The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2009, Qupperneq 23

Vol. 62 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
113
Greenland where even a polar bear has
invaded the world of semi-historical or lit-
erary characters whose proper domain was
on the great rivers of the European conti-
nent. Yet what is of importance is that the
poem reflects far less interest in the reasons
for the sufferings of the heroes concerned
than the way in which they surmount
them. Perhaps the extant version of the
Greenland Lay of Atli or even an older
one, now lost, was composed at Brattahh'5,
Eirfk the Red's home. It would of course
be utterly frivolous even to suggest that his
son Leif the Lucky was the author. But
who knows?
If we pause briefly to look for the
Vfnland the sight of which fascinated the
immigrant grandfather in Johann Magnus
Bjarnason’s novel towards the end of his
long and tortuous voyage from Iceland to
Halifax in the eighteen seventies, we are
unlikely to be able to determine its exact
location. But from the point of view of
19th-century pioneers, Vfnland was their
future home, an area with an attractive
name, a land where vines grow of their own
accord and where there is “abundance of
self-sown grain” to quote an early source in
which Vfnland is mentioned. The Icelandic
Vfnland rediscovered in the late 19th-cen-
tury was not a single territory marked off
by a fixed boundary. Perhaps there were as
many Vfnlands as there were Icelandic set-
tlements. We would then have to look to
the Americas rather than North America
alone since, after all, there was a small
Icelandic settlement in Brazil near Rio de
Janeiro. Acceptance of the view that in
ancient times Vfnland was an “onomastic
generalization” referring to a country or
the countries known to be west of the
Atlantic. Later, Vfnland, in the minds of
Icelandic settlers or pioneers, came to be a
fragmented territory associated with
Icelandic settlements in North America, or
possibly even South America, that is wher-
ever these settlements happened to be
founded and maintained. With this in mind
we can suggest that the early nineteen thir-
ties, when the Icelandic settlement in
Sunnybrook, B.C. came into being, marked
the end of the settlement of Vfnland.
The early voyages to the North
American continent or Vfnland led to high-
ly interesting explorations of new territo-
ries, but the explorers themselves did not
establish permanent colonies or settlements
there. They, their families and followers,
were too few in number to be able to form
a viable community. Their only option was
to return to their homes in Greenland and
Iceland where they gradually abandoned
ideas of further explorations or put them
on hold for almost 900 years. It was then
that people of the same ethnic origin as Leif
Eirfksson and Porfinn Karlsefni literally
resumed the work they and their followers
had begun. Despite this major hiatus in
exploratory enterprices we can detect a line
across the vast expanses of time being rec-
ognized and reactivated as the one having
originated with Eirfk the Red and worthy
of being continued. Despite a gap of some
nine centuries this line was picked up, so to
speak by his own people.
In the year of 1878 a small Icelandic
settlement was founded near Mountain,
North Dakota. Its very beginning was
marked by lively debates among the new-
comers on religious and philosophical mat-
ters. A few of them got together and
formed what they called “The Icelandic
Cultural Society”. The poet Stephan G.
Stephansson was the principal leader of this
new organization.
Even though The Icelandic Cultural
Society was active for only a brief period of
time, it attracted a good deal of attention
and its proclamations and duly recorded
objectives had an influence on several
young and promising North American
Icelanders. One of the objectives of the
society was to seek “humanitarianism and
fellowship; in place of unexamined confes-
sions of faith, sensible and unfettered
research; in place of blind faith, indepen-
dent conviction; and in place of ignorance
and superstition, spiritual freedom and
progress upon which no fetters are placed.”
When the Icelandic Cultural Society in
North Dakota was founded, an Icelandic
boy in the neighbourhood by the name of
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was too young to
join. He later became one of the world’s
most famous explorers and more than any