The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2005, Síða 9

Vol. 59 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
95
Logberg-Heimskringla: chameleon on
a changing surface
by David Jon Fuller
The thing with newspapers is there’s
always a deadline.
I first came to work at Logberg-
Heimskringla with experience from my
high school paper, a love for writing, and
not much else. At least, not in terms of
newspaper production. It was 1998, I had
returned to Winnipeg from a two-year stint
in Iceland the previous year, and Logberg-
Heimskringla, or L-H, was a way to some-
how integrate my experience with the
Icelandic community in North America.
That first week, taking over from the
previous layout person, I had to learn the
latest version of QuarkXpress so I could
lay out the paper, and then, with much help
from then business manager Harpa Isfeld,
transfer all the ads from Macintosh format
to Windows. Talk about a steep learning
curve — it was a case of doing just about
everything from scratch, under a very tight
deadline.
Why, you might ask, would anyone
take that on?
My actual knowledge of L-H goes
back a few years earlier. Having become
interested in my Icelandic heritage in 1994,
I started taking language classes at the
Scandinavian Centre on Erin Street. The
teacher, Carol Mowat, mentioned a schol-
arship for studying Icelandic in Reykjavik -
- but the announcement was only to be
found in the pages of L-H. I became a keen
reader -- though not a subscriber — after
that.
Having been successful in the quest for
the scholarship, I also had the good fortune
to be given a gift subscription to L-H while
I was in Iceland. It usually arrived a few
weeks late, which was pretty remarkable
considering how much longer a lot of my
other mail took. I read every issue, learn-
ing, among other things, that Guy Maddin
was of Icelandic descent and that Bjork was
prone to hitting photographers. Well,
once, maybe, and she sent flowers after-
wards.
Neil Bardal convinced me to begin
sending a few articles in. My main focus
then was on trying to fit into Icelandic
society, which is reflected in those early
submissions.
The funny thing is, it was clear from
the start that saying “I’m Icelandic” had a
totally different meaning on either side of
the Atlantic. It seemed to me that in
Iceland it was a patriotic way of asserting
an independent, national identity. That is,
not just European, not just Scandinavian
(definitely not Danish), but Icelandic —
culture of saga, poem and song, not to
mention long-simmering feuds and argu-
ments.
In North America, it is not the same
thing at all. I have met very few people of
Icelandic descent who would assert they
are “Icelandic” in the literal sense that
Icelanders do. There is no question that
they hold their citizenship in either Canada
or the United States very dear. And yet,
there is still some creeping sense of an
Icelandic identity here.
An identity, presumably, large enough
to merit its own newspaper.
I worked at L-H from 1998 to 2001,
part time, as the copy editor and layout
person. I take credit for the design of all
the early issues that still make me cringe,
every misspelled word I missed, and the
rough transition to digital production that
finally resulted in clearer photos. I worked
with Gunnur Isfeld and Lillian Vilborg
MacPherson, and had some great times
hammering out the monstrous special
issues (quadrupling the page count and
completing it in the same amount of time is
no mean feat) as well as seeing the paper