The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Qupperneq 48

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #2
television, computer or telephone, he
demonstrated how these devices often dis-
tract us from what’s important, robbing us
of something essential to our humanity,
and how easily we can live without them, if
we so choose.
“Every Icelandic story,” he wrote,
“whether the ancient sagas or the lively
gossip around the coffee table, begins with
the ritual chronicling of the xtt—family
history.” It is seemingly impossible for
Icelanders to get very far in conversation or
in correspondence without turning to
genealogy, and Bill Holm was no excep-
tion. So, along with all else that he was able
to see through the windows at Brimnes, he
gazed steadily at his own family of origin,
relating stories from his own childhood
and from the lives of his recent forebears.
Unlike those who pursue genealogy in
search of nobles, saints and heroes, Holm
willingly accepted his descent from a long
line of “bottom dwellers”—the working
men and women from whom most of us
have inherited our genes!
Holm got the occasional fact wrong,
such as when he refers to the burning of
witches in seventeenth-century Iceland
(they were actually hanged) or, more prob-
lematically, traces the division of the
Icelandic immigrants into Lutherans and
Unitarians back to the time of Rev. Pall
Thorlaksson. There were three major reli-
gious cleavages among the Icelanders—the
Unitarian separation being the second, by
which time Pall Thorlaksson was long
dead. In fact, several of the details in his
chapter “Christianity Under the Glacier”
are erroneous: Stephan G. Stephansson had
no relationship and only limited awareness
of the Norwegian poet Kristofer Janson,
nor had Janson (whose name is misspelled)
been the victim of “ruin and exile” on the
part of the Norwegian Lutheran church, let
alone been drummed out of the Lutheran
ministry in which he had never, in fact,
served. Similarly, Holm often exaggerates
for effect, as when he asserts, “Icelandic
society proceeded directly from the Middle
Ages to the cell phone, the airplane and the
Internet.” But Bill Holm was a storyteller
and polemicist—a master of literary hyper-
bole—not a historian, so he can perhaps be
forgiven the embellishments and embroi-
dery that make for a more lively tale.
Other times he proved to be right on
the mark, even when we might have pre-
ferred him to be wrong. Writing well
before any of us became aware of how
fragile Iceland’s financial boom of the last
decade would prove to be, Holm seems
prescient in his alarm at its foundations,
motivations and consequences. “When vast
fortunes accumulate, as they recently have
in Iceland,” he wrote, “and a whole culture
seems to join in the money grab, it does
not give off a good odor. It cannot, by its
very nature, any more than a pig lot or a
pulp mill can.”
Throughout its pages, The Windows
oi Brimnes reveals Bill Holm’s vocation as
a poet, even if it’s never a good idea to
identify it on one’s income tax return.
Even in his prose—no, especially in his
prose—the poetic spirit shines through in
its full elegance, whether he was writing
about plovers or politics.
“Your place on this planet,” he main-
tained, “if you are a human of some sort, is
where (among other things) the light feels
right to you.” The light that shone through
the windows at Brimnes clearly felt right to
Bill Holm and it allowed him to view the
world and its inhabitants clearly, conscien-
tiously and compassionately. Now the
light reflects back to us in the form of this
testament from Brimnes and, as its pages
illuminate our understanding of the world
around us, its light feels right to me.