William Morris Archive

by Peter Wright

Approaching three thousand years ago,1 in a period when his people were beginning a slow recovery from what was remembered as a great disaster, a poet of Ionia, of whom we know no more, at best, than the name of Homer, conceived the project of composing a poem much longer than would serve just for an evening’s entertainment or a days’ festival. The subject that he chose was derived from what may have been recalled as the last great common enterprise of his Achaean people, before an onrush of savage ‘Dorians’ from North-Western Greece had largely overwhelmed the Mycenaean kingdoms of the south, driving many into exile on the eastern coasts of the Aegean. Though incorporating much earlier tradition, it was to be centered on the anger of one great warrior, first at his commander impairing his honor by seizing the captive woman who was the reward of his valor, then at an enemy leader who had slain his best beloved friend. It would conclude in a minor key with the attenuation of that wrath as the hero faced his own doom. But through that particular story was to be presented, by reminiscence and re-enactment, anticipation and prophecy, a panorama of  the course of ‘the ten years’ war in Troy.’ Not too long after another poet, or the same one (the matter is still in dispute), decided to portray the culmination of the Trojan War and the fates of the Achaean leaders in an epic of almost equal scale; it would be chiefly devoted to the return home of, and re-establishment of order thereby, the last of those heroes to achieve such a return after long adventures in strange lands. The poet perhaps provided a kind of signature by presenting two bards like himself performing m kingly halls lays such as those which had preceded his more extended work. His creation would furnish for the Western imaginative tradition an archetype of romance and comedy, as the earlier epic had for the tragic mode.

 

Soon these longer epics, possibly to some extent adapted and interpolated, seem to have achieved a kind of classic status among the audience for such verse: over two succeeding centuries there gravitated, or were gathered, around them other epics, though on a lesser scale and told in a more episodic manner, which related the preliminaries of that war, and the events that fell between, and followed, the two more extensive poems.2 But it was the two Homeric epics that came for the Hellenic peoples to stand in place of a scripture, learned by heart by schoolboys, widely recited at enthusiastic gatherings, and eventually studied and carefully edited by scholars. Despite the censures of such philosophers as Plato directed at their morality and their mythological presentation of deity, they long continued to provide models for both ethical and practical activity. When the time came, the Romans were proud to have their own Virgil compose an Odyssey and Iliad in one.3 Until the decline of classical culture Homer was central to both the imaginative and the educational life of the Greco-Roman world, and the reflorescence of epic verse in late antiquity saw one Quintus ’of  Smyrna’ compose in would-be Homeric hexameters an account (called the Posthomerica) of the ending of the Trojan War.4 Those epics were still honored in the culture of the surviving Eastern empire: the Byzantine awareness of Homer is shown in an anecdote about an 11th-century emperor’s mistress.5 

 

In the West, the Greek text of Homer had been lost of the Iliad there was only a jejune 1,000-line summary. The Odyssey was still less known: even Dante, though reckoning Homer the ’poeta sovrano’ (Inferno, Canto IV, 88), supposed (unlike Tennyson) that his ‘Ulisse’ had never reached home in Ithaca, but had begun his final, presumptuous Ocean voyage from the dwelling of  Circe, his last known landfall in Latin poetry.6 Nevertheless the fame of the tales recorded by Homer was such that by the 8th century once barbarian peoples, such as the Britons and Franks, were proud, imitating the Romans, to claim for their rulers descent from Trojan royalty;7 it was the Trojan Hector, not the Greek Achilles who was enrolled among the Nine Worthies; and many medieval poets, among them Morris’s beloved Chaucer, were ‘besy for to bere up Troye’.8 

 

