On a warm Thursday afternoon on the 29th of May, the Leif Eiriksson Icelandic Club of Calgary held their annual seniors’ luncheon in the Valhalla Room at the Scandinavian Centre. As people arrived, they were served a starter of rúllupylsa on rúgbrauð (basically translated, it is rye bread). Both were delicious and were made by our very own president, Mark Petursson.

The folktale “Bjarni Sveinsson og Salvör systur hans” was collected by Magnús Grímsson (1825–1860) in 1845, originally published in Íslenzk æfintýri by Magnús Grímsson and Jón Árnason (1852) and subsequently published in the second volume of Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og ævintýri by Jón Árnason (1864). It appeared in German translation in Isländische Volkssagen der Gegenwart by Karl Maurer (1860) and in English translation in the second volume of Icelandic Legends, by George E.J. Powell and Eiríkur Magnússon (1866)...

“President of Iceland Halla Tómasdóttir was at Scandinavia House in Manhattan on May 22, 2025, to introduce a special screening of the documentary about the Icelandic women’s strike of 1975, The Day Iceland Stood Still, a collaboration between U.S. director Pamela Hogan, who campaigned as a high school student in the 1970s with her activist mother to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and Icelandic producer Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir, who at the age of seven accompanied her mother to the 1975 strike.