Icelandic Canadians are in the arts because they’re artistic

Examine the background of writer-filmmaker-editor Caelum Vatnsdal and you might reasonably suspect the existence of some kind of Icelandic Mafia lurking in the Winnipeg art community.

Consider: the 41 year old Vatnsdal got his start in the local film culture courtesy of the city's premiere filmmaker Guy Maddin, whose first feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1989) vividly mythologized the Icelandic-Canadians of Maddin's own ancestry.

(Vatnsdal's first gig was as a camera assistant on Maddin's 1992 feature Careful, but he also appeared on camera and got to utter a single line of dialogue, which he can still recite: "Master has an occluded bowel. Alert Herr Doctor Schmidt at once!")

Look at the list of film projects Vatnsdal has himself directed and note the concert film We're the Weakerthans, We're from Winnipeg, featuring Weakerthans frontman John K. Samson, one of the programmers (along with Vatnsdal) of the Icelandic-Canadian arts festival Núna (Now).

Leaving home, and going home

Atli Ásmundsson, the good-natured consul general for Iceland in Winnipeg, likes to say that only the superpowers have diplomatic representation in Winnipeg -- the U.S. and Iceland.

Ásmundsson has endeared himself to the Winnipeg community so excellently in his nine-year tenure here that most of us do not give it a second thought that Iceland is the only other country besides the U.S. to have a professional diplomatic presence in Winnipeg.

Considering there are much greater trade volumes between Manitoba and places such as China, Japan, Mexico and South Korea, and likely more immigration connections to the Philippines or Ukraine, it underlines the special relationship that exists between the north Atlantic island nation and this lake-dominated central province in Canada.

Ásmundsson has become a fixture in Winnipeg and is held in high regard not just by those of Icelandic heritage in Manitoba, but by the broader community. He has reached the mandatory Icelandic foreign service retirement age of 70 and will officially leave his post next June.

Chess has linked Gimli and Reykjavik since 1880s

For two magical months in the summer of 1972, the Earth stood still. All eyes were riveted on Reykjavik, Iceland, enthralled by the epic battle that unfolded to determine who would reign as the 11th chess champion of the world.

In the land where epic battles were witnessed and chronicled almost 1,000 years earlier, two gladiators of the mind waged an uncompromising struggle involving wits and will. The irresistible force that was Bobby Fischer, the challenger, was colliding with the immovable object that was Boris Spassky, the defender. Metaphorically, a volcano versus a glacier.

Fischer was the lone American, a hero of the free world, who was obsessed with fulfilling his destiny to become the world champion. Spassky was the unflappable defender of the crown, representing the Soviet chess empire that had dominated world chess since 1948.

In the era of the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets would regard a victory by their representative as positive proof of the superiority of their ideology and political system, as striking a blow for good over evil. American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sent a message of encouragement to Fischer before the match commenced. President Richard Nixon sent a congratulatory message to Fischer after his convincing conquest.

Icelandic-Canadian literature as 21st-century sagas

The more truth you impart to fiction, the stronger the story.

But how much is the reverse true when it comes to history? How does adding a little fiction make shared history more memorable? The Icelanders and their descendants in Manitoba could teach us a thing or two about that.

I'm not, by the way, suggesting anyone is wilfully lying or misleading or covering up things that really happened. But we remember things better when they make a good story, even when we know what we're getting isn't strictly history.

There's an interesting parallel between the flowering of Icelandic literature in the Middle Ages and what some writers of Icelandic blood are creating today.

A biased and snarky list of things Icelandic (and non-Icelandic)

Stuff you thought was Icelandic 

Vínarterta:

The layered prune torte, made by people of Icelandic descent all over North America, was only a passing fad in Iceland at the time of the largest emigration in the late 1800s. It soon disappeared from Iceland. It continued to be made and enjoyed here, however, and has even become a proper English word in the Canadian dictionary.

Golden boys

The idea that Winnipeg's new NHL team in 2011 might have been called something other than Jets was real.

