A thesis submitted to the Division of Modern Languages, Harvard University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, by Karl O. E. Anderson

In Three Volumes

Volume I
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1940

CHAPTER II: The Culmination of Morris’s Interest in the North: 1871-1876

During the years 1871 to 1876 Morris’s interest in early Scandinavia reached its height, and during this period he devoted practically all of his time and energy to his Scandinavian work. He not only continued to translate Icelandic sagas, turning at least twelve of these works into English, either wholly or in part, but he also prepared renderings of a number of Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish ballads. He made two prolonged trips to Iceland, one in 1871 and the other in 1873, visiting the scenes of his beloved sags and drawing fresh inspiration from the country, its people, and its literature. He wrote a great number of minor poems which were a direct result either of his visits to Iceland or of his growing acquaintance with Old Norse literature. And at the very end of this period he produced his long poem Sigurd the Volsung, which is considered by most critics to be without question the greatest English work – if not the only truly great work in English – inspired by a Norse legend.

In the case of the Scandinavian work Morris produced before 1871, we know, or can ascertain fairly definitely, the exact time at which the various translations or original poems were written out: in the case of the Norse works he prepared during the period 1871 to 1876, however, we are generally not aware of the precise date of composition. Hence I shall not be able to discuss the renderings and poems belonging to this period in their chronological order, as I have done with his earlier productions, but I shall

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treat them instead by groups.

I have already called attention to the fact that Morris translated a number of Scandinavian ballads, and I have pointed out that he began turning Northern folk songs into English at least as early as the beginning of 1870, for his rendering of  “Hafbur og Signy,” the first of those that are dated, was composed on February 4th of that year.¹ In all, Morris translated ten Scandinavian ballads – namely, “Habfur and Signy,” “Hildebrand Hellelil,” “Agnes and the Hill-Man,” “Knight Aagen and Maide Else,” “The Mother under the Mold,” “Axel Thordson and fair Walborg,” “The Lay of Christine,” “The Son’s Sorrow,” “Den Lillas Testamente,” and “Herr Malmstens drőm.” Only four of these renderings are dated or can be fairly definitely dated, - “Hafbur and Signy,” which, as I just pointed out, is marked “February 4, 1870” in the hologram manuscript, “The Lay of Christine” and “The Son’s Sorrow,” which must have been prepared before August 26, 1870 because they are included in an illuminated manuscript finished at that time,² and “Hildebrand and Hellelil,” which is dated “March 1, 1871.”³ Although the date of the compositions of the other six is not definitely known, it is generally assumed that all these ballad translations were written out in the early 1870’s.⁴

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Morris printed none of his ballad renderings until 1891, when he included in Poems by the Way “Hafbur and Signy,” “Hildebrand and Hellelil,” “Agnes and the Hill-Man,” “Knight Aagen and Maiden Else,’ “The Lay of Christine,” and “The Son’s Sorrow.”⁵ The first four Morris described – and correctly so – as translations from the Danish: the last two, as he indicated, are renderings from the Icelandic. “The Mother under the Mold,” also Danish, was first published by Miss Morris in 1915 in the last volume of the Collected Works.⁶ Morris’s translations of “Den Lillas Testamente” and “Herr Malmstens drőm,” two Swedish folk songs, were not put into print until 1936, when Miss Morris included them in her William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist.⁷ the rendering of the famous Danish ballad “Axel Thordson and Fair Walbrog” has never been published; Miss Morris, in the book just mentioned, merely states that the manuscript is in her possession, describing it as a “long ballad in four-line verse, from the Danish.”⁸ She does not indicate whether the translation is complete.

In the case of the five Danish ballad renderings by Morris that have been published, I find that for four of them he followed the versions given in Abrahamson, Nyerup, and Rahoek’s Udvalgte Danske Viser fra Middelalderen; for only one did he use the text in Grundtvig’s Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser.⁹ It is rather surprising that for

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four of these folk songs Morris preferred the versions in Udvalgte Danske Viser to those in Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser; - Grundtvig’s texts always reproduce the ballads exactly as they are found in the old manuscripts or in contemporary recordings, without any alterations or additions, and hence present the songs in their original form, with all their crudities and inconsistencies as well as with all their vigor and color, whereas Abrhamson, Nyerup, and Rahbek in their edition frequently make changes, additions, and deletions in accordance with modern taste and sometimes combine

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several ballads to form their own version, in this way giving the songs a literary finish which is really foreign to them. For his Icelandic ballad translations, Morris followed the texts given in Svend Grundtvig and Jón Sigurðsson’s Íslenzk Fornkvæðl.¹⁰ One of his renderings from the Swedish, “Dan Lillas Testamente,” he based on the version of this ballad in Adolf I Arwidsson’s Scenska Fornsånger;¹¹ for the other, “Herr Malmstens drðm,” he used the text in Geijer and Afzelius’s Svenska Folk-Visor.¹²

Most of the ten ballads Morris translated had previously been turned into foreign languages. Five of the six Danish ones were very well known in English, German, and French versions, and the sixth had appeared in English once;¹³ the two Icelandic songs, how-

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ever, so far as I know, had never before been rendered into

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English or French, and only one of them had ever been turned into German;¹⁴ of the two Swedish ballads, one had been printed in English, German, and French, and the other had appeared in German and French but never in English.¹⁵

“The Mother under the Mold,” and the Swedish ballad translations call for special comment. As I have already stated, none of these pieces were published by Morris himself, the Danish folk song appearing first in 1915 in the Collected Works and the Swedish

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ones in 1936 in William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist. When Miss Morris printed these works, she did not indicate that they were translations, but presented them as original compositions of her father.¹⁶ However, the three poems follow so closely to the Scandinavian ballads designated above – namely, “Den Dødes Igjenksomst” in Abrahamson, Nyerup, and Rahbek’s Udvalgte Danske Viser, “Den Lillas Testamente” in Arwidsson’s Svenska Fornsánger, and “Herr Malmstens drőm” in Geijer and Afzelius’s Svenska Folk-Visor – that there can be practically no doubt that they are direct translations of these Scandinavian pieces. In the case of the first one, the rendering is so exact that there is not room for any uncertainty whatsoever.¹⁷ In the other two poems Morris departs occasionally from the Swedish ballads just cited, but although some of these differences are surprising, they are really not great enough to justify any serious doubts that Morris’s compositions are translations. Moreover, these discrepancies are almost certainly not the result of Morris’s having followed some other version of these songs, as it seems at first that they might be, for an examination of all the European folk songs on these two themes that are recorded or mentioned in the ballad collections of F.J. Child, S. Grundtvig, and Geijer and Afzelius shows, as I shall make clear in a moment,

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that of all these versions the two Swedish ones referred to above are by far the closest to Morris’s poems; evidently the differences between these Swedish pieces and Morris’s translations were simply the result of his incomplete knowledge of the Swedish language or of the demands of the metre and rhyme.

The ballad theme embodied in “Den Lillas Testamente” is extremely widespread, being found throughout almost the whole of Europe, in the introductory remarks he gives in his English and Scottish Popular Ballads to “Lord Randall,” the English equivalent of this folk song, Professor Child cites 18 versions of this ballad in English, 12 in Italian, 6 in German, 1 in Dutch, 2 in Swedish, 2 in Danish, 2 in Magyar, and 1 in Wendish.¹⁸ A comparison of all these texts with Morris’s reveals, as I just stated, that the one called “Den Lillas Testamente” in Arwidsson’s Svenska Fornsánger offers by far the closest resemblance to Morris’s piece and must almost certainly have been Morris’s source. Not only does this Swedish folk song correspond more closely in general form and substance to the poem in question than do any of the other versions, but it also contains certain details found in this work which are not given in any of the other numerous ballads on the same subject. For example, it is only in Arwidsson’s version that the poisonous food of which the central figure in the folk song has partaken and is now dying is described as fried eels and pepper. In regard to the medium of the poisoning Child says,

There is all but universal consent that the poisoning was done by serving up snakes for fish. The Magyar says a toad, English M. a four-footed fish, and German D a well-peppered broth and a glass of red wine. English L adds a drink of hemlook stocks to the speckled trout; F, H have simply poison. The fish are distinctively eels in the Italian versions, and in English A, D, E, G, T, Swedish B.¹⁹

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Thus, although some of the versions state that the poison was eels and one mentions pepper, it is only in Arwidsson’s ballad that we find the combination fried eels and pepper. Furthermore, it is in Arwidsson’s version alone that the list of bequests made by the victim of the poisoning is given in exactly the same order and form as in Morris’s poem; in fact, I believe this Swedish folk song is the only one in which the dying person refers in his will to barns filled with wheat.²⁰

I stated above that Morris’s poem differs in some respects from Arwidsson’s ballad and that these discrepancies are evidently the result either of deliberate changes or of failure on the part of Morris to understand the Swedish. Thus, in the first stanza of the original the girl who has been poisoned says,

“Jag har vát i bänne
Hos broderen min!”²¹

but in Morris’s poems she states,

“To my brother’s house I went to play.”²²

The reason for Morris’s incorrect rendering of the Swedish here was very likely that he was unacquainted with the word “bänne,” meaning “prison,” which is now obsolete. Again, in the third and fourth stanzas the Swedish says that after the girl had eaten the eels, she gave the bones to the dogs, and they as a result burst into fifteen pieces; but Morris states that it was the broken meat that the girl threw to the dogs, and that when they had eaten of this food, their

[pg. 156 is missing]

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third with 7, and fourth with 1; that there is 1 in Norwegian, which has been collected in 3 different forms; that there is 1 in Romaic, with 9 versions; that there is 1 in Catalan, with 2 variant forms; that there is 1 in Italian, with 6 versions; that there is 1 in French, with 8 different forms; and that there is 1 in Finnish, 1 in Wendish, 1 in Dutch, and 1 in Faroese.²³ An examination of all these forms of this ballad-them shows that here again, although the theme and situation are similar in many of the others, none of them by any means resemble Morris’s poem so closely in subject matter and form as one of the Swedish ones – namely, “Herr Malmstens drőm” in Geijer and Afzelius’s Svenska Folk-Visor. Besides, it is only in this version that the lover is given the name “Malmsten” and that the young man learns of the death of his sweetheart from a woman in blue and a woman in red.

To be sure, in this ballad also, Morris departs from his original in a number of cases. Thus, he completely omits the double refrain,

Så lustelig locker man liljorna
Főr älskogsfullt han sőrjde’na,²⁴

and in several passages he renders the Swedish freely. For example, the exclamation

“Gud nåde er, Herr Malmsten, hvad sorg I får,”²⁵

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Morris turns into the question,

“My lord Malmston, what aileth you?”²⁶

For the lines

Herr Malmsten så hastigt af gångaren sprang;
Han lyfte så lätt under bare-stång,²⁷

Morris writes,

He let his horse loose hastily,
And by the dead corpse quick stood he.²⁸

The Swedish says that the young man, on meeting the pier of his beloved, took off his six gold rings, and

Det gav han åt den, som skulle grifta och ringa,²⁹

but Morris simply states that the youth pulled off the rings

And gave them to the clerks to hold.³⁰

In none of these cases, however, is Morris following other versions of the ballad. Most likely it was simply his lack of complete familiarity with the Swedish that led him in these passages to reproduce the original incorrectly or with undue liberty. Perhaps, also, the exigencies of metre and rhyme were sometimes responsible.

All the ballad translations that Morris produced he apparently prepared by himself.³¹ The only external evidence bearing upon the

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question of authorship that we have is the remark “translated from the Danish (by poor little me)”³² in the holograph manuscript of one of the copies of “Hafbur and Signy” and the statement at the end of the illuminated manuscript A Book of Verse to the effect that ‘I made the verses; but the 2 poems, the ‘Ballad of Christine’ and the ‘Son’s Sorrow,’ I translated out of the Icelandic.”³³ That Morris should have been able in the early 1870’s to render Icelandic ballads into English unaided is of course not surprising, for his study of the sagas with Magnússon had undoubtedly made him by this time well acquainted with the Icelandic language, but that he should also have been capable of translating Danish folk songs by himself is rather unexpected. However, strange as it seems, we must, I believe, for various reasons that I shall present below, interpret these two statements literally, and also assume that Morris rendered not only these three ballads by himself but all ten that have come down to us. Evidently it was his intimate knowledge of Icelandic and the slight familiarity with German that he is known to have possessed³⁴ that enabled him, with the aid of dictionaries, to read the Danish and Swedish although he had never made a formal study of these languages.