In one dramatic poem of the 1850s the medievalising Morris already has his Sir Peter Harpdon, entrapped like the Trojans in a losing war, holding with them in their fascination with Helen, and thinking Hector ‘the best knight’. It was, too, using medieval versions of the Trojan legend that Morris first handled Trojan themes at length. They were derived from late antique fabrications that claimed to have been recorded actually during the siege of Troy, long before Homer sang.9 When Morris composed about 1860 his ‘Scenes from the Fall of Troy’10 it was in that tradition, derived from a 12th-century French Romance of Troy, turned into Latin in the 13th, that he came to tell of Achilles slaughtering a disarmed Hector; Troilus as a leading Trojan warrior; and Paris plotting with Queen Hecuba to betray an Achilles infatuated with her daughter. Morris probably took those tales immediately from The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, a compendium of classical legend starting with the Argonauts’ voyage, translated by William Caxton and printed in 1475, barely ten years after its French original was written. (Morris himself reprinted Caxton’s work at the Kelmscott Press in 1892.)  Morris, however, tells those episodes of the end of the War in a severer style than most of his chivalrous verse of the 1850s, and gives us a sense of his Trojans as not merely war-weary, but world-weary. He concludes with a shocking account, presumably from his own imagination, of the renewed meeting of Helen with Menelaus, an event only hinted at in the Odyssey, while the most detailed other Classical versions have an initially vengeful Menelaus casting down his sword, overcome by her surviving beauty.11 For Morris a Helen, relieved at the Greeks’ departure and imagining a tranquilly contented ‘eld’, is suddenly confronted by a former husband who brutally compels her to help kill her new Trojan partner Deiphobus, and then forces her onto the couch where he lies slain.12 

 

The fate of another Trojan prince provides the only tale from Troy in The Earthly Paradise,13 in which, near the close of the war, Paris, mortally wounded by the poisoned arrows of Philoctetes, whose archery Odysseus commends to the Phaeacians,14 fails to obtain healing from his deserted first love, the nymph of Ida, Oenone. In Love is Enough, Master Oliver, faced with his former ward Pharamond’s visionary love, distracting him from his royal duties, invokes the ’warders of Troy’ to mourn over a parallel ‘Downfall’15 But Morris’s probably greatest tribute to Homeric epic came with his presentation of the legend that he most honored, that of Sigurd and the Nibelungs: his poem has all the formalities of such epic, including repeated conventional epithets, extended similes, divine interventions, long, vigorously expressive speech for the protagonists, and the elaborated treatment of the kind of activity typical of heroic life. Sadly in our new millennium, the Volsung story is less likely to be known from the poem on which he expended so much loving effort than from the music of the German composer whom he initially despised. 

 

When Morris came to translate the Homeric epics in the mid 1889s, he was entering a crowded field. Fiona MacCarthy lists no fewer than ten verse translations over the previous quarter-century.16 By then his literary tastes had become even more exclusively romantic than in his earlier life. In the 1870s he had devoted considerable effort both to translating Virgil’s Aeneid and to transcribing for illuminated manuscripts the poems of Virgil and Horace. By 1886 both those poets had become ‘sham classics’, and the only Latin poets he was willing to include among his ‘Best Books’ were Catullus and Lucretius.17 As a Marxist he should certainly have approved Lucretius’ philosophical materialism, though it is a little hard to imagine him working through complex Epicurean atomic physics set out in archaic Latin, though he would probably have appreciated that poet’s clear vision of the natural world, not obscured by mythological convention. Likewise, of the three Attic tragic poets, he omitted Euripides: though his choruses are vividly imaginative, much of Euripides’  dialogue was probably found too rhetorical and argumentative. Homer, however, survived, especially as a ’bible’, even though perhaps not altogether as the single greatest poet of antiquity.

 

In the ancient world, some had doubted whether the Iliad and Odyssey had been produced by the same author, but none, then or long after, that each was created by one poet. A change came in the 18th century, with a new idea of early Greek poetic activity: in 1795 the German scholar F. A. Wolff crystallized a suspicion that the primitive and illiterate bard of romantic imagination could not have composed so long and complicated an epic as the Iliad. Real or supposed discrepancies were discovered in its narrative, along with the superfluous repetition of some passages in different parts of it. Throughout the 19th century many eminent German philologists argued that that epic particularly (the Odyssey with its involved storytelling was a little less vulnerable) was not created by a single, early  Homer, but rather put together, perhaps in 6th century Athens, out of a set of ancient lays on individual heroic deeds. In England, the epic-reading public, still impressed with the sublimity of the poem, long remained stoutly ‘unitarian’ in its views on the ‘Homeric question’.18 As early as the 1830s, indeed, Coleridge had assumed multiple authorship of the Iliad,19 and about 1850 the Radical historian George Grote proposed that am original lay dealing only with the Wrath of Achilles and its consequences had later been enlarged, perhaps by the same poet, into one displaying the whole conflict at Troy.

