CHAPTER 4
Iceland
There is now a new theme entering Haggard’s life. Because he believed that in one of his earlier incarnations he used to be an Ice Age warrior, he decided in 1888, at the age of 32 to visit Iceland. The result was an imaginative burst that produced the saga, Eric Brighteyes and later, Allan and the Ice Gods , based on the further adventures of Allan Quatermain (Haggard himself).
Travelling on the emigrant ship, The Copeland, he and a friend moved around Iceland on ponies, viewing the salmon rivers, lakes, water falls, mountains, volcanoes and geysers of the country in the vicinity of Reykjavik. After a subsequent perilous shipwreck of The Copeland, which they gallantly survived, they continued their journey home.
Lang took the opportunity to read and comment on the story, Eric Brighteyes, and was, as usual, highly complimentary and encouraging to the writer:
"Eric” begins A1. I don’t know what about the public, but I love a saga but even too well, especially if it be a bloody one delicately narrated, or a very affectionate thing indeed but brutally set down, as Shakespeare says. I have only read Chapter I, but it’s the jockey for me. [1]
Later, he continued to encourage Haggard over the writing during periods of depression and lack of confidence.[2]
As a saga it was to be the beginning of a number of ancient Icelandic stories based on his visit to Iceland. ‘Eric’, Haggard recounts, “was dedicated to the late Empress Frederick” and the author went to great trouble to ensure that the dedication was accepted by Empress Frederick, even pasting her letter of acceptance as dedicatee into the original ms. [3]
The same psychological principles appear in this novel, as in Jess where Haggard, divided between two lovers, reveals his basic ‘anima’ mirrored by his torn love between Gudruda the Fair and Swanhild, Gudruda's half-sister and opponent. It is now becoming very apparent that a deep ravine appears in Haggard’s imagination driven by the forces of his ‘id’ (an area of the unconscious mind, according to Freud) where the effects of his domestic life between Lilith Jackson and Louisa Haggard replicate themselves in his novels. I cannot but interpret this as a fundamental conflict in Haggard’s psyche between which woman in his life to love and with whom to settle down and marry.[4]
The sagas had come into Haggard’s orbit aptly through Lang’s encouragement, and also through this journey to Iceland. Haggard and Lang had researched these myths which had come into Anglo-Saxon literature by “the Sacred Way”, the amber routes of old. A favourite was the story of King Arthur whose mother, Ygerne, was reputed to have been featured in a medieval comparison. Homer and Shakespeare were other sources for the tale recounted in the Haggard romances. Menelaus features in the role of Paris, who won the love of Helen,and The Tempest was used, according to M. Mannoni, as a springboard for the story of Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, whom Mannoni thinks were possibly the original precursors of imperial action and positively the original characters for the naissance of the isolation novel, Robinson Crusoe which rec