An Open Access Review Journal Encouraging Critical Engagement with the Continuing Process of Inventing the Middle Ages

July 1, 2019

Felce: William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas


Ian Felce. William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018.

Reviewed by William Biel (william.biel@uconn.edu).

Ian Felce’s William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas concerns itself with Morris’ developing concept of heroism, for Morris meaning the ways which men in particular might and should lead a politically engaged life. The focus remains squarely upon Morris’ art, but that focus is thoroughly contextualized by the public goals Morris aimed to serve through creative production. Felce gives a nuanced and persuasive account of Morris’ personal development toward atheism and socialism through his reading and rewriting of medieval Icelandic literature.

Felce situates the book as a corrective to prior work on Morris, which he finds draws inaccurate conclusions because of those writers’ lack of familiarity with Old Norse. Felce challenges scholars who he believes, lacking the necessary training to compare Morris’ texts with their sources, offer erroneous explanations for Morris’ creative output. Felce takes especial issue with two kinds of criticism, that which he finds over-emphasizes Morris’ marital problems and that which unproductively questions Morris’ skill as a translator. In the first case Felce objects to suggestions that Morris’ attraction to Old Norse was primarily an escape from the stress of his wife, Jane’s, possible affair with Dante Rosetti. Felce convincingly demonstrates Morris’ interest in Old Norse from adolescence onward, before even meeting Jane, and his partnership with Eiríkur Magnússon, Morris’ Icelandic tutor, as forces unto themselves. Felce does not deny some impact on Morris due to his wife’s intimacy with Rosetti, but he emphasizes the sagas attracted Morris for their own virtues, providing an opportunity to grow artistically and philosophically, and not merely as a distraction from problems at home. As to the quality of Morris’ work, Felce suggests criticism that either apologizes for or attacks Morris’ skill as a translator fails to uncover the motivations behind Morris’ choice of style. Felce sees Morris moving toward increasingly hyper-literal translation in an effort to present medieval Iceland as a kindred culture to Victorian England. In so doing, Morris hoped to inspire communal values aligned with his own socialism. Felce believes Morris honestly miscalculated the linguistic skill of his readership, and thus the extent to which they might identify with saga age Icelanders. Thus, Felce undertakes close comparison of Morris’ translations alongside their Old Norse sources to reveal nuances of Morris’ inner life and public commitments lacking in other scholarship.

The book follows a chronological structure across which Felce traces Morris’ poetic and philosophical evolution. The introduction provides Morris’ general biography oriented around his meeting Eiríkur Magnússon and his subsequent period (1868-76) translating and adapting Old Norse works. Chapter 1 contrasts Morris’ earlier inspiration primarily from the Arthurian Grail quest with his turn toward the sagas as a creative wellspring. Felce outlines Morris’ initial attraction to the transcendentalism of the Grail legend, which by 1868 becomes increasingly frustrated as Morris moves toward atheism. “The Lovers of Gudrun” from The Earthly Paradise represents a turning point in which Morris adapts Laxdæla saga’s love triangle into a quest structure familiar from Arthuriana, but it rejects the transcendental in favor of the existential. The Kiartan of Morris’ “Lovers” finds ennoblement by recognizing the Edenic world of his early days as tragically devoid of meaning, but enduring nonetheless. Chapter 2 highlights Morris’ infidelity to his sources in ethical rather than linguistic terms, that is to say, in his treatment of honor and shame as conveyed by Old Norse níð: both “malice” and “perversion.” Felce acknowledges obscenity legislation necessarily affected Morris’ translation, but argues Morris was also personally uncomfortable with the brutality to which saga protagonists are often motivated in order to defend their sense of heteronormative masculinity. Seeing such sexual violence as petty cruelty, Morris’ versions of saga heroes rather serve more abstract moral concepts approved by Morris and his audience. One example comes from The Story of Kormak. In the Old Norse original, Kormáks saga, Kormak defeats an opponent, Bersi the Dueller, by wounding him in the buttocks with his sword. The saga understands Kormak thus symbolically implies Bersi is the willing recipient of a male-male sex act, slandering Bersi as a pervert. Bersi’s wife, Steingerd, consequently leaves him. Morris removes the sexual connotations and shame directed at Bersi in his translation. But he also retains Steingerd divorcing him, including the saga’s tone of moral approval over her choice, though it now seems odd and harsh to a modern audience. As such, Felce suggests that Morris’ characters sometimes suffer from a misalignment between their motivations and actions. However, Felce stresses Morris shows no self-awareness of this infidelity, but rather believed himself to be magnifying an underlying heroic ethos in the saga for his Victorian audience.