 

Later in the century informed English opinion began gradually to accept a moderated form of ‘analyzing’ Homer, with which Morris’s views, expressed in 1887, were not out of line.20 He reckoned the Iliad ‘obviously the work of a school of poets’,  though it is not clear whether he imagined them to be active contemporaneously, or successively in a tradition. In the Odyssey he found different levels: the earliest,21 given his delight in stories about ‘cannibals & giants and sorceresses’, he placed in the tales of the hero’s ‘wanderings’, later added to by a ’family poet’22 to glorify ‘Odysseus … and his house’, and, what a good Socialist might expect of literature, associated him with ‘the ruling class of the time’. Morris was clearly aware that ‘the flitting of the ghosts’, that is the encounter of those of the dead heroes with those of the newly slain Wooers at the start of Book XXIV, was under suspicion of being interpolated. But, seeing the need for Odysseus to settle his ‘blood feud with the Wooers’ kin, and liking ‘Laertes & his garden’, he did not apparently reject the whole of that book with its reunion of the hero with a parent frequently mentioned, sometimes at length, earlier in the poem. In any case, he thought the whole of the epic had been ‘gone over’ by ‘one hand’.

 

Morris had originally considered translating both Iliad and Odyssey,23 but postponed the longer epic, of which only an opening fragment of Book I, edited by William Whitla in The Journal of the Pre-Raphaelite Society in 2004, survives. It would perhaps have appealed less to his tastes; in the earlier, more Germanic of his late Romances he was still willing to include extended narratives of fighting, with his favored side revealing both courage and skill in arms, along with careful tactics (against often incomperent opponents. But in both those tales such peoples are fighting in a good cause, the men of the Mark to resist aggressive Roman imperialists, those of Burgdale to deliver an oppressed and dispossessed people from the barbaric and tyrannical Dusky Men. (In the later of his Romances Morris tends to despatch actual fighting in just one or two pages, or only have it reported as from ’offstage’, with little detail.) In the Iliad there is relatively less to choose between the opposing forces. The Achaeans are aiming to punish Troy for Helen’s abduction by sacking the city and slaying or enslaving its inhabitants. Although the Trojans, as their leaders occasionally remind them, are fighting to defend their city and their wives and children, each side is equally fierce in its ways of treating both living, and dead, enemies: no prisoners are taken throughout the fighting in that epic. As for its pre-eminent hero, the anger-driven Achilles, Morris, who valued loyalty to his Socialist comrades, could hardly have approved of a man willing to see great numbers of his fellow countrymen killed to satisfy a personal point of honor. In effect, Morris was out of sympathy with the traditional heroic ethos.

 

The Odyssey he found ’more’ or ’most interesting’: besides its ‘fairy stories’ of romantic adventures in the outer seas, it had a protagonist with whom he could feel more sympathy. Resembling Hallblithe in The Glittering Plain, Odysseus is willing to decline a proffer of deathlessness from a woman who desires him, in order to return to a beloved homeland and a mortal, but dear spouse. He is prepared, too, to endure hardship and abuse in his endeavor to regain them. Morris could not, however, be pleased with his readiness, (unlike ‘Northmen‘, who only resorted to falsehood under the pressure of necessity), repeatedly to indulge, to the delight of his patron goddess Athena, in ‘an intricate series of lies’,24 out of apparent pleasure in his facility of invention. To William Bell Scott, who apparently found some degree of longueur in the Odyssey’s closing books set in and around Odysseus’ home, Morris emphasized the interest of Odysseus’ successive encounters with, and recognitions by, his ‘faithful thralls‘, his son, and his wife. Morris insisted, too, that the Wooers must be shown not only as his ’illegal enemies’, but as ‘blackguards’ if their slaughter is to appear justified, and was probably pleased that Odysseus took his swineherd and oxherd as comrades-in-arms. That hero could also boast not only, as to the Phaeacians in the eighth book (lines 202-33) of his skills as athlete and bowman, but later to the Wooers (Book XVIII, 365-75) of those at ploughing and hay-making. He also displayed ability in handicraft, especially ’the woodwright’s art‘.: he could both build a complete vessel for himself to sail, and construct the complicated framework of his marriage bed.25 Morris may also have liked to hear of others of his family engaged in physical toil: Penelope famously working at her loom, even though she might unweave her ’great web’ the next night;‘ or old Laertes, leather-gloved, digging in his vineyard.

