The Life of William Morris/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
JOURNEY TO ICELAND
1871
The journey through Iceland in the summer of 1871 had, both before and after its occurrence, an importance in Morris's life which can hardly be over-estimated, and which, even to those who knew him well, was not wholly intelligible. To enter into his feelings one must imagine a strange combination of Johnson in the Hebrides and Byron in Greece. The heroic stories of Iceland stood in his mind at the head of the world's literature; the deeds which they chronicled were the summit in their tragic force of all human achievement. And the Icelandic Republic represented, more nearly than any other state of things recorded in history, the political and social framework of life which satisfied his mind and imagination. On the Law-Mound of Thingvalla, by the steads of Herdholt or Lithend, he stood with deeper-kindled emotions than would have been roused in him in the Roman Forum or on the Athenian Acropolis, or where grass grows over the fallen towers of Troy. With such depth of awe and prostration of spirit a pilgrim might approach the desolate and holy places of a land where gods had once walked in the likeness of men. In his poem of "Iceland First Seen" he gave this feeling its fullest utterance. "What went ye into the wilderness for to see?"—this phrase kept perpetually reverting to him as he thought of Iceland: a land waste, black, desolate, grey-grassed, "dreadful with grinding of ice and record of scarce-hidden fire," and yet made by undying tales a treasure-house and queen of lands.
And to this was added the excitement of new and strange adventure. The voyage to Iceland had not become so common an amusement of a summer holiday as it is now: though one reached the island by a mail steamer and could map out the route accurately beforehand, there was enough of strangeness about the whole proceedings to make the planning of the journey quite exciting. The journey itself was one that had to be taken in adventurous explorers' fashion, with guides and a string of packhorses, carrying tents and food and all the means of life: once inland, the traveller was beyond all reach of news: it was a prolonged picnic spiced by hard living and rough riding. "Don't forget to practise riding," he wrote to Faulkner in May. "I began this morning. By Gum the great we shall have plenty of it there according to our program."
The party were four in number. Mr. Magnússon, who was taking this opportunity of paying a visit to his native place and kinsfolk, was the organizer and guide-in-chief. Faulkner was the third of the party; and the fourth was Mr. W.H. Evans of Forde Abbey in Dorset, a recent acquaintance, who had been planning an Iceland voyage on his own account and was ready to fall in with the wishes of the others as regards all the details of travelling. Morris entered into the preparations for the journey with the delight of a schoolboy. Money had to be sent out to Reykjavik to buy riding and pack horses for the party; tents, blankets, food, and appliances of all kinds were to be bought, and details of travel in the desert were rehearsed in anticipation. The Burne-Jones children long remembered vividly how Morris came one day and built a little hearth in their garden with loose bricks, over which he cooked a stew in the manner of some pirate or backwoodsman in a story-book. As the time drew near he was as excited and fidgety as a boy preparing for the holidays. The importance of the occasion was such that he resolved, for the first time in his life, to keep a diary. This was almost necessary in any case if he wished to bring home any ordered account of his adventures, for from the day the travellers struck inland from Reykjavik until they regained it again there was little chance of sending, any more than of receiving, letters. This diary, scribbled from day to day on the spot, was carefully written out by him when he came home, and afterwards revised and written out again with some idea of publishing it. This idea, however, considered and deferred more than once, was finally rejected by him towards the end of his life. The extracts given here are from the revised manuscript given by him to Mrs. Burne-Jones in 1873.
On the 6th of July, the party (except Mr. Evans, who had gone on to Leith by sea) started from London to take the fortnightly Danish mail boat from Granton. "That morning," says the diarist, "my heart had failed me, and I felt as if I should have been glad of any accident that had kept me at home; yet now it would have seemed unbearable to sleep in London another night." All night in the train he was too excited to sleep; but with the next day's dawn he recovered himself and began to observe things: sunrise among the forges of Darlington, a beautiful sky-landscape strangely confused with the still-glowing furnace fires: the clean Northumberland country, and the poetical-looking bay in which Holy Island lies, with the little town running all up the hill near the end of its long northern horn: Berwick-on-Tweed with its land-locked harbour and the long bridge of many pointed arches: the lovely glens that break down seaward from the skirts of the Lammermuirs, "like one's imagination of what the backgrounds of the Border Ballads ought to be": and finally the imposing masses and doleful detail of Edinburgh. It was his first sight of Scotland, a country which, like Dr. Johnson, he never loved and was always ready to find fault with. The next day the "Diana," one of the two steamers which alternated for the Iceland mail service, came in to Granton harbour, and they sailed the following morning. She was a wooden screw steamer which once had been a Danish gunboat, of about 240 tons, roomy for her size, but with an extraordinary capacity for rolling. The diary sets down a description of her somewhat as though she were a mediæval building:
"The little vessel looked quite clean and tidy now: she is as aforesaid an old gunboat, long and low, rising somewhat forward, and with bulkheads across the deck just forward of the deck-cabin, that seemed to us to forebode plenty of water on board: she has three masts, the forward one has two square sails and a fore and aft sail, the middle one a fore and aft sail, and the after one no sail at all bent on it: round about the rudder is a little raised platform where we lay about a good deal on the voyage out, then comes the deck-cabin with a narrow covered passage leading forward on each side of it, and with a hurricane deck on the top: then there is a small open space broken by the sky-lights of the engine room between the deck-cabin and the galley; there is good space for a walk forward of this, but when there is the least sea on, unless the wind is right astern it is too wet to be pleasant: over the galley, I forgot to say, is the bridge where the captain or mate stands to steer the ship: also our sleeping cabin is reached by stairs from the deck-cabin, and there is a ladies' cabin on the other side of ours—ours is a very small place, and almost pitch dark when the lamps are not lighted; as small as it is we were surprised to find that it really was not very stuffy, for they have managed to ventilate it well."
They had left Granton soon after sunrise on Sunday morning; and on Tuesday at daybreak the Faroes were sighted.
"I have often noticed," says the diary, "in one's expeditions, how hard it is to explain to one's friends afterwards why such and such a day was particularly delightful, or give them any impression of one's pleasure, and such a trouble besets me now about the past day.
