The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Blaðsíða 22

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #1
European nationalism, participating in the
ethnographic insult and counterinsult by
which European countries came to distin-
guish themselves in print.”
The achievements of the renaissance
humanist Arngrfmur Jonsson lay in his
ability to bring his work into proper rela-
tionship with prevalent philosophical ideas
within the European community, empha-
sizing the value of a cultural heritage repre-
sented by classical art and literature. From
an Icelandic point of view, he was the orig-
inator of a trend which gradually gained
momentum and led to the founding of
numerous centres of Icelandic studies on
the European mainland, the British Isles
and eventually in North America, and
beyond.
About the middle of the last century,
this international stamp of approval, indi-
cating among other things that the study of
Icelandic was considered to be an integral
part of a wider field of research in the area
of early English literature and language,
inspired those who spearheaded the estab-
lishment of The Department of Icelandic
Language and Literature at the University
of Manitoba. They were well aware that,
about the middle of the 19th century,
Oxford had become the cradle of Icelandic
studies in England. From there and other
institutions of learning in England had
come a large body of scholarly publica-
tions, including learned treatises on
Icelandic history, language and literature,
English translations of prose and poetry
and last but by no means least a large
Icelandic-English Dictionary published at
The Clarendon Press in Oxford in 1874.
Special mention should be made of
Professor Skuli Johnson, one of the vision-
aries behind the founding of The Icelandic
Department. Professor Johnson was a clas-
sicist who, in his younger days, had attend-
ed Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and
written an MA thesis on the subject of
studies and research in Icelandic Language
and Literature at academic institutions in
England. In a sense, his humanistic inter-
ests at the University of Manitoba cast him
in the role of a modern counterpart of
Arngrfmur Jonsson the Learned. Even
though these two men were born in the
same district in Northern Iceland, they
were three hundred years apart and could
therefore meet only in spirit. Obviously,
the trend which the Icelander Arngrfmur
Jonsson set in motion in the late 16th cen-
tury finally reached the University of
Manitoba where the historical or diachron-
ic dimension of Icelandic was clearly
understood. As a result, it became a basic
ideological element in a foundation which
also received strong support from another
source, which was mainly the Icelandic
ethnic community in Canada. At that time,
the University of Manitoba was perhaps
the only institution of learning outside
Iceland where academic interests of this
nature could be expected to blend in with
those of a surrounding community.
As noted earlier, SigurSur Nordal
maintained that there were two different
schools of thought in 12th -century Iceland
whereby some historians or literary
authors chose to write their works in Latin
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