3 - Grettir the Strong and the Courage of Incapacity

Summary

IF MORRIS REJECTED crudeness and ferocity in the saga heroes, he embraced their courageousness. Reflecting in the autumn of 1883 on what had attracted him to the sagas some fifteen years before, he declared that it was ‘the delightful freshness and independence of thought of them, the air of freedom which breathes through them, their worship of courage’. Four years later, in his 1887 lecture ‘The Early Literature of the North – Iceland’, he lauded the medieval Icelanders as a people ‘whose religion was practically courage’, and later, more emphatically, whose ‘real religion was the worship of Courage’ (note the substantiating capitalised ‘C’). These explanations of the bravery that he had discovered in Old Norse works have strongly influenced scholarly accounts of what drew him to Iceland and its literature. E. P. Thompson argues that there ‘can be few more striking examples of the regenerative resources of culture than this renewal of courage and of faith in humanity which was blown from Iceland to William Morris’, while Robert Page Arnot maintains that Morris was ‘powerfully affected by this literature, in which the quality of courage is so highly developed as to make much of contemporary medieval literature appear like bravado’. More recently Waithe has proposed that Morris ‘admired the passionate reserve of the typical saga-hero, and may even have found comfort in the sagas’ stoical view at a time when his marriage was failing’, while Richard Frith has asserted that Morris ‘strove to embody the same qualities of courage and stoicism in his own works – lived as well as written’.

Notwithstanding their influence on scholars, in these retrospective accounts Morris presents a simplified definition of the model of courage that he perceived in the sagas shortly after meeting Eiríkur Magnússon. While there is no doubt that the sagas proved a salient inspiration for him, and that the Icelandic treks he undertook in 1871 and 1873 provided an enigmatic psychic test that helped steel his resolve to forge a more robust path at a difficult time in his personal life, it should be remembered that the man reminiscing in the mid-1880s was in a very different position from the one who began lessons with Eiríkur in the late 1860s.