"I woke up later than usual, about half-past six, and went on deck in a hurry, because I remembered the mate had promised that we should be at Thorshaven in the Faroes by then, and that we should have sighted the south islands of them long before: and now there we were sure enough, steaming up the smooth water of a narrow firth with the shore close on either board: I confess I shuddered at my first sight of a really northern land in the grey of a coldish morning. (The Faroes seemed to me such a gentle sweet place when we saw them again after Iceland.) The hills were not high, especially on one side, as they slope beachless into the clear but grey water; the grass was grey between greyer ledges of stone that divided the hills in regular steps; it was not savage, but mournfully empty and barren, the grey clouds, dragging over the hill-tops or lying in the hollows, being the only thing that varied the grass, stone, and sea: yet as we went on, the firth opened out on one side and showed wild strange hills and narrow sounds between the islands, that had something, I don't know what, of poetic and attractive about them; and on one side was sign of population in the patches of bright green that showed the home-fields of farms on the hillsides, and at last at the bight's end we saw the pleasant-looking little town of Thorshaven, with its green-roofed little houses clustering round a little bay and up a green hillside: thereby we presently cast anchor, the only other craft in the harbour being three fishing smacks, cutters, who in answer to the hoisting of our flag ran up English colours, and were, we afterwards found out, from Grimsby for Iceland. The shore soon became excited at our arrival, and boats put off to us, the friends of our three passengers for the Faroes, and others, and there was a great deal of kissing on deck presently: then came a smart-looking boat carrying the governor, and having eight oars aside, manned by the queerest old carles, who by way of salute as the boat touched our side, shuffled off their Faroish caps in a very undignified manner. These old fellows, like most (or all) of the men, wore an odd sort of Phrygian cap, stockings and knee-breeches, loose at the knee, and a coat like a knight's just-au-corps, only buttoning in front, and generally open. The boats are built high stem and stern, with the keel-rib running up into an ornament at each end, and cannot have changed in the least since the times of the Sagas."
After breakfast the passengers went on shore for the day. "Magnússon took us to the store of a friend of his, a sort of place like a ship's hold, and where they sold everything a Faroese would buy from a tintack to a cask of brandy; we found nothing to buy there but Danish cherry-brandy, which was good and cheap; then we went into the private house of the merchant, and were kindly welcomed by his wife into a pretty wooden house very like a ship's cabin, and, to me, still unquiet: it was very clean, painted white, and with roses and ivy planted in great pots growing all over the drawing-room wall (inside). Thence we went out into the town, which pleased me very much: certainly there was a smell of fish, and these creatures, or parts of them, from guts to gutted bodies, hung and lay about in many places; but there was no other dirt apparent; the houses were all of wood, high-roofed with little white casements, the rest of the walls being mostly done over with Stockholm tar; every roof was of turf, and fine crops of flowery grass grew on some of them. The houses were pitched down with little order enough, and in fact the whole town was like a toy Dutch town of my childhood's days. The people we met were very polite, good-tempered, and contented-looking: the women not pretty, but not horrible either, and the men often quite handsome, and always carrying themselves well in their neat dresses; which include, by the bye, skin shoes tied about the ankle with neat thongs: the men were often quite swarthy, and had a curious cast of melancholy on their faces, natural I should think to the dwellers in small remote islands."
After seeing the town they set off to walk across the island of Straumey. "Presently, having gone through the town, we met on a road that ran through little fields of very sweet flowery grass nearly ready for the scythe: it affected me strangely to see all the familiar flowers growing in a place so different to anything one had ever imagined, and withal (it had grown a very bright fresh day by now) there was real beauty about the place of a kind I can't describe. We were soon off these cultivated meadows, however, and in a long deep valley of the open fells, peaty and grass-clad, with a small stream running through it, and not unlike to many Cumberland valleys I have been in: up the hillside on the left we struck, and clomb the hill, whence turning round, we could see the sound we had come up this morning, the little 'Diana' lying in the harbour with boats clustered round her, the little toylike-looking town so small, so small, and beyond it the mountains, jagged and peaked, of another island, with the added interest of knowing that there was a deep sound between us and them: sea and sky were deep blue now, but the white clouds yet clung to the mountains here and there.
"We turned away and went along the ridge of the mountain neck, and looking all up the valley, could see it turning off towards the right, and a higher range above its bounding hill; and again it was exciting to be told that this higher range was in another island; we saw it soon, as we turned a corner of the stony stepped grey hills, and below us lay a deep calm sound, say two miles broad, a hog-backed steep mountain-island forming the other side of it, next to which lay a steeper islet, a mere rock; and then other islands, the end of which we could not see, entangled the sound and swallowed it up; I was most deeply impressed with it all, yet can scarcely tell you why; it was like nothing I had ever seen, but strangely like my old imaginations of places for sea-wanderers to come to: the day was quite a hot summer day now, and there was no cloud in the sky, and the atmosphere was very, very clear, but a little pillowy cloud kept dragging and always changing yet always there, over the top of the little rocky islet. All the islands, whether sloping or sheer rocks, went right into the sea without a hand's breadth of beach anywhere; and, little thing as that seems, I suppose it is this which gives the air of romanticism to these strange islands. Close by the sea lay the many gables (black wood with green turf-roofs) of the farm of Kirkjubae (Kirkby), a little white-washed church being the nearest to the sea, while close under the basalt cliff was the ruin of a stone mediæval church: a most beautiful and poetical place it looked to me, but more remote and melancholy than I can say, in spite of the flowers and grass and bright sun: it looked as if you might live for a hundred years before you would ever see ship sailing into the bay there; as if the old life of the saga-time had gone, and the modern life never reached the place.
"We hastened down, along the high mowing-grass of the home-field, full of buttercups and marsh-marigolds, and so among the buildings: the long-nosed cadaverous parson who guided us took us first to the ruin, which he said had never been finished, as the Reformation had stopped the building of it: in spite of which story, it is visibly not later than 1340 in date, which fact I, with some qualms, stoutly asserted, to the parson's disgust, though 'tis quite a new fault to me to find local antiquaries post-date their antiquities: anyhow it was, or had been, a rich and beautiful Decorated chapel without aisles, and for all I know had never been finished: thence we went into the more modern church (such a flower-bed as its roof was!) which was nevertheless interesting from its having a complete set of bench-ends richly carved (in deal) of the fifteenth century, but quite northern in character, the interlacing work mingling with regular fifteenth-century heraldic work and very well carved figures that yet retained, in costume and style, a strong tinge of the thirteenth century: the ornament of the bishop's throne, a chair with a trefoiled canopy, though I am pretty sure of the same date as the bench-ends, was entirely of the northern interlacing work.
