When we say we want to embrace our heritage, we aren’t just talking about how much we like eating vinarterta or soaking in the Blue Lagoon. We’re talking about all everything that has made up our heritage, everything that made our great grandparents and great great grandparents, etc. who they were. We’re talking about all of Icelandic society.

We’re also talking about making an effort to understand the daily lives of the people. A big part of those daily lives were taxes.

There were numerous taxes but the major tax that Icelandic farmers paid was the tax to support the poor, the paupers.

Who were the paupers and why did they exist?

There were lots of ways to become a pauper.

Fishing was very dangerous. Burton says four out of every ten male deaths was by drowning. One can probably expect that those deaths by drowning were fishermen. An open row boat might hold fifteen men. Virtually every description of Icelandic open boats I’ve read describes them as leaky or very leaky. North Sea weather is repeatedly described as violent with high winds and waves. Bringing a boat ashore where there were no docks or jetties meant launching and returning through the surf. The surf was always dangerous.

When a fish boat sank or overturned there were seldom survivors. The fishermen were weighed down with their sheepskin clothes, most, maybe none, could swim, swimming described in the sagas was long forgotten. The water was freezing cold. Say fifteen men drowned. These would not all be single, hired men. Many would be farmers, crofters, men with families, and since there was no such thing as birth control many of these families would be large.  If eight of the men had wives and an average of six children, there were now 54 paupers.

Then there were avalanches. There are many reports of good farmland being destroyed by cascades of rock. Sometimes these avalanches also buried houses and people but sometimes they just destroyed the  home field. That was enough. In a few minutes, the independent farmer could be reduced to poverty. Without a home field with its supply of grass, sheep and cows could not be fed and had to be slaughtered. A live sheep or cow was worth much more alive producing wool and milk than dead. With no home field, with destroyed grazing land, a farmer was reduced to penury. There were no other jobs. If twenty people lived on the farm, all had to seek employment elsewhere. Some might be hired as laborers, of course, but some not.

Rich farms with good land, with shore rights, with boats, with owners with political connections, could survive some bad seasons but small farmers could be reduced to poverty by bad weather. A short growing season, unseasonal snows, rain, hail, could mean not enough grass to feed animals. Combined that with a poor fishing catch and there was starvation. Farmers on marginal land couldn’t survive.

Of course, there also were volcanic eruptions. Volcanic eruptions were good ways of creating paupers. It’s pretty hard to grow grass on a lava stream. Lava streams in Iceland are long and broad. They destroy everything in their path. People might flee but with grazing fields, home fields, houses, cattle, reduced to ashes, entombed in solid rock, where do the survivors go for food and shelter?

It was not just the people on farms swept away by lava who suffered. The poisonous gases and the particulates spread from the eruptions did great damage. In places, the grass was covered with silica granules. The cattle, from eating the grass, got cuts in their mouths, sores developed and from these, blood poisoning. The cattle had to be killed. 

Old age, if you survived to an old age, could turn you into one of the poor wretches described by travellers, living at the mercy of the hreppar and the farmer. You might have got by working as a farm hand and fisherman, never making enough money to buy land and animals, to have your own place but, eventually, disease and infirmity would make it necessary for you to go back to the hreppar where you were born and ask for welfare.

Thuridur (177-1863) started working on her father’s boat when she was eleven.l When she was seventeen, she was working on her brother’s boat as a full seaman. She became a foreman. She supported herself and her children but in old age she had to ask the hreppar for assistance.

Or, you could be an orphan. There were lots of orphans for epidemics were common, women dying in childbirth was common. In spite of all the restrictions on marriage, illegitimate births happened. In some syslas, they were one in every three births.

There were few ways of becoming rich but many ways of becoming a pauper. You might, for example, have become addicted to cheap Danish brandy. You might have had one or more children out of wedlock. You might have had an accident or become ill with a debilitating disease and Burton says there are so many diseases that all a writer can do is list them.

With so many ways to become a pauper, it is no wonder that there were many of them and since they had to be supported by those who had enough money to pay taxes, that is the land owning farmers, it is no wonder that the farmers didn’t want anyone marrying until he could prove that he could support himself, his wife and the inevitable children.

Tomasson, in Iceland, the First New Society, says that in 1870, 5.6% of the population were paupers.

Burton says that the farmer, besides paying regular taxes, also pays three tithes: to the priest, the Church and the poor. The tax to pay for the poor is the largest tax of all. It was called fátækra útsvar. This is on top of what is called the poor rate. It is as much as all the other taxes  put together. In some parishes, it is double the amount of all the other taxes.

