Pure Northerness – William Morris and C.S. Lewis

Having seen one of Rackham’s illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods in his youth, C.S. Lewis became instantly attracted to “pure ‘Northernness’”, a feature he would later associate with Scandinavian literature and mythology, Wagner’s music and William Morris’ romances. In a similar manner, Morris describes his reading of the Norse sagas as a momentous experience which influenced his later writings. However, the two authors seem to have responded to different aspects of the sagas: Morris to their realism of presentation and to their worship of courage, and Lewis to their use of magic and myth. Paradoxically, in spite of Morris’ paganism, his prose romances played an important part in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.