The Vikings Who Came to Fly

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

In The Vikings Who Came to Fly, Dona Paul Massel records Canada’s role in the lives of Norwegian airmen who trained at Vesle Skaugum or Little Norway at Muskoka, Ontario, during World War II. Massel takes a nostalgic journey into her childhood when, as the friend of a Norwegian girl, she became acquainted with the Norwegian airmen. But she does not simply transform her recollections of that time and place into poetry. She glides in and out of the consciousness of various figures of that day. She conjures images seen by the young military men who found themselves in a foreign land performing tasks with undefined outcomes and by the people who came in contact with those men.

The prologue to the poems reveals the historical facts leading to the presence of the Norwegian militia in Canada. After Hitler’s forces invaded Norway in April 1940, the Norwegian Head of State, King Haakon, and Crown Prince Olav and members of the Norwegian cabinet, under the protection of the Norwegian Army Forces but continually pursued by the German forces, set out to rendezvous with a British destroyer waiting to carry them safely to Britain. This maneuver affiliated the Norwegians with the Allied nations. Subsequently, the Canadian government offered the Royal Norwegian Air Force a training ground.

Massel’s poetry, however, focuses not on the historical situation but on the everyday lives of these airmen bent on avenging the “flag of the black swastika.” She empathetically describes the airmen’s feelings in a strange land and their behavior with Canadian youth. She describes their fears, frustrations, and pain, and their joys during recreational hours. Some poems consider customs (the sauna, the crafts of women) or jobs relevant to war (parachute packing).

These poems provide pleasurable reading while filling a historical gap. Massel treats her subject matter with honest clarity and, unlike many war writers, does not become sentimental. Her subjects are not glamorous war heroes but ordinary mortals with less than glamorous lives.