Was Falcons the favourite? Likely not. Still, it may well have been the best fit of all, based on the story of the very first Olympic gold-medal-winning squad, all but one of them castoffs of Icelandic heritage from then-mainstream Winnipeg.

Were those 1920 Falcons and the new Jets underdogs to do what they did? Maybe not in the final chapter of the story, but considering the entire picture of each, absolutely.

Overcoming rejection as part of their history? In spades.

Towering torte

For the local Icelandic community, there is perhaps no food more strongly associated with its cultural heritage than the towering torte called vínarterta.

When Recipe Swap put out a call for vínarterta information -- not just recipes but myths and memories, stories and lore -- we got an immediate and overwhelming response. Manitoba's Icelanders have a lot to say about this many-layered dessert.

Helle Wilson wrote to say that "in early days the Icelandic community in Canada had a fractious history."

"One group Lutheran, one Unitarian, some Liberal and some Conservative. Some read the newspaper Lgberg; others read the newspaper Heimskringla. But when it came to the festive season, there was no division of opinion about which cake to serve. It was vínarterta."

Raised Icelandic

Twenty-five per cent of Iceland's population left the island in the late 1800s. Acidic volcanic ash had poisoned the land and water, killed the livestock, and ruined much of the arable land leaving these fiercely nationalistic people with the choice of starve or leave.

Promised land in the Interlake, even though indigenous people also believed this land had been reserved for them under the recently signed Treaty 1, Icelanders came hoping to make a living by fishing and livestock farming.

Life in New Iceland was not easy. The people faced smallpox, frigid temperatures, grasshoppers, mosquitos and floods. Some Icelanders were treated as second-class citizens. One family changed their name from Eirikson to Steinberg to avoid discrimination.

All of my maternal great-grandparents came to Manitoba. Growing up in Lundar ("puffins" in Icelandic) my mother spoke only Icelandic until she started school. But like most of her generation she lost fluency after moving to Winnipeg as a teenager. The sound of Icelandic and Icelandic-inflected English is as familiar and comforting to me as the scent of my Amma's hand lotion, the clacking of knitting needles and the aroma of fresh ground coffee.

A Gimli landmark

At the corner of Third Avenue and Second Street North in Gimli, not far from the wondrous and vast Lake Winnipeg, stands one of the oldest Icelandic churches in Manitoba.

Gimli Lutheran Church was established by Icelandic settlers soon after their arduous journey from Iceland to the western shores of Lake Winnipeg. This year it is celebrating its 135th anniversary.

It is likely the first Icelandic Lutheran congregation formed in Manitoba.

The first sermon preached in Icelandic in Canada was delivered in Gimli in August 1876 by Rev. Páll Thorláksson.

Icelandic settlers of the ruminant persuasion making inroads here

Handsome, hardy and exotic -- words that have been used to describe the Icelandic settlers who came to Manitoba.

They've also been used to describe Icelandic sheep, a breed that's catching on in Manitoba.

"They look like something from a fairy tale," said Inwood sheep farmer Wendy Kunzelman. She and her husband Clayton have 160 sheep of different breeds -- and the Icelandic are their favourite.

Kunzelman crafts the fleece and wool into sweaters, slippers and mitts. The Interlake woman stresses how tough the animals are, able to withstand all kinds of weather and health challenges.

Our own Icelandic saga

RIVERTON -- While Nelson Gerrard talks, there's a great looming distraction behind him.

It's the local historian's massive bookcase. It covers one wall and stretches to the top of his home's three-metre-high ceiling.

The bookcase full of old books is more like a mural, like that famous collage of Dublin doors, very geometric except the shapes aren't doors but books, books, books.

Some books jut out farther than others. Some little ones look uncomfortably sandwiched beside big ones. Some are uniform, as in volumes in a set -- the famous Icelandic sagas, for example -- but most are random in size and colour and thickness. There are black and brown leather bounds, and many with those grainy red or green bindings, like the old schoolbooks.