www.cwecrocker.com
I was born in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, a town roughly 500 km south of the L’Anse aux Meadows national historic site. Despite growing up in relative proximity to the site, which is the only known location of Norse settlement in what is now North America, my interest in Old Norse-Icelandic literature began only after I completed my first university degree in mathematics. At the time, I was living and working along the west coast of Scotland where I became an avid reader in my off time. It was through the works of modern authors like William Vollmann and Halldór Laxness that I became interested in and began to search out works of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, at the time in English translation.
When I decided to return to Canada and to university, the presence of an Icelandic department at the University of Manitoba was an immediate draw. Although not initially my sole focus, the courses I took at the U of M in the Icelandic department, in both medieval and modern culture and literature, had a profound impact. So much so that, after a year of undergraduate course work, I entered a Master’s program in the department under the supervision of Professor Birna Bjarnadóttir. Modern Icelandic language courses with P.J. Buchan were also a crucial part of my program there. When it came time to develop a thesis project, Old Norse-Icelandic literature (and the Sagas about Early Icelanders in particular) was an obvious focal point.
During the final year of my program, I took part in the U of M’s Icelandic field school in Iceland, which led to a student exchange semester in Iceland. There, I audited courses in Old Norse language and medieval Icelandic literature and completed my dissertation on the representation of women in the sagas. I also met Professor Ármann Jakobsson who became my PhD supervisor at the University of Iceland. My dissertation project there focused on dreams in the sagas and was part of a larger project on Paranormal Encounters in medieval Iceland.
During and following my PhD program, I worked as an instructor in the Icelandic Department at the U of M, continued to conduct and publish my research on medieval Icelandic literature, and also co-translated Guttormur J. Guttormsson’s Ten Plays with Elin Thordarson. In 2018, I returned to the University of Iceland to work as a postdoctoral researcher in a large multidisciplinary project led by Professor Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir. The project, titled “Disability before disability,” explored disability in Icelandic society, culture, and history before the establishment of disability as a modern legal, bureaucratic, and administrative concept.
For the past two years, I shifted focus by developing my own research project on the North American-Icelandic children’s newspaper Sólskin. My project centred around a large collection of children’s letters, including two written by a young Halldór Laxness, published in the paper in the 1910s. The project culminated with the publication of my book The Sunshine Children. In the meantime, I developed an outline to produce a book that continues my earlier research on the representation of disability in the medieval Icelandic sagas. The book will be a more comprehensive study of the topic, which I have previously written about in shorter articles and book chapters. I am grateful to the Canada Iceland Foundation for supporting my work.
Christopher is in the process of drafting the manuscript for publication.
Canada Iceland Foundation, Inc.