The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Page 46

Mountain Man. That other local genius,
the poet K. N. wrote a little poem to
Stefansson:
Til Vilhjalms Stefanssonar
Meb mynd af Stefani G., Jonasi Hall
og skaldinu sjalfu. Alkunnug
er kenning Vilhjalms um „hvita Eskimoa“
a norburvegum.
Pessum korlum halda pari til haga.
hvab sem tautar, md peim ekki loga.
Sinn meb hvorum syni gamla Braga
sendi eg Per hvitan Eskimoa.
En skrytib er, hvab meta fair mig,
a meban allur heimur dair pig.
And in Minneota, my Icelandic home town,
his books sat majestically on the shelves of
local farmers. As a boy in the 40s and 50s I
fingered my great uncle J.B. Gislason’s cop-
ies of Stefansson’s books, signed with af-
fectionate Icelandic inscriptions. My
Holm relatives, when they discovered that
I loved scribbling poems more than clean-
ing pig houses, predicted that I would take
after my great uncle John G. Holme,
(Gudjon Gunnlaugur Johanesson), who
had gone from Minneota to New York and
became an author and a friend and re-
viewer of the famous Vilhjalmur Stefansson.
My father’s friend, Einar Hallgrimsson, had
stocked his bathroom with old Geographies
full of essays by Stefansson, decorated with
brown tone photos of ghostly snowy land-
scapes and the stoic faces of Eskimos. When
I went to sleep in the north room of my
father’s farm on blizzardy nights, my fanta-
sies were not of baseball or rock and roll,
but of slogging across the floating ice pack
with a fur parka and icicles in my mous-
tache, and seeing my name in Icelandic,
Vilhjalmur, like Stefansson’s — on the
spines of a yard of books. He was one of
the linchpins in my life as a writer, and I
owe him thanks and honour for it.
I love Stefansson also for two of his
quirks, both proof of his Icelandic charac-
ter. We are deluged now by new age sensi-

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