Abstract
Letters are multi-layered documents of life. Letters are not just texts but also artefacts that tell stories about literacy practices, family relations and social practices. When used as an evidence of the past, of lives and experiences, they must be read carefully, contextualised and situated in relation with their cultural circumstances, gender, class, geography, to name few intersectional factors of significance. Letters were an important venue of keeping in touch in sparsely populated and rural nineteenth-century Iceland. Those who could write, and utilised their practices, both men and women, often corresponded with family or friends living in other parts of the country, or in Copenhagen (Iceland being under Danish rule). Some of these connections lasted a lifetime, even though correspondents seldom expected that to be the case and many of them rarely met or never saw each other during their years of correspondence. Their lives, their friendship, family relations and relationship were thus interpreted and represented in letters. And their lives were being narrated in a way they could not foresee how would turn out in the end. This chapter is grounded in the author’s year-long study into the correspondences of nineteenth-century Iceland, in particular women’s correspondence. The connecting theme will be the epistolary lives of Páll Pálsson’s (1806–1877) family, as unfolded in their letters to him, their networks, the epistolary and literacy practices, but first and foremost, the ordinariness and situatedness of these letters.
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Notes
- 1.
I refer to Icelandic names according to Icelandic tradition, that is, by the first name, not surname. Furthermore, most often a family does not share surname as a woman is the daughter (dóttir) of her father but a man is the son of his father. That is why the five siblings are either Pálsson or Pálsdóttir, the son of Páll or the daughter of Páll—Páll Guðmundsson, their father. And their mother is the daughter of Jens.
- 2.
The term life writing has in recent years been preferred to autobiographical writing because it offers a wider definition than autobiographical writing and does not necessarily imply reflections on life: I have been using it myself because it offers a space for using different but related narratives when exploring and constructing a life from fragmented sources, letters included. See definition in Caine (2010: 69).
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Archives
Lbs (Landsbókasafn Íslands – Háskólabókasafn [National and University Library of Iceland]):
Lbs. 124 fol. Miscellaneous. Originated from Páll Pálsson’s Collection.
Lbs. 2409–2415 4to. Páll Pálsson’s Collection.
Lbs. 2843–2844 4to. Helgi Hálfdánarson’s Collection.
Lbs. 3180 4to. Jakobína Jónsdóttir and Grímur Thomsen’s Collection.
Acknowledgements
This study has been funded by Rannís, The Icelandic Research Fund (ref.130811–051). I wish to thank Ann-Catrine Edlund, Susanne Haugen and Lars Erik Edlund for the opportunity to spend time at Umeå University in 2014–2015, thinking and writing about letters and historical literacy. Also Julian Meldon D’Arcy for helping out with the English language.
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Halldórsdóttir, E.H. (2020). The Unforeseeable Narrative: Epistolary Lives in Nineteenth-Century Iceland. In: Parsons, J., Chappell, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31974-8_9
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