The first two chapters therefore provide a baseline for Morris’ idiosyncratic conception of his sources, against which the growth of his later work can be contextualized. Chapter 3 studies Morris’ exploration of heroic endurance through an ethics of incapacity. Morris’ treatment of Grettir the Strong dwells on the outlaw’s firm resolve despite decreasing physical ability and social debility. Grettir’s resilience sharpens the existential courage Morris attributes to Kiartan in “Lovers.” Chapter 4 addresses Morris’ progressively literal style in his translation of Heimskringla. Felce proposes Morris wanted to show his English audience how similar medieval Iceland and Victorian England were — or rather, could be. Morris thought the way of life depicted by the sagas manifested the socialist values he wanted to see reform England. He therefore hoped to reveal the two places as sibling cultures by stressing similar linguistic forms, appealing to ancient virtues to awaken a socialist conscience in his audience. But, Felce says, Morris misjudged how alienating his archaic style would be to his readers. Chapter 5 continues to develop the themes running through the first three chapters, seeing in Sigurd the Volsung Morris’ mature concept of the “deedful measure.” Felce takes Morris’ “deedfulness” as an approval of acting spontaneously by embracing life’s brevity. Against spontaneous Sigurd are gathered foes motivated by fear of death. Sigurd’s opponents foolishly try preserving a status quo that cannot last and thereby unwittingly hasten universal ruin. For Morris, the contrast means heroic action is only possible when dedicated to a common good that celebrates both human potential and frailty, without possibility of eternal salvation. Chapter 6 attends to Morris’ original fiction inspired by rather than directly translated from medieval literature. Morris turns from a historical Iceland to an imagined world based on Continental Germanic tribes, yet still exalting the heroic ideals developed through the translations. Felce suggests Morris’ embrace of a wholly fictional world helped inspire 20th century medievalist writers, such as C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

Felce displays easy facility with Old Norse, critical for his comparisons with Morris’ translations. Felce also increases the accessibility of his own readings with footnotes offering his own translations of Norse passages. This apparatus extends to prose re-orderings of difficult skaldic verses, a quite useful inclusion. The only possible critique comes to mind regarding the book’s structure: the chronological structure of the book leaves Chapter 4 slightly out of place. The subject of Morris’ literal translation style seems more thematically akin to the contents of Chapters 1 and 2. As the fourth chapter, it breaks the arc between Grettir’s heroism through incapacity to Sigurd’s deedfulness as an embrace of frailty and transitory human life. This is, though, merely a consequence of the organizational program, which is otherwise sensible and serviceable.

Felce convincingly argues for a more nuanced perspective on Morris’ art, attendant to the complexity of his life. Felce thereby recovers an inner life for Morris motivating his public aims in ways unnoticed by prior scholarship. De-emphasizing the impact of Jane’s involvement with Rosetti recasts Morris’ work as all the more politically committed. Felce depicts Morris as a founder of modern English language Old Norse studies, providing a potential history of the field rooted more in social justice than national-colonial projects. Old Norse studies, and medievalists in general, can always benefit from such a project of recovery. By that same project, Felce points to ways scholars of nineteenth century art might draw connections between creative output and political engagement by Morris and his contemporaries. Studies of twentieth-century fantasy can also be enriched by more fully understanding the intellectual tradition behind writers such as Tolkien.

