SOURCE: Litzenberg, Karl. “Allusions to the Elder Edda in the ‘Non-Norse’ Poems of William Morse.” Scandinavian Studies and Notes 14, no. 2 (May 1936): 17-24.

[In the following essay, Litzenberg traces Morris's allusions to Eddic matters in his pre-1869 verse.]

I

Although William Morris is noted for the Norse adaptations he made in such poems as “The Lovers of Gudrun” and Sigurd the Volsung, in composing which he drew directly upon the Laxdæla and Völsunga Sagas, his “non-Norse” poems do not contain any large body of Norse allusions. It is a rather curious fact, however, that the poet actually employed more allusions to the Edda in poems written before he studied the Old Icelandic language and literature than he did after he and Eiríkr Magnússon composed their joint translations. In 1869, after a short period of study with Magnússon, Morris began to publish his long series of Scandinavian works. But before 1869, Morris had published a few poems in which he alluded to certain Eddic matters. While such allusions are by no means vast in number, they are especially significant, for they help to explain what Morris knew about Scandinavian myth before he commenced his collaboration with Magnússon.

The first Eddic allusion occurs in “The Wanderers,” the framework poem of The Earthly Paradise. Encountering certain cannibals, the speaker says:

For with our grief such fearful foes we grew
That Odin's gods had scarcely scared men more
As fearless through the naked press we bore.(1)

The gods of Odin's Asgard, except for Thor, whose aspect is generally fearsome, and Loki, whose mischief-making is a by-word, are generally represented as kindly in their treatment of men. But Morris apparently knew as early as 1865-68 (when “The Wanderers” was probably composed) that the inhabitants of Asgard were not always gentle creatures. These gods were the eternal enemies of the giants; they often fought viciously among themselves, and were even known to play tricks upon unsuspecting men when they visited Midgard. Morris apparently appreciated the fact that, given the same circumstances, Odin's gods would have been just as fierce as the Norwegian Mariners about whom Rolf speaks in “The Wanderers.” That Odin and his lesser gods were not capable of the sublimity of the Christian God of Love, Morris seemed fully to understand. The wrath of the Norse gods, as for example in the Lokasenna and the Thrymskvitha, was terrific when once aroused.²

A second allusion in “The Wanderers” is more subtle in implication. For a considerable time after Christianity was introduced into the Scandinavian peninsula, the practice of the people was to rely both upon the God of their missionaries, and upon the old Odinic worship which their ancestors had followed. The wanderers in Morris's poem had accepted the Christian faith; moreover, they had a priest in their party; but they had not forgotten the heathen tales of long ago.³

Though we worshipped God,
And heard mass duly, still of Swithiod
The Greater, Odin, and his house of gold
The noble stories ceased not to be told.(4)

“Swithiod the Greater,” or Sweden the Great (Svíþjóð hin mikla), also called Godhome,⁵ was the home of the gods (in certain sagas); but the term found no general use in legitimate Eddic material. Magnússon ventures the opinion that it was synonymous with Valhalla.⁶ Morris probably got it from the Ynglinga Saga in English translation, or from some English epitome of Eddic and saga stories such as those made by Dasent and Thorpe. The names Svíþjóð and Goðheimar occur frequently in the Ynglinga Saga.

If it is true that Svíþjóð and Valhalla are synonymous, then the phrases, “Swithiod the Greater” and “Odin's house of gold,” in the Morris poem, are redundant; for Glaðsheimr (Odin's house of gold) was the fifth home of the gods (“In my Father's house there are many mansions”) and contains within it Valhalla. Says Odin, disguised as Grimnir:

The fifth is Glathsheim, and gold-bright there
Stands Valhall stretching wide;(7)

Following the lines from “The Wanderers” concerning Swithiod, the speaker continues to note the contrast between the old and new in times and religion:

A little and unworthy land(8) it seemed,
And all the more of Asgard's days I dreamed,
And worthier seemed the ancient faith of praise.(9)

In closing this phase of the discussion, we should note that Morris's respect for the “ancient faith of praise” and the worthy aspiration toward Valhalla—matters with which he was obviously acquainted before he could read the Old Norse language are not the least of the many things which the Old Norse literature taught him. There may be “more than meets the eye” in the poet's statement: “In religion I am a pagan.”

