The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Side 20

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #2
E. McCaine, where they founded the
First Icelandic Unitarian Society.
Several of the early members of the
Unitarian Church in Winnipeg had
been involved in the Icelandic
Cultural Society before relocating to
Manitoba.
14. Bylaws of the Icelandic Cultural
Society (1888), a composite interpre-
tation based on the translations of
Wilhelm Kristjanson and V. Emil
Gudmundson.
15. Felix Adler was both Leader of the
New York Society for Ethical
Culture, which he had founded in
1876, and, from 1878 until 1882, pres-
ident of the Free Religious
Association, which had been estab-
lished largely by disaffected
Unitarians, in 1867, who were react-
ing to what they perceived to be the
growing conservatism of American
Unitarianism. Ralph Waldo Emerson
was the first member of the FRA.
When Stephansson refers to Adler and
his movement as the inspiration for
the Icelandic Cultural Society, it is
difficult to tell whether he is making
reference to Ethical Culture or the
FRA but the choice of name coupled
with his specific reference to Adler
seems to point to the former.
Moreover, the nearby town of
Hoople, Dakota Territory, was home
to a small Ethical Society at about this
time, which suggests the possibility of
local influence from outside the
John Harvard, MP
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Chair, Northern &
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Icelandic community itself.
16. Jon Bjarnason’s dispute with
Stephansson does not appear to have
extended beyond matters of religion.
While Bjarnason was critical of what
he saw as the poet’s pessimism and
was uncomfortable with his use of
satire, he was quick to recognize
Stephansson’s gifts as a poet of first
rank.
17. Jon Bjarnason, Sameiningin
(1888), quoted in V. Emil
Gudmundson, The Icelandic
Unitarian Connection (Wheatfield
Press, 1984), 21.
18. See Jane McCracken’s concise but
insightful analysis of this issue in The
Poet of the Rocky Mountains, 35-36.
The later emergence of Unitarianism
provoked similar anxieties about cul-
tural cleavage and its consequences,
which only really began to be healed
with the organization of the Icelandic
National League in 1920, by which
time the process of assimilation and
acculturation was already well under-
way.
19. To understand Stephansson as a
pioneer farmer, it is helpful to remem-
ber that the present-day political divi-
sions with which we associate him in
many cases did not yet exist when he
arrived.
20. Stephansson, Bref og ritgerdir, vol.
4, trans. Bjorgvin Sigurdson, in
Selected Translations from Andvokur,
18.
21. Jane McCracken, Stephan G.
Stephansson: The Poet of the Rocky
Mountains, 108-109. If Stephansson’s
relationship to the Unitarian church
seemed ambiguous, the same cannot
be said about Icelandic Unitarians’
feelings toward Stephansson. Just as
his organization of the Icelandic
Cultural Society helped lay the
groundwork for the eventual organi-
zation of Unitarian churches among
the Icelanders in North America, his
poetry provided the closest thing to
devotional literature that the Icelandic
Unitarians had at their disposal. At
Icelandic Unitarian funerals, families