L.K. Bertram. 2020. The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans

Recent years have seen a surge of scholarly interest in the culture, history, language, and literature of the Icelanders who immigrated to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their descendants.Following upon the publication of Ryan Eyford's White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West (2016) and Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, Höskuldur Þráinsson, and Úlfar Bragason's edited collection (2018), L.K. Bertram's The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans arrives as another valuable and original contribution.Bertramʼs book helps to deepen our understanding of the development, multiplicity, and persistence of Icelandic cultural identities in a North American context.The book begins with an introduction providing crucial background information for readers unfamiliar with the history of Icelandic immigrants in North America as well as brief comments on the author's source material and methodological approach.While interacting with previous research on the subject, Bertram's stated goal is to depart from the "continued emphasis on certain forms of cultural expression, particularly literature" in order to grasp the "three-dimensional nature of [Icelandic North American] immigrant culture" (23).With this in mind, the analysis is carried out over five chapters focusing on "popular and commonplace traditions -particularly those previously dismissed as trivial and taboo" (23).Each chapter can be read as a standalone study, but readers will also benefit from the fuller image of the diversity of Icelandic cultural identities that emerges from reading them together.They will also come to recognize how cultural ideas about gender, race, and social classes simultaneously informed these traditions.The first chapter investigates the "rapidly changing circumstances of migrants' lives" (53) through the history of Icelandic immigrant communities' clothing customs in the late nineteenth century.Rather than interpreting changes in these customs through the lens of deterioration and assimilation, Bertram demonstrates that such changes reflect how Icelandic migrants in North America adapted to their new cultural, physical, and social environments.They offer particular insight, for example, into Icelandic-Indigenous relations and the creation of new social identities and divisions.Remaining in the social sphere, the second chapter concerns Icelandic immigrant drinking cultures, namely those formed around the brewing and consumption of coffee and alcohol.Bertram demonstrates how "coffee and alcohol acted as both cohesive

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