WILLIAM MORRIS & ICELAND

ADAPTED FROM AN ARTICLE BY GARY AHO

On his first journey to Iceland in 1871, from the pitching deck of a small Danish steamer, on a chill August morning, William Morris caught his first glimpse of Iceland: ‘a terrible shore indeed: a great mass of dark grey mountains worked into pyramids and shelves, . . . we see the first of the great glaciers . . . and black peaks sticking up out of the glacier sea . . . and the sides of the Vatnajokull, an ice tract as big as Yorkshire’ (Icelandic Journals, London: Centaur Press, 1969, pp. 14-15).

And in "Iceland First Seen," a later poem, Morris more subjectively recalls his impressions of ‘this mountain waste voiceless as death . . . dreadful with grinding of ice and record of scarce hidden fire’ (Poems by the Way, London: Longmans, 1891).

Morris’s 1887 lecture, "The Early Literature of the North--Iceland," opens with the following descriptions:

If you look at the map of Europe, you will see in its northwestern corner lying just under the Arctic circle a large island considerably bigger than Ireland. If you were to take ship and go there you would find it a country very remarkable in aspect, little more than a desert, yet the most romantic of all deserts even to look at: a huge volcanic mass still liable to eruptions of mud, ashes, and lava, and which in the middle of the 18th century was the scene of the most tremendous outpour of lava that history records. . . .

It is a country of no account whatever commercially: the whole centre of the island being high above the level of the sea is a desert indeed, partly glacier, partly rough rock and black volcanic sand, the moraines I suppose of ancient glaciers across which the wind sweeps with a fury unknown . . . It is not a thirsty desert however; every valley almost has water in it and huge rivers rush towards the sea from the glaciers, turbid and white with the grinding of the ice, cleaving for themselves the most fantastic channels amid the blocks of lava and basalt. Awful looking are these Icelandic wastes, yet beautiful to a man with eyes and heart (The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, Eugene LeMire, ed., pp. 179-80). Morris’s prose here is both precise and emotional, using adjectives that evoke a sense of the Sublime, of nature distant, dangerous, and inscrutable. Though ‘voiceless,’ it is able to convey a sense of fearful awe, as well as ideas of truth and beauty, especially to those who are both keen and sensitive, to those with ‘eyes and heart.’ And here we can understand why critics like Graham Hough placed Morris among The Last of the Romantics (London, G. Duckworth, 1947).

Iceland’s blasted and dramatic landscapes, the effects of fire and ice, the volcanos and geysers, the snowy peaks and vast glaciers, the marvels Morris first glimpsed in 1871, have drawn travelers and tourists to Iceland from the mid-19th century (and the advent of the steamship), right up to the present day. Those visitors, often with similar notions of the Sublime, have been humbled and exalted by the roaring cataracts of Gullfoss, by the broad vistas at Thingvellir (the vast sunken plain where the ‘parliament’ met each summer), and by thermal displays of hot pots and spouting geysers. A visit to the main Geysir site was, and remains, a must for every pilgrim. A few dozen had been there in the summer of 1871, and Morris was disgusted by the chicken bones and litter they’d left behind. What would he think of that site today, with its acres of asphalt parking lots, scores of tour busses lined all in a row, hundreds of tourists in the crowded restaurants and squat hotel?

Gullfoss and Thingvellir and Geysir, destinations on what today’s tourist brochures call ‘The Golden Circle,’ are close to Reykjavik and can be visited, recorded on video cameras, in one leisurely summer afternoon. But those eastern highlands, the Iceland Morris first glimpsed that August morning in 1871, those snowy wastes dominated by Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest glacier, they remained silent and distant and vast and empty, far off the beaten track for tourists, and home only to migrating geese, a few herds of reindeer, a shepherd looking for animals that had strayed up there from small steads down in one of the lower valleys.