 

Morris had begun work on his Odyssey translation by December 1885 and continued it over the next year and a half. occasionally at home or in friends’ houses, but often in the course of his journeys to preach Socialism, from which Homer provided ’a great rest’, as he traveled by railway or steamer, sometimes accomplishing 50-100 lines at a time. Steadily working through the Odyssey book by book, he was a third of the way through by August 1886 and was able to send to his printers the first twelve books (of which 250 copies were soon sold) for publication in April 1887. The second volume of the completed epic came out that  November and the whole poem (whose pagination had been deliberately made continuous) appeared in a single volume just before the end of that year.26 That one-volume version incorporated some, but not many of the amendments suggested by reviewers.27 It is perhaps of interest that while Morris was working on Homer, he was studying a book about ‘Russian Epic Songs’, the product of another heroic tradition.28 

 

Given that so much of his translating was done on the move, Morris can hardly have carried about many scholarly books about Homer to consult, though an abbreviated, portable version, in which he could have checked the more uncommon words, of the massive Liddell and Scott Lexicon had been available since the 1870s. (William Whitla has suggested, in his essay on 'William Morris and the Classical Tradition’ that the basic text used was a two-volume one by W W. Merry recently issued, also in the 1870s, by the Oxford University Press.) It is not clear how much practice Morris had had in reading Greek, recently or since he left Oxford. Almost no classical authors, even those he commended as ’ Best Books’ in 1886, other than the few he had translated or transcribed, seem to be mentioned in his surviving letters. Given his numerous other activities, artistic, commercial, and latterly political, and his other imaginative occupations with medieval literature, French, and Norse, he cannot have had much leisure for intense classical study. In the 1860s he had used Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica to provide the basic framework for his tale about Jason, and based his list of fifty Argonauts chiefly on Apollonius’ catalogue of them in his first book.29 Probably in the 1890s Burne-Jones recalled in a letter their consideration of the attitude to Amazons shown in tapestry and in the late Antique epic by  Quintus ‘of Smyrna‘ on the end of the Trojan War.30 Neither of those epics were available in translation in the Bohn Library, the Victorian equivalent of Penguin Classics,31 so Morris and his friend might  perhaps have consulted them in the original Greek. In the 1890s Morris owned a version of Quintus, published in 1734,32 so possibly acquired for its contents rather than its printing style. Watts-Dunton reported that, while working on the Odyssey, Morris had openly used as a ‘crib’ the Bohn translation of it, whose prosaic literalness would be less of a hindrance to his composition than that recently published by Butcher and Lang in 1879. Since the finer phrases of its somewhat Biblical prose might have clung to his memory and been unintentionally reproduced, he avoided looking at it.33 Probably also he could rely on recovering, as his translation proceeded, some of the knowledge of Greek learned at Oxford over thirty years before, perhaps also assisted as he went on by the formulaic repetitions typical of the epic style.

 

Early on, carefully attending to his task, he decided that his was to be ‘a real one’, and not, like ‘all the others’ ‘a mere periphrase’ (sic), and praised the ‘great simplicity of the original‘, hard to reproduce, with ‘never … a redundant word‘.34 Having finished, he claimed that his version, which matched Homer line by line, was ‘as nearly literal as a verse translation could be’.35 Surviving manuscripts of the poem show him writing out each section of verse steadily, line by line, occasionally pausing to revise individual words or phrases. (The length of the line of verse that he had chosen, and the narrowness of his paper, meant that often a line’s last words had to be tucked beneath earlier ones.) Morris does not seem to have looked back, as he worked, on earlier parts of his translation: thus portions of the epic which in the original are repeated, almost word for word according to the normal Homeric practice, such as those narrating in Books II, 89-110, xix, 141-155; and xxiv, 11-156; Penelope‘s trick over the unweaving of Laertes’’ shroud, or, the overlapping portions of the varying fictions which in Books XIII, XIV and XIX, Odysseus relates to different audiences about his imagined character’s adventures or the regularly recurring formulaic passages such as those which describe the serving of meals, or ships being launched or wrecked in storms Such sections are rendered, afresh by Morris each time he encounters them with slightly different wording.

