William Blake (1757–1827)

1.        William Blake was a poet, painter and printmaker. He is known as the most singularly unique artist of his age. Although virtually unknown during his lifetime, his productions in both word and picture have inspired many, including William Butler Yeats, the Beat poets, and the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.

2.        In his poetry, Blake is interested in all mythological systems, which he generally finds inadequate or false. He mentions Odin, Thor and Frigga, but also a deeper impact of the Eddas on his own self-invented mythological system has been observed. [1]  In one of his marginal notes to a book in his library, he lists the Edda as one among a number of works that are inspired, as the biblical testaments were. [2]  There seems to be direct borrowing from Thomas Gray’s English appropriation of Norse mythology: like Gray’s Loki, who will “burst his tenfold chain” at Ragnarök, Blake’s rebellious son Orc breaks free from his “tenfold chains” in the beginning of America (1793), as a sign of the old order ending and a new beginning. [3] 

3.        Blake began as a writer of poetry supporting radical politics. This can be seen in his enthusiastic response to the upheaval in France, the unpublished The French Revolution (1791), in Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789–1793), and the prophetic verses of America (1793) and Europe (1794). Mythology here becomes a vehicle to further political and spiritual liberty.

4.        “Gwin. King of Norway” is from The Poetical Sketches (1783), Blake’s earliest verses (written between c. 1769 and 1778). This publication of Blake’s juvenilia was financed by the sculptor John Flaxman and his friends, the Rev. A. S. Mathew and his wife Harriet, who hosted a London literary and artistic circle to which the young Blake had been invited. The poems are generally imitative: there are imitations of eighteenth-century popular nature poetry, “King Edward the Third” is a Shakespearean drama, while “Imitation of Spenser” is self-explanatory. “Gwin, King of Norway” and “Fair Elenor” reconstruct the form of ancient ballads. At the time Poetical Sketches was published, the ballad form was increasingly associated with radicalism and the people’s rebellion. This was made evident in the radical antiquary Joseph Ritson’s three-volume A Select Collection of English Songs (1783).

5.        Inspiration from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Macpherson’s Ossian poetry (1760–1763) is diffused throughout. The most conspicuous references in his poem of Gwin’s fall are to Thomas Chatterton’s forged translation “Godred Crovan” (1769). Godred (d. 1095) was a Norse-Gael ruler of Dublin, the Isle of Man and the Hebrides. Chatterton’s poem details a significant battle in the campaign to invade the Isle of Man. Blake takes the Norse connection and creates an early political hymn. However, Blake’s Gordred has little in common with Chatterton’s king Godred, who is also described as “rising” himself to battle; but this is not a popular uprising. However, the link between liberty and the Old North was sufficiently made in Paul Henri-Mallet’s chapter “Of the Form of Government which formerly prevailed in the North”.

6.        Blake’s Gordred figure is a “giant”, symbolizing the will of the people against the tyrant king. He rises to overturn Gwin, pointing forward to the giant Albion who rises to assert his ancient liberties against oppression, religious and political, in Blake’s later poetry. The diction of the poem also anticipates many of the later images he connects with political upheaval, depicted as a cataclysmic change, such as the blazing comets, rolling clouds, thunder and trumpets.

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