Auden's Icelandic Myth of Exile

Paul Beekman Taylor
Université de Genève

W.H. Auden's life-long artistic commitment to Iceland, and particularly to Medieval Icelandic literature, can be divided conveniently for analysis into four distinct stages. First, as a young boy, he listened to his father's stories out of Norse myth. He recalled years later that he knew more then of Norse myth than of Greek:

With northern myths my little brain was laden,
With deeds of Thor and Loki and such scenes; ¹

Later, as an undergraduate at Oxford in the mid-1920s and at work on his early poems and drama, he listened to J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud Old English verse. ² This incited him to experiment at once with its rhythms; and, subsequently, he adapted qualities of the common Germanic traditional poetic line in his earliest published efforts. In 1936, he visited Iceland with Louis MacNeice, and, finally, in 1964, he returned alone for a brief visit. Each of these stages also contributed to an intensifying of an artistic dedication to Icelandic story, particularly to its Norse myth. ³ These stages correspond to Auden's almost chronic sensitivity to his own isolation and exile. In archaic myth and historical legend Auden saw a distant and clear reflection of the social and intellectual worlds through which he was passing. Foremost in that reflection was the theme of exile that shadowed his own successive moves of residence. ⁴ A trace of these "axial" turns in Auden's career reveals an incremental Norse [End Page 213] influence on his style and diction, but more importantly, it reveals the growth of the poet's conception of the profitable uses of poetry.

I refer to his "life-long" commitment because, although one might suppose that influence on Auden's poetry of his Icelandic interests surfaced only sporadically and predominantly only in the very beginning of his career, they are perceptible from beginning to end. At the beginning of his appreciation of things Nordic, his father told him the origin of his name: He alludes to this information in Letters from Iceland:

  My name occurs in several of the sagas,
Is common over Iceland still. Down under
  Where Das Volk order sausages and lagers
I ought to be the prize, the living wonder,
The really pure from any Rassenschänder,
  In fact I am the great big white barbarian,
  The Nordic type, the too too truly Aryan. ⁵

That the family had distant roots in Iceland is generally taken as fact, ⁶ but the etymological origin of the Auden family name has been disputed. Although his father claimed an origin in Icelandic Au_unn, critics have suggested an English source in Anglo-Saxon Eadwin, Healfdene, or Ælfwine. ⁷ Auden himself preferred, for obvious reasons, to defer to the knowledge of the Medieval Icelandic mythographer Snorri Sturluson, who equated Audunn with Ódinn, ⁸ the name of the Norse father of the gods, god of poetry, lies, and the dead. Auden played on the polysemy in the word-element aud and in such words as audn "waste," audin "fate," audna "luck," aud "riches," as well as ódr,adjective "frenzy" (cognate with Latin vates), and ódr, the noun "poetry," each of which he could identify with his own character. Further, although overlooked by biographers whose works I have consulted, his given name was a modern form of Old English Weohstan "alter-of-the-rock," and Wigstan/Wihstan "battle-stone," manuscript forms of the name of the father of Wiglaf "survivor of battle," friend of the hero Beowulf. The English forms echo the Icelandic cognate Vésteinn, the name of the exiled saga hero of Gislasaga, who is killed upon his return to his homeland. So, the semantic resonances in the name of the mythic god of poetry and in the legendary model of wronged exile, are carried in Auden's name. In his given and inherited names resided his future earned fame. Nomen est omen.

At Oxford, attentive to Tolkien's reading Old English, his ear became easily attuned to the [End Page 214] strong alliterative stress of traditional Germanic verse. What Auden appreciated in Tolkien's readings was the almost magical power of poetry in public performance, if private the occasion and sentiment of its composition. It was at Oxford, as well, that Auden associated himself with, and imitated, the moderns, particularly T.S. Eliot. While Eliot and Pound looked back to classics to free their art from contemporary contexts, Auden sought the archaic in Norse tradition. ⁹

At the same time at Oxford, Auden felt exiled from his family and from his social class and assumed that his own life--if not all human life--consisted of a succession of isolations. The poet finds himself "isolated even in the midst of unity," ¹⁰ but Auden's sense of exile was unusually complex. As one of Auden's biographers notes, "The unbridged gulf, the lost wholeness, the threat of violence: these three elements form an inseparable cluster in Auden's early poems." ¹¹ These three elements are the standard stock of Icelandic legend and myth.

His sexual proclivities, which both bothered and stimulated him, linked Auden's sense of love with his sense of isolation. In "Love in the Saga World," written at Oxford in 1928, he alluded, much in the fashion of Eliot's The Waste Land, to the social role of love to which the poet must be sensitive, in contrast with the privacy of romantic love. He was uneasy with the poet's dilemma in reconciling the growing gap between secular and sacred thought and practice in the Western World. He appreciated the Icelandic saga uncomplicated commonplace "they married and, in time, grew to love one another." For him, the saga writers had handled love with a wry, bitter smile and a pair of aseptic gloves:

Love lies at surgical extremity;
Gauze pressed over the mouth, a breathed surrender.

So, for poetic form, after periods of imitating Hardy and Eliot, he settled on the alliterative sounds and verse rhythms of the Norse oral tradition in such lines as:

What siren zooming is sounding our coming
Up frozen fjord forging from freedom. ("The Exiles")

Exiling his verse from the exalted models of English Romantic poetry, Auden exiled himself from his predecessors. He had adopted, as others saw it, a "Nordic mask." ¹²

An obvious example of the art of his early mask is the early drama, Paid on Both Sides, written while still at Oxford. He based this "charade" on the Icelandic Gislasaga Sursonar, whose unhappy exile Vésteinn carries Auden's own given name. The title translates a line in Beowulf: Ne wæs pæt wrixle til,/ pæt hie on ba healfe bicgan scoldon/ freonda feorum (1305-6a) [That was not a good bargain that they had to pay on both sides with lives of friends]. The bad bargain that feud makes of kinship and marriage rituals in the play reflects [End Page 215] a tension, as Christopher Isherwood reads it, "in which the two worlds are so inextricably confused that it is impossible to say whether the characters are really epic heroes or only members of a school." ¹³ He suggested that the play "grew out of the comparison he and Auden had made between the two worlds of the Icelandic sagas and English boarding schools, which, they maintained, shared a common culture of feuds, practical jokes, and darks threats." ¹⁴

Much of the vibrancy of Auden's technical play with image and sound in his early poetry derives from the sounds and pulsating rhythm of traditional Germanic poetry and the theme of exile so central to Icelandic and Old English literature. That he read his own exile through Old English poetry and Old Icelandic saga is evident in the best of his early translations, or versions, such as "The Wanderer," an elegiac plaint which draws upon Old English and traditional Northern wisdom poetry:

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. ¹⁵
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried seas,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new man making another love.
Save him from hostile capture,
From sudden tiger's leap at corner;
Protect his house, [End Page 216]
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual rain spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn. (August 1930) ¹⁶

The landscape of exile, upon which the narrative voice declares a geo-political withdrawal from the vista of his poetic insight, is both socio-psychological and mytho-allegorical. ¹⁷ The poem is a paradigm of the utterance of an exile which, in the northern world, is the most wretched of human conditions (see Old English wrecan "to drive out," and wrecca "exile," cognate with Modern English "wreck"). "Wanderer" translates Old English anhaga "lone dweller." Appropriately, the Old Icelandic for "wanderer" is gangleri¸ an agnomen for Odin, the wandering god. There is appreciable irony, however, here and elsewhere, in the solitary occasion of the voice of the wanderer who has no audience apart from the solitary setting in which he utters his lament.