"From the church we went into the bonder's house, which was very clean, and all of unpainted deal, walls, floor and ceiling, with queer painted old presses and chests about it: he turned up with his two children presently, and welcomed us in that queer northern manner I got used to after a little, as if he was thinking of anything else than us, nay, rather as if he were not quite sure if we were there or not."
The "Diana" weighed anchor after dinner. "The evening was very fine still, the sea quite smooth and the tide in our favour; so the captain told us we were going to thread the islands by the sound called the Westmanna-firth, instead of going round about them; so, as it turned out, we had the best of our sight of the Faroes yet to see. Going down the sound we had come up in the morning, we turned round into the sound we had looked down into from Kirby that noon, passing close by the stead itself, and so into the Westmanna-firth, that grew narrower and narrower as we went on, though here and there between breaks of the islands we could see the open ocean: at last we were in the narrowest of it; it was quite smooth, clear and green, and not a furlong across; the coasts were most wonderful on either side; pierced rocks running out from the cliffs under which a brig might have sailed: caves that the water ran up into, how far we could not tell; smooth walls of rock with streams flowing over them right into the sea; or these would sink down into green slopes with farms on them; or be cleft into deep valleys over which would show crater-like or pyramidal mountains: or they would be splintered into jagged spires; one of which, single and huge, just at the point of the last ness before we entered this narrow sound, is named the Trolls-finger; and all this always without one inch of beach to be seen; and always when the cliffs sank you could see little white clouds lying about on the hillsides: at last we could see on ahead a narrow opening, so narrow that you could not imagine that we could sail out of it, and then soon the cliffs on our right gave back and showed a great land-locked bay almost like a lake, with green slopes all round it, and a great mountain towering above them at its end, where lay the houses of a little town, Westmanna-haven; they tell us that the water is ten fathom deep close up to the very shore in here, and that it is, as it looks, a most magnificent harbour. After that, on we went toward the gates that led out into the Atlantic; narrow enough they look even now we are quite near; as the ship's nose was almost in them, I saw close beside us a stead with its home-field sloping down to the sea, the people running out to look at us, and the black cattle grazing all about; then I turned to look ahead as the ship met the first of the swell in the open sea, and when I looked astern a very few minutes after I could see nothing at all of the gates we had come out by, no slopes of grass, or valleys opening out from the shore; nothing but a terrible wall of rent and furrowed rocks, the little clouds still entangled here and there about the tops of them: here the wall would be rent from top to bottom and its two sides would yawn as if they would have fallen asunder, here it was buttressed with great masses of stone that had slipped from its top; there it ran up into all manner of causeless-looking spikes: there was no beach below the wall, no foam breaking at its feet; it was midnight now and everything was grey, and colourless, and shadowless, yet there was light enough in the clear air to see every cranny and nook of the rocks, and in the north-east now the grey sky began to get a little lighter with dawn. I stood near the stern and looked backward a long time, till the coast, which had seemed a great crescent when we came out of the sound, was now a long flat line, and so then I went to bed with the sky brightening quickly."
"I have seen nothing out of a dream," he wrote from Iceland to Mrs. Morris, "so strange as our coming out of the last narrow sound into the Atlantic, and leaving the huge wall of rocks astern in the shadowless midnight twilight: nothing I have ever seen has impressed me so much."
Two days afterwards, early on a grey morning, they sighted the south-eastern coast of Iceland at Berufirth, where the "Diana" had to touch on her way to Reykjavik.
"The sun had not yet shone over the mountains on the east into the firth at whose mouth we were, yet patches of it lay upon the high peaks south-west of where we were: on our left was a dark brown ragged rocky island, Pápey, and many small skerries about it, and beyond that we saw the mainland, a terrible shore indeed: a great mass of dark grey mountains worked into pyramids and shelves, looking as if they had been built and half ruined; they were striped with snow high up, and wreaths of cloud dragged across them here and there, and above them were two peaks and a jagged ridge of pure white snow: we were far enough presently to look into Berufirth, and to see the great pyramid of Buland's Tindr, which stands a little way down the west side of the firth close by the sea; the sea was perfectly calm, and was clear of mist right up to the shore, and then dense clouds hid the low shore, but rose no higher than the mountain's feet: and as I looked the sun over-topped the east hills and the great pyramid grew red halfway down. The east side of the firth showed the regular Icelandic hillside: a great slip of black shale and sand striped with the green of the pastures, that gradually sloped into a wide grass-grown flat, between hill and sea, on which we could see the home-meads of several steads. On the west side we could see a line of rocks and skerries cut out from the shore, low green slopes behind them, and then the mountain feet; looking up the firth, which was all sunlighted now, the great peaks lowered till they seemed to run into the same black, green-striped hillsides as on the east."
Such was the landscape which he afterwards described through the less precise yet even more vivid medium of verse in the poem of "Iceland First Seen":
Lo, from our loitering ship
a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth
on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above,
striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west
from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point
like the buildings of Gods that have been,
The last of that waste of the mountains
all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,
And bright with the dawn that began
just now at the ending of day.
On Monday, the 17th of July, the preparations were completed, and the caravan started on its journey. The route taken had been planned out with the principal object of visiting the scenes of the greater Sagas: first Lithend and Bergthorsknoll on the southern coast; then across the wilderness to the fiords on the northern sea, and over the mountain passes into Laxdale; round the peninsula of Snaefellsness, the land of the Ere-dwellers; and so back to Reykjavik by Thingvalla, the great central place of assembly for Iceland from the heroic age down to the beginning of the present century. The Geysirs, the main object of most Icelandic tourists, which Morris, however, regarded with undisguised contempt, were to be taken on the northward journey.
When they got to camp at the end of the first day's travel, "we came into a soft grassy meadow bordered by a little clear stream, and jumped off our horses after a ride of six hours and a half: it was a cold night, though clear and fine, and we fell hard to unpack the tents and pitch them while the guides unburdened the horses, who were soon rolling about in every direction, and then set to work diligently to feed: the tents being pitched, Magnússon and Faulkner set to work to light the fire, while Evans and I went about looking for game, about the hill spurs and the borders of a little tarn between the lava and our camp: it was light enough to see to read; wonderfully clear, but not like daylight, for there were no shadows at all: I turned back often from the slopes to look down on the little camp, and the grey smoke that now began to rise up, and felt an excitement and pleasure not easy to express: till I had to get to my shooting, which I didn't like at all: however, I shot two golden plovers and came back to camp with them."
