The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Qupperneq 27

Vol. 62 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
25
probably now the Canadian Maritimes,
shortly after the year 1000 A.D. The Saga
of the Greenlanders describes a band of
Algonquins (Beothuks), the natives of the
Maritimes, on their visit to the houses of
Torfinnur Karlsefni, where they intended
to do business with the newcomers from
Greenland. Thinking that the visitors
meant harm, Porfinnur barred the doors of
his houses against them. The author of the
saga explains this unfortunate and bizarre
business meeting with the simple statement
that “neither side could understand the
other’s language.” At the time of this con-
frontation, neither the Algonquins of the
Maritimes nor the Icelanders from
Greenland knew that all languages are the
same in the deep structure, something
which Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT
claimed to have found out a long time
afterwards. I doubt though if knowledge of
Chomskyan deep structure in grammar
would have been of much help in this
instance. An impenetrable language barrier
remained the obstacle which, among other
things, made both camps suspicious and
hostile towards each other. In the end, the
Icelanders from Greenland, with odds
obviously against them, aborted their plans
of permanent settlement in the new world
and went back to Greenland and Iceland.
For them the atmosphere in Vinland seems
to have grown tense beyond endurance in a
short period of time.
Voluspa (The Sibyl’s Prophecy) is a
10th-century Icelandic poem which I have
ventured to call the Bible of the North. It
traces the history of the universe from the
time of Creation to Doomsday and ends
with Revelation. The principal characters
are the heathen gods of the Northmen. In
the words of Sigurdur Nordal, “The Sibyl’s
Prophecy has won greater fame from with-
in the Scandinavian countries, and even
beyond, than any other poem.” In a way I
always feel as if, through this literary mas-
terpiece, its anonymous author conquered
the entire universe, making Iclandic there-
by the universal language on earth and in
heaven. This feeling has been reinforced by
the fact that another Icelandic mythological
poem dating from the same time as The
Sibyl’s Prophecy has been ascribed to the
supreme god Odinn himself. Surely, a
supreme divinity always uses a language
which is universal and therefore under-
stood everywhere in the world.
During the last quarter of the 19th cen-
tury and the first decade and a half of the
20th century, a number of people left
Iceland and founded settlements in Canada
and the United States. This virtual exodus
brought about the only expansion of lan-
guage territory the Icelanders ever
achieved. About 1940, censuses for Canada
and the United States included information
about some forty thousand people in
North America who claimed that Icelandic
was their first language and that, occasion-
ally, they still used it in their day-to-day
affairs. In the North American-Icelandic
communities the immigrants'mother
tongue finally became “the other compo-
CONSULATE OF
Iceland
Gordon J. Reykdal
Honorary Consul
17631 - 103 Avenue, Edmonton,
Alberta T5S 1N8 CANADA
Tel.: (780) 408-5118
Cell: (780) 497-1480
Fax: (780) 443-2653
E-mail: gord@csfmancial.ca