Auden was both fearful of and attracted toward a physical dislocation from an environment in which his socio-mythological imagination restricted the free possibilities of play. The best known of his early exile poems, "Look Stranger, at this Island Now"(1935) takes as its point of perspective "not England at all, but the holiday island of his art." ¹⁸ That holiday island, however, can be identified with Iceland, the unreal island above and between Anglo-Saxon worlds. The point of view from this imagined locus is an exile's looking at moral conditions in the depressed islands of civilization in Western Europe and inviting the reader to look for alternate landscapes and other artistic and moral terrain for his mythologies.

In the early spring of 1936, Auden and Isherwood fashioned a dramatic typological reflection of Ragnarök--"destruction of the gods" (mistranslated early as "twilight of the gods")--in The Ascent of F6 (1937). In that play the hero, Michael Ransom (whose name-sense is emblematic), is on a political quest to confront a troll--locally called "Demon"--who lives on the summit of a mountain. An abbot, considering the local mythic beliefs, which have more real force than his own beliefs allow, questions the relationships between myth and social behavior in terms which Auden consistently attached to Nordic thought: "They see the truth as a crude and coloured picture. Perhaps, for that reason, they see it more clearly than you or I. For it is a picture of truth. The Demon is real. Only his ministry and his visitation are unique for every nature" (II,i). ¹⁹ [End Page 217]

One need not trace the many intertextual allusions to Nordic myth throughout the play to appreciate Auden's comparison of England after World War I to Asgard (the residence of the god) just before Ragnarök. Both of these locations house people hoping that "the deliverer come to destroy this dragon, . . . for it is stated in the prophecies that such a one shall appear" (II, v). In Icelandic myth, it is Odin who wanders in search of the meaning of his son's dream that predicts the destruction of the gods. Not surprisingly, the play ends with a survivor's vision of a resurrected world, the Gimlé of Norse myth:

Over the mountain and over the sea
You shall go happy and handsome and free.
. . .
You shall pick flowers, the white and the blue,
Shepherds shall flute their sweetest for you. (II, v)

Auden himself explained the general significance of the mythological context of his drama when he wrote some time afterwards: "All characters who are products of the mythopoeic imagination are instantaneously recognizable by the fact that their existence is not defined by their social and historical context; transfer them to another society or another age and their characters and behavior will remain unchanged. In consequence, once they have been created, they cease to be their author's characters and become the reader's; he can continue their story for himself." ²⁰ He characterized the aesthetic authority of such heroes as a prominent feature of Norse myths that display the "necessary inequality of finite individuals in relation to one another. [A]n 'aesthetic hero' . . . is the man to whom fortune has granted exceptional gifts." As if describing Odin, he argues that "the ethical hero is the one who at any given moment happens to know more than the others." ²¹ Both Melville's scarred Ahab with one leg and Odin with one eye display a symbol of that uniqueness. ²²

A few months later in the summer of 1936, when he moved across Iceland with Louis MacNeice, Auden saw the bleak Icelandic landscape as correlative with the Norse tales which his father had recited and the mythic elements which he had already incorporated in his verse. In the Icelandic language he heard clear echoes of the Old and Middle English that he had stored in aural memory since his Oxford days. He realized that the Icelandic language contains sounds that underlie English and that preserve words which the poet can reclaim for the English language. Further, his temporary exile in Iceland comprised a quest for self-discovery. In his poetic account in Letters from Iceland, he located himself in "the fabulous/ [End Page 218] Country impartially far." ²³ The diction is telling here, for Iceland is "fabulous" and "far" in its guard over its fabled history, and it is dislocated from the political and moral anxiety that Auden saw wracking Europe. "For Europe is absent. This is an island and therefore/ Unreal." ²⁴ This is Auden's island-ship Iceland, whose unique centricity affords a privileged and protected perspective over the city-civilization of Europe and America. Auden might well have been thinking here of the rim of Ásgardr (Asgard), the domain of the Norse gods from which the worlds of men and giants can be surveyed. ²⁵ In the first stanza of "Journey," he cites "the citiless, the corroding, the sorrow,/ And North means to all Reject." By distancing himself from Europe, one of his biographers observes, Auden "might obtain a better view of himself and his environment."' ²⁶ Much of the impact of his Icelandic journey is revealed in that crucial phrase: "Island and therefore/ Unreal"; for in Iceland Auden perceived, perhaps not for the first time, a conjoining of "two atlases," the dual geographies which the poet's eye traces over human and imaginative landscapes in order to bind history to story. Call them the "far" and the "fabulous." He would later call them "public" and "private" atlases, as well as "primary" and "secondary" worlds.

In Iceland that summer, Auden recalled with pleasure the old stories which he had heard as a youth. As he traversed the rough Icelandic terrain, he located those stories on their proper landscape. "Gisli the Soursop [Véstein's friend] was killed on the other side of the mountains." ²⁷ Further,

Yes, just like that. See Gunnar killed
At Hlitharendi white across the river,
And Flosi waiting on Three Corner Ridge. ²⁸

And:

Remember the doomed man thrown by his horse and
   crying:
"Beautiful is the hillside, I will not go.";
    The old woman confessing; "He that I loved the
    Best, to him I was worst." ²⁹

These sightings are far from just rehearsals of his saga listening and reading. The selection [End Page 219] of saga story sighted on the landscape is self-reflexive. In Njals Saga, Gunnar is exiled but refuses to go abroad after catching an accidental glimpse of his home. The beauty of the hillside slope and grass figure his wife, Hallgerd, as an earth-goddess whom Gunnar can neither control nor disdain, and her hair, like the goddess Sif's, is a fertile strand linking the two worlds. Linked with this vision are the words of Gudrun in Laxdæla Saga recalling to her son that she loved best the exiled hero Kjartan, whose exile in Norway left her to marry another. It is no wonder that Auden projected himself as a poet so easily onto a saga topography that spoke of exile, love and betrayal. In Iceland, Auden found it all very natural to conjoin fabulous story with human geography.

In effect, Auden's 1936 visit to Iceland, as he would characterize it in "Kairos and Logos" (1940), a poem written about other axial moments, or turns, was a kairos, which Auden defines as "the propitious moment for doing something." ³⁰ As one critic has noted, the record of his impressions of that trip in Letters From Iceland shows that all of Auden's discoveries of the artifice of cultural identity, like the martyrs' confirmation of their faith, "occur at moments of dislocation." ³¹ In effect, Auden was questing--as the Norse god of poetry quests--for kairos in the form of a meaningful dislocation, or exile, that informs a significant self-discovery.