William Biel
University of Connecticut

May 17, 2019

Orgelfinger, Joan of Arc


Gail Orgelfinger, Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).
Reviewed by Michael Evans

Here lies Joan of Arc, the which
Some count saint, and some count witch;
Some count man, and something more;
Some count maid, and some a whore.
Such was Thomas Fuller’s summary of the conflicting English views of Joan of Arc in his 1642 work The Profane State. Fuller refers to some interpretations of Joan that will be familiar to modern readers, but reminds us of other aspects of Joan’s reputation among the English, such as the idea (which was used by Shakespeare in 1 Henry VI) that, far from being a virgin saint, Joan claimed to be pregnant in an attempt to have her execution delayed.
While twentieth-century (re)interpretations of Joan’s story in the Anglophone world, such as Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) and the Hollywood movie starring Ingrid Bergman (1948) are well-known, there is a long and important back-story, and this relatively neglected period in the shaping of England’s view of Joan is the subject of Orgelfinger’s book, as she traces the evolution of this view from Joan’s death in 1431 to the late Romantic era 400 years later.
Orgelfinger sets out to challenge the perception that English attitudes toward Joan evolved in a steady and predictable way, from hostility to the “witch” and “whore” who opposed their forces in the Hundred Years’ War to sympathy in later centuries; “from heretic, to innocent believer, and, in due course, saint” (p. 7, quoting Ardis Butterfield). This process seemed to reach its culmination in the early 1920s, when, following her canonization in 1920 and in the midst of post-WW1 Francophilia, a statue of “Sancta Joanna de Arc” was set up in Winchester Cathedral in 1923 as “a slight act of reparation” by England toward its French ally (p. 3). Orgelfinger frames her book around this statue, returning to it in her “Afterword”, where she also cites Shaw’s reference to it in Saint Joan. However, she argues that the evolution of Joan’s image in England is far more complex than a linear process of rehabilitation and reparation, with contradictory views of her held (often by the same author) in all periods from the fifteenth century to the early nineteenth.
The book is structured around five thematic (and broadly chronological) chapters. Chapter 1 addresses what Joan of Arc knew about the English, and her attitudes toward them, arguing that Joan showed little animus toward the English as a people, and that their attitudes toward her were far from unremittingly hostile. Chapter 2 examines fifteenth-century and early modern English accounts of Joan, up to the early seventeenth century. Chapter 3 examines early modern attempts to locate Joan within the history of “Amazons”, “viragos” and other active or warlike women. Chapter 4 is devoted to Joan’s portrayal as “Joan la Puzel” in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1 (which Orgelfinger argues was influenced by the recent execution of Mary Stuart, who represented, like Joan, a Catholic and female challenge to England), and eighteenth-century representations of her in illustrated editions of the works of Shakespeare. Chapter 5 addresses the “domestication” of Joan in history and literature in the Romantic period in response to the French Revolution and early feminist writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft.
Orgelfinger’s approach reveals that there was no time when English opinions about Joan were not mixed and contradictory. Even in the immediate aftermath of her execution there were English observers who expressed doubts over the legitimacy of her condemnation and burning, such the Englishman who declared “we have burned a saint,” even though they had expressed fear and hatred of her during her brief military career. At the other end of the period covered in the book, David Hume (Orgelfinger includes Scottish authors in her survey of “English” responses to Joan) expressed contradictory opinions of Joan. As an Enlightenment thinker, he could not credit her with either a demonic of divine mission, crediting her success to religious “enthusiasm”, which he classed alongside “superstition” as one of “two species of false religion.”  