Introduction

Summary

THIS BOOK is about what the sagas and poetry of medieval Iceland meant to the poet, novelist, designer and political campaigner William Morris (1834-96). Today, Morris is best known for his abundant textile and wallpaper patterns, revolutionary socialism, and pioneering influence on the Arts and Crafts Movement. Alongside this, he is celebrated as one of the forefathers of modern environmentalism and twentieth-century fantasy fiction. What, then, could Old Norse literature possibly have to do with him? Well, in fact, rather a lot. Renowned foremost in his lifetime as a poet and novelist, for the eight years between 1868 and 1876 when he was aged thirty-four to forty-two, Morris became utterly consumed with Iceland and its medieval poetry and prose. In these years he based two of his most famous poems on Old Norse literature: ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ on Laxdæla saga, and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs on Völsunga saga, the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda. With his collaborator, the Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon (1833-1913), he translated and published several Old Norse sagas, most of which had never appeared before in English. Iceland and its literature also inspired some of Morris's most moving short lyrics, including sonnets written to Grettir Ásmundarson, the iconic hero of Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Further, in the summers of 1871 and 1873 he travelled to Iceland to undertake demanding journeys on horseback across its interior, during which he kept the only extensive journals that he ever wrote. Subsequently, in the final years of his life in the early 1890s, Morris again turned his attention seriously to the sagas, publishing translations of five more of the sagas of Icelanders, as well as the monumental collection of kings’ sagas known as Heimskringla (‘The Circle of the World’).

Old Norse literature and Iceland became so important to Morris between 1868 and 1876 that one of his most popular biographers, Fiona MacCarthy, has called them a ‘central obsession’ in his life (LOT, p. 709). This book considers the nature of that obsession.