W. D. Valgardson. What the Bear Said: Skald Tales from New Iceland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
W. D. Valgardson. What the Bear Said: Skald Tales From New Iceland. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2011. 130 pp. Preface. Glossary. $19.00 he. In this collection of fourteen short stories, W. D. Valgardson writes about nineteenth-century Icelandic immigrants and their descendants in New Iceland, Manitoba, placing the experience of emigration at the heart of his subject matter. Some of the stories take place in both the country left and the one arrived to, offering a spectacular view of the vastness of experience in an emigrant's life. Equally captivating are the stories that describe a settler's hard fought attempt to adjust to even the most unforgiving circumstances. All of the stories, however, bear the mark of a folk tale. As stated in the author's preface, the Icelandic folk tale serves as a model for these stories. When approaching the above-mentioned heart of this collection's subject matter, the reader may gradually understand the relevance of its literary style. In fact, the style of these short stories may in a large part be responsible for the collection's novelty. There is a certain historical framework at play in What the Bear Said. Coinciding with the great wave of emigration from the European mainland and Scandinavia in the nineteenth century, it was around 1870 when large groups of Icelanders started to leave their country for North America. In October of 1875, the first large group of Icelandic emigrants arrived on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, the site which became the Icelandic reserve, and which is still referred to as New Iceland. By 1876, in this place which for many had been imagined as the promised land, the newcomers from Iceland already faced several hard facts, one of them being a smallpox epidemic. W. D. Valgardson does not hesitate to revisit the site of broken dreams. One of the short stories is simply titled Quarantine (65-71), describing the dire circumstances wherein the Icelandic settlers found themselves. During the epidemic, they were literally cut off from all possible remedy in the new and densely hierarchical society. But can a folk tale serve such a subject matter, some may ask. What is a folk tale? In addition to the historical framework that provides the backdrop for these stories, a certain literary heritage makes itself felt. Icelandic folk tales do not only originate from the Germanic/Northern literary heritage. They have their roots in a longstanding tradition of oral storytelling, a tradition the Icelandic emigrants ferried over the Atlantic Ocean in the nineteenth century, and handed down to their descendants. Like the world's folk tales in general, the Icelandic one fosters a fantastic gallery of characters all of which make an appearance in What the Bear Said. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".