The Icelandic connection - 01.03.2018, Qupperneq 47

Vol. 70 #1
ICELANDIC CONNECTION
45
Kristjan Niels Julius (K.N.)
four-part project
by Bill Holm
Reprinted with permission from Logberg-Heimskringla, 7 December 1990
Kristjan Niels Julius (KN.) was born
in north Iceland in 1860 and came
to North America with the large wave
of immigrationin 1880. He was poor in
Iceland, and remained poor here. He tried
the Icelandic settlements in Canada, then
Duluth, and finally settled in his thirties
in Mountain, North Dakota, on the west
ridge of the Red River Valley just south of
Manitoba, ked as a farm hand, grave digger
and brick layer and lived in the south room
of a small farmhouse that also housed 11
children, parents and a grandmother. He
never married. He never attended school, on
either side of the ocean. He was frequently
drunk on vanilla extract, home brew, or any
other alcohol he could cadge. Once in North
Dakota, he never traveled further than a few
miles from the farm where he had been
given a room. At 60, he went to Winnipeg
to supervise the galley proofs of a book of
poems, but 10 years later, he was too broke
to afford a good suit, and was ashamed to
go back to Winnipeg in his old rough farm
clothes, all he owned. When he was 75 years
old, the Icelandic community gave him a
birthday dinner and celebration, but he was
drunk and had to be sobered up and then
supervised in the Lutheran minister's house
in order to be presentable to say a few words.
The irony is that he was a vocal and notorious
unbeliever and skeptic but considered the
minister one of his best friends. The funeral
home for which be dug graves provided him
with a free funeral when he died in 1936.
The facts of his life would merely be
a typical story of tragicomic immigrant
muddling and failure in a harsh obscure
place, were it not for the fact that he is
also one of the greatest and best known
and loved poets of the Icelandic language
in the 20th century. His complete poems
have never been out of print in Icelandic,
and were reissued in 1989 in a handsome,
ferociously expensive standard edition. At a
conservative estimate, 100,000 people know
substantial amounts of bis work by heart.
The slightly spicy, obscene, satiric poems
that he was too gentlemanly to print have
been handed down intact orally for 54 years
since he died. I have heard versions of them
from at least 25 people, on both sides of the
Atlantic.
This remarkably unremarkable man
can tell us something with his life and
work, and with the perceptions of, and
stories about him that still persist two
generations after his death, about the inner
life of the pickled-in-amber immigrant
culture that persisted for a few generations
in every ethnic group. It had amputated
the old world but didn't have time enough
in one life to grow the new one inside
itself. KN. Julius wrote Icelandic salted
with English words, peppered with the
malapropisms of immigrants who attached