Away – Far Away! Personal Sources of Icelandic Immigrants to Canada and the United States. Anthology from Icelandic Popular Culture 5. Co-authorship with Davíð Ólafsson. Published by the Icelandic University Press, 2001. 377 pages. – (Burt – og meir en bæjarleið. Dagbækur og persónuleg skrif Vesturheimsfara á síðari hluta 19. aldar. Sýnisbók íslenskrar alþýðumenningar 5. Davíð Ólafsson og Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon tóku saman (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2001).
Historical background
The majority of the Icelandic population was literate during the 19th century. Those who moved to the USA and Canada during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century took with them the skills of reading and writing. More importantly, these people often wrote down their thoughts and ideas before they decided to move to a new country. They recorded their experiences during their passage to the New World and documented their daily struggles on a new continent. Their thoughts were expressed in private diaries or journals, in letters to family and friends back home, and in autobiographies. These sources have mostly stayed in private hands and therefore out of reach for historians. Because of this and trends in the use of historical methods, these first hand sources have not got the scholarly attention which they definitely deserve.
The Autobiographical Advantage
The advantages of using personal sources, when one is researching people’s everyday life, are enormous. No other historical documents are likely to give the historian the opportunity to look into the mentality of the people who took part in the great migration. In diaries we witness desires, frustrations, surprises and the general world view of those who made the dramatic decision to move to the New World. These perspectives are extremely important to understand in depth the struggle which people had to go through on their way to “the promised land”.
The book
“Away – Far Away!” is an attempt to show how eight individuals, and their families from this small island in the North Atlantic Oceean in the 19th century, decided to pack their bags and move to a foreign continent. It also demonstrates how they took on the challenge of the trip itself, to America, and finally, how they experienced their first year in the New World. The diarists represent a wide spectrum of the social strata in Iceland, from workers and poor peasants to goldsmiths and wealthy farmers. They come from a large collection of extremely colourful diaries which have ended up in manuscript departments in Iceland and are in the group of the very best of that collection. Each individual diarist is introduced before the excerpts are shown and the authors wrote an extensive introductory chapter to the book where they shed light on one of the most important historical transitions in the eleven hundred year history of Iceland: – the great migration to North America.