I am currently a PhD candidate in history at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. It is difficult to pinpoint when I first became interested in Icelandic, but initially there was Tolkien, of course, and when I read Victoria Cribb’s first translations of Sjón in the early 2010s, I was hooked. I first earned a BA in Norwegian Studies and in English, but knew that what I really wanted was to learn Icelandic.

In 2015, I visited Iceland for the first time to attend the well-known four-week summer course in modern Icelandic, organized by the University of Iceland and the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, and, in a way, I never left. The instructors’ enthusiasm was contagious, and I wanted to learn more. When I finished my first degree, I was very fortunate to be awarded the Icelandic Government Scholarship administered by the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. This scholarship let me complete a BA in Icelandic at the University of Iceland, and I also earned an MA in Inter-American Studies there. I would encourage anyone who is seriously interested in learning Icelandic to apply for the scholarship, as the breadth and depth of the program is impressive, and there is likely no better way to learn the language and culture.

Around the time of my move to Iceland, I also became interested in the history of Icelanders in North America. I had learned of a short-lived Icelandic settlement in Nova Scotia – perhaps from a mention in one of Kristjana Gunnars’s poems – but no one I asked in the province had heard about it. I thought it would be an interesting story to tell, as at that time, most popular accounts of Icelandic history in Canada focused solely on Manitoba. I found a few mentions of the settlement, generally referred to as Markland, including a series of articles that J. Marshall Burgess, a descendant of one of the Icelanders who decided to stay in Nova Scotia, wrote for this newspaper.

My BA thesis in Icelandic compared three promotional booklets for Icelandic immigrants that were all published in 1875, one of which focused on Nova Scotia. My MA thesis focused on a novella set in Halifax, NS, by the Icelandic Canadian writer J. Magnús Bjarnason, who himself grew up in Markland. The more research I did on nineteenth-century Icelanders in Nova Scotia and in Atlantic Canada more broadly, the more I realized how connected the Nova Scotia episode was to other Icelandic settlements in North America, and so I decided to dedicate my PhD project to a nuanced examination of this history.

My dissertation and the resulting book project, with the working title “Icelandic Settlers in Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1867-1885,” examine Markland, the Icelandic settlement in Nova Scotia’s Musquodoboit Valley, which existed from 1875 until 1882, and they also focus on Icelandic settlers elsewhere in Atlantic Canada. Immediately after Confederation, the new Dominion tried to encourage the four provinces to enact free land grant policies and to support settlement, in order to compete with the United States. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick briefly supported what are often called “ethnic” bloc settlements until the mid-1870s. At the time, many Icelanders wanted to settle in either province rather than further West, as they saw the proximity to Iceland as advantageous, and expected the climate and landscape to be more familiar. The Ron Goodman Writer’s Award supports my work on this history, which will include detailed biographies of the Icelandic settlers in Nova Scotia, potentially of interest not only to scholars, but also to descendants and community genealogists.