Sverrir Sigurdsson's Blog
May 18, 2021
Digging into My Roots
A memoirist is supposed to depend mostly on his memory. But when I started writing my memoirs, I felt what was stored in my brain wasn’t enough. To get to the bottom of who I was, I needed to burrow into the consciousness of the people I came from.
My dad had researched the family tree of my maternal grandmother and traced it all the way to our ancestors who lived in Sognefjord, Norway in the late seventh century. In other words, I’m a descendant of the original Vikings who left Norway for Iceland in protest over King Harald the Beautiful Hair’s efforts to unify the country. My ancestral pantheon includes Erik the Red and his son, Leif Eriksson the explorer. But names alone weren’t enough; I wanted to know these people, how they lived, what they did in life, and what they were made of.
I started by digging into my grandparents’ stories. My maternal grandmother was no stranger to me as she lived with the family until she died. She was as gentle as a lamb with me, but she had to have the heart of a lioness to face down the tragedy of losing her husband and son in one fell swoop and continue to raise her four other children. The other three grandparents, however, had passed away before I was born.
Since I was located in the US, I was worried that accessing material for my memoirs might pose a challenge. To my delight, the internet brought the world to my fingertips. My first seminal find happened while browsing the online catalogue of the Icelandic National Library. My Uncle Óli’s name appeared in a cultural heritage project conducted by the library some years ago. I emailed the librarian, who promptly sent me the digitized cassette tapes of his interview. I clicked on one of the files, and there was my long-dead uncle speaking to me in his gravelly voice. In the interviews, he describes life as a seaman fishing the rough seas around Iceland. Having started his maritime career at the age of ten, the working age of Icelandic children in those days, he had plenty to tell. His words fill five hours of recording.
His accounts also shed light on his father, my grandfather. He was a self-made man who started as an orphaned farmhand and ended as skipper of a lucrative fishing vessel called Gyða. One day in 1910, his ship disappeared during a storm. Forty some years later, the ship’s mast was recovered from the bottom of the fjord, but none of the remains of the skipper, his first-born son and the other six crew members have been found. Uncle Óli would have gone down with them if he hadn’t stayed behind to take a school leaving exam that day.
On another internet search, I stumbled on the digitized logbook of Gyða’s first captain. The log is typically terse and dry, recording the weather, the catch, and the ship’s location, which could reach as far north as the Polar Circle. Some entries are more interesting than others, and here is one:
“A flu epidemic ravaged the town that winter. By the time Gyða set sail, three men had come down with the flu, and a fourth would join them by the time they reached the fishing grounds. Despite good weather and an abundance of fish, the lines were idle because all but the skipper and one crew member were in bed, delirious with fever. When the skipper finally succumbed to the flu, some of the other patients had recovered sufficiently to execute the sailing chores. A few days later, the crew was still weak but well enough to resume fishing. However, the bait, herring, had gone bad because the ice had melted while they were ill.”
I struck a goldmine on the website www.timarit.is. Until recently, accessing newspaper articles in Icelandic papers would have been a formidable task. But a few years ago, the University of Iceland and the National Libraries of Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland joined hands to digitize every newspaper article and periodical printed from the beginning of news publishing in the 1800s until today. To date, almost six million pages of searchable text are available to anyone for free at the site.
A story about my father’s side of the family came from an unexpected source—a Canadian newspaper that serves the Icelandic diaspora in North America. This heroic tale of devastation and salvation took place during the exceptionally long and cold winter of 1880-1881:
Runólfur, a farmer in northeast Iceland, was then old and infirm. He foresaw a shortage of hay in spring and asked for help from farmers in a nearby valley where the weather was milder. They came to his rescue, sheltering and feeding his sheep until early May. Assuming the winter was over, they sent the sheep back. But shortly after, snowstorms hit Runólfur’s farm again, dumping four feet of snow, which quickly turned into a solid sheet of ice. The neighboring farmers rallied once again. They crossed the snow- and ice-covered mountain pass on foot and skis and herded the sheep back across the pass. To keep the starving sheep moving, the rescuers carried on their backs sacks of hay, which they emptied now and then to entice the sheep to go on. They did the trek not once but twice in order to get all the sheep, horses, and cows, as well as people to safety. My grandfather, Runólfur Hannesson, born in 1867, was the nephew of his namesake in the above story.
