Socialism and Translation: The Folks of William Morris's Beowulf

Summary

William Morris's doctor is famously said to have declared that Morris died of “simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.” In literary circles he is perhaps best remembered for his Utopian text, News from Nowhere; thanks to his vital role in the emerging Arts and Crafts Movement, he is still remembered even now in interior-decorating circles for his remarkable range of product designs, most particularly wallpaper. His life was filled with an assorted array of enthusiasms and enterprises, but by the 1880s and 1890s, the last decades of his life, his focus had finally settled upon two consistent and enduring passions: first, the culture and literature of the so-called Old North and, second, the socialist movement. It is the relationship between these two passions that this chapter will examine.

The first passion actually went as far back as the 1860s and in the early 1870s included two trips to Iceland, a land he called a “terrific and melancholy beauty […] illumined by a history worthy of its strangeness.” He preserved his memories of the land in travel journals as well as in verse, but the greatest legacies of Morris's Old Northernism are probably the romances he set in reimagined proto-Germanic settings, such as The House of the Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890), as well as his collaborative translations of numerous Old Icelandic sagas and of Beowulf.