Questions of Travel E-Book

Lavinia Greenlaw

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The great Victorian William Morris was fascinated by Iceland, which inspired him to write one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw travels in his footsteps, combining excerpts from his Icelandic writings with her own response to the country.

Leseprobe

‘In July 1871 Morris and three companions, one of them the Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon, travelled by Danish mailboat from Edinburgh’s Granton harbour to Reykjavík, a four-day journey. Unusually for him, Morris kept a diary of his travels and the early entries are alive with hopefulness … They took a criss-cross route around the main sites of the Icelandic sagas, travelling on sturdy Icelandic ponies, hiring local guides. They first went westwards along the bottom coast, then struggled north-east across the wilderness to the fjords on the northern sea. They circled round the Snæfellsnes peninsular, returning via the mysterious and marvellous Geysir hot springs … His discovery of Iceland was to give him a new stimulus that lasted all his life.’ – Fiona MacCarthy

‘The best book of travel written by an English poet is William Morris’s Icelandic Journal, which is also one of the least known … He arrived bereft, his marriage in disarray, in an emptiness of love without hope. So Iceland entered him, lava, gravel, tufa, flow, mountain – detail clearly seen, and the condition of man meditated upon, past and present, between grizzly and glum immensity, vast chilled indifference and tiny nooks of green gentleness.’ – Geoffrey Grigson

‘[Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland] makes the reader dance a kind of duet over the pages, watching how Greenlaw has adapted and inverted the already fascinating account of the Pre-Raphaelite painter’s rather charmingly bumbling trip.’ – Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

The foremost English designer of his time (furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry, books), polemicist and reformer, poet and traveller – William Morris (1834–1896) has come to be regarded as one of the myriad-minded giants of the nineteenth century.

Lavinia Greenlaw’s interest in perception led to her being the first artist in residence at London’s Science Museum. She has published five collections of poetry as well as fiction and a memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls. She has an MA in seventeenth-century art from the Courtauld Institute and writes on music, art and vision. She has made radio documentaries about light with subjects ranging from Arctic midsummer and midwinter to a year-long study of the solstices and equinoxes in Britain.

Lavinia Greenlaw

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QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL

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William Morris & Iceland

Contents

–Title Page––Introduction–– A Note on the Text –– Sources and Acknowledgements –– A Journal of Travel in Iceland 1871 –– 1 London to Reykjavík –– 2 From Reykjavík to Bergthórshvoll and Lithend –– 3 From Lithend to the Geysirs –– 4 From the Geysirs through the Wilderness to Vatnsdalur –– 5 From Vatnsdalur to Bjarg and Hrútafjördur –– About the Publisher ––Other titles from Notting Hill Editions–– Copyright –

– Introduction –

If you look at the map of Europe, you will see in its north-western corner lying just under the Arctic circle a large island …1

Why did William Morris want to go to the corner of the map? In 1871 he was thirty-seven years old, married to a famous beauty with whom he had two young daughters, a celebrated poet and co-owner of a flourishing design company. He had also just found his dream home – Kelmscott Manor on the Thames in Oxfordshire. Yet as he took possession of Kelmscott, he dispossessed himself and set off for Iceland. This was part of his complex response to the relationship between his wife, Janey, and his friend and mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris took the house in joint tenancy with Rossetti, who promptly moved in for the summer with Janey and the girls. Morris himself stayed long enough only to oversee such things as the wallpaper.