The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2009, Blaðsíða 25

Vol. 62 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
this to say about his publication: “I may
have had my first intimation that it was
being read attentively when in April, 1906,
I received a telegram that turned me from
Africa to the Arctic.”
At this stage we may say that from our
North American-Icelandic point of view
the explorations Leif Eiriksson and his men
started one thousand years ago were all of a
sudden resumed in 1906 when Vilhjalmur
Stefansson went on his first expedition into
the Canadian Arctic, and we should add
that the ethnic background of the comman-
der himself still remained unchanged. At
the end of Stefansson’s third expedition, in
1918, the explorations in Vfnland had come
to an end. He had, at that time, added
350,000 square kilometres to the geograph-
ic map of Canada and made a great number
of scientific discoveries. He had learned the
language of Eskimos whom he at least sus-
pected were in part descended from Eric
the Red’s people in Greenland. This again
would have meant that if the physiological
and cultural traits of the Icelanders in
Greenland were transferred back to Stone
Age Victoria Island they had to have made
a journey backwards in time over a span of
some nine thousand years. After all,
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was not only an
explorer but a poet of note. To quote him
directly he once said that “the explorer is
the poet of action and exploring is the poet-
ry of deeds.”
That Stefansson sometimes viewed his
own explorations in a wide historical con-
text, including both Eric the Red and Leif
Eiriksson, is evident from his writings. On
one occasion he had this to say: “The story
of Scandinavian penetration westward
from the time of Eirik the Red until the
present was made into a modern Icelandic
saga in 1927 by the chief librarian of
Iceland Dr. Gudmundur Finnbogason,
when he wrote the first book length
account of my life.” Another unifying fac-
tor not to be overlooked when we try to
view our explorer heroes and the literature
about them from a sensible perspective is
implied by the very names they themselves
created for the territories they discovered
and explored. Accordingly, the names
Greenland (Gratnland), Wineland
(Vfnland) and The Friendly Arctic, which
was Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s famous desig-
nation for the polar regions, share a seman-
tic feature or component which attracts
rather than deters.
A decade and a half ago I had the good
fortune of being invited to give an address
at The Explorers Club of New York. As I
arrived on the Club premises, an attendant
on duty took me to the Vilhjalmur
Stefansson wing on the main floor. There I
was greeted by a huge but quite friendly
looking polar bear. Somehow, the idea then
occurred to me that this particular bear,
which had been given a permanent place in
a spaceous room on Manhattan Island, was
the same beast as had made its presence felt
in a heroic poem composed in Greenland
some nine or ten centuries earlier. In Old
Icelandic we have the saying “ad hafa
bjarnyl af einhverju”, which literally means
to draw a bear’s warmth from something.
What is meant is that if we are smart
enough we can draw a pleasant warmth
from almost any features of our environ-
ment, even such awe-inspiring beasts as
polar bears are reputed to be. With this in
mind I look upon my friend, the
Manhattan polar bear, a beast which at
varying intervals attached itself to either
Eirik the Red or Vilhjalmur Stefansson, as
a powerful unifying symbol for two out-
standing explorers who had the good for-
tune of being able to befriend the icy
mountains of Greenland and the ice floes of
the Canadian Arctic.