Conclusion

Summary

OVER THE COURSE of this book, I have had to base a number of points regarding Morris's motivations on reasonable surmise. It is, for example, impossible to know to what extent he intended the style of his translations and Sigurd to be a literary device of alienation or whether the alienating effect was the result of a lack of sensitivity on his part to his audience, though his belief that his saga translations were ‘in English idiom’ points towards the latter (see Chapter 4, p. 114). In addition, while I hope I have successfully called into question the commonly repeated assumption that Jane Morris's relationship with Rossetti lay at the heart of her husband's engagement with Old Norse literature, Morris's true feelings about the affair and the state of his marriage are also ultimately unknowable, so it is difficult to ascertain with confidence how they did or did not motivate him. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely, even ridiculous, that such a sustained and passionate interest as the one that Morris possessed in Old Norse literature was motivated primarily by his marital difficulties, not least because the interest appears to have outlasted Jane's affairs with both Rossetti and Blunt (and, indeed, in its earliest phase, preceded his meeting Jane in the first place).

As I see it, though the Icelandic trips and, perhaps more pertinently, Morris's desire to test his own sense of inadequacy, coincided with the period in which he was depressed about his personal life (see Introduction, pp. 19–20), the ontological reflection that caused him to redefine his model of heroism when he read and translated Old Norse literature was simply part of the lifelong impulse for inquiry and learning that motivated almost all of his personal endeavours outside of ‘the Firm’. This is not to say that his interest in medieval Icelandic literature did not interact with his personal life. The second trip to Iceland of 1873 seems to have confirmed a sense of self-assurance in him that led to his almost immediately restructuring Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co. into Morris & Co., and the code of secular action that he laid out in Sigurd correlates conspicuously with the crusade of social campaigning that he embraced immediately after its publication.