Iceland had provided Auden with a faith in a privileged landscape of exile that preserves not only the moral character of myth but also the language to give it force. Further, because the Icelandic language contains sounds that underlie English, it preserves sound-sense relations which the poet can reclaim for English. The full range of Icelandic is at the service of all reaches of the population. Its vocabulary is accessible for poetry without historical limits. To make this point, Auden used his own poetry consistently to retrieve obsolete English words in expressions such as "nemorivant tribes" (wandering in woods), "squameous serpents"(furnished with scales), "sessile wights" (footless), "Weland's stithy" (anvil base), and "steatopygous beings [fatty small]." In Iceland, Auden's sense of the viable power of performed sounds in rhythmic pattern was demonstrated again and again, particularly when comparing Icelandic compositional techniques with his own.

From the beginning of his career, he had experimented with alliterative dula (lists), such as: "Newman, Ciddy, Plato, Fronny, Bowdler, Baudelaire,/ Doctor Frommer, Mrs. Allan, Freud, the Baron, and Flaubert" (Poems, 1930, No. 22). His friend Stephen Spender recalls that "the poetry which he loved most had this monosyllabic, clipped, clear-cut, icy quality." ³² Auden was re-assured that the Icelandic poet in his own tradition remains in ultimate control of the world when he mediates between language and physical models of ideas. So, poems are charms marshalling nature for man's good, and man for nature's. To join poetry to human need, to translate and transform the nature of the past into present relevance, is the heroism of a poet. Bad poetry, like wrong love, he has said--perhaps thinking of Gunnar of Hlidarend--isolates itself and its maker from fulfilling his own nature. Good poetry, like "right" love, is profitably expended energy. [End Page 220]

At the end of Letters, Auden sums up his impression of Iceland soberly in a terse couplet:

All things considered, I consider Iceland,
Apart from Reykjavík, a very nice land. ³³

In prose, he had said, "The three months in Iceland upon which [Letters] is based stand out in my memory as among the happiest in a life which had, so far, been unusually happy" (Letters, p. 9) and ". . . that as far as the people themselves are concerned, I can think of none among whom I should prefer to be exiled" (pp. 210-11). Exile, an escape from an England where he felt his poetry no longer mattered, was exactly what Auden was seeking. Auden felt himself like Odin, a gangleri, or wanderer, in search of a fuller view of himself as a poet. ³⁴

Auden's first voyage to Iceland had not only confirmed his boyhood impressions of myth and landscape (the highlands of Yorkshire are not very unlike Icelandic terrain), but it had reinforced his conviction of the power of oral performance of Germanic traditional verse. Furthermore, Iceland provided him a vista over England and Europe that influenced his decision to settle in the United States on a quest to find a way in his private life and public poetry to distance himself from his audience. ³⁵ His disenchantment with the Republican cause in Spain was another factor in his decision. Auden's impetus to a more drastic social and geographical exile was incited both by the failure of social democracy in Spain and by his fear that the social and political inhumanity engendered by the Spanish Revolution menaced the status of myth and poetry. ³⁶

A few months after his Icelandic jaunt, Auden suggested that Iceland preserved the treasure of enduring life in myth that Europe was in the process of destroying:

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants;
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
    The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and of frightening gargoyles. ("Spain 1937")

After a brief cultural incursion into China in early 1938 during a circumnavigation of the globe, Auden and Isherwood decided to emigrate. The reasons were many, and Auden did not express them in clear order. He remarked to a friend that "European society was finished." ³⁷ [End Page 221] It is likely that his public success now seemed dangerous to him and that he needed to isolate himself from the political role of the poet which he thought had been thrust upon him. ³⁸ While being thought of by his peers as a leader of a group, he felt that he belonged to none. It was assumed generally that his move to New York effectively lifted his "Nordic mask" from his public body. ³⁹ Of course, the mask had not vanished, although overt forms of it seem to have been lost from critical view until its obvious fresh emergence in the mid-1960s.

For many, his departure from his geographical roots after his trip around the world had a dominantly negative effect on his poetic career by turning his poetry from public to private enterprise, from a political ideology in the 1930s to a Christian theology in the 1940s and 1950s. The oral poetic models "vestigially in Auden's mind" before 1939 were Native Germanic. ⁴⁰ Now they leaned toward the contemporary speech of Americans. "New Year Letter" to Elizabeth Mayer (1940) and "Age of Anxiety" (1944-46) delineate the main lines of a shift in personal belief and poetic intentions, but whether or not those poems exhibit in new prosodic dress a diminished poetic talent is open to debate. His poetic stance remained one of distancing itself from a Europe awaiting impotently an impending cataclysmic war. In 1938 the continent which he had deserted seemed to have been suffering what in Icelandic myth identifies as fimbulvetr, the great winter which portends the war that will destroy the gods. For Auden, this period presented a crisis which each man must face on his own terms. His own were made clear in "New Year Letter" (1940), a long poem expressing dissent from political ideologies and a shift toward those traditional spiritual values overshadowed by the events of 1939. The poem draws analogies "between the 'verbal society' of a poem and a happily reconciled human society," ⁴¹ as if both were part of a single private critical view. If, as one critic claims, Auden's early interest in the "immediacy of 'mouth'" had been an organic voice that, after his emigration, became an abstract voice, ⁴² that voice, nevertheless, was addressing concrete and private views.

In this, his first major "American" poem, Auden's mythopoeic vision adopts a significant Christian perspective for pagan story which, very much like the Völuspá ("Song of the Sybil"), displays a Christianized mythology of death and yearning for rebirth. Its voice refutes the past and social inertia in an argument to the effect that if one does not want to change, the unconscious will force change. ⁴³ In this, Auden speaks for Odin's unwitting acceleration toward an inevitable violent end; and, as if to call attention to the intertextuality, the poem presents a prince of lies who resembles Loki, as well as a mystery paralleling the fate of Baldur, Odin's son. Critics tend to read the poem as the poet's "final acceptance of a Western history given to error but ultimately overseen by a Christian God." ⁴⁴ Auden is depoliticizing [End Page 222] Christianity, "not to magnify God's powers but to delimit art's." ⁴⁵ His reflections on Icelandic myth had given shape to his conviction that poetry is an essential expression of oneself in a game without ultimate moral authority.

To illustrate this view, "New Year Letter" combines in a single Odin-like vision the geography of Norse myth with the cityscape of Western culture. The public atlas of New York City serves as a carnival mirror of the private atlas of Auden's mythical Iceland. The conjunction is not gratuitous:

. . . For long ago has been
Ever-After since Ur-Papa gave
The Primal Yawn that expressed all things
(In his boredom their beings) and brought forth
The wit of this world. One-Eye's mistake
Is sorry He spoke. (Quant, "The Seven Sages II")

. . . There are two atlases: the one
The public space where acts are done,
In theory common to us all,
Where we are needed and feel small (p. 130)
. . . .

The other is the inner space
Of private ownership, the place
That each of us is forced to own,
Like his own life from which it's grown. (p. 131)

Ur-Papa and One-Eye are names for Odin, who gave away an eye in return for knowledge. Primal Yawn (Icelandic ginnungagap) is the endless gap of space and time that existed before creation, and the two atlases chart the world of the gods and their arts (private space) and Middle-world, the public space of human habitation.

