The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Blaðsíða 26

24
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #1
consciously, he/she was making an attempt
to reach a much wider language territory
than was within immediate reach. Without
being fully aware of it, the poet may have
thought of long gone colleagues who, even
in the eighth century or somewhat later,
had become part of remote antiquity, and
whose language domain had been Old
Germanic in its almost undivided form. In
theme, the Volund poem is, as the other
poems of The Poetic Edda, without territo-
rial constraints.
Yet the Nordic tongue in which it was
composed must have had narrow boundary
lines in terms of both language and geogra-
phy. On the level of expression, the author
of the Volund poem, and some other
Nordic poets of the same period, could
nevertheless have felt, consciously or not,
that, through their choice of words alone,
they were taking steps back in time to reach
a larger and more populous language
domain than would otherwise have been
accessible. Deep down, their objective
would then have been similar to that of
Chaucer and Shakespeare in England some
six or eight centuries later, which was to
reach the undivided territory of a certain
language and bring to it a degree of unity
by drawing on all its vernaculars or
dialects. If this comparison makes any
sense - in my mind it is a thought rather
than a suggestion- the Nordic poets were,
to some extent, looking to a domain long
since vanished, whereas the English mas-
ters had theirs right before them.
Shortly before his death in 1241, the
Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson had
this to say about his fellow countryman,
Ari Porgilsson the Learned, who wrote the
first work of history in a Nordic vernacu-
lar shortly after 1120: “Priest Ari the
Learned ... was the first man in this coun-
try to write in the Norse tongue about lore
both ancient and modern.” The English
designation Norse comes from the Dutch
word ‘noors’ which means Norwegian and
is often used nowadays, it seems, to deice-
landicize medieval Icelandic literature,
which explains why I myself never have
taken a particular liking to it. Nevertheless,
the Icelanders shared their language with
people living in the western regions of
Norway for quite a long time, or at least
until the 15th century, when the Nordic
languages or dialects on the European con-
tinent were rapidly drifting away from the
language which the Danes, Norwegians
and Swedes once had in common, and
which we still know as Icelandic.
Eventually, all this linguistic drift brought
about a major shrinkage of the domain of
the Icelandic language.
On two occasions, the medieval
Icelanders carried out explorations beyond
their own country with the intent to found
settlements in previously unexplored parts
of the world. In the summer of 985 or 986
A.D. a fleet of twenty-five ships left the
south-west of Iceland for Greenland under
the leadership of Eirfkur the Red
Torvaldsson where he and his followers
eventually established, on the west coast of
Greenland, two different settlements with
altogether 280 farms. Almost four hundred
years later, according to information from
Icelandic Annals, the Greenlanders (the
Icelanders in Greenland) had a hostile
encounter with the natives of Greenland
who at that time were moving away from
deteriorating climatic conditions in the
northern regions of the country into its
southern parts in search of less inclement
weather. An entry from an Icelandic annal
for the year 1379 has this to say: “Skradings
(i.e. Inuit people) attacked the
Greenlanders, killing eighteen of them and
carrying off two boys into captivity.”
Nothing is included in this grimly laconic
report about the exchange of words or a
conflict between two unrelated languages.
The last reference to Greenland in the
Icelandic Annals is for 1410, when an
Icelander returned home after spending
four years in Greenland. Since then, Norse
or Icelandic people in that country have
not been heard from.
The matter of language conflict rather
than language contact is clearly addressed
and sometimes hinted at in the 13th-centu-
ry Icelandic Saga of the Greenlanders and
the Saga of Eirfkur the Red, the two
Vfnland Sagas which in part are about the
disovery of Vfnland and subsequent
attempts by members of Eirfkur the Red’s
family to establish a settlement in what is