Einar Odd Mortensen Sr. with Gerd Kjustad Mortensen. The Fur Trader: From Oslo to Oxford House.

Norwegian-born Einar Odd Mortensen's career as a fur trader began in 1925, when he travelled from his home country to Canada under the evidently mistaken impression that he had been offered a job by a Manitoba-based fur trading company.With no real knowledge of furs and equipped with a pair of skis that would break on his first day in the bush, Mortensen nevertheless managed to find work as an independent trader at a remote Manitoba trading post.In 1928, he returned to the urban setting of his birth city of Oslo to work in his family's furniture store.He never set foot in Canada again and passed away in 1969.However, he left an incomplete draft of a book on his experiences in Manitoba, written with a Norwegian audience in mind.Mortensen's unfinished memoir was edited decades after his death by his daughter-in-law Gerd Kjustad Mortensen and published by Gyldendal in Norway in 2007 as Pelshandleren [The Fur Trader].The Fur Trader: From Oslo to Oxford House is a critical edition and translation of the Norwegian edition, co-edited by Ingrid Urberg and Daniel Sims.It contains a detailed and valuable introduction to Mortensen's narrative, with an epilogue by Gerd Kjustad Mortensen that gives more background on her fatherin-law's life and the process whereby she and her husband, Einar Odd Mortensen Jr., revised the original manuscript into a book for publication with a major publishing house in Norway.Gerd Kjustad Mortensen also recounts her own trip to The Pas in 2011 and the contribution of the late Dr. Rosalyn Ing, an Elder of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, to the project of bringing The Fur Trader to a Canadian readership.The Fur Trader describes a cultural encounter between margin and margin: a young farmhand from the periphery of Europe who spends three successive winters trading with First Nations and Métis communities in the vicinity of Oxford House and Pine Bluff in northern Manitoba.The thousands of kilometres separating these locations receive barely a mention: Mortensen is already in The Pas when his narrative begins, and the narrative ends abruptly with an exhausted Mortensen returning to Oxford House after a gruelling winter journey from Port Nelson.Ing's advice that deeper historical and cultural context was needed for English-speaking readers was wise, since Mortensen expected his readers to share both his background knowledge of his home country and many of his initial misconceptions about the Indigenous Peoples of

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