Burton, in 1872, regards pauperism as evil. His solution, when our ancestors were getting ready to leave Iceland, is to get rid of the “sturdy vagrants who infest the land by providing free passages to America, or elsewhere.” It would be interesting to know who these “sturdy vagrants” are.

My great great grandfather, Valgardur Jonsson, came to Canada in 1878. He was definitely not sturdy. I expect that he was ill when he left Iceland. He died three years after he arrived. Ethel B. Harley (Mrs. Alec Tweedie) in A Girl’s Ride in Iceland, pub. 1889, looks from her ship’s cabin to see 40 Icelandic emigrants. These are our ancestors. “men, women, and children, many of the former quite old, apparently not more than one in five capable of a good day’s work”.  These were not the “sturdy vagrants” Burton wrote about from 1872. From her description some of these may very well have been paupers having their way paid to North America. England had got rid of its undesirables by shipping them to Australia. Iceland got rid of some of its tax burden by shipping some people not capable of a good day’s work to Amerika.

I wonder, though, if my great grandfather, Ketill, was one of those sturdy vagrants? He was eighteen, healthy, when he came with his father to New Iceland. His mother, his twin, and a sister had all died. There was just him and his ill father. Were he and his father such a burden on the tax paying farmers that it was cheaper to pay their fare to New Iceland than to keep them? Ketill came to Canada prepared to work, at fishing, on the railway, building a dairy, then a farm supply business, then a farm. He may have been irascible and sometimes difficult to get along with but no one could ever accuse him of being lazy.

Guðmundur Stefánsson who emigrated in 1873 writes to Iceland saying that emigration is good “But it is no good for those to come who are neither adaptable nor ready for hard work.“ For him to say this there must have been some he thought not willing to do hard work. He did not say not able. He said not willing.   

Who were then, these healthy, lazy louts who lived off the public dole? They, the farmers who paid a  heavy poor tax to support them and resented it (nothing new in that, we still have great effusions of resentment from taxpayers over people on welfare), the parish officials who officiated, the people who made the decision to solve the  pauper problem by shipping people to Amerika–all of them–are our heritage. They all sound terribly human if not always humane. I embrace them all for they struggled against forces beyond their control in an environment where day to say survival was an accomplishment and, if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here. And neither would you.

 

 Photos by WDV

Atli, the Icelandic Consul General, explaining the Icelandic economy to his second cousin, Myrna MacFadden who is from Port Alberni.

I’m not the world’s worst housekeeper but I don’t put a lot of effort into dusting. I’m too busy writing, chopping down gorse and broom, hacking away at English ivy, too busy doing research to spend much time on checking for dust on the trim in the living room. The carpets get an occasional vacuum. Most of the time, I live in the kitchen, office, bedroom and wander occasionally into the living room and dining room. I’m always a bit surprised to discover that I have a guest bathroom. You get used to what you are used to.

So, when I was on Salt Spring Island cutting gorse for JO and said to her, I’m going to have a reception for Atli Asmundsson, the Icelandic consul general, and his wife Þruður, she blanched, and said something like, “Oh, my God.” Or Mein Gott. Or Ekki Gott.I’m not sure since the battery in my hearing aide had died.

“What?” I asked.

“Your house!” she said. From the look on her face, it was obvious that she was remembering cobwebs so large they held the bodies of small birds, dust bunnies as big as tumbleweed, wine stains on carpets, my mountainous piles of papers and books threatening always to topple over and bury unwary guests.

According to her, if there was dust along the window sills, cobwebs in the corners, women guests would all notice it. I pshawed, but then I remembered what my mother told me. She got married when she was sixteen. Moved to Gimli, Manitoba. Joined a couple of the women’s groups. They rotated meetings, going from one member’s house to another. When it came to her hosting her first meeting, she was still not quite ready when a half  hour before the appointed time, one of the matriarchs of the town appeared, noticed that my mother was still in the dress she wore while cleaning  house and said, “Aren’t you ready yet?”

The matriarch was wearing white gloves. She proceeded to run her index finger along various surfaces to see if they had been properly dusted.

Remembering this, I quit pshawing and went to work scrubbing the deck and the balcony. There is a very large fir tree at the corner of the deck. A fir tree that litters my deck with needles, pollen, and bits of branches. The pollen provides feed stock for black mold that requires a long handled deck brush, a B-mop, hot water, soap and a lot of scrubbing. In the shade of the tree, green mold multiplies.