Yet, “Hume writes without irony, that she persevered ‘till, by the final expulsion of the English, she had brought all her prophecies to their full completion’” (p. 143). English writers often tried to shift responsibility onto the French, claiming, for example, that Joan was a fraud put forward for propagandistic reasons by Charles VII, or that she was betrayed by men within her own ranks when captured at Compiègne by the Burgundians. Conversely, others lamented the absence of clemency toward Joan by her English captors.  Orgelfinger also identifies many examples of English commentators who praised Joan for her courage and enterprise.
The breadth of Orgelfinger’s scholarship is impressive, and it is hard to do justice in a brief review to the range of themes she is able to cover in less than 170 pages. One key motif that runs through the work is unease over Joan’s dressing as a man. Orgelfinger subtitles her introduction “those cursed breeches,” a reference to an anonymous article in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737 in which the author expressed the opinion that the English “would have spared Joan’s Life, but they insisted on her laying aside those cursed Breeches, of which she was so obstinately fond” (p. 3).
The chapter on depictions of Joan of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI is particularly interesting in this respect. The author argues that this play was rarely performed in the eighteenth century, yet Joan was frequently depicted in this period in illustrated editions of the works of Shakespeare, testifying to the interest in her in England at the time. Despite the fact that historical sources describe Joan wearing armor or dressing as a man, she is often feminized in these images, which frequently purported to depict famous actresses of the time in the role, wearing dresses that would hardly be appropriate garb in warfare.  Even when depicted in armor, Joan is often feminized, wearing her hair long and in one instance showing “slim and shapely calves and dainty feet” (p. 118). Yet, while rendering her an attractive and feminine adversary, illustrators also played up Shakespeare’s depiction of her as a sorceress who associated with demons; the moment when her demonic companions desert her was a favorite subject. John Thurston in 1826 illustrated the execution of Joan with a stack of smoking armor, accompanying York’s line “Break thou in pieces and consume to ashes, Thou foul accursed minister of hell!” (p. 124, figure 12). Joan’s feminine clothes, and even Joan herself, have disappeared from the scene.
Orgelfinger addresses similar themes in her final chapter, aptly titled “’Tom Paine in Petticoats’: Domesticating Joan of Arc,” which addresses English / British verdicts on Joan during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. The quotation in the chapter title is drawn from Coleridge’s critique of Robert Southey’s 1796 epic poem Joan of Arc, which written in the light of the French Revolution. Where once Joan had been viewed as a witch and heretic on account of her refusal to wear women’s clothes, she was now trivialized by association with female garments. References to petticoats were often used to denigrate women who aspired to political commentary or activism, as in Horace Walpole’s description of Mary Wollstonecraft as a “hyena in petticoats.” (p. 130). As in the depictions of Shakespeare’s Joan la Puzel, these contradict the historical Joan’s wearing male clothes, and exist awkwardly alongside eighteenth-century references to Joan’s “cursed breeches.”
Orgelfinger’s work is a thoroughly researched and welcome addition to the scholarship on the post-medieval reception of Joan of Arc. She offers valuable new insights by focusing on British views of Joan before the performance of Shaw Saint Joan, and by challenging over-simplified narratives of England’s rehabilitation of her former adversary.
Michael Evans  
Delta College