Several poems that followed, including "The Double Man" and "Petition," display, as did his earlier elegy on the death of Yeats, "September 1, 1939," the temporal qualities of the three Norse Norns (Shakespeare's weird sisters) in a dark world with only glimmers of a light to follow. Those dim lights reside in the beings of good people, shadows of the virtuous gods Hænir, Baldur, and Hodur behind the veils of a shining Gimlé to come. Auden faced a Ragnarök and--as Yeats had--welcomed its purgative potential. Significant in this respect is the long and complex narrative "The Age of Anxiety" (1944-46), a pivotal work about contemporary human activities that mirror the mythological decline of the Norse gods. The temporal setting is All Soul's night during World War II, and the social location is a feast that begins in the public venue of a Third Ave bar in New York City and ends in the private venue of an apartment. The speeches of each character echo the logomachies of "Loki's Flyting" in the Poetic Edda: revelation, accusation, and despair at the inevitable loss of value they [End Page 223] witness. In discourse akin to the exchange between Thor and Odin in "The Lay of Harbard," each character confronts a mirror image of a self he cannot escape. ⁴⁶ The main character Malin ("cunning," from Latin malignus) is a Loki figure, caught up in the common quest for understanding the terror of the situation, but somehow an agent of its inevitability, ⁴⁷ for only "eyes of faith" can sight the new reality and "new locus." ⁴⁸ "Muster no monsters, I'll meeken my own," exclaims the poetic voice. ⁴⁹ What has happened to the world will happen again, as it happened again to the Norse gods. Auden's point here is more mytho-theological than political.

By the mid-1950s, however, from his second story nest over Saint Mark's Place in lower Manhattan-- and from the train windows on track to poetry readings--Auden viewed the American terrain as increasing menacing, not only to his life, but also to the substance of his poetic enterprise. He wrote much of The Shield of Achilles (1955) at his summer home in Ischia, at the time his friend J.R.R. Tolkien revived his youthful enthusiasm for Norse myth with Lord of the Rings. During his summers on Ischia after the war, Auden turned his mythological attention ostensibly to the antique cultures of the Mediterranean, but the model at the back of his mind remained Nordic. His "Ode to Gaea" (1954) is praise of Jörd "Earth." whose Valhalla would be hearing "verse by Praed/ or arias by Rossini," and "the holy laws of Speech were/ held in awe, even by evil tongues." "The Shield of Achilles" is a drápa (brief praise poem) of the "flickering forge-light" of Hephaestos' smithy whose artifacts, like those of the archetypal Norse smith Volund, have coordinate powers of creation and destruction. The voice of the poet whose heroic ideals are lost to dust and pain, asks, as Loki (breaker of oaths and deceiver of the gods) might have, "who'd never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept." What are the strategies of the gods once they realize "what art cannot do?" asks Auden.

In the mid-1950s, his work recuperated within private, informal and religious perspective earlier interests in the link between landscape and social myth. In a dróttkvætt (court-verse) lament among his "Shorts" (1954), Auden confronts Norse mythic reality with the waning moral and political idealism of the West:

Fair is Middle-Earth nor changes, though to Age,
Raging at his uncomeliness,
Her wine turn sour, her bread tasteless.

While professing Poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961, he moved his summer home to Austria, where he felt the landscape around Kirschstetten compatible with both Christianity [End Page 224] and Northern myth. In this period he wrote "Secondary Epic" (1959) to contrast the fragile Augustine world of Virgil--in which poetry affected events in the public sphere--with the violence of the Germanic world whose primary epic is a product of a craft that forges a personal moral bond with the spiritual world behind its [?] physical façade. In conjoining history with myths of natural creation, Auden does not ignore universal social causes, as some critics have claimed, but confronts them in personal and psychological rather than in ideological and political terms. ⁵⁰ Recourse to myth is his typical stylistic strategy in this effort. What critics see as a strong theological interest in his poetry of the 1940s and 1950s is essentially a conjoining of religious devotion with mythological form. ⁵¹ Although it is claimed that after leaving England for the United States, he renounced orality in favor of literality, ⁵² his commitment to oral tradition never waned.

In 1961, Auden's visit to Norway's Hammerfest incited a poem about the Útgardr ("uttermost world," home of mythic giants) at the "top of the world." He was impressed there by the landscape, but disappointed in the architecture of human habitats. He addressed this disjuncture later in a number of essays that conceive of poetry as a craft comparable to the skill of the Norse artificer elves who produce well-wrought habiliments, an idea which he put into verse in "City Without Walls" (1969):

fable them stories of fair-haired Elves
whose magic made the mountain dam,
of Dwarves, cunning in craft, who smithied
the treasure-hoards of tin-cans
they flatten out for their hut roofs.

Typically, Auden's alliteration and consonance here join contemporary observation with mythical authority, something which Yeats, Pound, and Eliot had done earlier in other manners. The style contributes to his emphatic disdain of Shelley's oft-cited contention that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." ⁵³

Nothing enforces this view so well as his Oxford lectures of the 1950s, collected in The Dyer's Hand & Other Essays (1962), whose recurring argument is that the dialectical oppositions between cultural perspectives such as sacred and profane, nature and history, truth and belief, primary and secondary imagination, Christian monotheism and pagan polytheism, oral and written transmission, favors poetry in the Greek and Nordic mythic modes. ⁵⁴ "The pagan world," he points out, "was a morally tolerant world--far too tolerant, for it tolerated many evils, like slavery and the exposure of children. . . . It tolerated them because it did not believe that the gods were necessarily good" (p. 461). After all, "the historical world is a [End Page 225] fallen world," although it is "a redeemable world in which unfreedom and disorder of the past can be reconciled in the future" (pp. 69-70). The redemptive slant of Christian thought, however, is for the holy man, not for the hero (p. 457).

The Dyer's Hand thus carries the reader back into the world of oral myth. Unlike Christian miracle, "Poetry is not magic. . . . It is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate"(p. 27). It is the poet rather than the priest who mediates culture. "Every poet," he asserts, "is at once responsible of his culture and its critic" (p. 352). "Christianity," he continues, "might have deprived Aphrodite, Apollo, the local genius of their divinity, but as figures for the forces of nature, as a mode of thinking about the creation, they remained valid for poets and their readers alike" (p. 358). "The whims of the gods and, behind them, the whims of the Fates [Norse Norns], are the ultimate arbiters of all that happens" (p. 429). Finally, and decisively, he asserts that "no artist . . . can feel comfortable as a Christian; every artist who happens to be a Christian wishes he could be a polytheist" (p. 456).

The essential quality of poetry is manifest only by its being heard (Secondary Worlds, p. 130), and the pagan gods "were persons who could speak to man" (p. 137). Oral performance maintains the temporal relevance of all poetry no matter when composed. "Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought," he reflects, citing Karl Klaus (p. 122). Of utmost importance in oral performance is the process of naming (p. 123). "Language is a means of denoting things or thoughts by sounds" (Dyer's Hand, p. 379), and poetry is a rite that pays homage by naming (p. 57). He leans again on the authority of Karl Klaus to note that "the poet is father of his poem; its mother is a language. . . . My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin" (p. 23). In such assertions, Auden associates the poet with pagan gods who, like poets, "are, by definition, irresponsible" (p. 67).