Morris sometimes surprises us by the literalness of his ballad translations, even occasionally rendering correctly a difficult word or phrase which other translators of the ballad in question misunderstood; but, as I just stated, he apparently prepared his

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renderings by himself, for there is no reason to suspect that he received aid from anyone acquainted with the Scandinavian languages. In the first place, if the translations had been the result of collaboration, Morris would almost certainly have stated this fact when he published them; with only one exception,³⁵ he acknowledged the assistance of Magnússon in every saga-rendering he printed. Secondly, if he had sought help in this work, it would most likely have been from Magnússon, who was acquainted with all the Scandinavian languages,³⁶ but Dr. Einarsson in his recent biography of Magnússon³⁷ says nothing of any collaboration by Morris and Magnússon on ballad translations, although he quotes and refers to a great many letter relating to their work together on the sagas. Thirdly, if he had received help from Magnússon, his renderings would have undoubtedly have been far more accurate than they are; very rare indeed are the errors in the saga-translations they produced together. It is thus almost certain that in turning these eight folk songs into English, he was not aided by Magnússon or by anyone else who was proficient in reading Danish and Swedish.

There is one other probability that must be considered: in rendering these Danish and Swedish ballads into English, Morris may 

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have been aided by previous English, or even German and French, translations. However, it seems extremely unlikely that Morris went to the trouble of locating English, German, or French renderings of the folk songs he wished to turn into English and that he then followed these in reading the Danish and Swedish; such a procedure would be entirely inconsistent with what we know about Morris’s usual methods of work. Moreover, when we compare the previous English, German, and French translations with Morris’s versions, we find, as I shall show, not only that there is never the slightest verbal similarity between Morris’s work and that of his predecessors, but also that sometimes Morris correctly interprets a passage which was misunderstood by the others and that he occasionally mistranslates a phrase or word which is correctly rendered in all the other translations.

Thus, in “Agnes and the Hill-Man” Morris correctly renders the Danish “tøyse”³⁸ as “twice,”³⁹ but Prior, the only other translator of this particular version, interprets it as “thrice.”⁴⁰ Later in the same ballad Morris renders the lines

“Og naar du kommer paa Kirkegulv,
saa maa du ej gaa med din kjaer Moder I Stol”⁴¹

much more closely that Prior does, for Morris translates them as

“So that when thou standest the church within
To thy mother on bench thou never win,”⁴²

but Prior says,

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“And when thou kneelest at church to prayer
Apart from thy mother place the chair.”⁴³

Similarly, in “Hafbur and Signy” Morris’s version is in several cases more exact than the six previous translations that were based either on the text in Danske Viser or on the very similar text in Tragica.⁴⁴ For example, in the account of Hafbur and Signy’s arrival in Signy’s chamber and their preparation for sleep, Morris renders correctly the lines which Danske Viser read,

Saa tændte de op de voxlys,
Saa herligt vare de snoed’,⁴⁵

and in Tragica appear as,

Saa tendte de op de voxxe Lius,
Saa herlig vare de snaa,⁴⁶

For he says,

Then kindled folk the waxlights
That were so closely twined;⁴⁷

but most of the other translators seem to have been troubled by the word “snoed” or “snaa” in the second of these lines. Thus the rendering of this ballad in Fraser’s Magazine departs entirely from the original at this point:

Hafbur and Signy took the light,
And their room they lovingly sought.⁴⁸

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Grimm, also, completely misunderstood the line:

Sie zeundeten de Wachslichter an, so freudig waren die zwel.⁴⁹

In his Old Danish Ballads in 1856, Prior,⁵⁰ following Grimm’s translation, says,

The tapers all they lit so bright,
Grew friendly more and more;⁵¹

and in 1860, in his Ancient Danish Ballads also, Prior seems to have relied on Grimm for this line, although he says that his rendering is based on the text of this ballad in Tragica, for here he translated the two lines thus:

The cheerful tapers there they lit,
And were se well inclined.⁵²

Narmier’s French version is likewise incorrect at this point: “Le flambeau de cire est allumé. Tous deux étaient bien joyeux.”⁵³ The only other translator besides Morris to understand the word was Sander, who says,

Das kunstgedrehte Licht von wachs,
Das leuchtet ringsumher.⁵⁴

A few stanzas later in the ballad we are told that when Hafbur and Signy were in bed together, Signy discovered the identity of Hafbur, who had come to her disguised as a maiden, and that she chid him for having thus deceived her and put her to shame. She asks,

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in Danske Viser,

“Hvi rider ej til min Faders saard
Med Hund, og Høg paa Hænde?”⁵⁵

and in Tragica,

“Hvi rider I icke til min Faders Gaard
Med Høg of Hund I hende?”⁵⁶

There is nothing difficult about these two lines, and Morris translates them correctly as

“Why ridest thou not to my father’s garth
With hound, and with hawk upon glove?”⁵⁷

Moreover, Grimm and Sander render them correctly in their German versions of this ballad, and Marmier, though not so exact, keeps the main idea of the original.⁵⁸ Prior, however, departs from the Danish in the second line both in his Old Danish Ballads in 1856 and in his Ancient Danish Ballads in 1860:

“Why ride not in with hawk and hound
In court my hand to claim.”⁵⁹

The third English translation follows the original more closely than Prior does, but is still not so exact as Morris:

“With hawk and hound to my father’s hall,
Ah, if you only came!”⁶⁰

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In Morris’s rendering of the ballad “The Mother under the Mold” occurs another very striking example of his independence of previous translators.⁶¹ In this song we are told that one night a dead mother begged the Lord for permission to arise from her grave in order to visit her children, who were being maltreated by their stepmother; the Lord yielded to her entreaties, whereupon,

Hun skjød op sine modige Ben,
Der revnede Mur og Marmorsten.⁶²

The Danish word “Ben” can of course mean either “bone” or “leg”; in this passage it almost certainly is used in the sense of “legs.” However, Morris is the only English translator to give it this interpretation:

Then forth her weary feet put she.⁶³

The rendering in the London Magazine reads,

Then up she raised her weary bones;⁶⁴

Robert Jamieson gives the translation

With her banes sae stark a bowt she gae;⁶⁵

Fraser’s Magazine has

She lifted up her weary bones;⁶⁶

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Prior in his Ancient Danish Ballads renders the line as

Out from the chest she stretch’d her bones;⁶⁷

and Longfellow, presenting this ballad as the Musician’s third story in his Tales of a Wayside Inn, gives the translation

She girded up her sorrowful bones.⁶⁸

In his Old Danish Ballads Prior translates the passage very loosely, omitting the word entirely:

In coffin then no longer pent
Her corpse its marble tombstone rent.⁶⁹

Three of the German renderings use the collective noun “Gebein,” which of course cannot refer to “legs.”⁷⁰ besides Morris, Grimm and Marmier are the only translators who definitely give the word the meaning “legs”: “Da hob sie auf ihre můden Bein,” and “Elle se lève sur ses jambs fatigues.”⁷¹

Finally, I should like to point out that in his rendering of “Hafbur and Signy” Morris includes the refrain, as do Grimm and Sander, but that all the three other English translators, as well as Marmier, omit it.⁷²

That Morris was not dependent upon the work of his predecessors is indicated not only by passages, like those just cited, in which his renderings are more exact than the previous translations, but also by cases in which Morris mistranslates the original and all

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the other renderings are correct. I should now like to give a few examples of such mistakes by Morris.

Thus, in “Agnes and the Hill-Man,” when Agnes has escaped from the mountain and the Hill-man tries to induce her to return by telling her that her children are crying for her, Morris completely misunderstands Agnes’s exclamation

“Lad dem græd’, lad dem gra͜ed’, lad dem græd’, med de vil:
jeg n ej mere hører dem til,”⁷³

and writes,

“Let them greet, let them greet, as they have will to do;
For never again will I hearken thereto!”⁷⁴

Prior, the only other translator of this Danish ballad, is much more exact though not absolutely literal:

“The children may wail, as they will, and cry,
with them nothing more to do have I,”⁷⁵

In his “Knight Aagen and Maiden Else” Morris likewise makes two mistakes which are not found in the other renderings of this folk song; these errors, however, seem to be the result of carelessness, rather than of a failure to understand the Danish. Thus he incorrectly translates stanza three,

Det var Jomfru elselille,
Hun var saa sorrifuld;
Det hørte Ridder Herr Aage
Hen under sorten Muld,⁷⁶

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as

It was the maiden Else,
She was fulfilled of woe
When she heard how the fair knight Aagen
In the black mould lay alow.⁷⁷

All the seven earlier renderings, however, state correctly that it was Aage who heard Else crying, not that Else wept because she learned that Aage was in his grave.⁷⁸ Later in the same ballad we are told that Aage arose from his grave one night in order to go and comfort Else, and that after she had welcomed him into her chamber, she took her comb and smoothed his hair:

Saa tog hun den guldkam
Saa kjæmte hun hans Haar.⁷⁹

Morris, however, says,

O, she’s taken up her comb of gold
And combed adown her hair.⁸⁰

Here again all the other translations are correct.⁸¹

Similarly, in his “Hafbur and Signy” Morris makes a very serious mistake, failing to understand the old Danish word “axle,” meaning “to put on”; thus he misinterprets the lines

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Midt udi den Borgegaard
Der axler han sit Skind.⁸²

as

Now out amid the castle-garth
he cast his cloak aside.⁸³

All the other translators render it in the right way.⁸⁴

Finally, I should like to point out that one of the mistakes I discussed above in Morris’s rendering of the Swedish ballad “Den Lillas Testamente” – namely, his translation

The flesh fell from them that they died

for

Remna I femton stycken,

is not found in Marmier’s rendering, the only other version based on the same text, for Marmier says, “Leur corps s’est brisé en morceaux”;⁸⁵ similarly, the errors I noted above in Morris’s translation of the other Swedish ballad are not in the other renderings of this song.⁸⁶

It is not necessary to cite further examples of this type. The ones I have already pointed out, like the specimens of previously quoted cases in which Morris gives correct renderings but the earlier translators misunderstand the original, show clearly that

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there is not the slightest reason for believing that Morris was guided in any way by the work of his predecessors. Moreover, it should be noted that the mistranslations which were made by Morris but not by the others indicate not only that Morris was not following other renderings but also that he could not have collaborated with Magnússon or with anyone else who was thoroughly familiar with Danish and Swedish.

In order to make this last point clearer – namely, that the lack of accuracy in Morris’s translations tends to prove that he could not have prepared them with the aid of some friend who was well versed in the Scandinavian languages. I should like to show that Morris’s mistakes are by no means rare by briefly calling attention to a few more cases in which he failed to understand his original. So far I have mentioned only those passages which Morris renders incorrectly but others translate in the right way, but there are of course words and expressions which not only Morris but others failed to comprehend.

Thus in “Hildebrand and Hellelil,” he misunderstands the line

“Min Fader lod mig saa haederlig somme,”⁸⁷

rendering it rather absurdly as

“He taught me sewing royally.”⁸⁸

Moreover he seems to have been unfamiliar with the word “svige,”

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meaning “to deceive,” for in “Hafbur and Signy” he mistranslates the line

Kong Sivards Datter at svige⁸⁹

as

King Siward’s daughter to woo.⁹⁰

He fails to understand the line

Der Dug drew over de Spange,⁹¹

and renders it incorrectly as

O’er the meads the dew drave down.⁹²

He confuses the word “stodte” with “stod,” ad thinks that the lines

De stødte paa Døren

Med Glavind og med Spyd⁹³

mean

So there anigh the high-bower door

They stood with spear and glaive.⁹⁴

Like all but three of the other ten translators of “The Mother under the Mold,” he misinterprets “udi Sky” as “under the sky”; the phrase means, of course, “in terror.”⁹⁵ For the Danish

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De Hunde de tuded saa højt udi Sky,⁹⁶

he says,

Under the sky the hounds they bayed.⁹⁷

Thus, as I have already stated, there is absolutely no reason to believe either that Morris relied on previous translations in preparing his ballad renderings or that he had the aid of anyone acquainted with the Scandinavian languages.

