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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
March 2, 2000
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©2000 Plains Folk
Freya Manfred is a great presence. She has all those traits we admire in this part of the country--straightforward manner, plain and articulate speech, passion for her subject, an expressive face that speaks beyond words--and yet the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Some people just sit well, or stand well, in front of a group, and she's one of them.
Freya--poet, novelist, and daughter of Frederick Manfred—is the author of a new book published by Minnesota Historical Society Press; it's titled "Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers." It was my pleasure to host her for a talk to my class at NDSU ("The North American Plains") on writing, her book and her father. She also gave a compelling reading from her work at Fargo's Zandbroz Variety Store.
Now for a few words about Frederick Manfred. In the first place, he was a big man, a 6-foot-9-inch-tall Frisian--I mean we have national monuments that aren't as big as Fred Manfred. Come to think of it, he was, or is, a national monument, truly a tower of literature on the northern plains. We ought to prop him up out there next to Devil's Tower so the traveling public could look at two great national monuments at the same time.
He wrote more than 30 novels, on a variety of subjects, but I see two main threads through them. First there are the Siouxland novels--"The Golden Bowl" and "The Chokecherry Tree" and others--that deal with farm life in the area of the Big Sioux River. These wonderful books are particularly notable in that they create, in fiction, a place that becomes real. As Freya recounts, businesses and organizations in southeastern South Dakota nowadays follow Manfred's literary lead by adopting the name "Siouxland." Sometimes life imitates art.
And then we have the Buckskin tales, the anchor volume of which is "Lord Grizzly"--Manfred's fictional rendering of the saga of Hugh Glass, mauled by a grizzly, left for dead by his companions, crawling out of the wilderness to get his revenge on those who had abandoned him.
Freya kept my class engaged with stories of how her father researched "Lord Grizzly." She told how he got out there southwest of Lemmon and figured out what ground Glass would have covered, and walked it himself, bagging up little specimens of grasses and herbs so that he could study them and describe them accurately. She told how when he got home he put a splint on one leg and started crawling around the hillsides so that he could see the world the way Hugh Glass saw it. What she told about, in other words, was the dedication of an author who wanted to make his fiction true.
In her own memoir, Freya tells quite a bit about the Manfred household and life, but the focus is on the time immediately preceding her father's death in 1994. This is a narrative that goes way beyond a literary reflection. It has to do with a man who had great dreams and was utterly dedicated to them; with a girl-become-woman who lived among those dreams and shadows and emerged from them; and with--no, reconciliation isn't the right word, it's more like mutual acceptance, learning to see and respect one another--with the common humanity of the two of them. And it has to do with dignity, even orneriness, in the face of death, and helping someone to achieve it.
You can learn more about literature, and about family, from Freya Manfred than from college degrees in English and Family Science put together. Again, the book is "Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers."
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB b&w photo)