February 8, 2019

"Distortions of the past for ideological reasons tend to be dangerous": An Interview with Tim O'Neill


Tim O’Neill is author of the blog History for Atheists. He was interviewed for Medievally Speaking by Michael Evans, the journal’s associate editor.


Medievally Speaking: What led you to start the “History for Atheists” blog?

Tim O'Neill: I’ve been an atheist for all my adult life, so I was interested when atheism began to get media attention in the early 2000s with the emergence of the so-called “New Atheists” like Dawkins and Hitchens. I noticed a large number of blogs and online fora springing up devoted to atheism and to the anti-religious ideology of the New Atheists. As I began reading some of these regularly I noticed some recurring themes in discussions on them. There were some historical ideas that kept being presented as fact – that Christianity “caused the Dark Ages”, that the medieval Church “suppressed science”, that Christians “burned down the Great Library of Alexandria” and that Christian persecution of various scientists (Hypatia, Giordano Bruno and Galileo being the usual examples invoked) “set back progress” by hundreds of years and so on.

I found that most of the more enthusiastic proponents of these ideas came from backgrounds in science and had little to no history education past high school level. These were simply tropes they had picked up from popular culture and accepted as fact. So I began to contribute to these online to show why these ideas were simplistic or just plain wrong. Eventually I got tired of repeating myself, since the same claims kept coming up over and over, so I decided to start a blog where I could address these myths and misconceptions about history in detailed articles and so only have to do so once. History for Atheists was the result.


Could you tell us about your background in medieval studies? Did it influence your decision to engage with New Atheist myths about the past?

I have studied the Middle Ages since my teens but did so formally at university by studying history as an undergraduate and then Medieval English Literature in for my post-graduate specialisation. I’ve always straddled history and literature, given that I took a “New Historicist” approach to the study of late fourteenth century Middle English poetry for my Masters thesis. My study of medieval history has been fairly wide-ranging, with particular interest in the early Germanic peoples, the fall of the Western Empire, the survival and revival of ancient learning in the west and the history of science and intellectual history generally. But I have also dabbled in everything from learning medieval sword fencing techniques, the use of astrolabes and experimented with scribal arts and book production.

I suppose the fact that I have a fairly in-depth appreciation of the real Middle Ages made the high school level clichés many of my fellow atheists were depending on more annoying. Some of them rather liked the clichés and resisted my corrections, but many others (thankfully) have been happy to learn real history rather than clinging to myths.


A lot of the topics you address are relevant to medievalists, such as the myth of the destruction of classical learning by the medieval church. Do you see the denigration of the Middle Ages as central to New Atheist thinking?

It certainly seems so. By “New Atheists” I am referring to the strain of atheism that is not simply without any belief in God or gods, but which is also actively anti-religious and anti-theist. Many of these people assume and depend on a Whiggish conception of history as a matter of inevitable “progress” which is pushed forward by science and held back religion. They accept the nineteenth century “Draper-White Thesis” of an eternal warfare between science and religion without question and regard its rejection by modern historians as some kind of incomprehensible “revisionism”.

In this view, history is divided into “good” eras and “bad” ones. The good ones are where science and reason were upheld and advanced and the bad ones are where they were denied and suppressed. In this view, the Greeks and Romans are romanticized as noble, wise, rational, scientific and tolerant (despite them often being none of these things) and we post-Enlightenment moderns are seen as their intellectual and cultural heirs. All fairy tales like this need a villain, so in this one it is the Medieval Catholic Church, which destroyed Greco-Roman learning, suppressed science and dragged us all into a “dark age”. Denial and refutation of any of this is often met with highly emotional responses by these people, since this fiction is foundational to their whole world view. This is why I get so much hate mail and online abuse.


Why do you think myths about the Middle Ages, the “Dark Ages,” and the history of Christianity are so tenacious?

Probably because they have deep roots in western culture, particularly in the Anglosphere. A lot of the ideas I’ve just outlined are not necessarily anti-theistic or even wholly anti-Christian in origin. They are specifically anti-Catholic. Since the English-speaking world has, knowingly or not, inherited a substantially Protestant cultural heritage, much of our popular culture’s ideas about the Middle Ages – a filthy, backward, dark age ruled over by corrupt theocrats – have their origins in sectarian polemic. This is why many elements of the myths about the Middle Ages – witch crazes, constant plagues, scientists being suppressed – are actually much later phenomena dating to the time of the Early Modern Period’s sectarian squabbling, but projected back onto the Middle Ages.

Then there is the strong influence of eighteenth and nineteenth century “free thinkers” on many popular ideas about the period. A distorted version of the Medieval Period was a whipping boy of anti-clerical and Deistic thinkers and writers in the Enlightenment and their Whiggish successors. So I am constantly tracing back erroneous ideas about the Middle Ages and finding them first argued by Gibbon, or Voltaire or nineteenth century polemicists like Robert Green Ingersoll or John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White.