Mr. Evans did most of the shooting that was done on the journey; Morris took no pleasure in it. "I had to see to my gun," he complains later, "which was rather a heavy charge all through the journey, wanting as much attention as a baby with croup."
From this camping-place they proceeded eastward to the Njala country by Eyrarbakki and Oddi, where they were entertained by Dean Asmundr, "a little hard-bitten apple-cheeked old man, extremely hospitable." "It was a beautiful evening still, and even the eastern sky we saw behind the great mountains of the Eyjafell range was quite red. Oddi lies on a marked knoll or slope, above a great stretch of boggy land through which Eastern Rangriver winds; the hills under Three-corner, and the long stretch of Fleetlithe gradually leading into the terrible gorges of the ice-mountains, girdle in these grey-green flats: it is a noteworthy place historically, for in fact the men who died here or hereabout still live in people's minds as the writers of most of the great stories and both the Eddas: I don't know if they actually wrote them; it was a mere guess (or tradition perhaps) of the seventeenth century that Saemund the Learned collected the poetic Edda: but at any rate these three men, who all lived here at one time or another of their lives, Saemund, Ari, and Snorri Sturluson, must certainly have been the great guardians of the body of Icelandic lore." Thence the next day they reached Bergthorsknoll, the home of Njal. Here Morris made one of his few and unsuccessful attempts to sketch. It was a thing he could not do. The sketch-book was soon put up again and the scene photographed in words instead.
"Pastures thick with a bright blue gentian, and other flowers (principally white clover) more familiar to me: I turned back once or twice to fix the place in my memory; and here I will recapitulate and tell what Bergthorsknoll looks like to-day, so as to have the matter off my conscience:
"Three mounds something the shape of limpets rising from a bright green home-mead with a smooth turf wall all round it, but divided by a lane river-ward of the stead, which is pitched on the middle mound; a wide shallow 'white' river with black sands sweeping in a curve by the last of the mounds, with a strip of smooth and flowery turf running along its banks: marshy land all round about, for the rest, all channelled with innumerable ruts, getting greyer and greyer in the distance, till on the south side it meets the sea, from which rise the castle-like rocks of the Westman Isles, and on the north is stopped by the long line of the Lithe, above which the mass of Three-corner shows: westward the great plain seems limitless, but eastward it is soon stopped by the great wall which is the outwork of Eyjafell, dark grey rocks rising without intermediate slopes straight out of the plain, and with the ice-mountains at last rising above them."
From Bergthorsknoll they crossed to Lithend, where the site of Gunnar's hall is shown on a space flattened out of the hillside near the present house; and went up the terrible valley down which the Markfleet comes roaring from the glaciers.
"Past this the cliffs were much higher, and most unimaginably strange: they overhung in some places much more than seemed possible; they had caves in them just like the hell-mouths in the thirteenth-century illuminations; or great straight pillars were rent from them with quite flat tops of grass and a sheep or two feeding on it, however the devil they got there: two or three tail-ends of glacier too dribbled over them hereabouts, and we turned out of our way to go up to one: it seemed to fill up a kind of cleft in the rock wall, which indeed I suppose it had broken down; one could see its spiky white waves against the blue sky as we came up to it. We dismounted and scrambled about it. its great blocks cleft into dismal caves, half blocked up with the sand and dirt it had ground up, and dribbling wretched white streams into the plain below: a cold wind blew over it in the midst of the hot day, and (apart from my having nearly broken my neck on it) I was right glad to be in the saddle again. The great mountain-wall which closes up the valley with its jagged outlying teeth was right before us: often the wall would be cleft, and you would see a horrible winding street, with stupendous straight rocks for houses on either side: the bottom of the cleft quite level, but with a white glacier stream running out of it, and the whole blocked up at the end by the straight line of the master-mountain. Jón told us how he had gone down this valley in the winter with the snow covering either hillside, and the moon at its brightest; of sheep-gatherings he had been at, where every individual sheep has to be carried on horseback over the fords; of expeditions he had made for the fun of the thing up into the pathless wastes about here; and finally, as we crossed one of the streams that run into Markfleet, he told us the timely and cheerful story of how, riding in the autumntide with a party down this valley, they coming to this stream concluded it to be fordless, but nevertheless one of the rashest cried out that he would not be stopped, dashed into the water, where his horse was immediately swept off his legs down stream, and the last they saw of the man was him clutching with both arms round the horse's neck, in which position the bodies of both horse and man were found thrown ashore lower down."
On the way back to Lithend they passed a stead where "the bonder, who was very deep in old lore, was flatteringly anxious to see me. He was a grave, black-bearded, intelligent-looking carle of about fifty, and soon he got discussing with Magnússon and Jón minute probabilities of time and place in the Njala, pretty much as if the thing had happened twenty years ago: from that he got to lamenting the wasteful cutting of the woods in that country-side: as we departed I made a bad shot at the saddle trying to mount, more Icelandico, on the wrong side, and measured my length on the turf: the bonder, without the ghost of a smile on his face, hoped I wasn't hurt, and only expressed his feelings by saying to Magnússon, 'The Skald is not quite used to riding then.'"
From Lithend the party made northward to the Geysirs, "the place," Morris writes indignantly, "which has made Iceland famous to Mangnall's Questions and the rest, who have never heard the names of Sigurd and Brynhild, of Njal, or Gunnar, or Grettir, or Gisli, or Gudrun: not mentioned in any Icelandic writing before the eighteenth century." He did not regain his temper till they were left behind. "The turf is the only nasty bit of camping-ground we have had yet," he notes: "all bestrewn too with feathers and wings of birds, polished mutton-bones, and above all, pieces of paper. And—must I say it?—the place seemed all too near to that possible column of scalding water I had heard so much of: understand, I was quite ready to break my neck in my quality of pilgrim to the holy places of Iceland: to be drowned in Markfleet, or squelched in climbing up Drangey, seemed to come quite in the day's work: but to wake up boiled while one was acting the part of accomplice to Mangnall's Questions was too disgusting." To these comments, however, Mr. Evans adds another, giving a feeling inspired by this strange place which Morris was loth to confess, though he admits to the terror suggested by the boiling mud and quivering earth.
