1. Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. Discovery; the autobiography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. (p. 12-13) [G635.S7 A3]
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (circled) with his class at Harvard Divinity School. Stefansson was born in Manitoba, Canada, but grew up on the plains of North Dakota, herding and hunting, before going to university. It was as a graduate student at Harvard Divinity school where he fell into Arctic exploration, after studying both divinity and anthropology.
2. Stefansson, Vilhjalmur. The church-ruin at Herjolfsnes viewed from N.E. Rauner Special Collections Library 1906-7. Stefansson Collection [stem226_544]
Shown here is a lantern slide from Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s collection depicting the ruins of a church at Herjolfsnes, a Norse settlement on the southern tip of Greenland. The church is believed to have been built in the 13th century and was the third largest church built by the Norse in Greenland. This slide was used as a visual aid in Stefansson’s international lecture series on life in the Arctic and was featured in his first article on the arctic: “The Icelandic Colony in Greenland”, published in 1906.