Dear
Morris World,
I
am back, and I am visiting Iceland. The two facts are not related,
but make up a coincidence more than nice enough for a blog post.
Instead of arriving by cold, heaving seas, and setting foot on the
very shore of Reykjavik, as Morris did in 1871 and again in 1873, I
flew into Keflavik airport, stepping out into a warm, postmodern
interior with faux wood flooring and skeins of yarn in the welcome
gift shop. The tourism board has arranged for (admittedly great) quotes to be painted on the walls here, like 'There are many wonders in a
cow's head' or 'It's a pity we don't whistle to each other, like birds. Words
are misleading'. Fish and crabs are embossed on the coins instead of
old men and women with flinty, xenophobic gazes. It is a good first
airport impression.
I
spent thousands of krona on a sandwich and a latte (almond milk!
Seemingly by default!) and sit down to think about Morris's start
here. He'd come for the ancient sagas and the harsh wilderness. He'd
come to escape his semi-wrecked life, in which his wife was in love
with his old mentor, the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
He'd bought a new nest—Kelmscott Manor—and left those two
particular birds together while he winged away to the lava wastes.
He'd come to scrub his mind out with volcanic rock; to blot out his
view of London with some inky mountains.
But
he soon found that Iceland blotted nothing out. Far from allowing
anyone to forget everything, Iceland was the blankest page,
containing nothing but humans and memories:
“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.”
This
is obvious from my very first step outside the airport: no trees,
just long bleak stretches, and free-falling views all the way out to
the distant mountains. The airport, far from a dominating symbol of
the 21st century, suddenly feels like tenuous stake of
indoor-ness, threatened on all sides by this vast exposure. If those
mountains were my destination, it would be a daunting start to my
journey. I had no idea it would be this dramatic. The scale of it all
puts the bravery of Morris's adventure into perspective.
But
he never thought of it that way. He wasn't thinking of himself, he
was observing the people around him, and imagining the people who
used to live there, in the saga times. He felt by turns envious of
the happy simplicity of life on an icelandic farm—haymaking and
brandy and salmon and curds—and sad for how “little” everything
had become from the grand, savage days of the sagas.
Nor
did he feel especially sad for the poverty of the Icelanders. He'd
seen working men in England, and their brutalized lives, and knew who
had the better lot. This trip contributed to his social thought in
new and unexpected ways, and he came away thinking “the most
grinding poverty is a trifling evil compared to the inequality of classes”.
Also
added to his imagination were the interiors, tiny and innocent of
drapery. These simple wooden places blurred the boundaries between
inside and out with their turf roofs, and sometimes with ivy growing
inside too. They were all small, and humble, and almost all of them
were clean. This furthered his vision for the small, classless house
of the future. Later in the '80s, he would write to Thomas Coglan
Horsfall, “What furniture a workman can buy should be exactly
the same ... as a lord buys.”
When
he left after his second Icelandic journey in 1873, he felt as if “a
definite space of my life has passed away,” and vowed to himself
that he would be a “really industrious man: for I do not mean to
return to Iceland again if I can help it.”
This
trip is only my 1871 however. I hope to see more of what Morris saw
in this place, and I mean to come again if I can help it. To come for
an 1873, and maybe even for that third trip that he never needed or
couldn't manage.
(Sources: William Morris Online Edition, John's Purkiss's The Icelandic Jaunt, and The Collected Letters of William Morris, Volume II, Part A.)