Auden's "Nordic mask" took on new and sharper features during and after his return visit to Iceland in April 1964. Basil Boothby, British ambassador in Reykjavík, who had met Auden as a member of the British Embassy staff at Hankow in April 1938, arranged the visit and gave several receptions at his residence on Laufásvegi, including one for students after Auden's reading at the University. For this occasion, the ambassador asked me to engage Auden in conversation so as to encourage the typically reticent Icelandic students. During a lull before some fifteen students and embassy personnel, I asked Auden some pointless questions about his views on the poet as priest and hero and about words as the poet's tools to inscribe birds in flight and shape limestone. Incited by my banalities, Auden entertained the students with a description of the poet as an artificer comparable to a shoemaker who shapes his product to fit particular bodies. Over the next few days in Reykjavík, before and after his trip to Isafjördur, he talked to me about Norse myth, as he would do five years later in his walk-up flat on St. Mark's Place in New York City. He told me that he preferred to read Icelandic saga and poetry as mythic truth, not as fiction or history. Then, in a subsequent meeting, he explained to a larger audience, according to my notes:

The mythical world provides material for moral story through which an audience can read about what is called the "real" world at a safe distance. Myth is a stage for vicarious confrontations with the terror of mundane experience. Look at the stories of Gunnar's Hallgerd and Thor's wife Sif. They are laminated history and myth of the same fear of impotence and sterility. But, they really belong, both of them, to [End Page 226] one world enclosing myth and history. That is what distinguishes the Edda and the sagas from European literature. The Icelanders' world of story does not differentiate a primary secular world of tenuous social survival from a manufactured secure world of art. I heard an example of this yesterday. It appears that a number of inexplicable accidents occurred recently in a quarry near Akureyri where there was drilling for hot water. One evening, the foreman on the site dreamt of a visit by rock elves, whose leader said that they were upset because they hadn't time to find new homes. The foreman advised the town council, and the work was suspended for a few days, after which everything went on without incident. So, you see, the Icelanders still live on a terrain which holds the essential elements of story their pagan ancestors wove into myth. They live in a world in which "mythic reality" is indistinguishable from any other reality.

This view of Iceland's mythic terrain is discernible also in his celebratory poem "Iceland revisited":

Once more,
A child's dream verified
The magical light beyond Hekla.

In effect, he rediscovered in April 1964 an Iceland in which poetry was a practiced as a craft that forges mythical treasure items in and for the public good. This concept was confirmed for him during coffee at Tröd café together with the poet Tómas Gudmundsson, whom Auden had first met in 1938. Auden asked Tómas how many copies of his last book of poems were sold. Tómas said, "five thousand in the first edition." Auden looked at him with amazement and said that was more than any first printing of his own poetry had ever sold. Then, when a young man came over to talk with Tómas, Auden asked the youngster what he did for a living. The reply, "I am a poet" had Auden bellow theatrically: "Here is where I should live!" Someone announcing his profession as a poet, Auden had said in The Dyer's Hand, would appear ridiculous in England or the United States (p. 74)).

What Auden appreciated in Iceland during his visit was a confirmation that the worlds of the poet's physical and imaginative visions can converge on one natural and mythological landscape. ⁵⁵ The contrast between the private world of the poet's art and the public world to which it speaks is characterized in "The Cave of Making," the third section of "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" which he wrote a few weeks afterwards in memory of Louis McNeice (July 1964). In it he locates art in "Weland's smithy, and antre/ more private than a bedroom even."

It is precisely the tension in his life between the two worlds of social and natural landscapes that kept Norse myth constantly within his poetic ken. He had said in a public reading in Iceland that the images of Nordic myths which his father had planted in his imagination were protected like a treasure trove to be retrieved in good time. He thought that all poetry, as [End Page 227] Norse myth does, should display concrete relations among daily life, linguistic habits, and conceptions of cosmic deities. The philosophic Greeks set their gods high in the cosmos, the pragmatic Romans grounded them in their homes and gardens as familiar deities, while Norse gods both friendly--Thor--and flawed--Loki--traverse all worlds. Even Odin's wisdom insinuates itself into social structures of the two worlds; so, it is fitting that he is god of poets and the dead, for poetry provides the same dignity to both artistic life and heroic death. As the particular god of exiles, Odin figures man suffering.

After returning from his second voyage to Iceland, he dedicated "Iceland Revisited" to Basil and Susan Boothby, a poem that sums up neatly his view of Iceland as a sanctuary for natural, social, and spiritual integrity. It concludes:

  Fortunate island,
Where all men are equal
  But not vulgar--not yet.

Four years afterwards, in New York, I asked Auden about this last line in light of his earlier disparaging remarks in Letters from Iceland about Icelandic manners. ⁵⁶ He told me that he had been struck during his first visit by a certain coarseness of social behavior, but not by what he would call vulgarity. Vulgar characterizes a language lowered from hieratic to demotic usage, from the dignity of clarity to the drab of mere noise. He reminded me that the Latin sense of vulgar denotes "a common language," and "Icelanders are ingenitally linguistic, living in a world in which demotic and hieratic have no boundary drawn between them." At the same time, vulgar qualifies the concrete religious expression of the Icelander that displays no mark of social class. Where else would a local bishop be president of a theosophical society?" he quipped. Iceland represents a habitat where art manifests an essential collaboration between Christianity and nature, in which art is a practice, not a posture. The first line of the Icelandic translation of Genesis (Í upphafi skapad Gud himin og jörd) he said, could be a line out of the Norse creation myth.

During my infrequent conversations with Auden, he spoke of the challenge of translating Old Icelandic traditional verse. When I replied that I had struggled with the problem in my doctoral thesis, he asked me to send some samples to him in New York. After perusing my attempt with "Baldur's Dreams," he advised me to translate the original texts in the best verse I could muster and said that he would adapt my versions to carry the force of the Icelandic into a contemporary English socio-mythological context. When he embarked on translating Old Norse traditional verse, he decided to do more that find for it a local English idiom. He would enrich the English language by conjoining Icelandic with it.

Our collaboration spanned the years between 1966 and 1971, years in which I was happy to be audience in both letter and in person to his enlightened views of Norse myth. ⁵⁷ He was [End Page 228] pleased to indulge himself in the literature that had informed his earliest thoughts about myth, and he was far more comfortable translating the mythological poems than the heroic material, some of which he turned into prose. The poems which he liked best were "Song of the Sybil" and "The Sun Song" because they reflected a spiritual intensity. They "sing to me of redemption," he said. Other favorites were "Skirnir's Ride," for a poetic language that bridges the worlds between men and gods, and "The Lay of Völund," for its realistic view of the artist as suffering exile.

Auden's unflagging effort in our collaboration manifested itself soon after in "The World of the Sagas," the third of his 1967 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent that were published under the title Secondary Worlds. The focus of the lectures was on the instability of the natural, social and public character of the primary world of experience in contrast to the stable cultural constructions of the secondary world of art, especially in music and literature. Secondary worlds are created out of a dissatisfaction with the primary. ⁵⁸ Poetry is of the secondary world, because in the mundane contexts of the primary world people no longer speak it, although Halldor Laxness' turn of the century Bjartur of Summerhouses in Independent People does, and contemporary Icelanders remain capable of it. Auden notes with regret that Icelanders in Snorri's age of power politics in the mid-thirteenth century looked back toward the tenth- and eleventh-century saga for the "attractions of a secondary world" at a time they were no longer living it (p. 82). Even then as now, however, Iceland's distinctive rural democracy preserves propitious conditions for a classless literature that is distinct from the literatures of continental Europe and North America (p. 63).

