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Nadine Fladd 59 “Stunning and Strange”: Iceland as Memory and Prophecy in Alice Munro’s “White Dump” and Sarah Polley’s “Away from Her” Nadine Fladd Alice Munro’s second-most recent collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock, explores her family’s emigration from Scotland to the colony that would later become Canada, and depicts the population and development of this country from the perspective of her own ancestors. The collection marks the culmination of a career-long interest in ancestry, genealogy and parentage for Munro. Although much has been written about Munro’s focus on the local history of rural Southwestern Ontario, there is another recurring cultural strain that runs throughout her oeuvre that has received much less attention: a focus on medieval literature, and medieval Scandinavian literature in particular.1 Throughout the last twenty years, Munro has become increasingly interested in stories whose characters study medieval literature, either as students or as professors. “White Dump,” from the 1986 collection The Progress of Love, concerns several generations of women, the oldest of whom is a retired professor of Old Norse, as is the male protagonist of “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” a story from the 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage and re-published in 2007 as the title story of the collection Away from Her. More recently, Munro’s uncollected stories in The New Yorker have also focused on medieval literature; the events of “Wenlock Edge” are anchored by the protagonist’s writing of an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for a university course, while “Free Radicals” features yet another former professor of medieval literature. Many of these stories connect medieval literature with participation in adulterous relationships. Munro’s most sustained engagement with medieval literature has been with Old Icelandic sagas and eddas. Both “White Dump” and “The Bear Came Over the Mountain ” refer to specific Old Norse literary texts that appropriately reflect the dark tones of these stories. In both cases, Munro translates physical violence and Old Icelandic motifs of betrayal in battle, the ending of the world, and Iceland as Memory and Prophecy 60 prophecy into more quotidian, realist studies of emotional violence: of the betrayals, endings and new beginnings in marital relationships between men and women. “White Dump” and “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” participate in a tradition of Old Norse literature by rewriting or translating sagas and eddas into contemporary, Canadian contexts that reflect the historical trend of Icelanders’ continual move west and ultimate settlement in Canada. In translating Munro’s written work into the visual, realist medium of film in Away from Her, Sarah Polley continues and intensifies this tradition. How Munro was introduced to Old Norse literature and developed an affinity for allusions to it in her stories is somewhat of a mystery. In her thorough studies of literature by Canadians of Icelandic descent, Daisy Neijmann contrasts the multicultural Canadian literary movement in which IcelandicCanadian literature participates with the “mainly British-Canadian authors who receive national and international attention and acclaim,” citing Alice Munro as a specific example of the kinds of authors who fall into this category (“Icelandic Canadian Literature” 245). Although Munro’s (née Laidlaw ) ancestors were quite literary, they were not Icelandic, and it is unlikely that she would have been introduced to Icelandic literature or Norse mythology at home.2 It is also unlikely that she studied the subject at school. Robert Thacker’s biography of Munro delineates her ambitious but short-lived education —one that included the study of French, German, Latin and English in high school, and two years of undergraduate study at the University of Western Ontario. As Thacker explains: Munro enrolled initially in the journalism program as something of a cover, so that she would not have to say that she wrote fiction—though, given the contributor note in the April 1950 Folio that has her major as Honours English “with an emphasis on creative writing,” it was not much of a cover. The journalism program required English, and that first year Munro also took English history (which she says she already knew backwards), economics, French conversation , and psychology. (94) For her second year at Western, Munro “shifted to English,” taking courses in “aesthetics from Carl Klinck, eighteenth-century British literature from Brandon Conron, a course in drama from Eric Atkinson (‘the best course I took’), French poetry, Greek literature and translation, and another course in English history ‘from a dreadful man’ who ‘read from...

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