The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Side 45

SPRING/SUMMER 1995
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
155
Remarks honouring
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
At the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame Banquet
at Norsk Hostfest in Minot, North Dakota, October 12, 1994.
by Bill Holm
In a few weeks, we will be able to celebrate
the 115th birthday of an extraordinary man.
In November, 1879, Johann Stefansson and
his wife Ingibjorg gave birth to a son,
Vilhjalmur, in a rough cabin near Arnes,
Manitoba, north of Winnipeg, close to the
already freezing shore of the mammoth
Lake Winnipeg. Johann left Eyjafjorbur in
north Iceland in 1876 to settle in New Ice-
land, the shortlived ethnic republic inside
Canada. Ingibjorg thought her baby
“delicate,” but what do mothers know?
Vilhjalmur went on to live 83 rough, ad-
venturous, quarrelsome, brave, healthy,
and eminently successful years. He died in
New England after a good dinner with en-
tertaining companions, an evening full of
wine, wit, and high spirits. He stood up af-
ter a mammoth stroke and walked into the
next room to begin to die, not wanting to
be a bad host or to trouble a lively evening
for his friends. This is only to say that he
was an Icelander to the end, a stubborn,
intractable, difficult grand man and a good
host.
For all the acrimonious controversy that
followed, and continues to follow his ca-
reer, he was indisputably one of the great
men of Arctic exploration and anthropo-
logical inquiry in this century. Taking what
he thought a temporary sidestep from his
studies of comparative religion, he began
his career with the Harvard expedition of
1906 and by the time he returned finally
from the Arctic in 1918 he had gathered
ideas and experience enough to last him a
lifetime as writer, lecturer, consultant, sci-
entist, scholar, controversialist and gadfly.
In his 27 books, his 400 magazine articles
and essays, and his hundreds of lectures,
he brought the north to life for millions of
readers for a half century. And true to his
literary roots as an Icelander, he did so in
Prose of such grace, energy and clarity that
modern scientific writers would do well to
emulate him. His expression was as vigor-
ous and adventurous as his life. He did not
grow up with the Sagas for nothing. My Life
with the Eskimo, The Friendly Arctic, Hunters
of the Great North, The Northward Course of
Empire, Ultima Thule, his books on Iceland
and Greenland, his autobiography, Discov-
ery. It is an honourable roll call for a man’s
life.
North Dakota has strong claims to
Stefansson too. His father, like so many
drastically poor New Iceland settlers moved
south to the Red River Valley for better
land. He settled near Mountain, a humor-
ously named town on the edge of the great-
est flat on the continent. Here Vilhjalmur
grew up, and began his education at the
University of North Dakota. Grand Forks
proved too small, both for his youthful hi-
jinks and for his curiosity about the world,
so he went on to Iowa and to Harvard, and
then to his Arctic life of fame and adven-
ture. But he was, to his dying day, partly a