The hot tub, I did not want a hot tub, it came with the house, I long ago gave up adolescent fantasies of partying in a hot tub with hot babes in G-string bikinis, was a disaster.  I’d just about forgotten that there was a hot tub on the back deck. I seldom go there. Small ferns grew out of some of the cracks of the frame. I never thought I’d spend time weeding a hot tub.

There is a brick ramp that leads into my garage. The bricks are beautiful. However, the spaces between the bricks collect pollen from the tree, dust from the road, and turn it into soil that nurtures weeds. These weeds are about the same size as a birch forest in Iceland.

I took a pointed trowel and went along every crack, vertically and horizontally, until the roots of every weed lay shrivelling in the sun. 

I swept my side of the road. That’s the kind of neighbourhood this is. No sidewalks. But every one sweeps their side of the road. This is hard for me to adjust to. I grew up in Gimli. My father had boats, nets, anchors, buoy poles stored in the yard. Fishing nets hanging from crossbars. Oiled corks strung like sausage rings on more crossbars. When my mother suggested my father mow the lawn, he brought home two goats.

JO said things like your carpets need cleaning. She even provided a machine that would do the job. I’d never seen one before. It was purple. She cleaned the hallway carpet, then said, “Come and look at this. I’ve left a small spot uncleaned so you can see the difference.” It was true. The carpet had darkened with age and the tracked-in fir dust.  Washed, it was a surprisingly light grey.

Apparently, there is something called “detail cleaning.” Or so JO says. I’m not sure. She may be putting me on. But I went to work on the en-suite bathroom just in case someone needed to use it. Surprising where dust gathers.  At the top of the shower. How does it get there? Dust, like life, is a mystery.

Every time I went to say “Nobody will notice” to JO’s list of what needed to be done, I remembered the matriarch with the white gloves.

“What are your plans for food?.”

“Costco.”

There is, lurking in the dark corners of every man’s soul, a messy adolescent, a belief in serendipity. There is, it would seem, in the dark corners of every woman’s soul, a need to organize the mess, to have a place for everything and everything in its place. I keep everything on the top of my desk because if I file it, I forget about it and rediscover it, with great surprise, years later.

“Wine, sparkling apple juice, Pellegrino, coffee, need wine glasses and cups,”she said.

I went through my cupboards. Thirteen wine glasses. Six cups and saucers and another four china cups from my grandmother’s china set.

I found a rental company on the internet. Turns out it is just around the corner on Quadra Street. It’s the most amazing place. You can rent anything. Leprechaun hats, big shamrocks. I nearly rented a Viking costume. One that had a helmet with horns.

I made a scouting trip to Costco. I usually try to avoid Costco. Nothing against it, just that my father liked to buy big. My mother lived in terror of his shopping trips to Winnipeg. He came home once all excited because there was an entire semi-trailer of paint for sale at the salvage company where he liked to shop. He was supposed to buy four gallons of white paint so he could paint the house.

When I think Costco, I think of my father. When I go through the door of Costco, he possesses my mind. The words “Buy lots” overwhelm my mind. I start to look for the largest dolly available even though I’m just coming for yogurt, coffee, a fruit tray, a veggie tray, some cheese.

When I resist the urge to buy big and am checking out, I feel embarrassed. In front of me is a woman with two carts, pushing one, pulling the other, piled high, thousands of dollars of everything. Behind me is a guy with a cart. He has gallon jugs of mayonnaise, five gallon containers of olive oil, cases of mangoes, enough bread for one thousand sandwiches, peanut butter by the gallon. When I get to the checkout girl, I always end up making excuses for having bought so little.

 Fred Bjarnason discussing the intricacies of being a chef with Judy Wilson and Linda Bjarnason, both of Nanaiamo. They braved driving over the dreaded Malahat to join the party.

The evening before the reception, I bought a patio set, a table and two chairs. Metal. Nowadays, everything comes in boxes. You’re expected to assemble what you buy using directions written by someone whose learned English off corn flakes boxes. The nightmare of Christmas Eve is now with us every day. I started to put together a chair. Three legs fit but not the fourth. The factory hadn’t drilled the necessary holes. The next morning, I raced to Zellers, gave them the pieces, grabbed a display chair and fled through the door. Nothing beeped. No sirens screamed. No police cars cut me off before I made it home.

At two thirty when the first guests arrived, JO had everything organized. Bottles of bubbly on the dining room table, food around the perimeter, everything overlooked by the ceramic cat I’d bought for a centrepiece, there were daffodils and ferns in a vase on the patio table.

