Gudmundur Remembered

Iceland Visit Shines Light on Forefather

By Joanne Denison

Published in the Seattle Times 2006

Last May, I flew to Iceland to meet my great-great-great grandfather, Gudmundur Gudmundsson.

This wasn’t going to be easy since Gudmundeur has been dead for 123 years and he isn’t even buried in Iceland, but in a quiet corner of Draper, Utah.

How did he get there?

Better yet – why?

All my life I had heard about our Icelandic forefather who came to America to join up with the Latter-day Saints in “Zion.”  In fact, one dedicated cousin took it upon herself to write his story for the family.  It was, of course, so wrapped in the trappings of Mormonism that our back-sliding branch of the family gave it short shrift.

The little history languished in my mother’s papers, but not in my thoughts.  My desire to see “from whence we came” has never faltered.

The day we arrived in Iceland was cold and windy.  Leaving the airport, we passed lava fields striving to pull a gray-green blanket of moss-like vegetation over themselves as if seeking lost warmth.

The fishing village of Keflavik furnished our first touch of color.  Roofs of bright red, deep blue and brilliant green lit up the gray landscape.

In Reykjavik we were greeted with gray as well, and the addition of trees beginning to leaf, with fragile daffodils and scrawny forsythia blooming to belie the cold wind.

As I started to write this I found I could not separate the man from Iceland.  Iceland formed his character and fortitude.  Living with volcanoes, with weather that turns horizontal at the snap of a finger, in darkness and half-buried in snow during the winter, and scraping a hard won existence from an unwilling earth or an angry sea, he learned, as did most Icelanders, to create light for himself in the midst of great darkness.

There is an old Icelandic saying, “Better shoeless than bookless.”  The living example of this lies in the culture House in Reykjavik, which holds many of the Icelandic Sagas as well as ancient books written on leather, cloth or any other material available – books made to carry, read and reread.

Gudmundur was born on a farm named Artun in the southwest of Iceland where the Gulf Stream brushes the land.  The little farm with its sod houses sitting side by side for warmth is gone, but the tiny parish church of Oddi which seats just 40, still stands atop a knoll facing a lonely landscape.  The church yard is full of aged Gudmundsson headstones.

As was the Icelandic custom, Gudmundur was “fostered” to a neighbor who could see to his education.  At 20, he spoke Icelandic, Danish, German and English.  Gudmundur’s neighbor also began training him to be a goldsmith and then sent him to Denmark to polish that training.

This proved to be a fateful move.  One Sunday he came upon Mormon missionaries telling of a new church in America.  He became the first Icelandic convert to the Mormon Church and returned home with missionary fervor.

Gudmundur’s family rejected him and his new-found faith, but he persevered and converted a number of Icelanders from the Westmann Islands.  (Vestmannaeyjar_ = large enough to win him honor in the Kulture House in Reykjavik along with his beloved books.  Unfortunately, he would never know that because the honor would not come until the next century.

When he was 32, he signed on as a cook aboard a ship filled with Mormon converts from Denmark.

As a member of the Seventh Handcart Company, this descendant of Norwegian kings pulled his way across the United States.

Gudmundur never returned to Iceland, but he left his mark there as a young man.  He only lived to be 58, but he also made his mark on Utah with his converts.

This man, who knew how to fill the darkness of the long Icelandic winters with the light of his mind and creativity of his hands, founded a family that has continued to find joy in that gift.

I wish I could say to this remarkable man in his native Icelandic, “Tak, Gudmundur.”