Novel
The Viking Heart
Laura Salverson · 1923
Synopsis
In a fjord in Iceland, an eruption ruins Einar Halsson's farm. In October 1876, his family is among the some fourteen hundred Icelanders who arrive in Manitoba on the strength of promises that were too good to be true. In Winnipeg, Borga, the eldest daughter, is placed as a servant with strangers, while her family make their way to Gimli, on Lake Winnipeg, where smallpox strikes the colony. Years later, married to Bjorn Lindal, she clears land on the bank of the Icelandic River and raises children who grow up between their parents' language and that of the new country.
Context
The Icelandic emigration of the 1870s, caused by a volcanic catastrophe and by years of famine, had brought thousands of people to the west shore of Lake Winnipeg, to a reserve that the federal government granted them and that they called New Iceland. The author, born in Winnipeg in 1890 to parents who had arrived later, wrote her book in English and published it in 1923, in Toronto and New York.
Who it is for
A family novel, from Iceland to Manitoba, over several generations; the Icelandic names call for a little attention.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as her best novel, and as the first account of immigration in the Canadian West written from the inside.
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