The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Page 10

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #2
Gudmundsson7 on October 3, 1853, at the
farm Kirkjuholl in Skagafjordur. Like the
other three farms where he spent his child-
hood and youth, the croft at Kirkjuholl is
now abandoned, its productive capacity
having been largely exhausted even before
the future poet’s family occupied it. The
material poverty of his childhood did not
yield a poverty of the intellect, however,
since his parents, Gudmundur Stefansson
and Gudbjorg Hannesdottir, “possessed
both intellectual alertness and cultural
appreciation.”8 According to his own tes-
timony, Stefan Gudmundsson was
unschooled as a child, so his education was
mostly the result of an insatiable thirst for
knowledge. He described himself as “a
parasite on others when it came to books”
and he managed to befriend enough indi-
viduals with libraries of their own or mem-
bership in literary clubs that he was widely
read even as a young man. All told, it was
an unlikely beginning for a great literary
figure. As Skuli Johnson observed at the
dedication of the provincial park in
Stephansson’s honour, “there is nothing in
the antecedents or in the circumstances of
Stephan G. Stephansson to account for
him.”9
In 1873, when he was nearly twenty,
Stephansson emigrated to North America
with his parents, which numbers them
among the first large group of Icelandic
emigrants to North America. He worked
as a labourer in Staughton, Wisconsin, for
nearly a year before moving north to
Shawano County, Wisconsin, where he
worked seasonally as a lumberjack and
fieldhand. There he homesteaded on 160
acres of spruce woods in the first of three
attempts to establish himself on the land.
While in Wisconsin he married Helga
Jonsdottir, his first cousin, with whom he
would have eight children - five sons and
three daughters. They were married by
Rev. Pall Thorlaksson in “his first priestly
duty among the Icelanders.”10 The
Shawano Icelanders, Stephansson included,
moved to Gardar, Dakota Territory, in
1880. En route to his new home, the trunk
full of books that he had accumulated over
the years was destroyed, leaving him with-
out his personal library.
Back in Wisconsin, Stephansson had
been a member of a small Icelandic congre-
gation led by Pall Thorlaksson, who was
serving a nearby Norwegian Lutheran
church. When Thorlaksson established a
church at Gardar, Stephansson participated
in its organization, serving as secretary at
the founding meeting. At the end of this
meeting, Thorlaksson observed that the
secretary had not signed the bylaws, which
were patterned on those commonly found
in the Norwegian Synod. When the minis-
ter questioned Stephansson about this, the
latter indicated that he alone had voted
against two of its provisions, one concern-
ing the creeds and another prohibiting
women from voting in congregational mat-
ters, which was contrary to the custom in
Iceland. In an act of compromise that was
uncommon for both men, the minister
asked if he could append Stephansson’s
name to the bylaws as long as it was accom-
panied by a notation that he did not accept
all of the bylaws’ provisions. Stephansson
agreed and was counted among the congre-
gation’s charter members. Following
Thorlaksson’s untimely death in 1883, at
the age of 33, the Gardar congregation split
into two, with the majority seceeding to
form the Park congregation. While the
presenting issue involved the rights of
women in parish matters, the split also
revealed a deeper cleavage in theological
matters. “Without realizing it,”
Stephansson later wrote, “the congregation
split laid the foundations for the New
Theology movement which denied the
infallibility of the Creed and the
Scriptures.”11
Stephansson was one of two represen-
tatives from the Park congregation at the
first annual conference of The Icelandic
Evangelical Lutheran Synod of America,
which convened in Winnipeg towards the
end of June in 1885. He was a reluctant
delegate but he did not want to let his lib-
eral friends down in the event that a con-
troversy arose at the founding convention.
When Jon Bjarnason nominated
Stephansson for the vice presidency of the
synod, he declined the nomination and
Magnus Paulson was elected instead.
Remembering the event a quarter-century