None of the guests wore white gloves. If they checked for dust, they did so discretely. Thank God. Instead, they engaged in lively conversations, chatted with Atli and Þruður, Atli gave a marvelous, funny, informative talk, then answered questions, the food mostly got eaten, the wine bottles drained, the coffee cups used. There was lots of laughter. The weather was grand.It was an afternoon to remember.

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PS: Today, I returned to Zellers and, amazingly, surprisingly, wonderfully, after looking at the two right legs, a clerk went and got me another display chair. Now, that is good customer service.

Photo supplied by Ken Kristjanson

By Ken Kristjanson

My father’s father, Siggi, was born April 25, 1879 at Skagafjorður, Iceland. Shortly thereafter, his father, Kristjan, died from consumption (tuberculosis). Bad luck dogged the people of northern Iceland. The fjord ice remained longer than normal, preventing the fishermen from getting out to sea.

To make matters worse, the cold weather produced a poor hay crop. Unable to feed their animals through the coming winter, the farmers had to sell their sheep at distressed prices. Many in the area looked to North America as a place where they could start a new life.

Grandfather Siggi’s mother was having a desperate time caring for her family. When a local childless couple, Hannes and Ingiborg Jónsson, offered to adopt my grandfather and take him to Canada, my great-grandmother, with a heavy heart, gratefully agreed.

Their trip wasn‘t finished. Ahead of them were three miles by oxen to their homestead north of Gimli. It was located on a small creek which they called Skipalak, Ship‘s Harbour. There the Jónssons kept a small flat-bottomed boat which they used to cautiously fish Lake Winnipeg.

Siggi, as he grew up, tried many occupations. He was a commercial fisherman at age 12 at Albert’s P:oint on Humpbuck Bay. He drove a hansom cab for Bardal and Sons Funeral Emporium in Winnipeg. He clerked at Tergesen’s general store in Gimli.

He was even a contract mail hauler. Twice a month, he walked or hauled by horse, the mail from Cavalier, ND to Icelandic River (present day Riverton). He bragged that he worked for both Queen Victoria and the President of the USA at the same time. I have a letter addressed S. Jonasson (Sigtryggur Jonasson, the “Father of New Iceland”) dated 1897. It could very well have been carried by my grandfather.

From these disparate beginnings, he began a lifelong love affair with Lake Winnipeg, graduating to fisherman, boat owner and fish station operator. Eventually, the Canadian Pacific Railway extended its rail line north from Winnipeg Beach to Gimli, Manitoba. This was partly to keep pace with the new Province of Manitoba’s expansion from its “postage stamp” configuration of 1870, but more important, it was a good business move—hauling freight and passengers was immediately profitable for the railroad.

The railway hauled in settlers and supplies and, on the return trip, took cord wood and fish to Winnipeg. The cord wood was to supply fuel for the stoves and furnaces of the people of Winnipeg. The fish was shipped to the USA.

In those years, the fishing was good with tens of thousands of pounds of pickerel, sturgeon, whitefish and goldeye shipped south. Fishing, however, was seasonal. My grandfather had a job between seasons as a bartender at the Lakeview Hotel in Gimli. Here, he met the hard-living, hard-drinking railroad workers. After hours, he participated in their nightly card games—he was a natural gambler, a born risk-taker.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was totally against this apparent career change. She was an early supporter of Nellie McClung and the suffragette movement, as well as being a strong supporter of the Good Templars. My grandfather returned to fishing. In those days, the summer whitefish season on the north end of Lake Winnipeg started June 1 and continued uninterrupted until Oct. 15.

The fishermen sailed in open sailboats with an overall length of 28 ft. They usually ranged about 30 miles from the fish station. There were no gas stoves to heat food or to make hot coffee. My grandfather related years later that towards the end of the season it was not uncommon for the sails to freeze solid.

This required them to beat the sails with boards so that they could haul them up the mast. In the summer of 1922,he and his crew were fishing at Warren’s Landing at the north end of Lake Winnipeg. A couple of Hudson Bay men were travelling to visit their post at Norway house.

As the Nelson River is not navigable at night, they were forced to stay over at Warren’s Landing. To pass the evening they asked the local RCMP officer if h e k new any card players. The Bay men whispered to each other that they would clean out the locals before proceeding downriver to Norway House. The Mountie contacted my grandfather and the game was on. Needless to say it was the Bay men who came up short in the morning. Their complaints to the RCMP about a fixed game were waved off.

