Short stories tell common truths, with tough-to-pronounce names

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What the Bear Said

Skald Tales of New Iceland

By W.D. Valgardson,

Turnstone Press, 130 pages, $19

IT may help to be Icelandic to get the most out of this new book of fine short stories by Victoria-based W.D. Valgardson, rooted as it is in the lore and legend of his ancestral home and the Western Icelandic culture in which he was raised in Gimli, but it is hardly necessary.

Folklore, after all, is pretty well universal. The details may be different and the names difficult -- but the themes are common, the hopes that there is some good out there in the world and the knowledge that there is always evil.

One Icelandic legend runs through several stories in What the Bear Said, a small but beautiful book.

God came to see Adam one day as Adam was working in the field and asked if he could come to dinner to meet Adam and Eve's children. Of course, said Adam, but when he rushed home to tell Eve that God was coming, she was upset because she didn't have enough time to clean up all the kids before God arrived. In the end, she felt she had to hide half of them because they were still dirty and presented the other half to God.

Are these all the children you have, asked God?

Yes, Adam and Eve replied.

Are you certain, God asked?

Yes, they replied, to which God then said: All the children you have hidden from me, they and their descendants will remain hidden from everyone forever.

The descendants of those children have been known always and today as the huldufolk, or the "hidden people." They live in the earth and the rocks and the hills and, although most Icelanders will deny it, many still believe in them. Even today in Iceland, roads are sometimes rerouted and construction projects refigured to avoid disturbing places where huldufolk are believed to live.

Now over 70, and retired from teaching creative writing at the University of Victoria, Valgardson has written more than a dozen books since his acclaimed 1973 debut, the short-story collection Bloodflowers.

The hidden people are not the only mythical creatures that complicate Icelandic lives in his books. There are also trolls and elves and ghosts and mischievous, sometimes malevolent, Christmas elves. Did they come to the New World with Icelandic immigrants who fled famine and persecution in the 19th century? Valgardson suggests they did.

A woman whose family's farm is plagued by a troll walks barefoot over the lava to the troll's cave with a dried fish-head -- all they had to eat -- that she leaves with a prayer that the troll will spare her household. And the troll does not come back.

A man in a fishing camp on Lake Winnipeg shoots a wolf for no particular reason, skins it and turns its pelt into a rug. "Why'd you do that?" ask his fellow fishermen, who have no compunction against killing but only do it for a reason.

He can't answer, but finds himself haunted by real or imagined wolves he thinks are out of for vengeance and one night takes his gun and walks out in a blinding blizzard to meet his real or imagined nemesis.

There is a lot of fable and fantasy here, but that is not what these stories are about. They are about real life as it has always been lived and is still lived now.

Valgardson's prose is as spare and sparse and sparkling as the Icelandic sagas that clearly inspire it -- if you're looking for lots of adjectives, find another book -- and, like the sagas, they go straight to the heart of our everyday existence.

Tom Oleson is a member of the Free Press editorial board.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 20, 2011 J9