The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Page 19

SPRING/SUMMER 1995
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
129
Halldor Hermannsson
- a personal memoir
By P.M. Mitchell
My earliest recollection of Halldor
Hermannsson is of a misconception. In my
first year at Cornell University, someone
ostensibly pointed Halldor Hermannsson
out to me, so I thought, but I saw not the
person mentioned, but another university
professor, a Professor Hamilton, who was
older than Halldor Hermannsson. For
some time I respectfully greeted Professor
Hamilton on the campus as Professor
Hermannsson — something that Professor
Hamilton apparently never noticed. Even-
tually, I was set aright, but it was a year later
that I became conscious of Halldor
Hermannsson’s work, and in shifting my
major interest from pre-medicine to Ger-
manic languages, 1 had occasion to deter-
mine that among related courses that could
be used in fulfilling requirements for a ma-
jor in German, were several Scandinavian
courses.
At this time I knew next to nothing
about Scandinavia, but determined to take
a course in the spring term in modern
Scandinavian literature. Halldor
Hermannsson was a one-man department,
so any course in Scandinavian literature or
language was taught by him. I became so
interested in Scandinavian literature that I
broadened my reading, which in Professor
Hermannsson’s class was confined merely
to Ibsen, with some Bjornson and
Strindberg thrown in. I was particularly
taken by Gunnar Gunnarsson’s novel,
which in English translation is called Ships
in the Sky. That book was my introduction
to Icelandic literature, although it was of
course written in Danish, a language which
I did not yet know.
Upon returning from a year abroad in
1937, I determined to have two majors, if
possible, one in German, and one in
Scandinavian. This seemed reasonable, but
I was unable to make the statements in the
course catalogue comprehensible since in
order to major in Scandinavian, one
should, according to the catalogue, pick
certain parallel courses in other depart-
ments, and I could not find these courses
listed in the catalogue. There was no choice
but to approach Professor Hermannsson
in this matter and ask about what I failed
to understand. He took my copy of the cata-
logue rather brusquely in hand and read
what he himself had written some years
before about courses which would comple-
ment Scandinavian study. Then he looked
up to me and said, “Damn them, they’ve
changed the numbers on me.” In other
words, there was no longer an established
set of courses listed in the catalogue that
one might take. It turned out that I was the
first undergraduate major that Halldor
Elermannsson had had in his many years
of teaching. He was to have only one more,
my contemporary and friend, Ward H.
Goodenough1. Ward Goodenough and I
were soon impressed by the breadth and