The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Page 20

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SPRING/SUMMER 1995
depth of Halldor Hermannsson’s knowl-
edge. He seemed able to talk intelligently
on any subject we brought up, but he made
no effort to impress us with his encyclope-
dic knowledge and it was only gradually
that we came to realize that Halldor
Hermannsson was one of the great schol-
ars at Cornell University, a man of interna-
tional fame, although apparently little rec-
ognized by the student body at Cornell.
I had to write several papers for Halldor
Hermannsson. The earliest dealt with
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and was very lengthy and
written in longhand, something that few
professors would tolerate today. I also wrote
a lengthy paper on Orkneyinge Saga, and,
under Halldor Hermannsson’s supervi-
sion, read other sagas in English transla-
tion. Since I was only acquiring Old Ice-
landic at the time, it was not possible for
me to read in the original.
Halldor Hermannsson, as great a man
as he was, was not a gifted pedagogue, and
his instruction in Old Icelandic was rather
mechanical. In addition to Ward
Goodenough, there was an elderly woman
also taking Icelandic, a Mrs. L. F. Peirce,
who was far advanced beyond the two un-
dergraduates in the course since, in her
own words, she had been, “thoroughly
grounded in Anglo-Saxon.” Ward
Goodenough and 1 struggled through the
first semester. We met two or three evenings
a week to read the assignments together.
At the end of the first semester, Mrs. Peirce
had read not only the first semester’s
pensum, but the second semester’s, assign-
ments, and in addition, read Dickens’ Oliver
Twist in Icelandic translation.
As a footnote to the remarks about
Halldor Hermannsson as a teacher, it
should be added that he taught Old Ice-
landic in his own office in Goldwin Smith
Hall and often smoked cigars while having
us decline nouns or conjugate verbs. The
instruction followed the very old method
of simply translating aloud in class from the
original. We were assigned a certain
amount of Old Icelandic to read for the
next class meeting. And we then translated
into English first one passage then another,
first one of us, then the other. This method
of teaching is necessarily not inspiring, but
one accepted it as an approved method of
the time. I had additional courses in Ger-
man where the same method was em-
ployed; we were given a certain amount to
read for the next time and in class meet-
ings we translated a section to the satisfac-
tion of the teacher. Wren a few years later,
I was a student at the University of Copen-
hagen, I discovered thatjon Helgason still
used this same method of assigning a long
passage and then having parts of it trans-
lated into Danish as we went around the
table where eight or ten students collected
to read, for example, Olafs saga hins helga.
Halldor Hermannsson and I met two
different summers in Copenhagen and it
was he who in 1937 introduced me to the
Royal Library, where he had worked for a
short time in 1905, prior to coming to the
United States as the curator of the Fiske
Icelandic Collection. In Copenhagen we
had several meetings together and it was at
one lunch that SigurSur Nordal came by
and I was introduced to him. Both men
were members of the Arne Mag me an Com-
mission and were therefore together in
Copenhagen for the business of the Com-
mission.
In the summer of 1937, I took a course
in Danish for foreigners in Copenhagen.
By that time, I was in love with a Danish
girl. That helped me to a certain extent,
although for the sake of better oral com-
munication, we spoke German with one
another for nearly two years. We were to
shift to Danish because of Halldor
Hermannsson’s insistence that we do so in
the late summer of 1938.
Despite Halldor Hermannsson’s insist-
ence that I speak Danish with my lady-love
he never spoke to me in any language but
English, save when he by chance said a few
sentences in Icelandic which I regularly