These people and their stories were never far from my mind when I wrote Viking Voyager: An Icelandic Memoir. Their endurance kept the nation going until conditions were ripe for Iceland to prosper. To them I owe my golden childhood and the superb education that equipped me to compete in the world. The spirit of these same people egged me to pursue an architecture degree in Finland and from thereon to adventures around the world. To them I owe my fortune, not in monetary terms but in the wealth of experiences gathered from the places I visited and people met. Vikings traveled the world to seek their fortune; I’ve indeed found mine.
Viking Voyager: An Icelandic Memoir
My dad had researched the family tree of my maternal grandmother and traced it all the way to our ancestors who lived in Sognefjord, Norway in the late seventh century. In other words, I’m a descendant of the original Vikings who left Norway for Iceland in protest over King Harald the Beautiful Hair’s efforts to unify the country. My ancestral pantheon includes Erik the Red and his son, Leif Eriksson the explorer. But names alone weren’t enough; I wanted to know these people, how they lived, what they did in life, and what they were made of.
I started by digging into my grandparents’ stories. My maternal grandmother was no stranger to me as she lived with the family until she died. She was as gentle as a lamb with me, but she had to have the heart of a lioness to face down the tragedy of losing her husband and son in one fell swoop and continue to raise her four other children. The other three grandparents, however, had passed away before I was born.
Since I was located in the US, I was worried that accessing material for my memoirs might pose a challenge. To my delight, the internet brought the world to my fingertips. My first seminal find happened while browsing the online catalogue of the Icelandic National Library. My Uncle Óli’s name appeared in a cultural heritage project conducted by the library some years ago. I emailed the librarian, who promptly sent me the digitized cassette tapes of his interview. I clicked on one of the files, and there was my long-dead uncle speaking to me in his gravelly voice. In the interviews, he describes life as a seaman fishing the rough seas around Iceland. Having started his maritime career at the age of ten, the working age of Icelandic children in those days, he had plenty to tell. His words fill five hours of recording.
His accounts also shed light on his father, my grandfather. He was a self-made man who started as an orphaned farmhand and ended as skipper of a lucrative fishing vessel called Gyða. One day in 1910, his ship disappeared during a storm. Forty some years later, the ship’s mast was recovered from the bottom of the fjord, but none of the remains of the skipper, his first-born son and the other six crew members have been found. Uncle Óli would have gone down with them if he hadn’t stayed behind to take a school leaving exam that day.
On another internet search, I stumbled on the digitized logbook of Gyða’s first captain. The log is typically terse and dry, recording the weather, the catch, and the ship’s location, which could reach as far north as the Polar Circle. Some entries are more interesting than others, and here is one:
“A flu epidemic ravaged the town that winter. By the time Gyða set sail, three men had come down with the flu, and a fourth would join them by the time they reached the fishing grounds. Despite good weather and an abundance of fish, the lines were idle because all but the skipper and one crew member were in bed, delirious with fever. When the skipper finally succumbed to the flu, some of the other patients had recovered sufficiently to execute the sailing chores. A few days later, the crew was still weak but well enough to resume fishing. However, the bait, herring, had gone bad because the ice had melted while they were ill.”
I struck a goldmine on the website www.timarit.is. Until recently, accessing newspaper articles in Icelandic papers would have been a formidable task. But a few years ago, the University of Iceland and the National Libraries of Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland joined hands to digitize every newspaper article and periodical printed from the beginning of news publishing in the 1800s until today. To date, almost six million pages of searchable text are available to anyone for free at the site.