II

To only three other Norse gods—Heimdall, Baldur, and Thor—does Morris allude in his non-Norse poems. The reference to Heimdall in the incomplete “In Arthur's House” testifies to Morris's early recognition of the importance of ragna rök:

E'en as the sun arising wan
In the black sky when Heimdall's horn
Screams out and the last day is born,
This blade to the eyes of men shall be
On that dread day I shall not see—(10)

The old carle who is speaking to Arthur's entourage refers to rogna rök, the last battle of the gods with their ancient enemies, the giants, by telling of the harbinger which shall herald the battle: the sound of Heimdall's horn. Heimdall, the “white god,” dwells in Himinbjörg, close to Bifröst, the Bridge of the Æsir. He is the watchman of the gods, and when the giants come raging over Bifröst, he will blow “Yeller-Horn” (Gjallarhorn) to warn the gods.¹¹ Then the gods will arise and take counsel: Yggdrasil will tremble, and the Æsir will attack their invaders. There will be much slaughter and mutual-killing in duels; the world will be burned, and the gods and champions of mankind will be dead.¹² Then the “dread day” which Morris's old carle says he will not see, will have come. Since “In Arthur's House” was doubtless written as early as 1865, we have in this reference to Heimdall's horn ample proof that Morris recognized the significance of the Norse day of judgment at least five years before he composed his first great Norse poem, and at least three years before he began his comprehensive study of Scandinavian literature.

Baldur's chief characteristics—his beauty and brightness—were apparent to Morris of course. In order to describe another man whose aspect he wished to appear shining also, Morris employed a Baldur simile by way of illustration. The elder woman in Anthony pictures a youth for the maiden to whom she speaks:

                                                            Southland may,
Almost would he have moved thy solemn heart;
Baldur come back to life(13) again he seemed
A sun to light the dim hall's glimmering dusk—(14)

This information concerning Baldur is given many times in both Eddas; Morris may have recalled a passage from Snorri, paraphrased by one of the English adaptors, which reads (in a modern translation): “‘The second son of Odin is Baldr, and good things are to be said of him … he is so fair of feature, and so bright, that light shines from him.’”¹⁵

Possibly the most elusive of all references to the gods in Morris's non-Norse poems is one which makes mention of Thor. In “Ogier the Dane,” the twelfth tale of The Earthly Paradise, Ogier scolds the multitude in the following manner:

          S[ain]t Mary! do such men as ye
Fight with the wasters from across the sea?
Then certes, are ye lost, however good
Your hearts may be; not such were those who stood
Beside the Hammer-bearer years agone.(16)

Although we cannot be sure of the particular incident to which Morris refers, the following explanation seems logical to the present writer: The “Hammer-bearer” is of course Thor (Hlorriði, Vingþórr: “Thor the Hurler”), and “those who stood” are probably the other gods. The allusion seems to contrast the inadequacy of Ogier's warriors in battle with the strength of the Æsir. They “stood beside the Hammer-bearer” while Loki wrangled and accused the Ásynjur of infidelity, and the accumulated rage of “they who stood” when they heard Loki vilify Sif, Thor's wife, drove Loki out of Asgard. He then hid in Franang's Waterfall, and was fished out by the gods in the form of a salmon. This concludes a long series of misdeeds perpetrated by Loki, and henceforth he lies bound with the guts of his son, Vali,¹⁷ waiting, as Snorri says, “Till the weird of the Gods.”¹⁸

While these three references to the gods Heimdall, Baldur, and Thor, seem casual enough, they indicate, when their full implication is laid bare, that he who used them knew rather a great deal about the Norse stories from which they came.