"Near our camp," he tells me, "there were several deep holes of beautiful still, blue, boiling water: it was in these holes we boiled our fish and fetched our hot water: but after we had each been several times, Morris on returning from one of these expeditions said it was so uncanny he could not go again."
They had to stay four days there, however, partly from stress of weather and partly because Faulkner was very unwell. On the 29th of July, on a bright cold morning, they started again northward through the wilderness towards Waterdale and the firths of the North Sea. Six cold days of rain and bitter wind among the "horrible black mountains of the waste," including an exploration of the great cave of Surts-hellir, impressed Morris's imagination with a sense of the terror of the land which never quite left him, and which reappears vividly in his descriptions of the mountain journeys in "The Glittering Plain" and "The Well at the World's End." Their route led over the Erne-water-heath, a dismal highland of bogs and pools on the watershed between the northern and western seas, where Grettir lived so long an outlaw; past Erne-water, where he slew Thorir Red-Beard, "a most mournful desolate-looking place with no signs of life as we rode up but for a swan that rose trumpeting from the lakeside"; and so down at last into Waterdale. The original plan had been to get further north and see Drángey, where Grettir lived strangely for the last three years of his life, and where he died at last in the great fight of the two against the eighteen. But time was running short, and this part of the journey had to be given up; they turned westwards, and crossed the ridges into Midfirthdale, where Bjarg, Grettir's birthplace, stands by its castellated rocks; then on to Thorodstead in Hrútafirth, and so round the end of the long sea-inlet and over the pass into Laxdale. On Sunday afternoon, the 6th of August, they rode into Herdholt.
"The little house that stands over so many stories of the old days is rather new and trim, but picturesque enough; three long gabled aisles, the turf sides of which are laid herring-bone fashion, and there are elaborate dogvanes on the gables. From the door of it one looks down on to the flats about the river, rising gradually into the slopes of the great bounding hill, where among long straight lines of the grey stone banks that old ice-waves have striped the hillside with, parallel to the main lines of the valley, and sad dull yellow-green bogs, lie two emerald green patches, the tuns of two steads; one of them Hauskuld-stead, the parent house of Herdholt. The hill above all this gradually slopes down to Hwammfirth, and above its lower end show two strange-shaped mountains, like a church roof with a turret at the end of it: the spurs of these again run down into the firth, leaving a space of low hills and boggy plain by the water-side: but beyond, and bounding all to the south-west, lies that sea of peaked mountains that are all about Holyfell. The actual waters of Hwammfirth are hidden from sight here because of the shoulder of the spur on which we are, the higher part of which also hides the mountains to the north. Evans and Faulkner went off to pitch the tent, while I spent my time alone in trying to regain my spirits, which had suddenly fallen very low almost ever since we came into Laxdale. Just think, though, what a mournful place this is—Iceland, I mean—setting aside the pleasure of one's animal life there, the fresh air, the riding and rough life, and feeling of adventure;—how every place and name marks the death of its short-lived eagerness and glory: and withal so little is the life changed in some ways: Olaf Peacock went about summer and winter after his live-stock, and saw to his hay-making and fishing, just as this little peak-nosed parson does; setting aside the coffee and brandy, his victuals under his hall 'marked with famous stories' were just the same the little parson in his ten foot square parlour eats: I don't doubt the house stands on the old ground.—But Lord! what littleness and helplessness has taken the place of the old passion and violence that had place here once—and all is unforgotten; so that one has no power to pass it by unnoticed: yet that must be something of a reward for the old life of the land, and I don't think their life now is more unworthy than most people's elsewhere, and they are happy enough by seeming—yet it is an awful place: set aside the hope that the unseen sea gives you here, and the strange threatening change of the blue spiky mountains beyond the firth, and the rest seems emptiness and nothing else: a piece of tuff under your feet, and the sky overhead, that's all: whatever solace your life is to have here must come out of yourself or these old stories, not over hopeful themselves. Something of all this I thought; and besides our heads were now fairly turned homeward, and now and again a few times I felt homesick—I hope I may be forgiven. Also there was that ceaseless wind all day: but now towards night it was grown calmer, and was still very bright, and the day ended with a beautiful and strange sunset; not violent red in the west, but the whole sky suffused with it over light green and grey, with a few bars of bright white clouds dragging over it, and some big dusky rain-clouds low down among the Broadfirth mountains: I stood and watched it changing, till that and rest from the wind, I suppose, made me contented again."
Here the travellers stayed three days, Evans fishing in the Laxá and Morris saturating himself with the traditions in which this region is so rich; Herdholt and Bathstead; Hwamm, the home, in the days of the early settlers, of Queen Aud the Deep-minded, and in after times the birthplace of Snorri Sturluson; and the "dreadful lonely dale" where Kiartan was beset by Gudrun's brothers, and Bolli struck the dolorous stroke.
This was the furthest point of the journey; and hence the party skirted round the peninsula of Snaefellsness to get back into the Southland without again traversing the wilderness. At Stykkisholm, on Broadfirth, they found a Danish brigantine, the "Holger," in the bay, on her way from Icefirth to Liverpool. The captain offered to take letters, and Morris had time to send a hasty note home.
"There has been but little roughing it," he wrote, "and I find sleeping in a tent very comfortable even when the weather is very cold. The weather has been cold, and rather broken till the last few days; last Thursday week we had a very bad day riding over the wilderness in the teeth of a tremendous storm of snow, rain, and wind. You've no idea what a good stew I can make, or how well I can fry bacon under difficulties. I have seen many marvels and some terrible pieces of country; slept in the home-field of Njal's house, and Gunnar's, and at Herdholt: I have seen Bjarg, and Bathstead, and the place where Bolli was killed, and am now a half-hour's ride from where Gudrun died. I was there yesterday, and from its door you see a great sea of terrible inky mountains tossing about; there has been a most wonderful sunset this evening that turned them golden though. The firth we look on here is full of little islands that breed innumerable eider-ducks, and a firth we crossed yesterday was full of swans. Give dear love to the little ones, and tell them I am going to try to bring them my pretty grey pony home; but if I don't they must not be disappointed, for there may be difficulties, or he may not turn out well. His name is Falcon, and when he is in good condition he ambles beautifully, fast and deliciously soft; he is about thirteen hands high. I wish you could see us to understand how jolly it is when we have got a good piece of road and the whole train of twenty-eight horses is going a good round trot, the tin cups tinkling, and the boxes rattling. Good-bye, my dear, I have so often thought of the sweet fresh garden at Kelmscott, and you and the little ones in it, and wished you happy."