 

For the meter of the Odyssey translation Morris did not adopt  the regular iambic ‘fourteener’, which he had used in the 1870s for his version of the Aeneid, (in which the frequent omission of articles, definite and indefinite, had produced a rather staccato effect)., He turned instead to the more spacious line in which he had composed Sigurd the Volsung. in the 1870s.  Perhaps derived from the traditional ballad’s iambic rhythm, its lines have most often three stresses in their slightly longer first half, (which mostly ends with an unstressed syllable), and three more in the second, part,(though occasionally those proportions of length are reversed). Sometimes a pair of stresses are butted together. Between each stress are usually a pair of unstressed syllables. The rhythm is assisted by two aspects of Morris’s archaizing style; the reversal of nouns and adjectives, especially in conventional epithets for characters (almost never omitted), so that Athena often appears as ‘the Goddess the Grey-eyed’, and the insertion before monosyllabic words of an extra syllable, for instance, ‘anear’, ‘alow’, ‘adown’, and even ’aswim’ and ’awroth’. End-rhymes are mostly placed on stressed monosyllables This meter enabled Morris to use a single line to match each of Homer’s hexameters, though sometimes particular phrases are transferred to adjoining lines. The result is that, after the earliest books, each of those his translation have exactly the same number of lines as those of the original. When that original has an odd number of lines. Morris generally concludes with a rhyming triplet. The ease with which he had learned to write in this meter is revealed by his using virtually the same one for most of The Pilgrims of Hope which he was composing for Commonweal over much the same period, and, soon after, for the verse sections of The House of the Wolfings.

 

It was also to the vocabulary that he had developed for Sigurd that Morris looked for an archaic language suited to the heroic world depicted in Homer, whose ethos he could imagine to resemble that of the Norse legends which he had earlier translated from Sagas and  Eddas. In this type of language, he did not primarily seek to revive antiquated words of ‘’Anglo-Saxon’ character r, though a certain number of largely obsolete ones appear, such as ‘burg’, dight’, ‘hight’, ‘rede’, ‘fain’,’ ‘gin‘, and ‘blent‘. Others replace common modern ones, ‘wend’  for ‘go’, ‘wot’ for ‘know’ or ‘wax‘ for ‘grow‘,  and others again are given unusual senses, ‘let‘ meaning ‘hinder‘ or ‘hoard‘ for ‘keep‘, Morris also liberally coined compound words, some matching Greek ones, such as ’well-decked’, others his own invention from Anglo-Saxon or antique roots, such as ’whirl-blast’, ’guest-cheer’, ’wine-swain’, ’cloud-wrack’, or ’corn-kind’’. But his chief method of .obtaining an effect of ancientry, perhaps even stronger than in Sigurd, was the exclusion of the majority of those words, often polysyllabic, that have entered  English from Greek or Latin during the Renaissance and later. (He was willing, however, here, as later in his Romances, to accept such words as had come from Latin through  Medieval French before 1500, which he would have met in Chaucer or Malory). In The Pilgrims of Hope, too, he largely relied on a similar archaic vocabulary for the more reflective passages, though a more modern one naturally appears in the narrative sections.

 

It may be noted that, whereas in his tales based on Classical myth composed in the 1860s he had followed the then-normal English practice of giving Greek deities the  Roman form of their names, in the Odyssey he regularly uses their original Hellenic ones, so giving ‘Zeus’, not ‘Jupiter‘, ‘Hephaestus‘, not ‘Vulcan’, and ‘Artemis’, not ’Diana’. Unlike Browning who starkly adopted a Greekish spelling in his narratives inspired by Greek tragedy, however, Morris continues to Latinise those of his lesser characters, so we meet ‘Telemachus, not ‘Telemakhos’, ‘Circe‘, not  ‘Kirke‘, ‘Achilles’, not ‘Akhilleus’, and even ‘Ajax’, not ‘Aias’.

