Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

London, near the Thames. And then he also became interested in typography, and created what are called “font families.” He drew Latin letters and Gothic letters, which in English are instead called “black letters.” And in spite of being an essentially modern man, he felt passionate about the Middle Ages. He was interested in medieval musical instruments—the kinds of instruments I believe Morpurgo has a collection of in Buenos Aires—and when Morris was dying he asked them to play old medieval English music on those instruments. 21
    One of the people who loved him most was the then young Bernard Shaw, a man who had no great passion for friendships. When William Morris died, honored and famous in the year 1896, Bernard Shaw published an article that has been preserved, in which he said the opposite of what all his contemporaries did, which was that England and the world had lost a great man; he wrote that a man like Morris could not be lost after his death, that Morris’s physical death was an accident, that Morris continued being a friend to him, a living person.
    There is one event in Morris’s life that should be mentioned, and this is a trip he took, I believe around 1870—I have a poor memory for dates—a trip to Iceland. 22 Or rather, he went on a pilgrimage to Iceland. His friends suggested a trip to Rome, and he said that “there is nothing in Rome that I cannot see in London, but I want to make a pilgrimage to Iceland.” Because he believed that the Germanic culture—the culture, let us say, of Germany, the Low Countries, Austria, Scandinavia, England, the Flemish part of Belgium—had reached its peak in Iceland, and that he, as an Englishman, had a duty to make a pilgrimage to that small lost island, almost inside the Arctic Circle, that island that had produced such admirable prose and such admirable poetry.
    I think that now a trip to Iceland is not something particularly heroic; it is a country commonly visited by tourists. But this was not the case at the time, and Morris had to travel by horse through the mountainous regions. Morris drank tea made with the water of the geysers, those tall columns of thermal water they have in Iceland. And Morris visited, for example, the place where the fugitive Grettir had hid out, and all the other places celebrated in the historical sagas of Iceland. 23 Morris also translated
Beowulf
into English. 24 Andrew Lang wrote that the translation deserved a reader’s curiosity, for it was written in an English that was slightly more archaic than the Anglo-Saxon of the eighth century. Morris also wrote a poem,
Sigurd the Volsung
, in which he uses the plot of the
Völsungasaga
, the plot thatWagner used for his musical dramas,
The Ring of the Nibelung
. 25
    Rossetti, who was not at all interested in anything Norse or Germanic, said he could not be interested in the story of a man who was brother to a dragon, and refused to read the book. This did not stop Morris from continuing to be his friend, though Morris sometimes had a violent temper. I said before that Morris began writing poetry as a hobby, and he published stories and then long novels written in lazy prose, novels whose titles are themselves poems:
The Wood at the World’s End
,
The Story of the Glittering Plain
, etcetera. 26 And in addition to the purely fantastical books, which take place in a vague prehistoric era that is, of course, Germanic, he wrote two novels to convert people to socialism. One was
John Ball’s Dream
. 27 John Ball was a companion of Tyler, one of the leaders in the fourteenth century of a rebellion of serfs (the peasants of England) in which they even burned down palaces and the archbishops’ residences. 28 So the dream of John Ball is that of England, what this rebel from the fourteenth century might have dreamed. The other book is
News from Nowhere
. 29 “Nowhere” is the Saxon word for “utopia,” and it means the same thing, that it is nowhere. In
News from Nowhere
, Morris writes, according to what he believed at the time, about the happy world a universal socialist regime would bring about. In addition to his oil paintings, which have been preserved, he did wood engravings and many drawings; and he built and furnished many houses. He carried on a kind of superhuman level of activity. 30 And commercially he also did well, because he was a good businessman. That is the opposite of Rossetti, who was as if lost in the inferno of London, asChesterton said.
    Morris