Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a New England devotee of Leif Eriksson and the Vinland voyages was responsible for perhaps the most aesthetically significant visual arts monument to them. In Newport, Rhode Island, which as we have already seen was home to the so-called Viking Tower, a wealthy tobacco heiress named Catherine Lorillard Wolfe had begun construction of a “cottage” (the Newport term for a mansion or stately home) to be named Vinland. No mansion was complete without stained-glass windows, so Wolfe in 1883 commissioned the firm of William Morris and Co. to design appropriately themed windows for her. Some of Morris’s letters to her (and her decorator) survive, and they record Morris deliberating about which figures to include. Erik the Red had never actually made it to Vinland, and Freydis was “a horrible wretch according to the Leif’s Saga whereas Gudridr has something pleasing and womanly about her.”28 Thorfinn Karlsefne and Leif the Lucky would make up the other two portraits flanking Gudridr.
While unfortunately the windows were removed in 1934 and sold into private hands in 1937, there survives a cartoon for the windows.29 One can see that all three figures are standing on rock platforms amid a sea of blue, swirling waves with the paler blue sky (rendered in a kind of brickwork pattern) above them, where their names are written on scrolls. According to Morris, Gudridr holds a rune-staff to represent her knowledge of pagan incantations (Erik the Red’s Saga, ch. 4). Thorfinn holds a shield and spear, Leif a shield and ax.
Above the Vinland adventurers (as he called them), Morris (and his chief designer for stained glass, Edward Burne-Jones) arranged three figures of Norse gods (Thor, Odin, and Frey), accompanied by their associated beasts and attributes. Above them appear Sol, the sun; Luna, the moon; and a Viking ship, with the golden boar of Frey gleaming on its sails; the handsome window for this last is now owned by the Delaware Art Museum and toured in a recent exhibition.30
Morris, who had become a socialist and an advocate for relief to the poverty-stricken Iceland of his time, could not help but comment on the political irony involved in the fact that “the poor fishermen & sheep farmers of Greenland & Iceland have so curiously found a place among the worthies connected with the great Modern Commonwealth.”31
World History