Finally, before closing my discussion of Morris’s ballad translations, I should like to point out that in spite of occasional errors, the renderings are on the whole very pleasing and highly successful. Morris always took pains to imitate the form of the originals as closely as possible; and as far as his knowledge of Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish permitted him to do so, he reproduced faithfully the substance of his texts. For example, he always retained the metre and rhyme scheme found in the originals, and often, though of course by no means always, imitated their metrical irregularities. Moreover, unlike many of the previous translators, he as a rule kept the refrain, which is such an integral part of the Scandinavian folk songs; in only one ballad rendering – that of “Herr Malmstems drőm” – did he omit the refrain. It should also be noted that he frequently introduced feminine rhymes, in this way reproducing the melodious quality of the original ballad poetry; in “Agnes and the Hill-Man,” for example, Morris’s first and fifth stanzas run thus:

Agnes went through the meadows a-weeping,
Fowl are a-singing.
There stood the hill-man heed thereof keeping.
Agnes, fair Agnes!

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There she sat, and lullaby sang in her singing,
Fowl are a-singing.
And she heard how the bells of England were ringing.
Agnes, fair Agnes!⁹⁸

Equally striking is his insistence on reproducing, as far as his knowledge of Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish and the demands of metre and rhyme allowed him to do so, exactly what is given in his originals, and nothing more. Never was Morris guilty of trying to improve his texts. In only one or two cases did he add a single image or descriptive detail of his own, although many of his predecessors enlarged upon the originals when the expressions in the ballads were bald or crude. One or two examples of Morris’s close adherence to his sources will suffice. Thus the opening stanza in “Hildebrand and Hellelil,”

Hellelil sidder I Bure –
Min Sorrig veed ingen uden gud.
Hun syer sin Søm saa prude.
Og den lever aldrig, jeg vil for klage min Sorrig,⁹⁹

Morris renders faithfully as

Hellelil sitteth in bower there,
None knows my grief but God alone,
And seweth at the seam so fair,
I never wail my sorrow to any other one;¹⁰⁰

but Robert Buchanan in his Ballad Stories of the Affections translates this stanza very freely:

Helga sits at her chamber door –
God only my heart from sorrow can sever!
She seweth the same seam o’er and o’er.
Let me tell of the sorrow that lives for ever!¹⁰¹

And a rendering of this ballad in Fraser’s Magazine for January, 1865, departs even further from the original:

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She sat in her bower, with eyes of flame,
(My sorrow is known to God alone.)
Bending over the broidery frame,
(And oh there liveth none to whom my sorrow may be told)¹⁰²

Later in the same ballad Morris translates the lines

“Aldrig var det saa dyb en Dam,
Min Broders Hest jo over svam.”¹⁰³

as

“No deepest dam we came unto
But my brother’s horse he swam it through”;¹⁰⁴

but Robert Buchanan and the translator in Fraser’s Magazine take great liberties with the text, for one says,

“Through deep fords the horse can swim;
He drags me choking after him,”¹⁰⁵

and the other relates that

“The deep ice-rivers were red with gore,
As over them we and the wild horse tore.”¹⁰⁶

Finally, at the opening of “Knight Aagen and Maiden Else,” in a stanza already commented upon in another connection, the original says,

Det var Jomfru Elselille,
Hun var saa sorrigfuld,¹⁰⁷

and Morris translates

It was the Maiden Else
She was fulfilled of woe;¹⁰⁸

but George Borrow in his Romantic Ballads states,

In her bower sat Eliza;
Rent the air with shriek and groan.¹⁰⁹

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Morris’s ballad renderings make it clear that he keenly appreciated the quiet beauty, simplicity, pathos, and reticence of the Scandinavian folk songs. This understanding of the art of the ballads together with his inherent ability as a poet enabled him to produce translations which are remarkably close in spirit and tone to the originals and which at the same time possess real poetic value of their own.

During the period 1871 to 1876, which we are now considering, Morris prepared not only the ballad renderings just discussed by also a great number of saga translations. Very few of these renderings, however, were ever published at this time. In 1871, in the March and April issues of the Dark Blue, he presented to the public an English version of the Friðpjófs saga hins fra͜ekna;¹¹⁰ in 1875 he republished this saga, together with five other short Old Norse tales, in a volume called Three Northern Love Stories, and other Tales.¹¹¹ These are the only saga translations that he printed from 1871 to 1876, -  in fact, from 1871 to 1891.

In his “Story of Frithiof the Bold” Morris followed the longer and better known of the two recensions of the saga. He does not state on which edition of this form of the tale he based his rendering, but very likely he used the first of the two texts in volume II of Fornaldar Sőgur Nordrlanda;¹¹² this volume, as I have already

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pointed out, was in his library at his death.¹¹³

When Morris printed this translation in the Dark Blue, he presented it as entirely his own work; but when he republished it with only a few changes together with five other sagas in Three Northern Love Stories, he stated on the title page that the renderings in this volume were the result of collaboration between Magnússon and himself, and made no special comment on the authorship of the translation of the Friðpjófs saga. It is not known whether the rendering was originally produced by Morris alone and was later revised by Magnússon when it was republished in 1875, or whether the earlier translation also was the work of both men and the absence of Magnússon’s name in the Dark Blue is entirely without significance. That Morris received aid from Magnússon in preparing the first version as well as the second seems, on the whole, very likely, for when we compare this translation with the Old Norse, we find that it is remarkably close and exact. Very few alterations, as I just stated, were made when the story was printed again in 1875, and in only three cases were actual mistranslations corrected;¹¹⁴ most of the changes simply introduce archaic words of forms, or

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offer slightly more exact renderings.¹¹⁵ It seems extremely improbable that Morris could have produces this very literal translation entirely unaided in 1871. Very likely Magnússon prepared the first draft as usual and Morris afterwards wrote out his own rendering on the basis of Magnússon’s version, making a few minor errors which Magnússon may never have had a chance to correct or which he overlooked if he actually did revise the work.

As in the case of the ballad translations, there is of course a possibility that Morris produced this rendering without Magnússon’s aid but was guided by some previous translation. The Friðpjófs saga had already been turned into English by George Stephens, his rendering of the saga appearing in 1839 in the same volume as his English version of Bishop Tegnér’s poetical version of the tale.¹¹⁶ We know that Morris was familiar with this work for H. Buxton Forman, speaking of another matter in his Books of William Morris, refers to a letter he received from Morris in the winter of 1873 "returning a copy of George Stevenson’s Frithiof which I had borrowed for him….”¹¹⁷Morris may easily have seen

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this book as early as 1871. However, a comparison of Morris’s translation with Stephens’s shows that Morris was almost certainly not dependent upon the work of his predecessor in any way. In the first place, Stephens’s rendering, as he himself states, is based mainly on the text in Bjorner’s Nordiska Kämpa Dater,¹¹⁸ which, as I have already said, differs in many cases from the text Morris used.¹¹⁹ Furthermore – and this fact is much more important – several passages which are the same in the Kämpa Dater and in the Fornaldar Sőgur are given entirely different interpretation by Morris and Stephens, sometimes Morris, sometimes Stephens, being the more exact.¹²⁰ Finally, I should like to point out that none of the mistranslations which occur in Morris’s version in the Dark Blue but were corrected in the Three Northern Love Stories are found in Stephens’s rendering, or, as a matter of fact, in any of the Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and German translations.¹²¹

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Very likely Morris did not borrow Stephen’s book because he wanted to use it as a guide in his rendering of the Icelandic saga, but because he wished to become acquainted with Tegnér’s poem on the same subject. We know that Morris was familiar with this work, for in a note at the opening of his translation of the Friðpjófs saga in the Dark Blue he says, “This tale is the original of the Swedish Bishop Tegnér’s ‘Frithiof Saga,’ a long modern poem, which has a great reputation, but bears little enough relation, either in spirit or matter, to its prototype.”¹²² It is almost certain that Morris was not so proficient in Swedish that he could read this long narrative poem in the original; there were of course many English renderings of the work available at this time, but inasmuch as we know that he borrowed Stephens’s translation in the early seventies, it is fairly safe to assume that it was on the basis of this rendering that he formed the opinion expressed in this note.

Although no saga translations were published from the spring of 1871 to 1875, we know that Morris was extremely active during these years in turning Icelandic sagas into English. Almost all our information regarding this work, except for a few references in letters, comes from the illuminated manuscripts he used to produce recreation at this time. I have already on several occasions referred to Morris’s activity as an illuminator.¹²³ As I have stated before, he began this work as early as 1856, but did not complete any painted book until 1870; from that year until 1875 or

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1876, however, he spent all his leisure time in writing out and decorating manuscripts, and produced during these years an astonishingly large number of such books. Many of them are copies of sagas he had rendered out of the Icelandic.

On the basis of one of these manuscripts we know that by the end of 1871 Morris had translated the Kormáks saga Øgmundssonar and had begun his English version of the Heimskringla. This manuscript, which is now in the private library of Sir Sydney Cockerell of Cambridge, England, and which I have had the privilege of examining, contains, in translation, the whole of the Kormáks saga, one page from the opening of the Heimskringla, eighteen stanzas of “Hafbur and Signy,” and two pages of the Friðpjófs saga; according to a note by Sir Sydney Cockerell at the beginning of the book, the “paper on which everything in this volume is written bears a watermark dated 1870 and the date of the skript[sic] is not later than 1871.”¹²⁴ The last two selections in this book are not important

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for the purposes of this study, for we know from other sources that Morris had translated “Hafbur og Signy” and the Friðpjófs saga by the end of 1871 and both renderings in their entirety have been published; the first two selections, however, are of special interest.

Morris’s translation of the Kormáks saga was never printed; in fact, it is only through this illuminated manuscript and a few waste leaves¹²⁵ that we know that he prepared a rendering of this tale. The basis for his version must have been the Kormaks saga sive Kormaki OEgmundi dilii vita, published in Copenhagen in 1832, for this was the only text printed at this time. His translation covers the whole of the saga, but does not include any of the “Fragmenta carminum” found at the end of this edition. I have compared the rendering with the original, and find that it is accurate and similar in style to Morris’s other saga translations.

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It is likewise very interesting to learn that Morris had begun his rendering of the Heimskringla as early as 1871, as the illuminated page of the opening of the Yngling saga included in Cockerell’s manuscript indicates. This very lengthy work, which he was not to complete until more than twenty-five years later, seems to have occupied his attention throughout this period; in a letter dated February 11, 1873, he writes, “My translations go on apace, but I am doing nothing original….I certainly enjoy some of the work I do very much, and one of these days my Heimskringla will be an important work.”¹²⁶ Other illuminated fragments of the Heimskringla rendering also exist. In the private library of the late Sir Emery Walker of Hammersmith, London, there is an illuminated manuscript which contains various short selections, among them nineteen pages of the opening of the Heimskringla, covering “The Preface of Snorri Sturluson” and almost twenty-five chapters of the Ynglinga saga; those pages that bear a watermark are dated 1870, and the script is similar to that in Cockerell’s manuscript, so that very likely these leaves also were written out in 1871.¹²⁷ At the time of her death Miss May Morris had in her posses-

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sion two vellum leaves which bear no title but contain part of Chapter XXI, the whole of Chapter XXII, and the opening of Chapter XXIII of Morris’s translation of the Haralds saga hárfagra.¹²⁸ There is writing on both sides of the pages, and the leaves are numbered 35, 36, 37, and 38; evidently they were originally part of an illuminated manuscript of the whole of the Haralds saga hárfragra. The script used here is larger than in the other two Heimskringla manuscripts, and is somewhat different in character; probably these leaves were prepared at a later date.