At first light my grandfather cleared his throat, lit a cigar, took a swallow Gooderham &Worts, then assembled his crew and headed for the fishing grounds. Fishing was good that day. However, just as they were finishing lifting their nets, a major storm blew up from the northeast. To prevent their overloaded sailboat from sinking they tacked to the nearest shelter.

The Spider Islands didn’t offer much lee form the wind. They managed to get behind one of the bigger islands and beached their craft. Hungry, wet and totally exhausted, they built a fire and cooked some of their catch. In the morning, while the storm was still raging, Grampa Siggi took out of his pocked a huge roll of sodden bills. As one of the crew was later to relate, “There we were placing rocks on the wet bills to try and dry them out while the wind howled. We had all this money and couldn’t buy a cup of hot coffee.

 (Ken Kristjanson comes from a family with generations of experience of fishing on Lake Winnipeg.)

Sally Ito is a writer, editor, teacher, and translator living in Winnipeg with her husband 
and two children. Her most recent book is the poetry collection Alert to Glory (
Turnstone Press, 2011). Buy What the Bear Said at McNally Robinson Booksellers (click on the 
line below): 

http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9780888013804/w-d-valgardson/bear-said?blnBKM=1

I love the Gimli Viking. He’s been a part of my life since 1967. He was created by Gisur Eliasson, a friend, artist and professor. Being created by Gisur, how could he be anything but friendly?

I love him because he has horns on his helmet. That means that he is our New Iceland Viking. He is not a real Viking. Real Vikings, unfortunately, did nasty things. Viking means pirate. The whole purpose in life for a pirate was to steal as much as he could. Pirates were not brave warriors. They were plunderers. They chose soft targets. You know, monasteries full of monks who were busy praying, singing, copying and creating manuscripts. These weren’t warrior monks practicing Kung Fu. They were the educated segment of society that preserved and created knowledge. Today, it would be like a motorcycle gang descending on a university campus, burning the buildings, killing the professors, and kidnapping the students to sell into slavery.

I know that the Vikings, the Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, and some Icelanders, who went Viking, that is on pirate raids, eventually settled down. We all get older. Viking longboats were great technology for the times but they weren’t first class travel for aging bones. When they settled, the Vikings created societies and, with those societies, they developed cultures. Many aspects of that culture is admirable.

However, most people who rah, rah Vikings, don’t know anything about Viking culture. Unless, of course, it is from movies or comic books. After a few beers, it’s yah, we’re Vikings, we fight, we kill, we plunder. We take those Irish women as slaves. They get excited at the idea of Irish women as slaves. My response is “Get a girlfriend.” A little sex and you’ll not get so excited over an Irish slave fantasy.

I like the Gimli Viking because those horns on his helmet say he’s not a real Viking. He’s our Viking. He’s the Viking of our imagination. He’s an image of something we admire. Our people who came to Canada were so poor they had to have government help to relocate within Canada. They were laborers, domestics, paupers, farmers coming from the poorest country in Europe.

The Gimli statue captures the idea of nobility, of strength, of bravery, of seeking new lands, of opportunity. Interestingly, it’s positioned to look westward, at the land, not at Lake Winnipeg. The statue is not looking to leave, to go raiding, but to settle. He’s coming to New Iceland to be a dairy farmer, a sheep farmer, a grain farmer, a railway worker, a logger, a ditch digger, a fisherman. The first settlers of Iceland and the settlers of New Iceland had that in common. They weren’t going raiding. They were coming to settle the land.

 It was not Vikings who settled Iceland. It was Norwegian farmers. They weren’t going Viking. They didn’t go to Iceland to plunder it. They went to settle it. They brought cows and sheep and horses. They brought families. They might have looked a bit like the Gimli statue, but they, too, looked landward, looked for places to settle, to raise dairy cows and sheep.

There’s nothing wrong with admiring Vikings. There is much about Viking culture to admire. However, to admire it, you’ve got to know it. To know it, you’ve got to make the effort to read about it. Drinking six beers and eating some dried cod don’t make anyone a Viking or an expert on Viking history.

The next time you are in Gimli, go visit the Viking statue. Rub his knee for luck. If you are of Icelandic descent, put your hand on him for a moment and be grateful that through the centuries of political and economic exploitation, your people held onto the spirit of independence the statue represents so it was still there when they had a chance to sail to North America.

The model for my great great grandparents wasn’t of Viking raiders or pirates. It was of farmers fleeing an oppressive king to settle in a new land with new opportunities. That’s how they were similar to people like the Viking in the Viking statue.