Poetry as a confrontation with ragnarök is an implicit conceit throughout the essays. Verse true to orders of nature, he assures us, can display the possibilities of an Eden or a Valhalla. A language and its poetry are the fallen material which the poet's craft must revivify. The poet's duty is to share his perception with others, for man was made "to reveal the secret things of the father" (p. 131, citing George MacDonald). The poet is an artificer whose white magic (p. 128) cannot be used by the black magician, since all response to it is conscious and voluntary (p. 130). The Norse gods used language as an arm in the struggle, albeit vainly, against the seidr (black magic) which threatened their existence. "When the pagan gods appeared to men," Auden said, "they were immediately recognisable as divine by the awe and wonder they aroused in their mortal beholders, and pre-Christian poets were acclaimed as mouthpieces of gods because their language was the language of magic enchantment" (p. 135). The pagan gods "were persons who could speak to men and to whom men could respond" (pp. 136-37). Since Iceland has never known any other kind of poetry but "modern," its myths, unlike the Greek and Roman myths of a distant past, are continuously present. "In such a culture, therefore, poets are the theologians, the sacred mouthpieces of society; it is they who teach the myths and rescue from oblivion the great deeds of ancestral heroes" (p. 137). ⁵⁹ Auden would join the company of the mythological god of poetry, Odin, and the historical Snorri Sturluson, a thirteenth-century poet and composer of saga. Auden and his [End Page 229] Icelandic predecessors humanize the Norse gods, whose being and action are based on natural law to which they are not superior, in contrast with Renaissance kings who deemed themselves superior to the law which they made (Dyer's Hand, p. 124). In the North, both the poet and the gods he poeticizes are citizens of the same world.

Auden's argument promotes a Nordic oral tradition that continues to transmit and transform myth from one generation to another. When he was in Iceland, there was no local television, and Old Icelandic rimur (verse) and sagas were staple radio fare (although Penthouse and Playboy were cultural artifacts more scrutinized by the young). The old myths were featured in comic strip form in Morgunbladid, the major morning newspaper, although perhaps more as a reminder of a neglected mythic past than as a viable presence. For Auden, the obvious qualities of Norse mythic poetry--still practiced in Iceland by young poets ⁶⁰ --are the qualities of good English poetry, and the critic, Auden said, must be able to understand them if he would mediate for the poet's audience. So Norse myth partakes today, as then, of "social realism"; for an example, he points to the allusive style of "The Lay of Völund"--particularly in kennings such as "Grani's road"--that joins myth intertextually with familiar materials. The artificer Völund is a universal figure of exile in a mythological system which, like early Greek story, exemplifies dislocation and dispossession, but unlike Greek myth, is still viable as a social marker. Because Icelandic literature is not isolated from life, neither Icelandic poets nor their audiences are isolated from the essential enduring features of their cultural heritage. Their medieval is their modern, whereas England, for one example, is an island where such poets and artificers as Völund are constrained to serve a political order in which their gifts are squandered (pp. 66-67). Because Old Icelandic poetry and prose do not distinguish primary from secondary worlds, they are characterized not by a "fictional" style, but by a style of truth. One does not believe a saga or Edda character, but finds him true.

Auden would have the literary critic, understand Icelandic poetic style if he would mediate for the poet's audience (p. 66-68), a point he had made emphatically in The Dyer's Hand when he set a test for critics based on his own tastes for Norse poetry. He asked: "Do you like

1. Long lists of proper names . . .?
2. Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade?
3. Complicated verse forms . . . such as . . . Drott-kvætts?
4. Conscious theatrical exaggeration. . . ?

If a critic could truthfully answer affirmatively to all four, he deems, "then I should trust his judgement implicitly on all literary matters" (Dyers Hand, pp. 47-48).

Auden emphasized these criteria further as a pointed response to a rejection of our translation of the Norse cosmogonic poem "Song of the Sybil" sent to his friend Stephen [End Page 230] Spender, then editor of Encounter. ⁶¹ After passing the text on to his colleague Frank Kermode for an editorial opinion, Spender replied to Auden that he would print the poem on condition that the "Dwarf Catalogue" (Icelandic dvergartal), a long list indeed, be omitted. Auden was furious, refused a resubmission, and said he would never again speak respectfully of Kermode as a critic. ⁶² He insisted that the sounds of the names were part of the magic of the poem. I can easily conjure up the sound in his flat in lower Manhattan of his recitation of one exemplary strophe:

Fíli, Kíli,  Fundinn, Náli,
Hepti, Víli,  Hánarr, Svíurr,
Frár, Hornbori,  Frægr oc Lóni,
Aurvangr, Iøri,   Eikinscialdi.

In Secondary Worlds, Auden says it is "our right and duty . . . to give names to all things (p. 123). Earlier in TheDyer's Hand, Auden had written and "like a line of poetry, a Proper Name is untranslatable" and "words become, as it were, little lyrics about themselves" (p. 35). The proto-poet is a name-giver, and a test of his artistic genius is the ability to name a cat (p. 34). Then, he extends that power in "A Short Ode to a Philologist" (1962) in quipping that

[Even] A poor commoner [may] arrive at
The Proper Name for his cat. ⁶³

That is, poetry is potential in everyone who cherishes his language.

In the Canterbury lecture, "The World of the Sagas," Auden gave evidence that since his 1964 visit to Iceland, if he had ever mislaid it, he had a firm hold again on the traditional oral bond between poet and his audience. He insisted that oral performance, such as his own of the dwarf catalogue, gives force to its immediate occasion, while a literary text is at the mercy of free transport by readers, and has, therefore, only indeterminate specificity. Accordingly, in "The World of the Sagas," Auden represents mythology as a topical ordering principle for art and government. Its divine precepts for life are human, for the gods, like the poets, will die. While "The Words of the High One" exposes a human wisdom of dignity, "Baldur's Dreams" incites an anxiety of heritage and generation. So the secondary world of Norse myth merges with the immediacy of the primary world as a talismanic charm. In Norse myth, he added, the cosmos is domesticated so that those in its audience can feel the terror of their situation in a story, such as "Song of the Sybil," whose purpose is to cross the imaginative [End Page 231] Bifröst ("Rainbow Bridge") between the worlds. ⁶⁴ No matter how evil the world, how evil the man, the memory of a poem holds firm the generative ideals of a people.

While working on the translation, Auden celebrated his sixtieth birthday with a poem whose voice speaks to and for Odin:

All but the youngest of the yawning mammals,
Name-Giver, Ghost-Fearer,
maker of wars and wise-cracks,
a rum creature, in a crisis always,
the anxious species to which I belong,
whom chance and my own choice have arrived
to bide here yearly from bud-haze
to leaf-blush, dislodged from elsewhere,
by blood barbarian, in bias of view
a Son of the North, outside the limes. . . .
Flesh must fall through fated time
from birth to death, both unwilled,
but Spirit may climb counterwise
from a death, in faith freely chosen,
to resurrection, a re-beginning. "Prologue at Sixty" (1967)

The direct Icelandic connection in the poem is manifested in its common Germanic alliterative line, traditional epithets and the pun "rum creature," which weds Icelandic rúm "space" (rúmr, adj. "loose, roomy")--appropriate for a description of Odin--with the English colloquial rum "queer, strange." He made himself an emblem of his own message when he took to wearing a sweatshirt bearing the name "GIMLÉ."

