The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2009, Qupperneq 24

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #3
I 14
other man he bridges the long gap in
Greenland and Vrnland explorations. It is
evident from his writings that the free
thinkers’ spirit which permiated the
Icelandic Cultural Society had influenced
him. He had for example this to say about
his father: "Unlike most Icelanders my
father was a poor linguist, and the works of
liberal authors were, in our part of the
country, available only in English. This
handicap may have kept my father from
leaving the church and possibly finding
greater intellectual companionship among
the freethinkers.”
The freethinkers’ spirit of the North
Dakota Icelanders was in one way directed
towards their own cultural heritage which
they tried to use and did use as a founda-
tion for intellectual progress and general
advancement. Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s rem-
iniscenes from his childhood years testify
to this. “In counting my blessings from
that time, I feel that the greatest of them
was that we did not have more than the
minimum of anything . . . There were not
enough Icelandic sagas and so, when read-
ing aloud in the evening, we had to read
some of them over again, and these of
course were the best ones. Among them
was the Saga of Eric the Red, and when we
reread it, Father said that he wanted to
impress upon us that we ourselves were
now living in a western extension of the
Wineland that Eric and his descendants dis-
covered.”
Most of his academic training
Vilhjalmur Stefansson received at Harvard
University where he completed his M.A. in
Anthropology in 1906. Before that time he
had become a teaching fellow, looked upon
at Harvard as the Anthropology
Department’s specialist on the polar
regions. As he has pointed out himself this
recognition was given to him because of his
ability to read the Vinland Sagas and other
old Icelandic sources in their original lan-
guage. In addition, his article on The
Icelandic Colony in Greenland, published
in 1906 in the American Anthropologist
further shaped his career. Stefansson has
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