Although his work on the Heimskringla must have occupied much

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of his attention during the years 1871 to 1872, he nevertheless found time for several other saga-renderings. We learn from a letter written December 8, 1873 that by that time he had read the Viglundar saga, the Heðins saga ok Hőgna, the Hróa páttr heimska, and the porsteins páttr stangarhőggs; in the letter, just mentioned, Morris describes the material he intended to include in the volume of translations which he was then planning to publish but which did not appear until 1875 under the title Three Northern Love Stories, and says,

It [the book] stands thus now as I intended at first: the Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue, printed in the Fortnightly some years back; the Story of Frithiof the Bold, printed before in the Dark Blue; the story of Viglund the Fair, never before printed: these ‘three Northern Love Stories’ will give the name to the book, but to thicken it out I add three more short tales; Hrol the Fool, Hogni and Hedin, and Thorstein Staff-smitten; the first of these three a pretty edition of a ‘sharper’ story and the same as a tale in the Arabian Nights. The second a terrible story; a very well told, but late version of a dark and strange legend of remote times. The third simple, and not without generosity, smelling strong of the soil of Iceland, like the Gunnlaug.¹²⁹

Moreover, an illuminated manuscript shows us that three months later – namely, by the end of February, 1874 – he had translated three more fairly long sagas, - the Hænsa-póris saga, the Sandamanna saga, and the Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings. His rendering of these three tales is written out and decorated in a very beautiful script of 224 pages, which is now in the Fitzilliam Museum, Cambrdige, England; Morris did not date the work, but a note at the end, evidently in the hand of Sir Sydney Cockerell, points out a “letter to Mr. C. Fairfax Murray shows that this book was finished in February 1874.” The sheets that are watermarked all bear the

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date 1870.¹³⁰ None of these translations were published until 1891, when all three appeared in the first volume of The Saga Library.¹³¹

The last of these three tales, the Hávarðar saga, it should

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be noted, was one of the Scandinavian works which Magnússon and G. E. J. Powell had intended to publish in an English form before Magnússon began collaborating with Morris. As I have already pointed out, Magnússon wrote out a renderings of this tale and handed it over to Powell for revision in 1863, but the latter never completed his share of the work so that it could be printed; even as late as 1869 and 1870 references in letters show that they were still planning to publish it.¹³² Probably Magnússon by that time realized that it was useless to wait longer for Powell, and so put his literal translation in the hands of Morris.

The story of Haward became one of Morris’s favorites among the shorter Icelandic tales; he once wrote to Theodore Watts-Dunton, in a letter which evidently accompanied a presentation copy of Volume One of the The Saga Library, “Seriously I hope you will like it. The Howard Saga, I think the best short saga after G…¹³³ and the other 2 are very good.”¹³⁴ In the Fitzwilliam Museum illuminated manuscript of “The Story of Hen Thorir,” “The Story of the Banded-Men,” and “The Story of Haward the Halt,” we find at the end “A gloss in rhyme on the story of Haward, by William Morris.” In this gloss, which consists of fifty-eight lines in heroic couplets, Morris briefly retells the main events of the tale; the comments that he makes on the characters and their deeds in the course of this poetical summary show that he was deeply moved by this old story of wrong made

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right even in the face of overwhelming odds, and reveal that he sincerely sympathized with old Haward in his troubles and weakness. Note, for example, the following passage towards the end, in which he compares the change in Haward’s fortunes to a beautiful dream:

A dream methinks all this by someone told,
Of many griefs in all defeat grown old;
A dream of lying down unloved, alone,
Feeble, unbeauteous, but by mocking known,
And waking up a famous man and fair,
Well-loved, most mighty, bold all deeds to dare;
Happy to bring the hardest thing to pass;
Nought left save longing of the wretch one was:
Of lying down most loth to wake again,
And waking up to wonder what was pain –
A dream of wrong in one night swept away
And Baldur’s kingdom come with break of day.¹³⁵

Another Icelandic work which Morris seems to have translated by the end of 1874 is the Haldórs páttr Snorrasonar. Three pages of an illuminated manuscript of his rendering of this story, called by him “The Tale of Haldor,” are now in the private library of Sir Sydney Cockerell; as is pointed out in a note on the inside of the front cover of the book in which these pages are bound, this selection is written out in the same script as that used in the Fitzwilliam Museum manuscript just discussed.¹³⁶ There are two “pættir” concerning this Haldor, one dealing with Haldo and Einar pambarskelfir, the other with Haldor and King Harald Harðráði;¹³⁷ it is the first of these that Morris translated. He wrote out only about forty lines

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in the illuminated manuscript, and so it is difficult to determine which text of this “páttr” he was following in his rendering;¹³⁸ however, even this short passage shows that he certainly did not use the version in Volume III of the Flateyjarbók¹³⁹ and that very likely he did not base his English version on the text in the Saga Ólafs Tryggvasonar published in 1689,¹⁴⁰ but it does not indicate whether he followed the version in Volume III of Fornmanna Sőgur or that in Volume I of Flateyjarbók.¹⁴¹ All these books, it should be noted, were in his library at his death.¹⁴² This translation was never published and is not mentioned in any of the studies of Morris. I should also like to point out that Morris’s knowledge of Old Norse literature must have been very extensive, since he read and translated such minor and very slightly known tales as this one and the last three included in Three Northern Love Stories; probably he read this account of Haldor because this man was the son of Snorri the Priest, with whom Morris had become acquainted in the Eyrbyggja saga at an early date.

Another illuminated manuscript which was likewise probably produced in the early 1870’s contains about one-fourth of Morris’s rendering of the Vápnfirðinga saga. This translation, like that of the

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Halldórs páttr, was never published, and is not mentioned in any of the Morris studies. The manuscript is now in the private library of the late Sir Emery Walker of Hammersmith, England.¹⁴³ The rendering, as usual, is very literal, with an archaic coloring. Evidently the translation was based on the text in Nordiske Oldskrifter, the only version printed at that time.¹⁴⁴ The Porsteins páttr stangarhőgga, which we have already seem that Morris had read by the end of 1873,¹⁴⁵ is a continuation of this saga; very likely he had translated the saga proper also by that time.

Finally, I should like to point out that three other saga translations that we know Morris prepared – namely, his renderings of the Heiðarvíga saga, of the Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, and of the Norna-Gests páttr – may have been produced during the period 1871 to 1876. The first of these works was not published by Morris until 1892, when it appeared in the second volume of The Saga Library.¹⁴⁶ The other two Morris himself never printed, but manu-

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scripts of parts of both these translations are extant,¹⁴⁷ and one of these manuscript renderings, comprising forty chapters of the Egils saga, Miss Morris published in 1936 in her William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist.¹⁴⁸ All of these translations are undated, but, as I stated above, there is reason to believe that they were prepared in the early 1870’s. In the first place, various allusions to Norse customs that Morris introduced in his poem “Anthony,” which, as I shall show later, he seems to have written shortly after 1870, indicate, though they by no means definitely prove, that he was familiar at that time with the Heiðarvíga saga and the Egils saga.¹⁴⁹ Moreover, as I shall make clear in Chapter IV, the verse form Morris uses for his English versions of the “vísur” in The Story of the Heath-Slayings points to its being an early work.¹⁵⁰ Finally, it should be noted that, as we shall see in the next chapter, Morris did no translation work from the late 1870’s until

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1890, and when he resumed his translating at that time, he seems to have devoted all his attention to finishing or revising renderings he had begun in the 1870’s; with the exception of The Story of the Heath-Slayings, all the translations he printed in The Saga Library are works we definitely know he had prepared or at least begun in the period 1868 to 1876. None of this evidence is of course conclusive, but it all indicates that these saga-renderings were produced in the period now under discussion.¹⁵¹

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Although Morris translated so many sagas in the early 1870’s, he published only one small volume of Icelandic tales during these years; this was Three Northern Love Stories, and other Tales, which appeared in June, 1875.¹⁵² The first two sagas which he included here, “The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Toungue and Raven the Skald” and “The Story of Frithiof the Bold,” he had already printed in periodicals, as I have pointed out before;¹⁵³ both these tales he and Magnússon now carefully revised before republishing them in book form.¹⁵⁴ I have already commented in detail upon these two translations. The third tale of love is “The Story of Viglund the Fair,” a rendering of the Víglundar saga, a late fictitious narrative. Morris almost certainly based his translation of this work on the text in Nordiska Oldskrifter.¹⁵⁵ However, the melody which he introduced in Chapter Eleven for the song that Ketilrid sings when she thinks that Viglund has drowned¹⁵⁶ is not found in this edition or in the only other text available in 1873; this tune he evidently inserted because, as he notes in his Journal of his first visit to Iceland in 1871, he had heard it played on an Icelandic violin at one of the farms at which

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he stayed on this trip.¹⁵⁷ These three tales of love, “The Story of Gunnlaug,” “The Story of Frithiof,” and “The Story of Viglund,” make up more than three-fourths of the book; the remainder consists of three very short tales or “pættir.” “The Tale of Hogni and Hedinn” is a translation of Sőrla páttir, or Heðins saga ok Hőgna; Morris seems to have used the text given in Fornaldar Sőgur Nordrlanda.¹⁵⁸ “The tale of Roi the Fool” is an English rendering of Hróa páttr heimska; the two texts of this story existing in 1873, one of which is found in Fornmanna Sőgur and the other in the Flateyjarbók, differ so very slightly that it is impossible to determine with certainty which one served as the basis of Morris’s work, but it seems that he followed the former.¹⁵⁹ The last story is “The Tale of Thorstein Staff-Smitten,” a translation of porsteins páttr stanagarhőggs, which is a continuation of the vápnfirðinga saga; the text given in Nordiske Oldskrifter of this “páttr” was the only

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one published by 1873.¹⁶⁰ In the case of the last four sagas, Morris’s renderings are the only English versions ever printed.¹⁶¹

At the beginning of this collection of six short Icelandic tales we find a very brief Preface with comments on the general nature of each story, and also a chronological table of the main events in “The Story of Gunnlaug.” At the close of the book are two notes; in one of them Morris presents a two-page translation of the story of Hogni and Hedinn as it appears in Chapter L of the “Skáldskaparmál,” thus giving his readers an opportunity to compare this short account with the much more detailed version given in the Sőrla páttr, which he had translated in the text. There are also at the end two indexes of characters and places mentioned in these six sagas.

The book met with almost unqualified approval in the contemporary reviews. All the critics were loud in their praises of the accuracy and general style of the rendering, and freely recommended the volume to their readers.¹⁶² As was to be expected, most of the reviewers, recognizing the superior merits of “The Story of Gunnlaug,” placed this tale far above any of the other sagas in the book, and hailed it as one of the treasures of the world’s literature. One critic even devoted his whole article to this saga, merely mentioning the names of the other five tales.¹⁶³ Edmund Gosse, whose review is by far

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the most scholarly and acute, says of this story,

…it claims admiration for a rounded and finished form, a passionate perfection of style, a fullness of detail without an iota of triviality or thinness, which distinguish it above all its fellows. Without the grandeur of “Njála,” the romantic verve of “Grettis,” the fullness of humanity of that “Laxdaela” which we can only hope Mr. Morris may yet find time to render for us, the “Gunnlaug” has a concise picturesqueness, a purely artistic perfection, which place it at least as high as these, perhaps higher.¹⁶⁴

“The Story of Frithiof” also was warmly praised, but “The Story of Viglund” was generally described as being distinctly inferior to the first two “love stories.” Mr. Gosse even went so far as to say, “With all deference to Mr. Magnússon’s learning and Mr. Morris’s taste, we feel doubtful whether they were justified in occupying so much time and space with a saga so late and so poor as this.”¹⁶⁵ However, both Gosse and one of the other critics took pains to point out that the songs in this story were particularly beautiful; Gosse wrote, “The ‘Viglundarsaga’ is understood to be inelegant and unclassical in language….The best parts of the work are the passages in verse, which bear marks of an earlier and a far more gifted hand….We would take this opportunity of pointing out how especially beautiful are Mr. Morris’s versions of these short poems.”¹⁶⁶ The other three tales in the book were dismissed by the reviewers with only a few words. It is of course not surprising that this collection of stories, unlike the other two saga translations that Morris and Magnússon had published in book form, was highly praised by the critics, for these six short tales, especially the first three, in view of the fact that the characters and action portrayed in them were much

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closer to modern life, were much more easily understood by the nineteenth century Englishman than the Vőlsunga saga or the Grettis saga.

During the period of Morris’s life which we are now considering, when Morris was devoting himself almost entirely to Scandinavian studies, he became so intensely interested in Iceland and its literature that he determined to make a tour of the country even though he realized that such a trip would be accompanied by severe hardships and real dangers. Early in July, 1871, Morris left England for Iceland in the company of Eiríkr Magnússon, C.J. Faulkner, and W.H. Evans. The party first sighted land at Berufjőrðr in the southeast, and then sailed along the southern coast to Reykjavík. After spending a few days in the capital city, they set out to the southeast for the purpose of visiting Bergthorsknoll and Lithend; then they headed north proceeded through wild, rugged territory up to the northern coast; at Hnausar they turned south, riding back to Reykjavík along the western shore of Iceland, through the district richest in saga-associations. Morris and his friends returned to England early in September.