Auden's allusions to Norse myth lent force to his poetic commentary on current affairs even in his most somber poetic moments. It is common knowledge that his despair over Soviet irruption into the Prague Spring produced the lines in City Without Walls:

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech. "August, 1968" (1969)

"Ogre" (from Latin orcus) designates as well the giant invaders of Asgard at the final showdown between two kinds of being, and the "speech" which the ogre cannot master is the magical word-power of the gods and wise men. ⁶⁵ That Auden intended the allusion here is made clear in the same volume by another allusion to Soviet intervention that fills out the [End Page 232] mythological dimension of the "ogre." The "Song of the Ogres" scolds a "Little Fellow" with a warning that, despite his evil intention, he "will never see the dawn." This is a transparently comic parody of "The Words of the All-Wise," in which Thor destroys an elf who would steal his daughter by keeping a wisdom contest going until the light of break of day proves fatal to him.

Auden's 1970 commonplace book, A Certain World, draws frequently from Norse myth for its encyclopedic scan. The rubric "Anglo-Saxon Poetry" reads: "In the small extant corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry, there is nothing as good as the best poems in the Elder Edda." "World, Creation of the," is illustrated by his translation of the creation strophes of "Song of the Sybil," strophes from the same poem illustrate "World, End of the." Such entries recall Auden's musing fifteen years earlier upon the pristine nature of the first world when he assumed that the ethnic mix of the inhabitants of Eden was "highly varied as in the United States, but with a slight nordic predominance" (The Dyer's Hand, p. 6). He followed this speculation with an insistence that the writer's "Eden, like the pagan one, must be a fortunate place [like Valhalla] where there is no suffering and everybody has a good time" (p. 414). The Christian's Eden is comic, while the pagan's is beautiful (pp. 414-15).

Speaking of Iceland in private conversation during the winter of 1970, he told me that he was considering taking up residence there. He asked me several questions about living conditions, and after my reply, said he approved of the culture, the language, the landscape, and the autumnal and vernal climate that suited the composition of poetry, but the cost and limited supplies of liquor and cigarettes in the state monopoly horrified him. ⁶⁶

To the very end of his career, Auden's poetry conveyed the message that the Norseman's mythology does not create a distinct second world, but portrays a continuing presence in a primary world of experience. The voice in one of his last poems muses:

Poets have learned us their myths,
but just how did They take them?
That's a stumper.
When Norsemen heard thunder,
did they seriously believe
Thor was hammering?
No, I'd say: I swear
that men have always lounged in myths
as Tall Stories,
that their real earnest
has been to grant excuses
for ritual actions.
Only in rites
can we renounce our oddities
and be truly entired. ("Archeology," 1973) [End Page 233]

In other words, only if we follow the example of the Norse gods, who renounced their oddities to join against the giants, can we be made whole again in the re-vitalized Gimlé which he wore over his heart.

This trace of Auden's mapping of a mythic Iceland is not meant to re-order the priority of Auden's artistic influence established by his critics. It would, however, emphasize the continuity of Auden's Norse influence that joined in his work a geographical Iceland with a mythic Iceland of exile. That myth survived the turns in his career from poet of public and social concern to poet of private and spiritual place. In both prose and poetry, Auden depicts Iceland as a privileged belvedere from which to survey the primary and secondary worlds within his ken. He depicts its corpus of myth as a dynamic metaphor for world story. For Auden, that body of texts figures a history of the Western World that disdains mundane history in favor of poetry itself. Auden's Iceland, in which art and life are bonded, is a friendly place for an exiled poetic imagination. If far, Auden's Iceland remains forever fabulous.

Paul Beekman Taylor was born in England and studied at Wesleyan and Brown in the United States and the University of Oslo in Norway, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Old Norse heroic poetry. While teaching in Iceland in 1964, he met W.H. Auden, and the two agreed to collaborate on translation of the traditional Medieval Norse poetry. Since 1965, he has been Professor of Medieval English Language and Literature.

Notes

1. "Letter to Lord Byron, IV," Letters From Iceland (Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 200. A version of this paper was read at the Edinburgh conference on "Norse Mythology Ancient and Modern, 27 September 1997. It has been completely revised in response to the editorial readers of Journal of Modern Literature.

2. In The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (Faber and Faber, 1975), pp. 41-42, Auden recalls this moment.

3. "Norse" refers to the common mythic and legendary material of Scandinavia (Finland excepted). Following scholarly practice I identify it specifically as Icelandic, since it was recorded in Icelandic and in Iceland between the end of the twelfth century and the middle of the fourteenth century.

4. Edward Mendelson, Early Auden (Viking Press, 1981), pp. xxi-xxii, traces the poet's youthful sense of exile. Mendelson says, p. 54, that Auden thought his isolation "congenital and incurable."

5. "Letter to Lord Byron IV." This verse is absent from the early Faber edition, but is restored by Edward Mendelson in The English Auden (Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 189. Auden is making fun of the Third Reich's appropriation of an idea of Iceland as an Aryan vestige.

6. Christopher Isherwood, "Some Notes on Auden's Early Poetry." In Monroe K. Spears, ed. Auden. (Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 10.

7. A certain Audoenus Huglacii was King Eirikr's ambassador to the French court in 1280. At any rate, Old English Eadwin "friend of riches" is cognate with Icelandic Audunn and the Lombard form Audoines. It is reproduced in Latin documents as Audoenus.

8. "Eptir Ódins nafni var kalladr Audun" (Ynglingasaga, 7). For a full survey of the etymological root aud- in names, see my "Roland's Aude: Retrieving the Treasure in Name." Romance Quarterly, XLI (1994), pp. 195-203.

9. Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 43.

10. Mendelson, p. 23.

11. Mendelson, p. 17.

12. John Blair, The Poetic Art of W.H. Auden (Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 186, observes that Auden's Nordic mask "reaches back through all of English poetry, even to its roots in Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic."

13. Isherwood, "Some Notes," p. 11.

14. Cited by Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden: A Biography (George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 79.

15. The opening line is from the late twelfth-century West Midland "Sawles Warde": Ha beod se wise pæt ha witen alles godes reades. His runes ant his domes pe derne beod and deopre pen eni sea dingle' (Cotton Hom. 263). It also echoes "Dinges mere" of the Old English "Battle of Brunanburh." "Dingle" is cognate with Icelandic dengja "knocking, hammering sea" (ME dingen).

16. Alhough the title of the poem points to one source in the Old English "Wanderer," the imagery draws heavily from the Old English "Maxims," as well as well as from other elegiac poems.

17. Barbara Everett, Auden (Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p.14, sees the early poems set in a "landscape of crisis . . . reduced to a hostile separation."

18. Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 337. He continues, p. 338: "The location matters less than its insularity."