A story about my father’s side of the family came from an unexpected source—a Canadian newspaper that serves the Icelandic diaspora in North America. This heroic tale of devastation and salvation took place during the exceptionally long and cold winter of 1880-1881:
Runólfur, a farmer in northeast Iceland, was then old and infirm. He foresaw a shortage of hay in spring and asked for help from farmers in a nearby valley where the weather was milder. They came to his rescue, sheltering and feeding his sheep until early May. Assuming the winter was over, they sent the sheep back. But shortly after, snowstorms hit Runólfur’s farm again, dumping four feet of snow, which quickly turned into a solid sheet of ice. The neighboring farmers rallied once again. They crossed the snow- and ice-covered mountain pass on foot and skis and herded the sheep back across the pass. To keep the starving sheep moving, the rescuers carried on their backs sacks of hay, which they emptied now and then to entice the sheep to go on. They did the trek not once but twice in order to get all the sheep, horses, and cows, as well as people to safety. My grandfather, Runólfur Hannesson, born in 1867, was the nephew of his namesake in the above story.
These people and their stories were never far from my mind when I wrote Viking Voyager: An Icelandic Memoir. Their endurance kept the nation going until conditions were ripe for Iceland to prosper. To them I owe my golden childhood and the superb education that equipped me to compete in the world. The spirit of these same people egged me to pursue an architecture degree in Finland and from thereon to adventures around the world. To them I owe my fortune, not in monetary terms but in the wealth of experiences gathered from the places I visited and people met. Vikings traveled the world to seek their fortune; I’ve indeed found mine.
Viking Voyager: An Icelandic Memoir
December 9, 2020
Icelandic Sagas
Here's my guest post at https://straightfromlibrary.blogspot....
WHAT IS A SAGA?
The Chinese have their Great Wall, the Egyptians the Pyramids, the Germans have Beethoven, and the Italians Leonardo de Vinci. Iceland has the Sagas. (In the Scandinavian languages the word saga means story or history.) Written in the Icelandic vernacular language from about 1200 to 1350 when all self-respecting scholars in Europe were writing in Latin, the Sagas tell about events that happened a few hundred years earlier. In that way, it’s similar to the Bible and many other ancient texts.
One of the first sagas, The Book of Settlements tells us about the first settlers in the country— where they put down roots in the uninhabited island, whom they married, and who their descendants were. It is a dry, and some would say boring, account of who’s who in Iceland in the 9th century. As a historical account it is invaluable. As time went by, various writers embellished the stories and turned them into what’s comparable to today´s historical novels. The heroes and heroines talk to us, they love, hate, and fight. When the hero, Gunnar in Niall´s saga, asks his wife for a lock of her hair to replace his broken bow string during an attack on his home, she refuses, reminding him of how he slapped her in the face during a domestic dispute. Gunnar is killed in that battle. Over time, the Sagas continued to evolve. The stories became increasingly fantastical and the realistic historical novels gave way to tales of superheroes performing magical feats. The writing finally ceased during the Little Ice Age in the 14th century, when the country descended into poverty and misery. But itinerant story tellers told and retold the stories as they traveled from farm to farm to entertain the inhabitants.
During the 18th century, the Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon collected all the Saga manuscripts that he and his associates could lay their hands on in Iceland. Because Iceland was then a colony of Denmark, with Copenhagen as capital, the manuscripts were archived in the library of the University of Copenhagen. During a disastrous fire in Copenhagen in 1728 which destroyed more than a quarter of the city, some of the collection was destroyed. Fortunately, most of it was rescued.
Since Iceland became independent in 1944, it has built a special institute in Reykjavik to house a major part of the collection, including the aforementioned Book of Settlements. A sister institute in Copenhagen, the Arnamagnæan Institute, still retains the rest of the collection.
Every Icelandic child studies the sagas in elementary school, and more in-depth in the higher grades. The most popular are the ones akin to historical novels, such as Niall’s saga, which is considered among the best written. It’s a story of Niall and his sons, feisty, complex characters who become embroiled in feuds with their neighbors. Although Niall is a wise, peaceful man, he can’t escape the scourge of vengeance. The book presents a comprehensive picture of Icelandic life in the 13th century. For anyone interested in reading the sagas, this is a good one to start with.
WHAT IS A SAGA?