Poor Falcon's hoofs went wrong after this; he came lame into Reykjavik, and had to be sold there instead of being brought back to England. The fleet of swans on Hwammfirth was one of the most strikingly beautiful sights that the travellers saw. Mr. Evans gives an interesting reminiscence of the occasion. "Every little tarn we passed," he says, "was occupied by a pair of wild swans, where they scatter to breed; but the first fiord we reached on the north coast was filled with hundreds, and they looked such splendid marks shining in the sun that I said how I wished I had a rifle, which brought down on me the most severe reproof from Morris: he called me a British officer,"—Mr. Evans held a commission in the Dorset Yeomanry—"which was his most severe term of contempt."
The journey round the peninsula is a long one, lying now along the shore and now over necks of land from firth to firth. On one of the long peninsulas thus formed, but now out of practicable reach in the time at their disposal, is Ere, the centre of the story of the Eyrbyggja Saga, which had been the first book translated by Morris from the Icelandic. In the beautiful manuscript of his translation, which he had executed in the previous April, he had written some verses which express with great simplicity and sincerity the effect on him of the Icelandic literature, and the feeling of his own kinship as a tale-teller with the authors of the Sagas. Perhaps he never elsewhere set forth so fully what the meaning of poetry was to him; a help in the darkness until the new day should come, not for one person or another, but for all the world.
Lo here an ancient chronicle
Recording matters that befell
A folk, whose life and death and pain
Might touch the great world's loss and gain
Full little: yet such might had they
They could not wholly pass away:
From mouth to mouth they sent a tale,
That yet for something may avail;
For midst them all a man they wrought,
Who all these words together brought,
Made shadows breathe, quickened the dead,
And knew what silent mouths once said,
Till with the life his life might give
These lived again, and yet shall live.
Where art thou, O thou nameless one?
And dost thou laugh to look upon
My eagerness thy tale to read
Midst such changed hope and fear and need?
Or somewhere near me dost thou stand,
And through the dark reach out thine hand?
Yea, are we friends? Draw nigher then,
Thou tale-teller of vanished men,
For we are of one company
To link the dull years straggling by,
Their lonely hopes and griefs grown cold,
Into a chain of tear-washed gold
That yet shall cling about the Earth
In dawning of her second birth.
Tale-teller, who 'twixt fire and snow
Had heart to turn about and show
With faint half-smile things great and small
That in thy fearful land did fall,
Thou and thy brethren sure did gain
That thing for which I long in vain,
The spell, whereby the mist of fear
Was melted, and your ears might hear
Earth's voices as they are indeed.
Well ye have helped me at my need.
It was not till a week later that the travellers reached Grettir's lair on the Fairwood-fells, "such a savage and dreadful place that it gave quite a new turn in my mind to the whole story, and transfigured Grettir into an awful and monstrous being, like one of the early giants of the world." On the 22nd of August they crossed White-water, and after a day's rest at Reykholt, where Snorri Sturluson lived and died, set forth for Thingvalla, the last goal of their pilgrimage.
"The wind dropped and a long strip of blue-green opened in the south-west, and widened and turned bluer and let the sun out. It is exciting to us to see the indigo-coloured peaks whose shapes we know rising up one after another over the dull heath: and soon we note the ragged screen of rocks before Ball-Jokul, and that other range that runs south from Skjaldbreid, and the whole tumbled sea of peaks that rise between us and the plain of Thingvellir.
"The heath bettered as we rode on, and we got to riding into little valleys now, boggy or sandy at bottom (oftenest the latter), but with the banks about them grown over with heath-berries, sweet grass and flowers, much as it was with our old encampment at Brunnar; at last these open out before us into a wider plain, and we can see Skjaldbreid clear to his feet, and the grey lava we journeyed over that other day, and the aforesaid toothed screen of mountains, ending in a gap through which show mountains a long way off, bright and intense blue under the now bright sunny sky; on the other side of this gap rises a lumpier range gradually drawing toward us, which is Armansfell: and through this gap lies our way to Thingvellir. We are now come to our old camping stead of Brunnar, and there we bait, not at our encampment on the hillside, but on the grass meadow about the pools: we rest about an hour and then set forward, I greatly excited by the warm day and the thought of the Thingmeads before us. Then passing by our old camp, we follow up a willowy stream that runs under bents edging a sandy plain somewhat willow-grown also, with Skjaldbreid ever on our left, looking no otherwise than when we saw it weeks ago from the east side of it, for in short it is quite round. Then over a neck of shale and rock called Trollahals (Troll's-neck) into a great wide sandy valley, going utterly waste up to the feet of Skjaldbreid, and with a small stream running through it. We are now turning round Skjaldbreid, and can see on his south-west flank two small hills lying that are perfect pyramids to look at from here. We are drawing near to the spurs of Armansfell now, and the wide plain narrows as a hill on our left shuts out the view of Skjaldbreid, and then we are in a great round valley of dark brown sand, as flat as a table and almost without a pebble on it: the shoulder of Armansfell, the haunt of the Land-spirits, rises on the south-west of the valley; and in that corner is a small tarn, for in fact in the wetter times of the year the whole valley is a lake except these slopes on which we are riding now. The valley, open at the side we rode into it, is quite shut in everywhere else, but at the east corner the hills sink into a low neck, which we make for, and scaling it, are in a pass with shaly sides scantily grass-grown here and there. My heart beats, so please you, as we near the brow of the pass, and all the infinite wonder, which came upon me when I came up on to the deck of the 'Diana' to see Iceland for the first time, comes on me again now; for this is the heart of Iceland that we are going to see: nor was the reality of the sight unworthy. The pass showed long and winding from the brow, with jagged dark hills showing over the nearer banks of it as you went on, and betwixt them was an open space, with a great unseen but imagined plain between you and the great lake, that you saw glittering far away under huge peaked hills of bright blue, with grey-green sky above them, Hengill the highest of them, from the hot springs on whose flank rose into the air a wavering column of snow-white steam.