19. No critical study which I have consulted discusses the echo of Icelandic myth here. Herbert Greenberg, Quest for the Necessary, W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 38-39, says the "decision to climb the mountain turns out to have been motivated by a neurotic need to supplant his brother in their mother's affections." Edward Callan, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 105, also points to the psychological drama in a common allegorical relationship between Demon (one's own will [?] that comes with life and can be dealt with) and Dragon (the destroying mother), and, identifies the moral message as: "[O]nly through the abnegation of self can he overcome the temptation of the Demon" (107). Monroe K. Spears, The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 102, sees Ransom as a figure of contemporary man, "both absurd and admirable." George T. Wright, W.H. Auden (Twayne, 1969), p. 67, calls him an exemplum of "what constitutes real strength in a man"; and, Stan Smith, W.H. Auden (Blackwells, 1985), p. 167, says "failure and weakness may be the only way to be Truly Strong."

20. The Dyer's Hand, The Dyer's Hand & Other Essays (Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 407.

21. The Enchafèd Floodor The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 83-84.

22. The Enchafed Flood, p. 115.

23. "Journey to Iceland," Letters, p. 24. In Secondary Worlds (Faber and Faber, 1962), pp. 76-82), Auden discusses this scene at great length.

24. I use the text in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 203, since these lines do not appear in the earlier version.

25. Spears, The Poetry of W.H. Auden, p.141, calls Auden's landscape of morality (see note 14 above) a paysage moralisé in a psychic geography. Edward Callan--Auden: A Carnival of Intellect (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 213, speaks of Auden's topophilia.

26. Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden, p. 196.

27. "Letter to William Coldstream, Esq," Letters, p. 218.

28. "Letter to R.S. Crossman," Letters, p. 90.

29. "Journey to Iceland," Letters, p. 24.

30. The Dyer's Hand, p. 140n.

31. Smith, p. 95.

32. World Within World (Hamish Hamilton, 1951), p. 51. For early examples of alliteration, see Collected Poems, pp. 64, 68, and 104.

33. There is a play here, of course, on "an ice land." Icelanders recall with wonder the Nazi boast that "Für uns Island is das Land." Auden quips, p. 92, that the "Nazis look on that sort of [Icelandic] life as the cradle of all virtues." He remarks, p. 158, that Hitler would have the Eddas take the place of the Lutheran prayerbook.

34. In "Many Happy Returns" (1942) he identified the Father of Gods as a poet-dramatist like himself:

Remember if you can then,

Only the All-father

Can change the cast or give them

Easier lines to say.

35. Lucy McDiarmid, Auden's Apologies for Poetry (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 21.

36. Charles Osborne, W.H. Auden: The Life of A Poet (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 129-37, reviews Auden's project for involvement in the Spanish revolution.

37. Carpenter, p. 244. Mendelson, The English Auden, p. xix, notes Auden's intolerable position of being considered the official poet of the left.

38. Carpenter, p. 245.

39. Wright, W.H. Auden, p. 80. There is an apt coincidence in the fact that English "mask" can be rendered by Icelandic grima, the feminine counterpart of grimnir, one of Odin's agnomena in "The Lay of Grimnir," Strophe 46. For titles of the poems in the Norse Poetic Edda, and for Icelandic name forms, I use the English forms that Auden adapted in our translations, Norse Poems (Athlone Press, 1981).

40. McDiarmid, Auden's Apologies, p. 20. Mendelson, The English Auden, p. xx, exposes the immediate effects of Auden's move to New York.

41. McDiarmid, p. 18.

42. Stan Smith, W.H. Auden, p. 25.

43. Greenberg, Quest for the Necessary, pp. 100-01.

44. Wright, p. 120.

45. McDiarmid, p. x.

46. Everett, Auden, p. 87.

47. Gerald Nelson, Changes of Heart: A Study of the Poetry of W.H. Auden (University of California Press, 1969), p. 79, calls it a quest poem, but adds, "the quest is false." He reads Malin as "malingerer" (p. 80) and Auden's cityscape "a picture of the damned in a world gone mad" (p. 90).

48. Justin Replogle, Auden's Poetry (University of Washington Press, 1969), p. 81.

49. See Old Icelandic mjúkr "meek." Greenberg, Quest for the Necessary, p. 155, sees Auden here "concerned with the individual's need to accept and be himself if his life is to have meaning." Callan, A Carnival of Intellect p. 208, reads the poem as a series of movements toward an establishment of wholeness. That Auden is thinking of Ragnarök and Gimlé seems indicated by the sailor called Emble, the name of the first woman in Nordic creation myths.

50. Auden would not have poetry an illegal miracle, a means of ruling children.

51. Brian Conniff, "Richard Davenport-Hines's Auden, and the Problems of Auden Criticism," Christianity and Literature, XLVI (1997), p. 185.

52. McDiarmid, p. 30n.

53. In The Dyer's Hand (Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 27, Auden says, "'The unacknowledged legislators of the world' describes the secret police, not the poets." Further references to this work are parenthetical.

54. See particularly "Christianity and Art," The Dyer's Hand, pp. 456-61. Auden's thesis reflects the view of the Medieval Church in the European north that Germanic peoples are not disposed to worship gods that they cannot see.

55. Appropriately, in a review of a biography of Lincoln, cited by Carpenter, p. 287, Auden noted that great men have a "double focus."

56. Letters, p. 212.

57. Our mutual friend Peter Salus, who lived in New York City during part of this period, was an essential intermediary in our discussions. Salus encouraged the collaboration and, until he moved from New York, met with Auden more often about points of translation than I did in both correspondence and on infrequent visits from across the Atlantic. My written exchanges with Auden are now in the Icelandic National Library in Reykjavík. The poetic drafts which I made for him are in the Berg Collection of the New York City Public Library.

58. Secondary Worlds (Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 51. Further citations to this work are parenthetical.

59. In Norse myth, gods can traverse human terrain, and heroes who die in battle can be elevated to residence in Valhalla.

60. Examples are easy to find anywhere in bookshops. Pertinent to Auden's particular favorites on my bookshelf is a collection of poems on saga and myth by Jón úr Vör, a poet whom Auden met in 1964. One poem about Gunnar's Hallgerd is entitled "Hallgerdur í Laugarnesi."

61. Spender, World, p. 56, acknowledged Auden's particular interest in technical words as an " . . . intellectual awareness of what they signify and yet like a kind of abracadabra." Auden calls names either tecnonyms defining relationships to living persons or necronyms defining relations to the dead (Secondary Worlds, p. 122).

62. When the Medieval scholar John McGalliard heard of the rejection, he arranged publication of the translation with Windhover Press in Iowa City. Twenty years later, Sir Frank Kermode repeated the story to me and then told me of his role in refusing the translation. He asked me then if I thought the list was important. My response repeated Auden's.

63. In The Dyer's Hand, p. 34, Auden quotes Samuel Butler to the effect that the "true test of imagination is the ability to name a cat."

64. Bifröst is the bridge across which the gods passed to create life and over which the giant trod to destroy life.

65. Auden's "Postscript" to "Thanksgiving for a Habitat III" in About the House, published four years earlier, elaborates: Speechless Evil/ Borrowed the language of Good/ And reduced it to noise.

66. Carpenter, p. 431, notes that Auden had mentioned to others the possibility of living half of each year in Iceland.

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