The Chinese have their Great Wall, the Egyptians the Pyramids, the Germans have Beethoven, and the Italians Leonardo de Vinci. Iceland has the Sagas. (In the Scandinavian languages the word saga means story or history.) Written in the Icelandic vernacular language from about 1200 to 1350 when all self-respecting scholars in Europe were writing in Latin, the Sagas tell about events that happened a few hundred years earlier. In that way, it’s similar to the Bible and many other ancient texts.
One of the first sagas, The Book of Settlements tells us about the first settlers in the country— where they put down roots in the uninhabited island, whom they married, and who their descendants were. It is a dry, and some would say boring, account of who’s who in Iceland in the 9th century. As a historical account it is invaluable. As time went by, various writers embellished the stories and turned them into what’s comparable to today´s historical novels. The heroes and heroines talk to us, they love, hate, and fight. When the hero, Gunnar in Niall´s saga, asks his wife for a lock of her hair to replace his broken bow string during an attack on his home, she refuses, reminding him of how he slapped her in the face during a domestic dispute. Gunnar is killed in that battle. Over time, the Sagas continued to evolve. The stories became increasingly fantastical and the realistic historical novels gave way to tales of superheroes performing magical feats. The writing finally ceased during the Little Ice Age in the 14th century, when the country descended into poverty and misery. But itinerant story tellers told and retold the stories as they traveled from farm to farm to entertain the inhabitants.
During the 18th century, the Icelandic scholar Árni Magnússon collected all the Saga manuscripts that he and his associates could lay their hands on in Iceland. Because Iceland was then a colony of Denmark, with Copenhagen as capital, the manuscripts were archived in the library of the University of Copenhagen. During a disastrous fire in Copenhagen in 1728 which destroyed more than a quarter of the city, some of the collection was destroyed. Fortunately, most of it was rescued.
Since Iceland became independent in 1944, it has built a special institute in Reykjavik to house a major part of the collection, including the aforementioned Book of Settlements. A sister institute in Copenhagen, the Arnamagnæan Institute, still retains the rest of the collection.
Every Icelandic child studies the sagas in elementary school, and more in-depth in the higher grades. The most popular are the ones akin to historical novels, such as Niall’s saga, which is considered among the best written. It’s a story of Niall and his sons, feisty, complex characters who become embroiled in feuds with their neighbors. Although Niall is a wise, peaceful man, he can’t escape the scourge of vengeance. The book presents a comprehensive picture of Icelandic life in the 13th century. For anyone interested in reading the sagas, this is a good one to start with.
November 22, 2020
Virtual Book Tour
I thought I was very clever back in January, when I booked a room at the local library for my book launch in November. Needless to say, the corona virus took care of that.
My book Viking Voyager: An Icelandic Memoir is about my growing up in Iceland and getting the inspiration to travel the world like my Viking forefathers.
So now, instead of an in-person book launch, I'm taking my memoir on a virtual book tour. The program is organized by two very efficient women at Goddess Fish Promotions. I will be stopping at 30 different blog sites from Nov. 23 to Dec. 18.
During this time, Viking Voyager will be on sale for $1.99 on Amazon Kindle. I'd wanted to make it 99 cents, but it turned out my file was too large to qualify for the lowest price. The color photos in my book, some of them pictures of wonderful Icelandic scenery, added to the megabytes.
Please join me on the tour and learn about Iceland, its history and Viking culture. https://goddessfishpromotions.blogspo...
My book Viking Voyager: An Icelandic Memoir is about my growing up in Iceland and getting the inspiration to travel the world like my Viking forefathers.
So now, instead of an in-person book launch, I'm taking my memoir on a virtual book tour. The program is organized by two very efficient women at Goddess Fish Promotions. I will be stopping at 30 different blog sites from Nov. 23 to Dec. 18.
During this time, Viking Voyager will be on sale for $1.99 on Amazon Kindle. I'd wanted to make it 99 cents, but it turned out my file was too large to qualify for the lowest price. The color photos in my book, some of them pictures of wonderful Icelandic scenery, added to the megabytes.
Please join me on the tour and learn about Iceland, its history and Viking culture. https://goddessfishpromotions.blogspo...
