William Morris Archive

13 July 1871 Diupivogur [1]

Martin Stott, photographer

‘So I have seen Iceland at last: I awoke from a dream of the Grange; which by the way was like some house at Queen’s Gate, to glare furiously at Magnússon who was clutching my arm and saying something, which as my senses gathered I found out to be an invitation to come up on deck, as we were close off Papey; which is an island inhabited by the Culdee monks before the Norse colonization began, and is at the south-east corner of Iceland. It was about 3 a.m. when I went up on deck for that great excitement, the first sight of a new land. The morning was grey still, and cloudy out to sea, but though the sun had not yet shone over the mountains on the east into the firth at whose mouth we were yet patches of it lay upon the high peaks north-west of where we were: on our left was a dark brown ragged rocky island, Papey, and many skerries about it, and beyond that we saw the mainland, a terrible shore indeed: a great mass of dark grey mountains worked into pyramids and shelves, looking as if they had been built and half-ruined; they were striped with snow high up, and wreaths of cloud dragged across them here and there, and above them were two peaks and a jagged ridge of pure white snow . . .’ (IJ p. 19)