"Down through the pass now, which gets so steep that we have to dismount, and so narrow that its sides hide the distant view as we get lower; till where the pass, still narrow, widens into Godaskörd, so called after a witch-wife of ancient times, we can see the great grey plain before us, though the nearer mountains now hide the Hengill and those others beyond the lake: now as we get toward the mouth of the pass there rises on our left a little peaked hill, called the Maiden's Seat, because the other side of it looks into the meadows of Hofmannaflötr (Chieftain's-flat), where the men returning from the Althing used to hold games, the women looking on from the hill aforesaid: the pass comes out presently on to grass and bushgrown banks above the meadow, which lies perfectly flat and green under grey cliffs on the other side, which fall away, as they sweep round to us, into grass-grown slopes: westward it opens into the great plain, which is hidden from us again by the slopes on our right: it was a beautiful and historical-looking place.
"We were now fairly in the plain of the Thingmeads; the great round mass of Armansfell, scooped here and there into shallow dales (dal-verpi, dale-warps), with a bunch of snow lying on them in places, is the north boundary of it; and opposite to that, on the other side of the now unseen lake, is the noble Hengill and its flanking mountain: these two change no more for us, but on the south-east we have at first a ragged toothed wall of clinker running down from the flank of Skjaldbreid, which falls after a while into a gap through which pours the great sea of lava down the slowly sloping side of Skjaldbreid: as we ride along (over the lava now), we come opposite to a flat-topped hill some way down the lava-stream, and just below it opens a huge black chasm, that runs straight away south toward the lake, a great double-walled dyke, but with its walls tumbled and ruined a good deal in places: the hill is the Raven-burg, and the chasm the Raven-rift. But as we turn west we can see, a long way off across the grey plain, a straight black line running from the foot of Armansfell right into the lake, which we can again see hence, and some way up from the lake a white line cuts the black one across. The black and the white line are the Great Rift (Almanna-Gjá) and Axewater tumbling over it. Once again that thin thread of insight and imagination, which comes so seldom to us, and is such a joy when it comes, did not fail me at this first sight of the greatest marvel and most storied place of Iceland.
"When we first came into the plain it was on the edge of the lava, sandy but grown over with willow and grass; we are on pure lava now, which is also far from barren, being much grown about with grass and willow, but chiefly birch; everywhere, however, the bare molten rock shows in places, never tossed up in waves, but always curdled like the cooling fire-stream it once was, and often these strands or curdles are twisted regularly like a rope. Over this lava-plain we rode to a little stead called Hraun-tún that lay on a low mound of soft grass, with a few great boulders scattered about it, rising like an island from the much-riven lava-sea; there we struck the regular road from the south-east to Thingvellir, and hastened along it at about eight o'clock on the loveliest and clearest of evenings. On our way we crossed by a narrow bridge-like rock over a terrible chasm, deep, straight-sided, and with water at the bottom, into a little sunken plain nearly round, all grass-grown and smooth and flat, round which the lava has run without breaking into it: a small stream follows the inside of the lava wave nearly all round this strange place, and through its opening we ride into the lava again; over a wave-top and into the trough of it, as it seems, and then on to another wave—and lo, there we are on the lower side of the Great Rift, a grass-grown, shrub-grown slope, with a huge wall of grey rock rising on the other side of the chasm, as perpendicularly as though the plummet had ruled it. It was getting dusk when we got there, and we had hit the Rift rather high up, so we rode straight down toward the lake along the Rift-side, the great wall with a fantastic coping of clinker ever on our right, till we saw, at the end of a bight of the lake, an undulating bright green tun with a church and stead on their little mounds, and between us and them a flat green plain with Axewater winding about it most sweetly, till, straightening itself on the Rift-ward side of the stead, it ran straight for the lake, widening as it went.
"We got leave to encamp on the tún down by the side of Axewater, and soon had our tents up on a beautiful piece of mossy turf close to the water's edge, almost under the shadow of the Great Rift, whose wonderful cliff rose into the moonlit sky a few rods on the other side of the river, and was all populous with ravens that kept crying out and croaking long after we were settled there."
The next day, "a most beautiful morning, warm and soft like a fine day of latter May in England," he visited the famous Hill of Laws. "A deep rift in the lava splits into two arms having a little island in the midst, bridged by a narrow space on which two men could barely stand abreast. When you are in the island it widens and slopes upward higher and higher, till at last, where the two arms of the rift meet, there is a considerable cliff above the dark dreadful-looking rift and its cold waters: a dozen yards from this is a little mound rising from the surface of the island, which, if the Hill of Laws is the heart of Iceland, is the heart of the Hill of Laws, for here stood the Speaker at Law, and every year gave forth the law: the whole island is not a large church for the ceremony; it might hold some five hundred men close-packed; but surely 'tis one of the most dramatic spots in all Iceland, and Grim Goatshoe, who picked it out for the seat of the Althing (he had a penny for his pains from every householder of Iceland), must have been a man of poetic insight. It is a good deal raised above the level of the Valley of Axewater; the rift all round it is deep and wide, I should say sixteen feet wide at the narrowest, where you can see, many, many feet below, the rocks all blue and purple through the clearest water in the world; this is the place that they call Flosi's Leap; for the tradition (not the Njala Saga) says that Flosi the Burner leapt across it to join his men who were drawn up outside the Berg: and they say he was in all his arms when he leapt. The Hill of Laws is all covered with sweet deep grass, and the heath-berries grow all down the sides of its rift. As you stand here you look, as I said, across the grassy valley through which Axewater, having tumbled over the sheer height of the upper wall of the Great Rift, and cleft the lower wall through, wanders serpentine, making little sandy or grassy islets as it goes; the most obvious of which, a mere patch of turf, nearly level with the river, but in the very midst of the plain, is called the Battle-Holm, because there the judicial combats were held.
"You must suppose that only the Lawman and some of the chiefs, with the jurors of the courts, had their place on the Hill of Laws; the main body of the people were on the other side of the water-filled rift, which in fact made the Hill of Laws a fortress easily defensible in those days so lacking in good shot-weapons. Across the plain of Axewater, on the first slopes of the lower wall of the Great Rift, were set up the booths of the different districts, going all down the Rift-side right to the lake: just opposite where the stead now stands is a breach in this lower wall, through which runs the Reykjavik road; and the slope on the lakeward side of this is known as the site of the booth of Snorri the Priest, whereby he stood with his men in this very gap in the Rift-wall at the Battle of the Althing, prepared to help the winners moderately, and make peace if he could do so to his own advantage.