Finally, we have the more modern phenomenon of people getting their ideas about history from intellectual celebrities. So, celebrity scientists like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson – all of whom are very learned in their relevant scientific fields – make pronouncements on history which demonstrate they have no grasp of that field, but which are taken as gospel by those who trust their authority.

All these things make the myths about the Medieval period deep rooted in popular culture and so any refutation of them simply “feels wrong”, even before we get to the fact that those who accept them often have an ideological and emotional need for the myths to be true. This makes dislodging them difficult.


Has social media culture made matters worse? I’m thinking, for example, of those memes I keep seeing about the loss of the Library of Alexandria, or about Easter being named after the goddess Ishtar.

It’s hard to tell if this makes the problem worse or it just makes it more obvious to the rest of us. I’m fairly sure these ideas were widespread before the internet. Perhaps they spread more rapidly now.


What can medievalists (and historians and scholars of the past generally) do to better engage with the public to challenge misconceptions about history?

I find that while some people, as I’ve mentioned, have emotional biases and ideological commitments that make dislodging these myths difficult, others are open to changing their minds. The “Mythbusters” approach, where the myth is presented and then the alternative is laid out with reference to evidence-based arguments, is actually very persuasive for many people. People who aren’t tied to an ideological need to believe something often like being able to tell their friends “actually, that stuff about the Medieval Church killing all the cats and causing the Black Death is not true”.

Most of the myths about the Middle Ages in popular culture are based on nineteenth century understandings of the period. But the real study of the Medieval Period did not really get underway until the twentieth century. So popular culture is lagging behind scholarship by about a century. This means things like the realization that Medieval people did not, actually, think the earth was flat are only just beginning to permeate the popular sphere – I had a friend inform me of this the other day as though it was an amazing new discovery that I would be interested in. But people tend to get their understandings of history from novels and movies and until the producers of those start doing their homework better we will be stuck with the clichés and fairy tales.


You have written about the relationship between history and science, and “why history isn’t scientific.” Is it therefore impossible for historians to identify “true stories” or “real history”? And is it futile to try to debunk “bad history?”

No, because the fact that we can’t “prove” what happened in the past the way a scientist can prove something in physics doesn’t mean we can’t make an evidence-based argument to the best explanation. I can’t definitively “prove” that there was no vast massacre of cats that caused the Black Death, but I can show there is no evidence this happened, that medieval people liked and kept cats and did so partially because they controlled rodents and show how the “cat massacre” myth arose fairly recently. That’s debunking a piece of bad history and is usually suitably persuasive.


Medievally Speaking is devoted to the study of medievalism – the post-medieval reception of the Middle Ages. In the words of the sub-header, the blog “Encourag[es] Critical Engagement with the Continuing Process of Inventing the Middle Ages.” As a “medievalismist,” I sometimes find myself having to set aside my frustration at “wrong” history in – say – a film or novel to analyze it as a work of engagement with the medieval.  Do you think it is possible to do this with the “bad history” that you encounter? Or is “bad history” always a problem that needs to be challenged?

It depends. I sat and watched A Knight’s Tale the other day and enjoyed it immensely. As an accurate depiction of the Middle Ages it’s … well, it just isn’t one. But as a fun response to and, as you say, engagement with the period through a self-knowing and rather wry lens, it’s a great movie.

But the difference is that movies like this or, on a less knowing and deliberate level, something like Kingdom of Heaven, is the New Atheist ideologues I deal with are not “engaging with the Middle Ages”. They are fighting a culture war and using a distortion of the Middle Ages, presented as FACT, to do it. I’m actually not very interested in their culture war, but distortions of the past for ideological reasons tend to be dangerous, regardless of whether it is the Alt-Right or the New Atheists who are doing it.


In what future directions do you see your work taking you?

Various people have been urging me to write a book, so some of my blog articles are now being written with one eye on working them up into chapters. In the meantime, there are still very big topics for me to tackle, as I have yet to write articles on the myths surrounding the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria and the maelstrom of nonsense that swirls around the Galileo Affair. So I suspect I will be busy for a while yet.