Albert Jóhannesson and the scribes of Hecla Island: Manuscript culture and scribal production in an Icelandic-Canadian settlement ...

• Main Author: Parsons, Katelin
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Humanities Commons 2019
• Subjects: Books; History; Canada; Icelandic literature; Literature, Medieval; Iceland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17613/ah9b-pb97; https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:29809/

Manuscript culture in Icelandic immigrant communities in North America is examined through the case study of an immigrant-scribe, Albert Jóhannesson (1847–1921), who left Iceland as an adult in 1884 and eventually settled in the community of Hecla Island, Manitoba, Canada. Albert Jóhannesson is one of the last known individuals in the Icelandic tradition to participate in manuscript production as a pastime: he started his oldest saga manuscript in 1889, and his last dated saga is from 1910. He copied some material from printed books and periodicals but worked mainly from manuscript exemplars borrowed from fellow immigrants. At least one of Albert's exemplars, SÁM 35 from 1827-1829, was brought to Canada by another Hecla Islander, Grímólfur Ólafsson (1827–1903), and contains an abridgement of Breta sögur, the concise Old-Norse Icelandic version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae. Albert's manuscripts contain a diverse mixture of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, ...