"Just in the very midst of the Hill of Laws rises a low mound regular in shape, and still having on it signs of the concentric rows of seats on which the jurors of the court sat.
"You must not forget, when thinking of all this, that the huge wall of the Great Rift does verily bar the whole plain from the slopes of Armansfell to the lake; so that no ordinary man could scale it except in that one place by Snorri's booth aforesaid: and the long line of it cuts clean against the sky with never a mountain rising over it till Armansfell thrusts up a broad shoulder at the further end."
The travels now were ended: nothing remained but the day's ride back into Reykjavik, and so home. Two days, clear and golden-soft, were spent at Thingvalla: then the weather broke in the night, and they struck their last camp and rode off in a downpour of driving rain.
"At last we came, with a great jump in my heart, to the sea, and riding past a creek or two, could see a long way off the beacon on the hill above Reykjavik, and very dimly the harbour and ships lying there; then we turned from the sea a little, and presently our road ran into the one that led to Bolavellir, our first camp in Iceland; thence away the road was almost like a road in England, and we swung along a great pace, keeping quite close together, the horses knowing well that they were coming near their journey's end. There we were past the beacon, and into the little town; and I, heeding not other people, galloped my best to Mistress Maria's house, jumping off my horse (Mouse, to wit) just six weeks to the minute since I had mounted him before, by the paling of the queer little weedy-looking garden before the black, white-windowed cottage that I have seen in night-dreams and day-dreams so often since. Well, Miss Sæmundson, who met me presently, told me that there were no letters for me there, so off I galloped for the post-office. Why doesn't one drop down, or faint, or do something of that sort when it comes to the uttermost in such matters? I walked in quite coolly in appearance and gave Mr. Finsen my name scribbled big on a piece of paper; he shuffled the letters and gave me eleven: I opened one from Ellis there and then, thinking that from him I should hear any bad news in the simplest form: though indeed the eleven letters at first glance did somewhat cure my terror, for there was no one dead at least.
"So home I went soberly to another lodging than last time, and thence, after reading my letters, with not more than the usual amount of disappointment and wondering at people's calmness I suppose, to Mrs. Maria's house again, where was dinner and the courtly old carle Sir Henry Holland, whose age (eighty-four) I thought was the most interesting thing about him. I was rather low after all, and cowed by the company, and a sense of stiffness after our joyous rough life just ended."
The "Diana" came in that night, and after three days at Reykjavik in the wind and wet, busy with selling the horses and seeing the museum and dining with the Governor, they sailed for home on the last day of August. As on the outward voyage, the "Diana" put in at Berufirth for a few hours. "At noon the signal gun was fired, and we were off presently, the pilot's boat towed alongside of us; I watched it going through the water, cold green under the shadow of our sides: the pilot's son sat in the stern, a tall, handsome-looking youth of about eighteen, 'wide-faced, grey-eyed, and open-eyed,' the very type of a northern youth, as he sat looking dreamily out to sea: his father went over the side into the boat presently, and they cast off, and soon even the shadows of the rocks faded into the mist, and I had seen the last of Iceland." The voyage back was uneventful. In the evening of the 6th of September, a soft warm grey day, the "Diana" came along the pier at Granton in time for Morris to catch the night mail for London. "I was curious to see," he writes on the last page of his diary, "what effect the trees would have on me when day dawned, but they did not have much. I thought the houses and horses looked so disproportionately big for the landscape that it all looked like a scene at a theatre."
"I think I should have plenty to tell you of my travels if I saw you," he writes to Mrs. Baldwin a few days after his return, "but I am the worst of letter writers; besides I made a sort of journal which I intend writing out, perhaps may manage to do so to part of it in time to send Georgie while she is staying with you, and then you can read it if you care to; anyhow you shall see it when it is done if you like, though I believe it will be but a poor specimen of its class. Moreover, I confess to a dread of setting to work on it: it is true that the journey was altogether successful, and that I think I have gained in many ways by it; but it seems such a long way off now, and there is a bit of one's life gone; and the world so much the narrower to me because of it: and when I look over it I am afraid of having to grin sourly at this bit of enthusiasm, and be puzzled at that bit of high spirits; and note here how I refused to acknowledge a disappointment, and there how I pretended not to be weary—and in short—all the rest of it; something in its way like looking at a drawerful of old letters—if anybody ever did venture on such a bold act, which I doubt.
"I rather miss the mountains, I must say, which is not what I expected, for I use to consider myself a hater of them: to-day I had to go out on business to a place near Wimbledon, and there was what people called a pretty view there, and I thought how dull it looked, and that after all people were right to build villas and plant red geraniums about it: my own little old house by Lechlade though is sweet and innocent enough, and though it has a sadness about it, which is not gloom but the melancholy born of beauty I suppose, it is very stimulating to the imagination. I am going down there on Saturday, where I expect to enjoy making the acquaintance again of the little pony that carried me in my six weeks' ride, the bravest and best tempered of little beasts: you should have seen him picking his way in one of those dismal bogs, where if you sneeze, the earth, or rather the roots of the grass, trembles violently: they say, however, that the Icelandic ponies get lazy among the fat pastures and soft air of England—small blame to them."
He had already been down to Kelmscott, where his family, with Rossetti, had been living during his Iceland voyage. On the 23rd of September he went there again, stopping on the way at Oxford to buy a boat for the new house, and driving over from Oxford up the beautiful autumnal Thames valley. Early in October the long summer came at last to an end. Mouse, the pony, was left at Kelmscott, where he grew fat and lazy, and was much loved by the children. The little biography which one of them gives me, five and twenty years after, makes a pretty picture of that peaceful home.
"He was gentle and quiet, though not without slyness: for I remember there was one gate-post against which, when I went out for a ride, he used often to try to rub me off his broad back. I'm ashamed for my horsemanship to think how often the rogue had his way. Father used to ride him about the country a good bit at first. Then I jogged about with him, and he used to be put to a little basket-carriage, and go meandering along in a meditative way. He got enormously fat on our coarse thick plentiful English grass, with little to do; and I used to imagine him lonely, and yearning for the fun and clatter and hardships of his Iceland life among his friends, as he stood there with his head stretched forward looking intensely meditative. One day, when the hunt passed through our home-meadows, the excitement of horses and hounds was too much for the lonely philosopher: he threw up his head and, fat as he was, bundled over a hedge and actually followed the hounds a good way. I missed the gentle funny little animal much when he died."