SOURCE: Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. “Isabella Valancy Crawford's ‘Gisli the Chieftain.’” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, no. 2 (spring/summer 1978): 28-37.

In the following essay, Ross analyzes “Gisli the Chieftain,” arguing that the poem best embodies Crawford's use of the “solar myth” and outlining the poem's mythological sources.

The structural core of all Isabella Valancy Crawford's work is romance. At fourteen she was writing fairy tales already containing the elements of design that she was to elaborate in her later fiction and poetry. Her prose romances repeatedly use motifs of dark and fair heroines; a descent into a world of confusion and darkness followed by re-ascent and recovery of identity; ritual sacrifice and rebirth; and identical twins, separated as children, who bring into alignment opposite worlds of darkness and light. Her poetry, while relying upon these same patterns, is more clearly mythopoeic. The twins in “Malcolm's Katie”, for example, are...