 

Early reviews36 were generally favorable: they acknowledged with admiration Morris’s previous achievement as a  narrative poet, and some found that he had well reproduced the vigor and rapidity of Homer, though he had less fully matched that loftiness which Matthew Arnold had also descried in his original. But they also noted, sometimes critically, the archaic character of his language, which enveloped the epic in a distinctly Northern atmosphere. In 1896-7 Longmans, who had just taken over from Reeves & Turner as Morris’s publishers, reissued the stereotyped text of the one-volume edition, which they kept available into Edwardian times. But, although the Chiswick Press published in 1901 a new edition, organized by Sidney Cockerell, using Morris’s Golden Type, Morris’s translation has not reappeared in the 20th century, outside Volume XIII of the Collected Works,37 not benefiting from the late 20th century revival of interest in his Socialist writings and in his romances. Despite the deliberate closeness with which he followed the Homeric text, the Teutonic idiom which with practice came so easily to him has not commended itself to later readers. In the 1930s the editors of The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation  had chosen about ten of the sixty pages which were devoted to the Odyssey from Morris’s version. (Perhaps surprisingly, almost twice as much was taken from the stately quatrains of his biographer, J. W. Mackail’s one.) By contrast, when The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in English Translation was issued in 1991, its editors, who concentrated for Homer on versions composed before 1800 or after 1950, selected not a single extract from Morris’s work.

ABBREVIATIONS

ch. chapter

[HO ...] Number of line in Greek text of Homer's Odyssey, when different from Morris's translation.

tr. translated, translates

U. P. University Press

Books of the Odyssey are cited by Roman numbers I in lowercase letters, those of the Iliad are in uppercase ones, and of other classical epics by Arabic numerals.

  1. The Homeric epics are likely to have been produced some time between 900 and 700. Those who, although allowing that poems of such length and elaboration could have been composed by a poet working orally, doubt whether a stable text of one could be preserved without some use of writing, will be inclined to place their final composition towards the end of that period. Writing, after a long gap, had been reintroduced, with an adapted Phoenician alphabet, at first for practical purposes, not long before 700, and by the mid-7th century was being employed to record the verses of named poets with individual characters.

  2. The surviving summaries of, and quotations from, these poems of the so-called ‘Epic Cycle’ are available with English translations, in Greek Epic Fragments, ed. M. L. West, Loeb Library (Harvard U. P. 2003), pp. 64-171.

  3. e.g. Propertius, Elegies, Boo. 2, xxxiv, 65-6.

  4. Edited, with verse translation, as ‘The Fall of Troy’, by A. S. Way, Loeb Library (Harvard U. P. 1913 and later editions to 1984).

  5. Michael Psellus, Chronography, Book 6, ch. 61.

  6. Compare Dante, Inferno, Canto 26, 91-99; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Boo. 14, 308-9.

  7. Cf. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, Book 1; M. Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas (Yale U. P. 1991), esp. Ch. 4.

  8. Chaucer, The House of Fame, Book 3, 1465-74. For medieval English poems about the Trojan war, see J. A. W. Bennett, Middle English Literature (Oxford U. P. 1986), 194-8.

  9. For those impostures, see G. Highet, The Classical Tradition (Oxford U. P. 1949), 51-4, 574-6.

  10. William Morris, Collected Works, ed. May Morris, Vol. XXIV, pp. 3-51.

  11. e.g. Quintus, ‘Posthomerica’, Book 13, 364-414. W. S. Landor, Hellenics (1847 edn.), no. XIII, gives an English version of this scene of eventual reconciliation.

  12. Morris will have known Virgil’s version (Aeneid, Book 6, 494-533), where Helen hides her sleeping partner’s weapons so that Menelaus may kill and mutilate him.

