William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas by Ian Felce (review)

The polymath William Morris has attracted many studies since his death in 1896, whether of his life history, his importance to the Arts and Crafts Movement, his socialism, and increasingly his environmentalism and his pioneering role in the creation of the genre of fantasy literature, both subjects that have resonated with many people in recent decades. The significance that Iceland and medieval Icelandic literature held for Morris and his representation of these subjects in his poetry, his translations of Icelandic sagas, and his two travel journals, have also been treated by his biographers, his daughter May Morris, and other writers, but, as Ian Felce claims, no one with a sound knowledge of Old Icelandic language and literature has previously made a thorough study of Morris’s use of Icelandic material, particularly his translation methodology, including his so-called literal style, and the translations themselves in comparison to the Icelandic texts. Another, related topic that Felce begins to investigate, though much more could be said, as he himself admits toward the end of the book, is the role of Morris’s Icelandic teacher, Eiríkur Magnússon, not only in teaching him the language, but in helping to shape his translation style, word by word.

The book begins with parallel short biographies of Eiríkur and Morris, in Iceland and England, respectively, leading up to the time of their first meeting in 1868. It then traces their partnership in learning and translating Icelandic, through what Felce calls the 1868–76 “Old Norse Period” when most of the saga translations were first produced, and then to the later period of revision of the translations for publication in the series The Saga Library, edited by both men and published in six volumes by Quaritch between 1891 and 1905. Along the way Felce takes the opportunity (repeated at various later points in the book) to debunk several popular hypotheses about why Morris became so much drawn to Iceland and Icelandic literature. Escape from the angst caused by his wife Jane’s long-running affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the most popular theory, but Felce demonstrates how unlikely this is to be the whole story, given that Morris’s interest in Iceland predates even his first meeting with his future wife.

In place of this and other superficial but attractive theories, Felce proposes a much more complex set of reasons for Morris’s involvement with Icelandic culture and society, which he finds signalled in his versions of Old Norse literature. He investigates both the medievalism of “The Lovers of Gudrun” and “Sigurd the Volsung,” which take their inspiration from Icelandic sagas and eddic poetry, but are not direct translations, and the translations of various sagas of Icelanders, some translated into English for the first time, and of the kings’ sagas in Heimskringla. Felce’s method is that of close reading, comparing Morris’s translations with the Old Icelandic texts, and this serves him well on the whole, although he tends to concentrate in his analysis on particular themes, perhaps to the exclusion of a more rounded assessment of Morris’s representation of the heroic world that he perceived and valued in saga literature.

In Chapter 2, for example, Felce focuses on how Morris represents “the performance of masculinity” (p. 53) by investigating how he translates passages from saga texts that involve the concept of níð or unmanly behavior and the slurs associated with imputing passive homosexuality to a rival. The difficulty of choosing this particular topic as evidence for Morris’s softening of the Icelandic saga world’s depiction of male aggression by means of his use of vague and unspecific language where the sagas call a spade a spade is faced squarely: he would have fallen foul of nineteenth-century British censorship laws had he done so. Nevertheless, Felce presents enough evidence of Morris’s habitual translation of saga scenes of aggression and violence in terms that are vague and inclined to...