The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2009, Page 20

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
Alberta an old community building bears
the name Fensalir, which is known from
Old Nordic mythology as the hall of the
goddess Frigg, Odinn’s illustrious wife. In
the New Iceland area and other Icelandic
settlements in the Interlake in Manitoba
almost every farm had its Icelandic name,
many of which were from the Old
Icelandic Sagas. To give an example, the
farm Hagi near the town Arborg comes
from the classical Laxdxlasaga set in 10th -
century southwestern Iceland. At this farm
in the Arborg area lived, in the early part of
the last century, a well-known and a well
respected man by the name of Gestur
Oddleifsson whose namesake was a 10th -
century farmer and sage living at Hagi in
Iceland, a neighbour and contemporary of
Eirfk the Red and his sons. In the province
of Saskatchewan Logberg - Thingvalla was
the name of the first Icelandic settlement,
recalling the sanctity of the Old Icelandic
outdoor assembly Aiding and its tribunal
(Law Rock).
If one goes south of the U.S. border to
North Dakota, a town within a short dis-
tance of the border bears the name of
GarSar. The Icelandic poet Stephan G.
Stephansson, one of the town’s founders,
had brought this name with him from
Iceland and thought it was appropriate for
an Icelandic pioneer town in North Dakota
since it had previously been borne by a 9th
- century Swedish seafarer and explorer
Gardar Svavarsson, the first man who cir-
cumnavigated the country which later
came to be named Iceland. Gardar named
the country after himself calling it
Gardarsholmur (Gardar's Isle). He win-
tered on the north coast of Gardar’s Isle at
a place he called Husavfk, and then left.
Gardar Svavarsson was as heathen as a
Swede can be. His Husavfk now greets vis-
itors to Manitoba on highway 9 just south
of Gimli. Heathenism no longer attaches
itself to this place. Instead, young people
flock there every summer to receive
instruction in the Christian faith and the
Icelandic language. These few examples of
place names, among many other things, tes-
tify to a very keen awareness on the part of
the Icelandic immigrants who came to this
country about 130 years ago of the history
and cultural setting of their long-gone
compatriots, people who were very distant
in time but had nonetheless made it to
North America.
The Icelandic homesteaders called the
tracts of land allocated to them in their var-
ious North American settlements landnam
(land-claims or land-takings), using the
same terminology as the mid-twelfth cen-
tury Icelandic Book of Settlements, a work
which lists some 430 of the principal set-
tlers who made land-claims in Iceland from
874-930 A.D., including both Eirfk the Red
and his father Forvald Asvaldsson. The ear-
liest writings about the settlement of New
Iceland in Canada were patterened after
this old medieval work. At this point it
should be noted that one of the two 12th-
century authors of the old Icelandic Book
of Settlements, Ari Forgilsson the Learned,
had in a still earlier historical work, the
Book of Icelanders, written a chapter on
the Greenland colony, quoting as his
source his own paternal uncle who, accord-
ing to the author, had himself been in Eirlk
the Red’s company when he went from
Iceland to Greenland to found his colony.
No special comments will be made
here on the constitution or rather the Rules
and Regulations published in 1878 for the
New Iceland colony. Yet it does not escape
one’s attention that central concepts of this
remarkable code appear to have been bor-
rowed from Iceland’s earliest law code on
which the Old Icelandic Freestate was
founded in 930 A.D. It is indeed tempting
to believe that essential parts of that code
were eventually recorded in the Laws of
Early Iceland, Gragas, which appeared in
English translation not so long ago as part
of The University of Manitoba Icelandic
Studies Series. Yet what is interesting from
our perspective is that, on the basis of the
penal section of this old code of law, Eirlk
the Red, having repeatedly come into con-
flict with his neighbours and even killed
some of them, was sentenced to outlawry.
He then began to turn his eyes toward
Greenland, and one may safely say that his
banishment had an unquestionable legal
basis in what we now know as Gragas. This
ancient and remarkable lawbook rests
upon time-honoured and priceless oral