Eleanor Arnason is the daughter of H. Harvard Arnason, a Canadian-born man of Icelandic descent, who worked as an art historian and became the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1951, and Elizabeth Hickcox Yard Arnason, a social worker by profession who spent her childhood in a missionary community in western China. Arnason is the niece of the American feminist Molly Yard and her maternal grandparents were both Methodist missionaries. This Methodist influence would be visible in her works, most notably in "Ring of Swords".