The Icelandic Canadian - 01.11.2007, Blaðsíða 10

52
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 61 #2
they complement one another rather than
compete, although Jonas has been largely
unknown to the passing generations of
North Americans of Icelandic descent.
Unlike many of the Romantic poets
The balmy south a gentle sigh releases -
And countless ocean billows, set in motion,
Breathe to my native shore the south’s devotion,—
Where strand and hillside feel the kindly breezes.
O give them all at home my fondest greeting,
O’er hill and a dale a sacred peace and blessing.
Ye billows, pass the fisher’s boat caressing;
And warm each youthful cheek, ye south winds fleeting.
Herald of springtime, thou whose instinct free,
Pilots thy shiny wings to trackless spaces
To summer haunts to chant thy poems rare.
O greet most fondly, if you chance to see
An angel whom our native costume graces.
For that, dear throstle, is my sweetheart fair.2
across cultures, who perceive some pristine
and heroic age and write out of their love
for it—a tendency for which the Icelandic
sagas provide ample fodder—Jonas
Hallgnmsson viewed his homeland with
the eye of a naturalist, oftentimes imbuing
his verse with a scientific precision to
match its poetic power. It was once sug-
gested of one of his poems that its geology
was as sound as its grammar.
Jonas’s place in the development of
Icelandic literature is comparable to that of
his contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
in American literature. However, while
Emerson’s appreciation of nature was
almost entirely romantic, Jonas brought
the understanding of a scientist to his cele-
bration of the natural order and, more sig-
nificantly, the quality Jonas’s poetry is
more even and far superior overall, even if
its quantity is far less, owing to his early
death. Jonas Hallgnmsson was one of the
key figures—perhaps the central personali-
ty—in the literary reawakening of Iceland.
The literary scholar Stefan Einarsson
wrote of Jonas:
Being the greatest representative of
unadulterated classic beauty among the
Romanticists, he sometimes painted bril-
liant, often geologically correct, canvasses
of his landscapes, sometimes placed himself
in the midst of nature among familiar flow-
ers and scenes, greeting them with the lov-
ing intimacy of a St. Francis. He could do
the same with the birds, the farmer with his
scythe, and the fisherman in his boat, and
he was really the only one who succeeded
in painting country life as attractive ... As
Bjarni Thorarensen was the poet of rugged
winter, Jonas was the songbird of summer.3
While history best remembers Jonas as
a poet, it is important for us to remember
that he was also an accomplished scientist
and a key political figure in the budding
nineteenth-century nationalist movement,
which laid the foundation for the restora-
tion of the Aiding and the eventual inde-
pendence of Iceland with its robust culture
and liberal democratic institutions. If Jon
Sigurdsson was the political genius behind
the nationalist movement in nineteenth-
century Iceland, then it can fairly be said
that Jonas Hallgnmsson was the move-
ment’s poetic inspiration.
This year, we mark the bicentennial of
Jonas Hallgrfmsson’s birth at Hraun in
Oxnadalur and we remember his life and
gifts with deep appreciation and more than
a little awe. Legend has it that that there
was a treasure chest atop Hraundrangi, the
needle-like summit that towers over
Jonas’s birthplace, although when three