  13. Ed. Boos, Vol. II, pp. 9-28.

  14. Odyssey, Bok VIII, 219-20.

  15. Love is Enough, Dialogue ‘In the King’s Garden’.

  16. F. MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (Faber & Faber, 1994), 543.

  17. Collected Letters of William Morris, ed. N. Kelvin, 5 Vols. (Princeton U. P.  1984-96), (hereafter cited as Coll. Letters), Vol. II, p. 515.

  18. For Victorian views on Homer and the Homeric problem, see F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (Yale U. P., 1981), 135-86; esp. 143-52.

  19. S.T. Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. H. N. Coleridge, under 12 May 1830; 9 July 1832.

  20. Quotations on the Odyssey in this and succeeding paras. are from his letter to William Bell Scott, 5 December 1887: Coll. Letters, Vol. II, pp. 721, 724.

  21. It is perhaps more likely that the widely known folktale about a man, lover, or husband, long absent, who comes home only just in time to prevent his spouse or bride from being taken by a rival, has been filled out with legends of distant adventures to explain his long delay and loss of all his companions.

  22. Morris seems to place the Odyssey’s composition rather close to the events described in it, not allowing for the forced transfer of heroic traditions from the Greek mainland to Ionia, where some noble families claimed descent from the houses of Atreus and Neleus, also from Aeneas, but none, so far as is known, from Odysseus.

  23. Coll. Letters, Vol. II, p. 498.

  24. Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, ed. E. D. Lemire (Wayne State U. P. 1969), p. 188.

  25. Odyssey, Book V, lines 234-257; Book XXIII, lines 183-204.

  26. Coll. Letters, Vol. II, pp. 498, 541, 567, 575, 578, 587, 602, 625, 644, 687, 709.

  27. Cf. the reviews reprinted in William Morris: the Critical Heritage, ed. P. Faulkner (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 293-309, esp.  pp. 296, 298, 300-1.

  28. Coll. Letters, Vol. II, p. 578. C. M.  Bowra, Heroic: Poetry (Macmillan, 1932), provides extensive discussion of the tales of the heroes (bogatyrs) gathered at the court of Vladimir, prince of Kiev. A recent selection of them is An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, ed. & tr. J. Bailey and T. Ivanovna (M. E. Sharpe, 1998).

  29. Note on Argonauts in Morris Archive Edn. of The Life and Death of Jason.

  30. Letter to Morris, cited in J. M. Mackail, Life of William Morris, Vol. I, at end of Ch. VI. The tapestry is probably the 15th-century one, showing the Amazon queen Penthesilea welcomed at Troy and riding into battle, (still on show at the Victoria & Albert), which was acquired for the South Kensington Museum in 1886-7 on Morris’s advice, and, as he admitted, chiefly for his personal enjoyment: Coll. Letters, Vol. II, p. 604.

  31. See Catalogue of Bohn Library, regularly placed at end of its volumes. Morris had probably looked at some of that series occasionally in his earlier life: he could most easily have found the ‘Love Stories‘ of the very obscure late Greek writer Aristaenetus, from which he proposed to take ‘The Dolphins and the Lovers‘ as an Earthly Paradise story, in a Bohn volume, annexed to Propertius & Petronius. W. S. Landor wrote an English version of that tale, replacing the rescuing dolphins with sea-nymphs: Hellenics (1847 edn.), No. XI. ‘Enallos and Cymodameia’: (‘In-the-Salt’ and ’Wave-Tamer’.)

  32. Aymer Vallance,  The Life and Work of William Morris (1897; repr. Studio Edns, 1986), pp. 211-12.

  33. Coll. Letters, Vol. IV,  p. 425, under Calaber, Q, (Proctermisssa’ should read ‘Praetermissa’). The catalogue of Morris’s Early Printed Books, ibid. pp. 404-33, contains almost no Greek poets, not even Homer. They were not needed for his study of the early typography of the Roman alphabet for his Kelmscott Press designs for letters.

  34. Coll. Letters, Vol. II, pp. 510, 525.

  35. Ibid. p. 721.

  36. Reprinted in William Morris: The Critical Heritage, ed. P. Faulkner (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 293-311.

  37. A Bibliography of William Morris, ed. E Lemire (Oak Knoll Press, 2006), pp. 113-16.