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Laxness and the Holdomor
Chapter 9 When I was a kid, my father took us to Seven Sister’s Falls. There’s the hydro dam, the river, islands, we went for a hike, had a picnic lunch, but what I remembered most about that trip was...
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June 17: the king’s visit
“Have you heard what they are saying?” Fusi asked. He was cutting grass. “No, I haven’t time for gossip,” Bergir replied. “The king is coming to Iceland.” “The king? What king?” “The king of Denmark....
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Our Ancestral Loggers
For this prairie boy who grew up in the mixed poplar, spruce, birch forests of the Interlake of Manitoba, the trees of British Columbia will never lose their overwhelming majesty. There are, of...
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Icelandic Migration to Salt Lake City
When I was at the INL convention in Seattle, I heard Prof. Fred E. Woods give a talk on the emigration of Icelanders to Utah in the 1800s. I was fascinated because I had read Laxness’s novel Paradise...
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The Sinking of Iceland´s Góðafoss, 1944
On November 23, the Icelanders of Victoria club showed the Icelandic film, Árásin á Góðafoss. The Góðafoss was an Eimskip ship that was torpedoed and sunk during 1944 by a German Uboat. If Western...
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Book reviews: Fires of the Earth and Island On Fire
Fires of the Earth The Laki Eruption 1783-84 By the Rev. Jón Steingrimsson (trans. by Keneva Kunz) As I read Fires of the Earth, the translation of Jón´s account of the Laki eruption and its...
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Oblivion by Indridason
I’m a great fan of Analdur Indridason’s writing. I’ve read all his books that have been translated into English and I eagerly look forward to the next one. I bought Oblivion and, although I usually go...
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Cornucopia
When the Icelandic immigrants came to Canada, they left a country where the soil was only suitable for grazing. Even that grazing land was only about one percent of the total land because the rest of...
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Yrsa’s Someone To Watch Over Me
Yrsa Sigurdardottir Someone to Watch Over Me Hodder and Stoughton, 15.99 Trans. B Philip Roughton I’ve had lunch and supper with Yrsa. I was impressed. Not just by her writing but because not only is...
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A Perplexing Mystery
The Silence of the Sea Yrsa Sigurdardottir Hodder, paperback, 15.99 One of the great strengths of Yrsa’s murder mysteries is the existence of a protagonist in Thora Gudsmundsdottir who is so well...
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