Beyond the North Wind by McIntosh Christopher

Author:McIntosh, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781633410909
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
Published: 2019-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

It was Thomas Percy's Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, along with his Northern Antiquities (1770), and the splendid 1768 Norse Odes of Thomas Gray, which put the seal on the arrival of the old northern literary sensibility. These were the texts that rolled the pitch for the opening bowlers of Victorian old northernism, and established the canon of old northern texts that guided paraphrasers and imitators for most of the nineteenth century.7

One of these “bowlers” was George Dasent, professor of English language and literature at King's College, London. In 1861, he published his translation of Njal's Saga under the title The Story of Burnt Njal, which became, as Wawn writes, “the work through which many Victorian readers made their first acquaintance with the specifically Icelandic as opposed to Scandinavian old north.”8 Few works in the literature of the world can rival the human depth, epic sweep, and heroic grandeur of Njal's Saga, and its sensitive rendering by Dasent helped to give rise to a flood of writings on Iceland and the Vikings from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. These included scholarly works, novels, poetry, and travel writings.

Of the many nineteenth-century travelers to Iceland, two in particular are worth mentioning because of their totally contrasting reactions to the country. The first was Victorian England's Renaissance genius William Morris (1834–1896)—poet, novelist, textile designer, printer, publisher, translator, and dedicated socialist—who visited Iceland in 1871 and again in 1873. Morris, emotionally shattered on account of his wife's love affair with his fellow artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sought and found solace in Iceland, its warm-hearted people, its raw, unencumbered landscape and its beautiful, subtle language, which he knew well enough to be able to translate Icelandic literature. Starting in Reykjavik, he and three companions went around the coast and through the interior of the country, traveling on Icelandic ponies, identifying the sites described in the sagas, visiting the famous Geysir and its hot springs, and marveling at the beauty of the fjords, mountains, waterfalls, and glaciers. On the way, Morris kept a travel diary and wrote much poetry. Enchanted with Iceland, he returned there two years later. His love of Iceland and the North had been foreshadowed in his early poem “The Dedication of the Temple” (1855), which contains these lines:

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