The Tricking of Freya, by Christina Sunley, St. Martin's Press, 352 pages, $28.95
Until I began researching my novel, I'd never visited either Winnipeg or Gimli – yet I'd been hearing about these places all my life.
While I was growing up in New York, my mother would regale me with stories about her childhood in the West End, Winnipeg's Icelandic enclave, and her summer visits to Gimli , an Icelandic village an hour to the north on Lake Winnipeg.
With great nostalgia, my mother would tell me tales of “our people” in Canada, poets and storytellers who drank strong coffee through sugar cubes clenched between their teeth. I heard endlessly about her lovely mother, who was crowned the Fjallkona (maid of the mountain) at Islendingadagurinn , the annual Icelandic festival in Gimli, and her father, a renowned doctor in Winnipeg. Along with miscellaneous relatives like her cousins, the gang of Finnbogason boys.
Yet never once in all those years did we ever go to visit our people in Canada.
Orphaned as a young girl, my mother was abruptly sent away from her cozy life in Winnipeg's West End to live with relatives in the United States. And though she returned to Canada for occasional visits, without living parents or grandparents she eventually lost touch. By the time I was born, she claimed there was no point going to visit Winnipeg. “Everyone I know is gone,” she would say longingly.
Iceland, of course, was the other place our people came from, and it seemed even more remote to me than Winnipeg. One of my earliest memories is of my mother telling me the story – true, in fact, yet mythic all the same – of how my grandfather as a child came to emigrate with his family from Iceland to Canada after a devastating volcanic eruption in 1875. After the ash fall had ruined much of the farmland, my grandfather's family set off for the “New Iceland” settlement that was forming on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. They rode away from their farmstead on horseback, crossing glacial rivers under the midnight sun, never to see Iceland again.
Eventually, my mother's stories about “our people” inspired me to write a novel – The Tricking of Freya – about a young woman of Icelandic descent who becomes obsessed with unravelling a family secret that takes her back to Gimli and then to Iceland itself.
To research the book, I – like my main character, Freya – would need to journey to both Iceland and Canada. On my first trip to Iceland, I was greeted with great hospitality by distant relatives and experienced a whirlwind of dramatic landscapes: glaciers, fjords, fields of steaming lava.
But what would Winnipeg be like, and tiny Gimli? I had only my mother's memories of a lost world from the 1920s and '30s. It was now the 21st century. Unlike many immigrant communities in North America, the Icelandic immigration was confined almost exclusively to a period of 40 years – well over a century ago. What would be left, I wondered, of the Icelandic immigrant culture she remembered so vividly?
In Winnipeg, I managed to track down one of the Finnbogason “boys” of my mother's youth, a kindly gentleman now in his early 80s. Tom gave me a tour of the old West End, pointing out the sites: the “Goolie” Hall (Icelanders in Canada were called goolies), the Jon Bjarnason Academy, the Wevel Cafe, and various other Icelandic establishments. Yet most were either closed or had long ago changed hands. Finally we ended up at my mother's childhood home on Victor Street, the setting for so many of her stories. Sadly, it was boarded up and covered with graffiti. I never showed my mother the photographs I took.