III

After the completion of the translations of the Gunnlaugs Saga and the Grettis Saga, made in collaboration with Eiríkr Magnússon and published in 1869, Morris turned his attention to the heroic lays of the Elder Edda and the Völsunga Saga from both of which he acquired that vast body of legendary material concerning the Volsungs and Niblungs which he later used in Sigurd the Volsung. Although Magnússon states elsewhere that Morris was familiar with the Eddas from the Thorpe and Dasent versions before he had studied the originals, he leads one to suppose in his Preface to the last volume of the Saga Library,¹⁹ that Morris's first real understanding of the Volsung stories came to him while Morris was working over the translations which he and the Icelander made together in 1870. Certainly the two allusions to the Volsung legends which occur in Morris's poems written previous to 1870 do not disprove Magnússon's theory. But they do indicate that Morris was at least slightly acquainted with the general ideas of the Volsung-Niblung stories. Both of these references mention the Hoard of the Niblungs. The “link” following “The Writing on the Image” in The Earthly Paradise, Part II, contains these lines:

They praised the tale, and for a while they talked
Of other tales of treasure-seekers balked,
And shame and loss for men insatiate stored
Nitocris' tomb, the Niblungs fatal hoard,(20)

The other Niblung allusion speaks of the Hoard figuratively as a kenning for gold:

[On the Sword, Tyrfing]
“The ruddy kin of Niblung's [sic] curse
O'er the tresses of a sea-wife's hair
Was wrapped about the handle fair”;(21)

The “ruddy kin” is easily explicable, but the “sea-wife's hair” is not so readily interpreted. Ægir, the Norse Sea-god, had a wife, Ran, who was the sea-wife in most Eddic stories concerning the deities of the waters. Her “hair” may pertain to the net in which she caught those ship-wrecked within her domain, or it may refer to gold itself.²² The vague allusion to “sea-wife's hair” probably was intended by Morris to represent simply one of the attributes of Tyrfing, or perhaps to signify the fetter which bound Tyrfing to its scabbard so that its unwary possessor might not pull it out and thereby kill himself, for Tyrfing always took a life when it was bared. The passage is mysterious enough to lend to the sword that glamour of the supernatural which was so definitely a feature of the charmed weapons of the Norsemen. But it actually does not tell us any more about the Hoard of the Niblungs than the mere fact that it existed.²³

IV

The Norse allusions in the non-Norse poems of William Morris are of no small importance to the study of his relations with the Old Norse literature. We have seen that before he studied Old Icelandic with Magnússon, he had a fairly broad and general knowledge of Scandinavian mythology. We have likewise observed that he undoubtedly knew much more of the gods than he did of the Volsung heroes. English versions of the Eddas as paraphrased and translated by Dasent and Thorpe probably contributed to Morris the substance of his Norse allusions; and it may even be that some of them came from the incidental mythological references in Laing's English version of the Heimskringla. We should not overlook the importance of the allusions in these poems of The Earthly Paradise period, written mostly between 1865 and 1868, no matter how inconsequential they may appear at first view. The fact that Morris had some understanding of Norse matters before he worked with Magnússon allows us more easily to comprehend the phenomenal speed with which the English poet and the Icelandic philologist worked. Within a few months after the commencement of their collaboration, their first English version of a saga—that of Gunnlaug the Wormtongue—appeared; others followed in more than rapid succession.

Miscellaneous Norse allusions ceased to appear in Morris's poems after 1870, for after Morris had once plunged into the lays and sagas written in the Old Icelandic tongue, nothing other than the direct adaptation of whole stories could satisfy the artistic urge which now possessed the English “Frún-smiðr of the Northern Olympus.” Morris's desire to recreate in his own language the Norse stories of another age brought forth those magnificent poems of a later date: “The Lovers of Gudrun” and Sigurd the Volsung. Yet we cannot say that such a line as

‘And all the more of Asgard's days I dreamed’

does not have its private and exemplary significance in the genesis of that aesthetic which produced the noble hexameters of Sigurd.

Notes

1. The Collected Works of William Morris, With Introductions by his Daughter, May Morris (London and New York, 1910-1915), III, 48.