Even this extended trip, however, did not completely satisfy Morris’s longing for the land which was the main scene of the sagas he loved so well, and he soon began planning for a second visit. Two years later, in February, 1873, he wrote to a friend, “Iceland gapes for me still this summer: I grudge very much being away from the two or three people I care for so long as I must be, but if I

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can only get away in some sort of hope and heart I know it will be the making of me….”¹⁶⁷ In July of that year he set sail again for Iceland, accompanied this time only by C.J. Faulkner. Morris and his friend landed at Reykjavík, made a brief visit again to Njál district, and then set off in a northeasterly direction through the heart of Iceland; at Dettifoss, far up in the northeastern corner of the island, they turned west, and when they reached the Blandá they began travelling south, passing between Longjőkull and Arnarfellsjőkull on their way back to Reykjavík. On this second journey they visited very few saga-steads, most of their time being spent in wild, uninhabited country. They returned to England early in September.

During both his trips Morris kept a diary. The first one he rewrote when he came home, turning it into a finished, literary account of his experiences and impressions; the second diary he never revised. Neither the journal of the first journey nor the diary of the second was published during Morris’s lifetime, but they were both printed by Miss May Morris in 1911 in Volume VIII of the Collected Works.¹⁶⁸ Both accounts- but particularly the first one- are very well written and are extremely interesting; they have a special importance for the present study because of the light they throw on the extent of Morris’s acquaintance with saga-traditions at this time.

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Thus, very frequently in his description of the places that he and his friends visited, Morris shows in a striking manner that he knew the sagas very thoroughly and that he clearly remembered incidents and even details mentioned in these narratives. For example, when he is writing of their journey in the northeastern part of Iceland near Midfirth and is telling of their approach to Midfirth Neck, he notes, “Just as we turn out of the valley on to the neck, we come on a knoll, the site of Swala-stead, where Vali of the Bandamanna Saga was murdered….”¹⁶⁹ A few pages later, when he is describing the district around Ramfirth, he refers to Thorodd-stead as “the dwelling-place and death-place of Thorbiorn Oxmain, who slew Atli Grettir’s brother and was slain by Grettir in his turn.”¹⁷⁰ In his account of their ride past the head of Swanfirth, he says, “ …we rode down the other side of the firth till we came to Vadil’s-head where Arnkel the Priest, the good man of Erybyggia, is buried; … down here also Thorolf Lamefoot, Arnkel’s father was burned and so partly got rid of.”¹⁷¹ Of Swordfirth he writes,

Then we all rode away together passing by a little creek that Thorlacius pointed out to us as Sword-firth (Vigrafiőrðr) the scene of that ueer fight in Erybyggia where Freystein Rascal is killed, and often mentioned in that Saga: I remembered what a much bigger place I had always thought of for that place, where the very skerry in the middle is named after the fight, and called Fight-skerry.¹⁷²

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He even remembers the family relationship of various characters: he refers in one passage to Áseirgsá as “the home of Ásgeir Madpate, father of Hrefna and uncle of Grettir’s father,”¹⁷³ and in his account of Burgfirth he reminds his readers that “Egil lived at Borg, and his son Thorstein, father of Helga the Fair….”¹⁷⁴

Moreover, he not only reveals an intimate familiarity with the more famous sagas, which we already know that he had read, but he also shows that he was acquainted with some of the less important tales, which we should hardly expect him to have studied. Thus, when he and his friends are travelling in the northwestern part of Iceland, on their way from Grímstunga to Hnausar, Morris writes,

The hero and “landnáms-man” of the vale is Ingimund the Old and most of the steads Thorstein shows us have reference to him; at the first we come to Ás[where] lived Hrolleifr, the rascal he protected, and who slew him; … Thorstein points out a sandy spit running into the river which is the traditional place of the deadly wounding of Ingimund….¹⁷⁵

As Miss Morris points out in a footnote, these incidents are described in the Vatnsdæla saga.¹⁷⁶ It is still more surprising to discover a few pages later that he is familiar with the Finnboga saga ramma: he describes Borg as “the place of the Saga of Finnbogi the Strong; in its present condition rather a poor characterless story; but with one touching part in it where the wife of Finnbogi dies of grief for the slaying of her favourite son by a scoundrel.”¹⁷⁷

Undoubtedly the two tours increased Morris’s knowledge of the

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saga-traditions considerably. On several occasions we are told that the guides supplemented the stories in the sagas by local traditions. For example, in describing Swala-stead, to which I have already referred, Morris says, “Víðalin told us of it that many stories were current of it and of Swala’s witchcraft, and repeated a rhyme that says how the day will come when the big house of Swala-stead shall be lower than the cot of Víðidalstongue.”¹⁷⁸ A few pages later he says that when they were riding at the head of Hvammfirth, an old parson at whose home they had made a brief stop pointed out the places of interest in that locality:

Then we went out and he showed us above the house Auð’s thing-stead and doom-ring, and close by the temple of those days; though Auð herself was a Christian, and would have herself buried on the foreshore between high and low watermark, that she might not lie wholly in a heathen land: they show you a big stone on the beach that they call her gravestone: but ‘tis covered now by the tide.¹⁷⁹

Moreover, in many cases Morris’s visits to the scenes of the sagas seem to have changed his conception of tales he already knew and to have helped him to understand the characters and their actions more fully. Thus, when he is describing the horrible aspect of the mountains as they are passing Skialdbreið on their outward journey in 1871, he writes that “…just over this gap is the site of the fabulous or doubtful Thorisdale of the Grettis-Saga; and certainly the

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sight of it threw a new light on the way in which the story-teller meant his tale to be looked on.”¹⁸⁰ Much later in the Journal he says of Fagraskógarfiall, one of the haunts of Grettir, in the Mires, “It is as such a savage dreadful place, that it gave quite a new turn in my mind to the whole story, and transfigured Grettir into an awful and monstrous being, like one of the early giants of the world.”¹⁸¹

It is clear from remarks that Morris made in the accounts of both trips that he was deeply moved by his visits to the scenes of the sagas. As he describes the approach to Thingvellis he writes, “My heart beats, so please you, as we near the brow of the pass, and all the infinite wonder, which came upon me when I came  up on the Neck of the Diana to see Iceland for the first time, comes on me again now, for this is the heart of Iceland that we are going to see nor was the reality of the sight unworthy….”¹⁸² A few lines later, as he draws closer to the place, he remarks, “Once again that thin thread of insight and imagination, which comes so seldom to us, and is such a joy when it comes, did not fail me at this first sight of the greatest marvel and most storied place of Iceland.”¹⁸³ When he is writing of the his second visit to Lithend in 1873, he states,

It was the same melancholy sort of day as yesterday and all looked somewhat drearier than before, two years ago on a brign evening, and it was not till I got back from the howe and wandered by myself about the said site of Gunnar’s hall and looked out thence over

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the great grey plain that I could answer to the echoes of the beautiful story – but then at all events I did not fail.¹⁸⁴

A short time after he had returned to England, at the close of his second tour, he wrote to a friend,

The journey has deepened the impression I had of Iceland and increased my love for it. The glorious simplicity of the terrible and tragic, but beautiful land, with its well-remembered stories of brave men, killed all querulous feeling in me, and has made all the dear faces of wife and children and love and friends dearer than ever to me…! surely I have gained a great deal, and it was no idle whim that drew me there, but a true instinct for what I needed.¹⁸⁵

Morris’s intense interest in everything Scandinavian during the years 1870 to 1876 – an interest which, as we have seen, led him to translate a number of Icelandic sagas and several Northern ballads and induced him to make two trips to Iceland- is reflected also in several original poems which he wrote at this time. All but one of these, Sigurd the Volsung, are minor works or fragments; I shall discuss these shorter poems first, for all of them seem to have been composed at an earlier date than the Sigurd.

Three of these short pieces – “Iceland First Seen,” “Gunnar’s Howe above the House at Lithend,” and an unnamed fragment dealing with Gunnar and Njál- were directly inspired by his visits to Iceland. All three are undated, but although two of them were not published until 1891, when they appeared in Poems by the Way,¹⁸⁶ and the third was first printed by Miss May Morris in 1936 in her William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist,¹⁸⁷ the subject matter of these poems

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makes it almost certain that they were written in the early 1870’s.¹⁸⁸

In “Iceland First Seen,”¹⁸⁹ a short piece consisting of six seven-line stanzas in anapestic hexameters rhyming ababacc, Morris represents himself as asking, as he catches his first glimpse of the bleak, mountainous country, what it is he has come to see in this desolate land, and he answers that it is Iceland’s glorious past which has drawn him thither; he goes on to say that even when Balder returns to the earth and all sorrow and pain come to an end, it will be pleasant to dream of the days of old, when men lived nobly and courageously, although faced with inevitable defeat and ruin. According to his Journal of his first visit to Iceland, he obtained his first glimpse of the country when the “Diana” sailed into Berufjőrðr on July 13, 1871 to land some passengers at the trading-station of Djúpivogr;¹⁹⁰ no places are mentioned in the poem, but the description of the scene given in the opening stanza agrees with the account of Berufjőrðr in the Journal, so that this must have been the spot which inspired him to write these lines.

The second poem occasioned directly by his visit to Iceland, “Gunnar’s Howe above the House at Lithend,” is rather brief, consisting of only twenty hexameter lines.¹⁹¹ Here Morris describes his feelings as he stands at dusk one day, while the moon is shining feebly in the Northern summer sky, before the mound in which lies the famous Gunnar of the Njáls saga; he laments that noble

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deeds of the past can be so quickly forgotten that a man can now stand in this spot

with unbated breath,
As I name him that Gunnar of old, who erst in the haymaking tide
Felt all the land fragrant and fresh, as amidst of the edges he died.
Too swiftly fame fadeth away, if ye tremble not lest once again
The grey mound should open and show him glad-eyed without grudging or pain.
Little labour methinks to behold him but the tale-teller labored in vain.
Little labour for ears that may hearken to her his death-conquering song,
Till the heart swells to think of the gladness undying that overcame wrong.¹⁹²

In these lines Morris is obviously referring to the account given in Chapter LXXVII of the Njáls saga of how one night shortly after his death Gunnar’s mound opened and Skarphedinn and Hőgni, Gunnar’s son, saw and heard Gunnar singing within.¹⁹³ Morris records in the Journal of his first trip to Iceland in 1871 that he visited Lithend on July 21st, and says that he saw Gunnar’s mound first in the early evening and again, the same day, just before midnight.¹⁹⁴ It was almost certainly this second visit that provided the setting for this poem; in his Journal he writes of it as follows: “… it must have been about eleven at night as we passed the howe again: the moon was in the western sky, a little thin crescent, not shining at all as yet, though the days are visibly drawing in, and the little valley was in a sort of twilight not: so to camp and into our tents away from the heavy dew: the wind

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north-west and sky quite cloudless.”¹⁹⁵ According to his account of his second journey to Iceland, he saw Lithend again in the summer of 1873 on his way from Reykjavík to Steppafil. On the outgoing trip the party passed by without stopping, but when Morris and his friends returned, they halted for a rest at that farm and Morris revisited Gunnar’s howe; he says, however, that the day was dreary and that he did not at all feel moved by the associations of the spot as he had been two years before.¹⁹⁶ Undoubtedly it was the visit in July, 1871, that inspired the poem under consideration, and very likely Morris wrote the piece at this time or shortly thereafter.

The third poem on Iceland, as I have already stated, is only a fragment.¹⁹⁷ After expressing his longing for the days of old when men lived bravely and nobly and even in defeat gained fair fame, Morris says he will try to sin of these past days while waiting for their return, and he then abruptly begins to describe the site of Gunnar’s home at Lithend, with Fleetlithe to the north and Eyiafell to the east, pointing out to his imaginary companion the path of green on the hill where Gunnar lived and died and telling his friend that it is impossible from this spot to see Bergthorsknoll, where Njál and Sharphedinn¹⁹⁸ lie at rest. At this point the poem ends,

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The fragment that we have gives little indication of what Morris originally intended to do in this piece; it is possible that he had planned to retell briefly the story of Gunnar and Njál, using the actions of these men to exemplify the way of life that he had praised at the opening of the poem. Both this piece and the one discussed just before it reveal the deep impression that the Njáls saga, which he first read in Dasent’s translation,¹⁹⁹ had made on Morris; undoubtedly his visits to the scenes of the tale had made the story even more vivid. For the metrical form of the poem Morris chose seven-line stanzas rhyming ababacc, each line containing seven accents; in this use of fourteen-syllable lines, as Miss Morris points out,²⁰⁰ Morris foreshadows the choice of metre he was to make for his Sigurd the Volsung.

