Guttormur J. Guttormsson (in the middle) with his father Jón Guttormsson and his brother Vigfús Guttormsson at their farm Víðivellir, Manitoba, ca. 1885.

The Guttormur J. Guttormsson Lecture Series is held in memory of the poet, avant-garde playwright, musician, and farmer Guttormur J. Guttormsson (1878– 1966). A son of Icelandic immigrants to Canada, Jón Guttormsson (1841–1896) and Pálína Ketilsdóttir (1849–1886), Guttormur was born and raised at the farm of Víðivellir in Manitoba’s Interlake region, at the banks of the Icelandic River. Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Guttormur left the pioneers’ site where he was raised and was gone for several years, taking odd jobs here and there. In 1911, he returned to claim his Víðivellir and riverbound plains, and lived there for the rest of his life in the company of his wife, Jensína Júlía Daníelsdóttir (1884–1962). They had five children: Arnheiður, Pálína Kristjana, Bergljót, Hulda Margrét and Gilbert Konráð.

Guttormur established his reputation as a significant writer during his lifetime on both sides of the Atlantic and seems to have been captivated throughout his life by the language of his parents, rich and displaced. Referred to as the poet of New Iceland, and for good reason, he was born into the world of pioneers, where a deep attachment to Iceland and the cultural heritage of the Icelandic immigrants manifested itself. As a poet, he seems to have been just as animated to the environment and history of Manitoba’s Interlake region, and his acute perception of indigenous peoples in the processes of colonialism is equally evident. In his landmark poem “Sandy Bar,” he weaves together the region’s rich environment and nature with its history, unveiling the transatlantic scope of the struggles of the Icelandic pioneers.

As was the case with other major writers of Icelandic Canadian literature, including Stephan G. Stephansson (1853–1927), Helga Steinvör Baldvinsdóttir (1858–1941), who wrote her poetry under the pseudonym Undína, and Jóhann Magnús Bjarnason (1866–1945), Guttormur only wrote in Icelandic, and taught himself to travel in world literature and the history of ideas. He assembled a library that contained, in his own words, “books of the best authors of the various nations, including not only poetry but also novels, plays, and essays,” an indication of a passionate quest into the world of literature on par with writers such as Halldór Laxness (1902 ̶ 1998) and Stephan G. Stephansson. Following Guttormur’s death, his family donated his library and his writing desk to the University of Manitoba’s Icelandic Collection of the Elizabeth Dafoe Library.

Guttormur’s books of poetry:

  • Jón Austfirðingur og nokkur smákvæði (1909).
  • Bóndadóttir (1920).
  • Gaman og alvara (1930).
  • Hunangsflugur (1944).
  • Kvæðasafn (1947).
  • Kanadaþistill (1958).
  • Aurora. English Translations of Icelandic Poems (1993), edited by Heather Alda Ireland.

As a playwright, and in tune with the macabre vim of the interwar avant-garde, Guttormur captured modernity’s melancholy in the slim volume Tíu leikrit at the solitary banks of the Icelandic River. These highly symbolic and expressionistic plays are singular in Canadian and Icelandic literature, and perhaps North American literature more widely. Originally published in Reykjavik in 1930, they appeared in English translation in the book Ten Plays / Tíu leikrit (2015) by Elin Thordarson and Christopher Crocker, accompanied by short essays by Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, Heather Alda Ireland and Elin Thordarson, and edited by Birna Bjarnadóttir and Gauti Kristmannsson.

 

Playwrights such as Euripides, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Oscar Wilde, Eugene O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett filled the shelves of Guttormur’s library. One could also find the complete and collected works of Henrik Ibsen, a fact that holds some significance for those who detect Ibsen’s intellectual legacy in Guttormur’s dramatic expression of modernity’s zeitgeist. The presence of Belgian symbolist and Nobel prize ̶ winner Maurice Maeterlinck in Guttormur’s library, charts another gleaming passage into Guttormur’s Ten Plays. Maeterlinck, haunted by the existential urgency of German Romanticism, reveals in his “Blue Bird” the cadaverous feel of modern existence by placing children, who see the world so tenderly, at the heart of the drama. By doing so, he shatters emotional equilibrium and creates an atmosphere that resonates with some of Guttormur’s plays.

Throughout Guttormur’s life, music was another passion of his and he taught himself to play the cornet. A soloist and conductor of the village brass band, he had an antique Victrola phonograph and a stellar collection of classical music and band recordings. Thus, while facing the challenges of the history of New Iceland and capturing modernity’s melancholy in his works of literature, the solitary banks of the Icelandic River may have sounded like a centre of creativity.

 

Benefactors:

Heather Alda Ireland, the mezzo-soprano, former Honorary Consul for Iceland to British Columbia and Yukon, and Guttormur’s granddaughter, is the benefactor of the Guttormur J. Guttormsson Lecture Series. Together with her late husband, William Ireland (1934–2023), Heather Alda was also instrumental in the process that led to the establishment of the transatlantic enterprise.

Board members:

Andrew McGillivray, Ármann Jakobsson, and Birna Bjarnadóttir.

Speakers:
Deila