada suffered many hardships, but
perhaps the worst was the fact that they
would never again see their beloved Iceland
or the family and friends they had left be-
hind. Still, they kept the connection alive
through what must have been a very primi-
tive set of postal services. They sent letters
and received them in return. In this edito-
rial I would like to discuss this activity and
offer some suggestions to our readers.
Unravelling the Past:
the Letters of the Immigrants
Icelanders on both sides of the Atlantic take
pride in both their own literary achieve-
ments and those of their ancestors. We are
justly known as a people who take writing
seriously, and that tradition goes back to
Saga times when the Icelanders were the
skalds who composed those grand works of
history. But, when we think of writing as a
way of capturing events we usually mean
prose and poetry created for a wide reader-
ship — or, writings which are published.
However, there is another genre which has
been produced by those who came before
us for a more limited audience. It consists
of letters. In a time of computers, e-mail and
the electronic highway, the importance that
‘old-fashioned’ letter-writing held for ear-
lier generations is easily forgotten.
The Icelandic community of Winnipeg
was reminded of this in a recent address
given under the auspices of the Department