Three other poems which were printed for the first time in Poems by the Way in 1891 were the result of Morris’s Scandinavian studies.²⁰¹ Only one of these, “The Raven and the King’s Daughter,” can be definitely placed in the period 1871 to 1876, the manuscript of this work being dated August, 1872,²⁰² but the other two also, “Of the Wooing of Hallbiorn the Strong” and “The King of Denmark’s

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Sons,” for reasons which I shall state in a moment, were very likely composed in the early 1870’s, and are usually assigned to those years by critics.²⁰³

All three of these poems are written in the ballad style,²⁰⁴ and are furnished with a double refrain. Two of them deal definitely with Scandinavian material; and the third also, “The Raven and the King’s Daughter,” although its subject matter cannot be traced directly to Norse sources, seems to have been influences by the author’s Scandinavian studies. Very likely, as I just stated, Morris wrote all three poems during the period now under consideration, when his mind was full of Scandinavian matters and he was translating Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic ballads. Of course, the use of the ballad form with the doullable refrain cannot be ascribed definitely and solely to the influence of his study of the Scandinavian folk songs, for Morris was also well acquainted with the English and Scottish ballads; however, double refrains are much more usual in the Norse bads than in the English and Scottish ones, and, besides, some of the refrains Morris introduced distinctly recall Scandinavian refrains, whereas none of them are at all closely paralleled in the English and Scottish ballads, so that

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it seems very likely that these three ballad-imitations were, in form at least, the direct result of Morris’s interest in Scandinavian folk songs in the years 1870 to 1876.

“The Raven and the King’s Daughter” tells of a princess who has been shut up by her father in a tower and who seeks information about her lover Olaf from a raven. On its first visit the bird relates that it has seen Olaf sailing to battle in the company of Steingrim, and it says that he was then singing a song, promising to return and win his love. For this information the girl gives the raven a ring. A short time later the bird comes back to tell the princess that Olaf distinguished himself in the battle, and that he is now lying asleep on his ship; it adds that before the fight Steingrim promised to unite Olaf with his love. The next day at daybreak Steingrim brings Olaf, dead, to the bed of the princess, and she dies at once.

The names “Olaf” and “Steingrim” indicate that this story deals with Scandinavian characters, but so far as I know, the poem is not a translation of any Norse ballad and is not based on any immediate Scandinavian source.²⁰⁵ However, although the story as a whole is apparently Morris’s own, he seems to have drawn some of its details at least from the Scandinavian and English

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ballads. For example, in several of these folk songs, as in Morris’s poem, birds are represented as carrying messages or news;²⁰⁶ in regard to Morris’s selection of a raven for this purpose in his tale, it is interesting to note that in the English and Scottish ballads the birds which play the part of messengers are described as hawks, parrots, starlings, magpies, popinjays, nightingales, larks, cocks, or simply as birds, but never, it seems, as ravens, whereas in the Scandinavian folk songs they are regularly given the name “ravens.”²⁰⁷ Moreover, the account at the close of Morris’s poem of the death of the princess upon the lifeless body of her lover is paralleled, roughly at least, in a great many ballads.²⁰⁸ Finally, the refrain which Morris uses in this ballad-imitation,

Fair summer is on many a shield
Fair sing the swans ‘twixt firth and field,²⁰⁹

may very likely have been suggested to him by the refrains in the

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Icelandic ballads “Vallara kvæði” and “Draumkvæði,” for in the first of these the refrain is

-skín á skildi –
-sol og sumarið fríða -,

and in the second it runs

um sumarlánga tíð:
mín liljan fríð:
fagurt syngur svanrinn-

Both these ballads are printed in Grundtvig and Sigurðsson’s Íslenzk Fornkvæði,²¹⁰ with which we have already seen that Morris was acquainted.²¹¹

“Of the Wooing of Hallbiorn the Strong” bears the subtitle “A Story From the Land Settling Book of Iceland, Chapter XXX.”²¹² In this poem Morris follows fairly closely the story told in the Landnámabók of Hallbiorn’s visit to Odd of Tongue, his marriage to Odd’s daughter, Hallgerd, the slaying of Hallgerd by Hallbiorn because of her refusal to accompany him home in the spring, the death of Hallbiorn at the hands of Snæbiorn, and the end of Snæbiorn on Gunnbiorn’s skerries. As is to be expected, Morris makes the tale somewhat longer and fuller, adding descriptive details, dialogue, and a little sentiment; but he does not depart from the main facts of his original, and the ballad style in which he writes the poem helps him to preserve much of the terseness, restraint,

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and directions of the Icelandic account. The most striking change that he makes in the story concerns the part played by Snæbiorn in the tragedy. In the Landnámabók we are not told directly that Snæbiorn is a lover of Hallgerd, but we are led to suspect that he has some particular interest in the girl, for when the news of her slaying are brought to Odd, her father, the latter refuses to pursue Hallbiorn but immediately sends word to Snæbiorn, and it is this man who carries out the revenge on Hallbiorn and his followers. Morris, however, makes it clear from the outset that Snæbiorn is a rival lover, and he uses this character to render the situation more tense throughout the poem.

Very interesting is Morris’s insertion into the story of a number of place-names which are not given in his original; apparently he introduced these names in order to make the setting more vivid. Thus, he mentions Deildar-tongue, Whitewater, Brothers’-Tongue, Whitewater-side, Olfus mouth, Helliskarth, Oxridges, Shieldbroad-side, and the Wells. In the Landnámabók the references to the scenes of the action are extremely vague; in order to give the tale such a definite setting Morris almost certainly must have drawn upon some other account of these incidents. However, so far as I know, there is no other written version of the story. In fact, with the exception of Whitewater and Whitewater-side, both of which are frequently referred to in the sagas,²¹³ the

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place-names that Morris inserted are very rarely indeed mentioned in any of the sagas; only two of them occur in the Icelandic works which we know Morris had read at this time.²¹⁴ Most likely Morris had acquired the knowledge he reveals here of the setting of the story in the course of his trip to Iceland in 1871. According to the Journal he kept during his first visit, he and his friends travelled through the region in which the tale is laid, and he mentions all but one of these places in his account of this part of his trip.²¹⁵ Although he does not make any reference to this tale in the Journal, it is not at all unlikely that Magnússon, or some of the other Icelanders in the party, told or referred to the story as they were riding though this district, pointing out the places concerned, and that it was on this oral account, as well as on his own familiarity with the region and his acquaintance with the story in the Landnámabók, that Morris drew when he wrote his poem. In this connection it is interesting to note that a slight mistake that Morris makes in the poem in regard

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to the setting is also found in his account of this district in the Journal of his tour. In both descriptions he states that Odd lived at Deildar-tongue, but as Magnússon points out in the Notes to the Journal, Odd did not live here but at Breiðabólstaðr.²¹⁶

In this poem Morris uses the refrain

So many times over comes summer again,
What healing in summer if winter be vain?²¹⁷

So far as I know this is not a translation of any Scandinavian refrain, nor does it seem to have been directly inspired by any Scandinavian ballad. There are, however, a great many references to summer in the Scandinavian folk songs; as examples of refrains expressing a somewhat similar idea I should like to cite the following:

Nu är sommaren kommen;²¹⁸

I år så blir de ten sommar;²¹⁹

I år så få vi en sommar;²²⁰

Ty nu går sommaren in;²²¹

-Sumarið mun líða-.²²²

The ballad entitled “The King of Denmark’s Sons” deals with Knut and Harald, the sons of King Gorm and Queen Thyrre.²²³ According

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to Morris’s story, Harald, who was hot-headed, reckless, and given to fighting, grew up in jealousy and hatred of his brother Knut, who was kind-hearted, just, and fair, and who consequently won the love of his father and of all the people. In fact, Knut was so dear to his father that the King made a vow that whoever brought him news of his son’s death should himself lose his life at once. One Christmas as the young men were returning home for the Yule-feast, Harald came upon Knut in Lima-firth, the former having ten ships, the latter only three. The two parties fought, and Knut was killed. On his return home the following morning, Harald went at once to the Queen’s bower, and remained there the whole day. In the evening, evidently following the counsel of his mother, he strode into the hall where his father was drinking, and in answer to the King’s request for news, said that he had seen a white and a gray falcon battling together, and that after a long fight the gray one killed the white one. Gorm failed to realize the significance of the story. During the following night, however, while the King slept, Thyrre and her maidens draped the hall in black, and in the morning, as Gorm marched to his high-seat, he noticed the change. He asked the Queen whether Knut was dead, and she replied,

“The doom on thee, O King!
For thine own lips have said the thing.”²²⁴

Before noon old Gorm himself lay dead.

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It is interesting to note that in his poem Morris did not follow the more usual form of the story, according to which Knut was slain not by his brother but by the enemy, when the two brothers were fighting side by side in Great Britain; this is the version given in Saga Ólafs Konúngs Tryggvasonar,²²⁵ in the history of Saxo Grammaticus,²²⁶ in C. C. Rafn’s Nordiske Kæmpe-Historier,²²⁷ and in most of the modern histories which deal with the incident.²²⁸ Morris’s story is of course far superior to the other from a literary point of view: it has greater unity, it is much more dramatic, and the sense of tragedy is far deeper. For this form of the tale Morris very likely drew upon the account found in the opening chapters of Jómsvíkinga saga.²²⁹ This version is given by Torfæ

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also in hs Trifolium Historicum,²³⁰ and by J. B. Des Roches in his Histoire de Dannemarc,²³¹ the passages in Des Roches which deal with these incidents being virtually a translation of Torfæus’s account. However, although we know that Morris could read both Latin and French, and although there is nothing in his poem which he could not just as easily have drawn from Torfæus or Des Roches as from the Jómsvíkinga saga, it seems most likely that it was the Icelandic version which served as the basis of the poem, for this account is the longest and most fully developed and is by far the most readily accessible. In retelling the story, Morris made only a few relatively unimportant changes.

The refrain that Morris uses in this ballad imitation,

So fair upriseth the rim of the sun.
So grey is the sea when the day is done,²³²

is not, so far as I know, either directly translated from, or even closely paralleled by, the burden in any Scandinavian folk song. I have not found anything resembling the second half of Morris’s refrain in the Scandinavian ballads; the first part may possibly                                                                   

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have been suggested by such lines as,

För dagen dagas upp under östan;²³³

Det dagas intet än;

Men det dagas likväl under tiden;²³⁴

In der dagenn opliust!²³⁵

In addition to the fragmentary poem on Iceland which I discussed above, Miss Morris printed in 1936 in her William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist two other unfinished poems on Scandinavian subjects which seem to have been composed during the period we are now considering.

The first one,²³⁶ which consists of only twenty-one and a half lines, tells, in rather humdrum verse, how the sailors aboard a trading-vessel which had passed from Ghent to Norway and was now skirting the coast in sight of the “Thrandheimers mountains,” suddenly became aware of a longship bearing down upon them, its drake-head flashing in the sun; at this dramatic moment the story comes to and end. This fragment, like the uncompleted poem about King Harald and the unfinished drama “Anthony,” both of which I shall discuss in a moment, was evidently an attempt on the part of Morris to tell and original story laid in the Viking Age. It                               

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is rather surprising that during these years when he spent so much time reading and translating sagas he did not compose a tale of his own depiciting life in the saga-times; not until fifteen years later, when he began writing his prose romances, do we find him using the institutions, beliefs, and customs he found in the sagas to build up a background for an original narrative.²³⁷ The fragmentary story under consideration is told in rolling anapestic hexameter lines, which are grouped in seven-line stanzas rhyming abcbabc.²³⁸

The second fragment is somewhat longer, consisting of twenty heroic couplets.²³⁹ These lines also, as I have already indicated above, seem to be the beginning of an original narrative poem dealing with events supposed to have taken place in early Scandinavia. The fragment opens with a description of the skald Hornklofi singing in a Norse hall at night, when suddenly

from hollow of the horn
A formless dreadful note of war is born
Such as we heard it when the day was new
And the light wind across our raven blew
Drifting the sailless ships in Hafursfirth
While yet our glory was but come to birth.²⁴⁰

After a short account of this memorable victory at Hafursfirth the scene shifts back to the Norse hall, and the poem tells how Earl Ragnvald stands by the high-seat where sits King Harald, whose golden hair, now cut, 

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Lies either side his face in tresses fair.²⁴¹

For the familiarity Morris reveals here with the skald Hornklofi, with Harald’s important victory at Hafursfirth, and with the clipping of Harald’s hair by Earl Ragnvald after the King had made himself sole ruler of Norway, he was obviously indebted to the Haralds saga hárfagra.²⁴² However, there is no incident recorded in this saga between the time of Harald’s battle at Hafursfirth and the death of Ragnvald to which the poem as a whole can refer; apparently Morris was planning to treat the material in this part of the Heimskringla in an entirely original way.

