The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2004, Page 6

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #3
Lies My Mother Never Told Me
by Nelson Gerrard
Over the years, various “popular mis-
conceptions”, both minor and major, have
surfaced in Icelandic Canadian popular
culture. Many of us, for example, assume
that either Reykjavik or Akureyri was the
birthplace of our immigrant ancestors, and
almost everyone “knows” that the eruption
of Mount Hekla drove Icelandic emigrants
from lava-covered farms to the shores of
Hecla Island. It is also widely believed that
greedy agents and an unscrupulous
Canadian Government “lured” unsuspect-
ing Icelanders to Canada - only to change
their names arbitrarily and dump them off
in uninhabitable wilderness. There are even
claims about a “Twelve Year Republic of
New Iceland”! Thankfully none of these
“lies” was among the stories my mother
told me as I was growing up - though the
story of our descent from Bishop Jon
Vldaltn proved not quite accurate and the
claim of kinship with Vilhjalmur
Stefansson did turn out to be “a little tenu-
ous”.
The imparting of history by one gener-
ation to the next is a delicate process, and
while human potential for remembrance is
truly amazing, equally astonishing is our
capacity for forgetting. This seems espe-
cially true of our generation. Perhaps not
surprisingly, memorization and story-
telling skills were developed to a much
higher level in centuries past, while in mod-
ern, media-focused times we have seeming-
ly become less adept not only at remem-
bering and retelling, but at listening.
One of my favourite illustrations of
the degree to which memorization was cul-
tivated by our forebears comes from Emil
Bjarnason’s The Whole Truth: Sagas from
the Quills. In “Ajar of Beans”, Emil relates
the story of Gu3rl3ur Jones, an elderly
Icelandic neighbour during his youth in
Vancouver. Bedridden but “sharp as a
tack”, Gu3rI3ur enjoyed young Emil’s vis-
its, during which she spoke Icelandic and
shared lore dating back to her girlhood in
Vopnafjor3ur. Gu3rl3ur was 92 when Emil
was to leave for university in Ontario, and
she had something special for his parting
visit, knowing that in all likelihood it
would be their last. Producing a jar of 105
beans and a bowl, she explained that the
rhyme she was about to recite had 105 vers-
es. If she remembered it intact, there would
be no beans left in the jar when she had
completed her recitation. Not only did
Gu3rl3ur empty the jar bean by bean, fur-
ther investigation revealed that the lengthy
rhyme she had learned from her afi some 80
years before (using the same bean tech-
nique) dated from the 15th Century! In
fact scholars in Iceland had only manu-
script fragments - which fit perfectly into
Gu3rl3ur’s version. She had thus accurate-
ly preserved a complex body of language
and lore that had been passed down by
word of mouth in like fashion for five cen-
turies!
At the other end of the scale, a man my
parents’ age once began relating his family
history by stating that his grandfather had
been a fisherman in Iceland and had loaded
his wife and children into his boat, sailed
for Hudson’s Bay, and brought the family
to Lake Winnipeg via the old York boat
route. In actual fact, the family had emi-
grated with the “Large Group” in 1876 and
had travelled to New Iceland via Scotland,
Quebec, Duluth, and the Red River. While
the Hudson’s Bay version made for a great
yarn (and the teller swore he had this
directly from his father) - it was false.
Tempting as it is to assume that his father
must indeed have known - after all, he was
there (albeit a small child at the time) -
somewhere in the telling there had been a
major “slip twixt cup and lip”. The
irrefutable proof was an original Allen Line
passenger contract signed by his grandfa-
ther in 1876.
This incident illustrates much about