2. See also Gylfaginning, ch. 51, and Völuspá, stanzas 43-66.

3. For a modern treatment of the same paradoxical dual worship, see Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter.

4. Collected Works, III, 6.

5. See Ynglinga Saga (Saga Library, London, 1891-1905, III, 25-26), where Swegdir searches for Godhome so that he may find Odin.

6. See Saga Library, VI, “Godhome,” Index II, p. 252.

7. Grimnismál, stanza 8, Bellows' translation (The Poetic Edda, translated by Henry Adams Bellows, New York, 1923). Cf. also Gylfagynning, Chapter xiv, wherein Gladsheim (Glaðsheimr) is the first house. “It was their [the gods'] first work to make that court in which their twelve seats stand, and another, the high-seat which the Allfather himself has. That house is the best-made of any on earth, and the greatest; without and within, it is all like one piece of gold; men call it Gladsheim.” (The Prose Edda, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, New York, 1929.)

8. That is, the land in which he, the speaker, lived.

9. Collected Works, III, 6.

10. Collected Works, XXIV, 323.

11. Gylfaginning, chapter xxvii.

12. See Snorri's Edda, chapters li, lii, liii.

13. “Baldur come back to life”: cf. “Ah! when thy Balder comes back,” in Morris's Iceland First Seen, Collected Works, IX, 126; and also “And Baldr comes back” [mun baldr koma], Völuspá, stanza 62. The coming of ragna rök and the return of Baldur were two important events which Morris later incorporated into his social philosophy. The present author has discussed these matters in a previous article: “The Social Philosophy of William Morris and the Doom of the Gods,” Michigan Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature, X (Ann Arbor, 1933), 183-203. It is exceedingly interesting to observe that one of the first things Morris knew about Norse myth was the destruction on the dread day of ragna rök, for he made considerable use of this idea in his later works.

14. Collected Works, XXIV, 335. This poem belongs in the 1865-68 period also.

15. Gylfaginning, chapter xxii, Brodeur's translation, p. 36.

16. Collected Works, IV, 235-236. While it is appropriate that Ogier the Dane should himself make a Scandinavian allusion, the poem, Ogier the Dane, can scarcely be considered a Norse poem. It is even less characteristically Scandinavian than Morris's “Aslaug,” or his “Swanhild,” both of which were written before he could read Norse. The real Norse poems are “Gudrun” and “Sigurd.”

17. Loki's expulsion for his abuse of the gods is found in the Elder Edda, Lokasenna, stanzas 60-65. Cf. also Thrymskvitha for Thor's wrath and the passive nature of his companions, stanzas 30-33.

18. In Snorri's version, however, Loki is punished by the gods for his part in Baldur's death. See Gylfaginning, chapter l.

19. Saga Library, VI, Preface, pp. xv-xvi.

20. Collected Works, IV, 85.

21. In Arthur's House, in Collected Works, XXIV, 320.

22. “Ran's light” was a kenning for gold, since Ægir used gold instead of torches to illuminate his palace. See Snorri's Edda, Skáldskaparmál, chapter xxxiii.

23. In contrast to these vague Volsung allusions, cf. the lines:

    My Sigurd's sword, my Brynhild's fiery bed,
    The tale of years of Gudrun's drearihead,

    from Love is Enough, composed after Morris had delved into the Völsunga Saga in the original. “Sigurd's sword” was Gram, which Regin made from the shards of Sigmund's broken brand. “Brynhild's fiery bed” symbolizes the well-known Volsung episode: Sigurd, in the person of Gunnar, rode through the flames that surrounded Brynhild, on his horse, Grani; and slept with her three nights in the guise of Gunnar, placing Gram between them. Gudrun's later knowledge of this, the subsequent murder of Sigurd by Gunnar and the brothers, and the ensuing life of tragedy made up those events which are “The tale of years of Gudrun's drearihead.” The two lines quoted above from Love is Enough show that when he wrote that poem Morris was well informed concerning the Volsung tradition.