The longest of these minor poems which Morris seems to have written during the period now under discussion and which bear the mark of his Scandinavian studies is the dramatic fragment “Anthony,” which he left unpublished but which his daughter printed in 1915.²⁴³ There is no external evidence, so far as I know, which dates this work. When Miss Morris published it in the last volume of the Collected Works, she included it in the group of compositions headed “Poems of the Earthly Paradise time (About 1865-1870)”; however, it seems to me almost certain that it was written well after 1870, for not only does Morris seem to allude to episodes in sagas which we know he did not read until after this year, but his very extensive references to the customs, beliefs, and history of the early Norse-men indicate that he was exceedingly well informed about these matters and that he was literally steeped in the stories of the sagas, and such was not the case before 1870. To be sure, Miss Morris

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seems to have had no definite reason for ascribing the poem to this early period, and very likely she had no intention of placing it definitely before 1870; she evidently assigned it to this group because she could not include it in either of the other two sections, the first one being “Early Poems,” written while Morris was at Oxford or directly thereafter, and the last one being “Late Poems,” most of which are compositions resulting from his Socialistic activities. For the reasons stated above, I have decided to consider the fragment a product of the central period of Morris’s interest in Scandinavia; and I have accordingly felt justified in suggesting as possible sources of Morris’s Scandinavian allusions sagas which he seems first to have read during the years 1871 to 1876.

The leading figure in this drama is Anthony, a wealthy man of “noble Southland kin.”²⁴⁴ When the play opens, Anthony is sailing with Wulfstan, an English Shipmaster, to the home of Rolf on the coast of Norway, for the purpose of seeking revenge upon this Northman for having many years before attacked his ancestral castle in the south, slain his father, and carried off his sister Margaret. Just after Anthony has arrived in Norway and has been reunited with his sister, the poem ends. Morris does not state the time of the action, but various allusions in the fragment indicate that the story is laid in the tenth century. We are told, for example, that Iceland has been settled²⁴⁵ and that Icelandic

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skalds are visiting in Norway;²⁴⁶ these remarks fix the time of the action well after 872. On the other hand, inasmuch as Norway is described as still being heathen,²⁴⁷ we can safely assume that we are dealing with the period before the reign of Olaf Tryggvason, who died in 1000, or at any rate before the death of Olaf the Holy in 1030.

Unlike most of Morris’s other Scandinavian works, this poem does not seem to have any definite historical or literary basis. I do not know of any similar situation in the sagas. However, two of the characters may have had historical prototypes. There is a possibility that in the case of Rolf, the Viking who plundered and burned Anthony’s castle, Morris had in mind Rolf Ganger, who, according to the Heimskringla, frequently harried in the South – Baltic lands, once made a raid in the Vík contrary to the command of Harald Fairhair and was consequently outlawed, went plundering in the Hebrides and later in northwestern France, and finally became earl of what is now called Normandy. Rolf Ganger came to Normandy in 911 and died in 931. Morris was undoubtedly familiar with the history of this Rolf not only from the account in the Heimskringla but also from the story in Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.²⁴⁸ However, Morris never applies the picturesque name of Rolf ganger to his character, as it seems very likely that he would have done if he had intended that his poem should refer to the historical Rolf.

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Moreover, in his poem Morris says that Rolf fought at York, Scarborough, and Dunwich,²⁴⁹ but none of the sagas, so far as I know, mention battles by Rolf Ganger at these places. On the whole, in spite of a certain similarity between the two, it is perhaps unsafe to assume that Morris intended to identify his character with Rolf Ganger. On the other hand, it is very probable that in the case of Earl Sigurd, who is depicted in the poem as the ruler of these Northmen, Morris is referring to Earl Sigurd of Ladir, who held practically supreme power over the Thrandheim district from the time of the death of his father Earl Hakon until he himself was murdered by the sons of Gunnhild, an event which, according to Laing, occurred in 962.²⁵⁰ the career of this Earl Sigurd is described at great length in the Heimskringla.²⁵¹ However, in Morris’s poem Earl Sigurd is said to have visited the English king,²⁵² but none of the sagas, so far as I know, mention any journey of Earl Sigurd of Ladir to England. Again, Morris says that Rolf was the foster-father of Earl Sigurd,²⁵³ but the sagas do not indicate where Earl Sigurd of Ladir was fostered. Nevertheless, in spite of these departures from the saga account; it is not at all unlikely that Morris meant to refer directly to the historical Earl Sigurd. The other Norse characters in the poem, Thora, Thorgerd, and Eric, are obviously entirely Morris’s own creations.

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Although the story as a whole appears not to be based on any situation described in the sagas, it is clear that Morris drew directly on the sagas for many of his details; we find in the poem a number of references to early Scandinavian customs and beliefs, and there are several passages which distinctly recall episodes in the sagas.

Thus, at the opening of the drama, when Wulfstand and Anthony are on their way to Norway, the English shipmaster describes for Anthony the character of the Northmen, and imparts to him some sound advice as to how he must act in this new land. He says,

A second warning: try your mocks on them,
They will not laugh belike or say a word
Though the hall roars around them; you shall think
Them dull and go on piling jeer on jeer;²⁵⁴
But two hours thence, two hours or days or months,
As time serves, you shall find they understood.²⁵⁵

Similar situations are found frequently in the sagas. In the Heiðarvíga saga, for example, Bardi is ridiculed and jeered at for being slow in seeking revenge for his brother Hall; but although he seems to pay little attention to these remarks, he carefully plans his actions with the help of Thorarin, and when the opportune moment arrives, he takes a revenge about which there is nothing mean.²⁵⁶ In the Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings old Howard is grievously insulted on two occasions when he seeks atonement from Thorbiorn for the slaying of his son Olaf, but although Howard must submit to these outrages at the time, he does

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not rest until he succeeds in killing Thorbiorn. Again, towards the close of the Vőlsunga saga Atli slays the brothers of Gudrun, his wife, and then mocks her; Gudrun pretends to be appeased, but some time thereafter she kills Atli’s two sons, murders him, and sets fire to the whole hall.²⁵⁷

A few lines later Wulfstan says,

 -Take this by the way that they may well deal thus,
Sell you a sword and thrust you through therewith,
Sell you a house and burn it o’er your head,
Sell you a horse and steal it the next morn,
Sell you a wife and bid her loose her tongue
Until you make a red mark on her face –
And then the district-court and her tall kin
And point and edge, or clink of the King’s sweet face
Outside you purse – Well all that by the way.²⁵⁸

Nothing exactly like this is related in any of the sagas, so far as I know. Very likely Morris is deliberately exaggerating the actual facts, because Wulfstan, into whose mouth he puts this statement, is obviously in a facetious mood as he characterizes the Norsemen for his friend Anthony. However, there is of course a certain element of truth in the description. For example, we frequently read in the sagas of the burning of people in their houses. The most famous account and the most likely source for Morris’s remark is, needless to say, the description given in the Njáls saga.²⁵⁹ The Hænsa-Dóris saga describes much more briefly a similar act,²⁶⁰ and the Eyrbyggja saga tells of an attempt at burning which was frustrated.²⁶¹ Moreover, the last part of the passage

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quoted – the account of the rights of married women – recalls the divorce of Thordis from Bork in the Eyrbyggja saga because of the blow he had give her when she tried to murder Eyolf.²⁶² The account in the Laxdæla saga of Gudrun’s separation from her first husband Thorvald is perhaps even more similar; in that saga we are told that when Thorvald struck Gudrun because he had become impatient at her incessant demand for jewels, she replied that he had now given her what all women highly esteem, “en pat er litarapt gótt,” and when she was later divorced from him, she received half his property.²⁶³

In his account of the Northmen Wulfstan goes on to say to Anthony that

all women here –
Yea how you start – are marked and known and named
Duaghter of this goodman, sister of that.²⁶⁴

Evidently Morris inserted this remark here because the Scandinavian system of nomenclature, which he of course met with in all the sagas he read, interested and amused him.

As the ship rounds a ness and they come in view of Rolf’s hall, Wulfstan describes the scene in the following words:

lo there the hall
Big enough for a king, the water deep
Up to the garth-gate; there on the round hill
Thor’s temple – may Christ curse it! the ship-stocks,
One, two, three cutters, one great merchant-ship
Just newly pitched – the long-ships neither there.²⁶⁵

A little later in the conversation, Wulfstan, having discovered the purpose of Anthony’s visit to Norway, exclaims,

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Why, [had] I said to Rolf thou wishedst him dead
He would laugh somewhat – drink nightlong with thee
And call thee to the ring of hazel wands
Wherein they fight next morn….²⁶⁶

I do not know of any exactly similar situation in the sagas; but so-called “holmgangs” are frequently mentioned,²⁶⁷ and the description of one of these may have been the basis of Morris’s remark. In the Egils saga we learn that Egil Skallagrimsson at one time visited a friend called Friðgeirr at his home in Norway.

After being detained there for three days by inclement weather, he prepared one morning to depart, and was then told that Ljótr the Pale, a famous beserk, had challenged Friðgeirr’s sister in marriage. Egil at once gladly assented to fight in his place and returned into the hall. The sagaman seems especially eager to show how unconcerned Egil was over such a fight, for he states that they drank all that day and arranged a great feast in the evening for a host of guests; the next day Egil killed Ljótr.²⁶⁸

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Wulfstan tries further to frighten Anthony from seeking revenge by extolling Rolf’s prowess in battle; he describes vividly his skill in handling a sword, concluding with the remark,

So say his own men, and our English folk
Have e’en such tales to tell of him at York
And Scarborough and Dunwich.²⁶⁹

I have already referred to this passage in my discussion of the possibility that Morris intended to identify his character Rolf with Rolf Ganger, and I have pointed out that the sagas do not state that Rolf Ganger ever fought at these places. However, Morris shows that he is familiar with the history of the Norse incasions of England in ascribing battles here to his character, for the Northmen were very active in this part of England. York and Scarborough are frequently mentioned in the sagas.²⁷⁰

The second scene of the drama is laid in Rolf’s home, where Thora, his wife, is talking with Margaret, Anthony’s sister. It is interesting to note how Morris utilizes his knowledge of the early history of Scandinavia by inserting allusions thereto in order to make his story more vivid and more realistic. Thus Thora remarks,

day by day,
For a year past, I thought of sending thee
Unto my mother’s brother in the North
Or out to Iceland to my father’s kin.²⁷¹

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Thora babbles on, and recalls her wedding-feast five years earlier, at which Earl Sigurd, then a fair young man, was present; she exclaims that he was so handsome that

Baldur come back to life again he seemed.²⁷²

With Balder and the story of Ragnarők we have already on several occasions seen that Morris was acquainted.²⁷³

After Wulfstan and Anthony have arrived, we learn that Icelandic skalds are being entertained at Rolf’s house, for Thora checks Wulfstan’s rather florid praises of her with the words,

Nay Wulfstan, we shall get to verses soon;
Content thee, man, two Icelanders we have
To set the big words going….²⁷⁴

We read repeatedly in the sagas of Icelandic poets who lived as honored guests on the large estates in Norway and received noble gifts as reward for their compositions; in fact the majority of the Norwegian court poets were Icelanders. Some of the most famous of the Icelandic skalds who visited Norway were Gunnlaug and Rafn in the Gunnalgus saga ormstungu, Kormák in the Kormáks saga, and Halfred Ottarson Vandrædaskald, Sigvat Thordarson, and Thiodolf Arnarson in the Heimskringla.²⁷⁵

After Thora has welcomed her guests and has asked for the news, she leads the men into the hall to the feast, saying,

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Come, whatso things tomorrow’s sun may bring,
Tonight at least shall see us somewhat glad
Drinking the grave-ales of our joys bygone.
Our hopes too bright to bear three noonday suns.²⁷⁶

There are numerous accounts in the sagas of the drinking of “grave-ales.” Perhaps the best known ones are the description in the Laxdæla saga of the feast that Olaf Pá gave in memory of Hőskuld, at which about a thousand friends were present,²⁷⁷ and the account in the Heimskringla of the funeral-banquet held by King Swand of Denmark for this father Harald, when Swend vowed either to kill King Athelstane of England or drive him away, and the chieftains of the Jomsburg Vikings pledged themselves to treat Earl Hakon of Norway in the same way.²⁷⁸ With both of these accounts Morris was undoubtedly familiar.

