Complete Works of William Morris, page 791
“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 Bernfirth, 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 Bernfirth, 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 overtopped 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.
Running along the southern coast of Iceland with its awful mountain wall, the “Diana “ reached Reykjavik on the afternoon of the 14th of July. Loega, the guide, “a big fellow, red-headed, blue-eyed, and long-chinned, like a Scotch gardener,” met them with the news that the horses had been got. Of these they started with twenty, being a double relay for six riders (the four tourists and two guides) and eight packhorses. On the journey, the number was increased for various reasons to twenty-eight. One of the two that Morris himself rode, Mouse, was brought back by him to England, and lived many years at Kelmscott. Then with some difficulty, for the transaction almost exhausted the metallic currency of the capital, the money for the journey, 1,000 silver dollars in canvas bags, was procured. Two days passed at Reykjavik in the various preparations, and in visits to the notable people of the town: “the most noteworthy of them was Jón Sigurdson, the President of the Althing, whose editions of Sagas I know very well: he seemed a shy, kind, scholarlike man, and I talked Icelandic all I might to him.”
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 ob-. ject 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 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 autumn-tide 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’ 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 Drangey, 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 Ramfirth, 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 turf 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.
