The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2009, Blaðsíða 18

108
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
these early voyages and explorations. Some
forty years ago, Bjarni was very much in
fashion in scholarly circles. Lately, his fame
has been diminishing quite rapidly. It no
longer appears to be politically wise to let
anyone overshadow Leif Eiriksson's
famous voyage of accidental discovery
when blown off course en route from
Norway to Greenland.
In the early 11th-century, Forfinn
Karlsefni and his family left Vrnland to take
up permanent abode in his native district of
Skagafjordur in northern Iceland. Their
departure marks the end of early attempts
made by explorers from Iceland and
Greenland to colonize parts of the North
American mainland. From Eirfk’s Saga one
may gather that the newcomers to Vrnland
were virtually driven away by the aborig-
ines of that country. In the saga’s account
one detects, on the part of the explorers
themselves, a mixture of anxiety and racial
prejudice in references to “small and evil-
looking” men with “evil” (coarse) hair.
Fatal blows were exchanged and in the
words of the author of Gr^nlendinga Saga
“neither side could understand the other’s
language.”
After some abrupt encounters with the
natives of Vrnland, Forfinn Karlsefni and
his family decided that they must return to
Iceland and seek their fortune in the district
of Skagafjordur. For the ensuing eight cen-
turies and a half there were no contacts
between Iceland and Vlnland. It is even
uncertain whether, during that long period,
anyone knew where to look for the latter.
Yet one notes that the Icelandic historian
Ari Fhorgilsson the Learned’s mention of
Vlnland in his Book of the Icelanders writ-
ten in the early 13th-century has an air of
familiarity about it. What ideas the
Greenlanders maintained about Vlnland no
one knows. On the other hand, the location
of the Markland of the Vlnland Sagas must
have been reasonably clear to people in
both Greenland and Iceland for centuries if
one is to accept as authentic an entry in the
Icelandic Annals for the year 1347 in which
a boat, on its return voyage from Markland
to Greenland, is said to have run aground
in the area of Snacfellssnes in south-western
Iceland.
Wherever the ancient Vlnland and
Markland of the Sagas may have been, it is
quite certain that, in the late 19th - century
Icelandic immigrants to Canada had not
forgotten their medieval accounts of
Vlnland and Markland. In Eirlkur
Flansson, Johann Magnus Bjarnason’s pre-
viously quoted autobiographical novel, the
protagonist’s grandfather could hardly
wait to set foot on Vlnland the Good just
before he arrived in Halifax supposedly in
the mid-eighteen seventies. About that
time a group of Icelanders tried to colonize
a hilly area in Nova Scotia, some 80 kilo-
metres south-east of Halifax and named
their settlement Markland. The community
consisted of more than 150 pioneers living
on some thirty farms, with each farm hav-
ing an Icelandic name. The Markland area
turned out to be too barren for any mean-
ingful or prosperous farming. As a result,
the Icelandic settlement came to an end in
less than a decade, at which time people
moved on to New Iceland on Lake
Winnipeg and to North Dakota.

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