Icelanders’ Manitoba saga marks Year 150

According to one theory, it wasn’t radical ideas about the rights of man and self-government that sparked the French Revolution — but Iceland’s 1783-84 Laki volcanic eruption.

Spreading poisonous clouds throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the eruption’s fallout ravaged crops and exacerbated famine in feudal France, ripening conditions for a peasant insurrection.

Nearly 100 years later, another eruption in Iceland once again set history’s wheels in motion, triggering the largest known exodus of Icelanders in its long recorded history.

Famously, most Icelandic immigrants — generally pastoral farmers just like their great-grandparents and many generations before them — came to Manitoba.

While “Sigurdson” and “Arnason” fill rather less space in Manitoba’s White Pages than “Friesen” and “Smith,” our province still hosts the world’s largest diasporic Icelandic population: about 31,000 compared to the fewer than 400,000 people elsewhere overseas who call Iceland home.

Like Iceland proper, habitants and descendants of New Iceland — which stretches from roughly Gimli to Riverton alongside Lake Winnipeg — outpunch their weight culturally.

They’ve become some of Manitoba’s most prominent sons and dóttirs: musician John K. Samson, filmmaker Guy Maddin, writer Kristjana Gunnars — not to mention Second World War spy William Stephenson, immortalized in Manitoba lore as author Ian Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond.

Canadian multiculturalism encourages mild ethnic pride amongst settler and immigrant populations. It celebrates narratives of boot-strap hardship and integration — with more wiggle room for cultural distinctiveness and festivities than the “American melting pot.”

And many Manitoba Icelanders, a highly self-aware community for how few still speak their dizzyingly conjugating mother tongue but for a few phrases, soon say ‘skál’ to a milestone.