William Morris - 2012 - History
With Introductions by His Daughter May Morris William Morris. Rapunzel ... Guendolen now speaks no word, Hands fold round about the sword. Now no more of ...
Morris’s next early calligraphic experiment approximates the tenth-century Carolingian forms of organic ornamentation. Guendolen, a short poem by Morris, was illuminated in August 1856 as a gift for Georgiana MacDonald (later Georgiana Burne-Jones, the intended recipient of several of Morris’s best manuscripts). The text is in six three-line stanzas, again written in rough textura quadrata script. The curved fish-tail serifs on the H and P ascenders resemble the Paracelsus border hybrids. . The initial capital is a T, fronting floral vine decoration of a style which resembles Morris’s later initials at Kelmscott. A small figure stands on the lower border, holding her hair out, watched by a knight’s face in the historiated initial O of the last stanza. This charming element is more directly illustrative than any decoration Morris had used before in this medium. The border uses gold, red, and Prussian blue, and the “beech nuts” are also gold balls, a notably Italian element found in some English fourteenth-century manuscripts (though sadly I have been unable to locate a colour image of this page, which is in private hands). Though Morris still has little control of the pen, and has not yet developed his later draughtsman’s discipline in geometric layouts, this page is remarkable in its adaptive use of his sources. The irregular line justification, however, is unlike medieval models, and results in Morris’s prime sin: crowding of the body text into cramped short lines which are difficult to read smoothly. On the right-hand margin, too, the line is ragged, and the negative space between the text and the foliate border draws the eye into nothing. These are all mistakes Morris would learn from, though not immediately.
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