The last scene of this fragment shows us Anthony and Margaret conversing secretly in the forest near the hall; they recall the events of the day when their father’s castle was sacked, and Margaret relates how, while they were all standing huddled together in the courtyard, the captain cried out,

“Eric the skald, good skill thou deemst thou hast
In ways of women, choose thou ten of these
That like thee best besides this noble may.”²⁷⁹

By this reference to Eric the skald, Morris shows that he was familiar with the fact that skalds were often present in the battles of the Norsemen and sometimes even took an active part in the fighting. We

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often meet with references to this custom in the sagas. The Heimskringla, for example, tells us that Olaf the Holy took three skalds with him into the battle at Sticklestead so that they might by eyewitnesses of the events they would later be called upon to describe.²⁸⁰

Finally, I should like to point out that Margaret relates that when Eric facetiously selected an old hag for Rolf, the captain cried out,

“Nay, for this Valkyria here
Shall be my darling some four summer hence.”²⁸¹

It is of course unnecessary to seek for a definite source for Morris’s information about the Valkyries; he probably first became acquainted with these mythological figures through Thorpe’s Northern Mythology.²⁸²

It is unfortunate that Morris failed to finish this poem, for it is by far the most promising of all the attempts that he had made up to this time to write an original poem with a Scandinavian background. As my discussion has shown, he seems to have been extremely well acquainted with life in early Scandinavia by this time, and he could undoubtedly have made the whole story historically accurate and very realistic. Moreover, the fragment that we have is entirely free from the romantic, sentimentalized attitude toward the past that we find in his portrayal of medieval life in the prose romances that he wrote in the last eight years of his life.

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Before passing on to a discussion of the greatest of all the original poems that Morris wrote on a Scandinavian theme – The Story of Sigurd the Volsung -, I should like to point out that the work called Love is Enough; or, The Freeing of Pharamond, which was published in November, 1872,²⁸³ shows traces of Morris’s Norse interests although the poem as a whole is definitely no-Scandinavian. This piece tells of a king named Pharamond, who went in search of a beautiful maiden he had seen in a vision; after many hardships he found her, and he was so happy and contented in her love that when he returned to his kingdom and found that his people had chosen a new king in his absence, he gladly renounced all claim to the throne. This story is told in the form of a play, which is represented as being performed before an emperor and empress, recently married, and a host of their subjects. Morris presented the main action of the drama in alliterative unrhymed verse. Some critics have pointed out that Morris’s use of this form may have been the result not only of his acquaintance with Old and Middle English alliterative poetry but also of his study of the Poetic Edda.²⁸⁴ However, Morris’s alliterative verse does not at all conform to the rather strict rules of alliteration which govern Old Norse poetry; it seems likely that in introducing this verse from here Morris was not directly inspired by the Eddic lays, but rather, as Professor Mackail suggests, but the alliterative verse of the early English drama.²⁸⁵

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In commenting upon this poem, Mackail also points out that “touches of landscape here and there show that the author’s mind was still full of Iceland”;²⁸⁶ he cites no examples, but in making this statement he evidently had in mind such passages as the following:

Girthed about is the vale by a grey wall of mountains,
Rent apart in three places and tumbled together
In old times of the world when the earth-fires flowed forth;²⁸⁷

and

It was gone when I wakened – the name of that country –
Nay, how should I know it? – but ever meseemeth
‘Twas not in the southlands, for sharp in the sunset
And sunrise the air is, and whiles I have seen it
Amid white drift snow….²⁸⁸

Finally, I should like to call attention to one passage in the poem in which Morris alludes briefly to the three main figures in the story of the Volsungs. In the introductory speech of Love, who appears at regular intervals throughout the play to interpret the action, the god speaks of the various symbols of his power that he has collected through the ages, and mentions, among others,

My Sigurd’s sword, my Brynhild’s fiery bed,
The tale of years of Gudrun’s drearihead.²⁸⁹

With the material to which he refers here Morris had of course become acquainted through the Vőlsunga saga and the heroic lays in the Poetic Edda.

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The period 1871 to 1876, when Morris reached the peak of his interest in early Scandinavia, closes fittingly with the publication in 1876 of The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs,²⁹⁰ which not only ranks first among Morris’s Scandinavian works but is also, in the opinion of most critics, the greatest of all his poetical undertakings. In fact, Morris himself considered this poem his best, and it was on this production that he wished the final estimate of his literary ability to be based. Miss May Morris says of it,

It is the central work of my father’s life, his last long and important poem, and in it sustained poetic inspiration culminates – and closes. It is the work that, first and last – putting aside the eagerness of the moment which sometimes gives all precedence to the work in hand – he held most highly and wished to be remembered by. All his Icelandic study and travel, all his feeling for the North, led up to this, and his satisfaction with it did not waver or change to the last.²⁹¹

The history of this poem carries us back to the years 1869 and 1870, when Morris was translating the Vőlsunga saga and the heroic lays of the Edda. As I have already pointed out, Morris was repelled by the story of Sigurd when he first came into contact with it, but became more and more impressed with the dignity and grandeur of the tale as he proceeded to turn it into English;²⁹² and in his preface to the published translation of the Vőlsunga saga he speaks of it as “the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what

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the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks.”²⁹³ Morris revealed his deep admiration for the saga in an unrestrained manner in a letter he wrote to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard on December 21, 1869; commenting upon his work, he stated,

I have also another Icelandic translation in hand, the Volsunga Saga viz. which is the Ice: version of the Nibalungen, older I suppose, and, to my mind, without measure nobler and grander: I daresay you have read abstracts of the story, but however fine it seemed to you thus, it would give you little idea of the depth and intensity of the complete work: here and there indeed it is somewhat disjointed, I suppose from its having been put together from varying versions of the same song; it seems as though the author-collector felt the subject too much to trouble himself about the niceties of art…; the scene of the last interview between Sigurd and the despairing and terrible Brynhild touches me more than anything I have ever met with in literature; there is nothing wanting in it, nothing forgotten, nothing repeated, nothing overstrained; all tenderness is shown without the use of a tender word, all misery and despair without a word of raving, complete beauty without an ornament, and all this in two pages of moderate print. In short it is to the full meaning of the word inspired; touching too though hardly wonderful to think of the probable author; some 12 century Icelander, living the hardest and rudest of lives, seeing few people and pretty much the same day after day, with his old religion taken from him and his new one hardly gained – It doesn’t look promising for the future of art I fear. Perhaps you think my praise of the work somewhat stilted, but I has moved us one and all in the same way, and for my part I should be sorry to attempt reading aloud the scene I have told you of before strangers. I am not getting on well with my work, for in fact I believe the Vőlsunga has rather swallowed me up for some time past, I mean thinking about it, for it hasn’t taken me long to do. I had it in my head to write an epic of it, but though I still hanker after it, I see clearly it would be foolish, for no verse could render the best parts of it, and it would only be a flatter and tamer version of a thing already existing….²⁹⁴

In the Preface to Volume VI of The Saga Library, in a passage which I have already quoted in another connection, Magnússon tells us that it was he who suggested to Morris that he should retell the story of the Vőlsunga saga in a narrative poem of his own; he states

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that at first Morris definitely rejected the idea, even going “so far as to say that these matters were too scared, too venerable, to be touched by a modern hand…,” but a month of two later he found Morris one day “in a state of fervid enthusiasm,” determined to make an epic poem out of the story of Sigurd.²⁹⁵ However, although the tale of Sigurd was very much in Morris’s thoughts all through the early seventies,²⁹⁶ he did not actually begin writing the poem until October 15, 1875.²⁹⁷ By March of the following year, according to a letter quoted by Miss May Morris, he had reached the end of Part II, having finished his account of the death of Sigurd and Brynhild;²⁹⁸ in November, 1876, he had completed the whole work, and presented it to the public.²⁹⁹

The relation between Morris’s poem and his sources is very fully and competently discussed by Heinrich Bartels in his William Morris, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, Eine Studie über das Verhältnis des Epos zu den Quellen, published in Műnster in 1906. Bartels points out that in the main Morris followed the Vőlsunga saga, but that he used his original very freely, making numerous changes, additions, and omissions. Thus, for example, in order to give the work greater unity, Morris omitted several episodes

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in the Vőlsunga saga, such as the opening account of Odin, Sigi, and Rerir, Sigurd’s avenging of his father, and the story of Swanhild in the last three chapters; he tried to make the tale more acceptable to nineteenth century readers by omitting or altering the details of particularly savage episodes, such as the killing of Sigurd’s nine brothers in the woods by the she-wolf and Sigurd’s murder of the first two children of Siggeir and Signy; in several cases, for reasons difficult to ascertain, he failed to include references given in the saga to early Germanic customs, such as the burning of Brynhild on a pyre together with four men, two hawks, and ten slaves; in order to give his story a vague and mystical background, he substituted colorful but indefinite names for the more or less specific place-names mentioned in the original, as, for example, “Midworld’s Mark” for “Húnaland”; on several occasions he seems to have endeavored to render the tale less bewildering to modern readers by refraining from mentioning minor characters by name; greatest in number, as is to be expected, are the alterations that he made in the characters themselves, degrading some and elevating others for the purpose of improving the motivation and plot structure of the story from the modern point of view.³⁰⁰ Bartels also points out that in several cases Morris departed from the version of the tale given in the Vőlsunga saga and introduced instead material from the Sigurd lays in the Poetic Edda. Thus, he shows clearly

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that for many details and even incidents Morris drew upon “Reginsmál,” “Fáfnismál,” “Sigdrdrífomál,” “Guðrúnarkviða I,” “Sigurðarkviða in skamma,” “Atlakviða in grœnlenzka,” “Atlamál in grœnlenzko,” and “Frá dauða Sinfiǫtla.”³⁰¹ He also finds that for some of his material Morris was indebted to the non-Sigurd poems in the Edda, such as “Vǫlospá,” “Hávamál,” Grímnismál,” “Alvíssmál,” and “Helgakviða Hiǫrvarzsonar”;³⁰² these examples are especially interesting, because they are not the only clear proof we have that Morris read not only the heroic lays which he printed at the end of his translation of the Vőlsunga saga in 1870 but also the non-Sigurd poems at the beginning of the Edda. In a few cases, Bartels also notes, Morris seems to have followed the brief account of the Volsungs given in the “Skáldskaparmál” in the Prose Edda.³⁰³ Finally, he proves clearly that contrary to the statements generally made by critics and reviewers, the poem was considerably influenced by the Nibelungenlied, especially in the account of Gudrun after the murder of Sigurd by her brothers and in the whole description of the fight in Atli’s hall.³⁰⁴

In the foregoing synopsis I have pointed out that Bartels calls attention in his study to a few cases in which, in developing

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the background of his tale, Morris departed from the stories of Sigurd that he was following and inserted details drawn from other Norse works that he had read. In addition to the material of this nature to which I have already referred, Bartels notes at the beginning of his study³⁰⁵ that the account in the poem of the swearing of oaths over the “Boar of Sôn” at the wedding feast of Sigurd and the description of the ritual connected with the swearing of the oath of brotherhood were inserted by Morris, but he does not indicate the source of Morris’s information regarding these matters. Both these episodes demand further consideration than Bartels has given them.

In the Vőlsunga saga there is no detailed account of the wedding-feast of Sigurd and Gudrun; the Old Norse tale merely states that “a noble feast was holden, and endured many days, and Sigurd drank at the wedding of him and Gudrun….”³⁰⁶ Morris, however, tells us that in the midst of the feast the “Cup of daring Promise” and the “hallowed Boar of Sôn” were borne into the hall by servants,³⁰⁷ that Sigurd drew his sword, placed it on the “hallowed Wood’beast,” swore that he would live bravely and nobly, and then drank the “Cup of Promise,” and that afterwards Gudrun’s brothers, Gunnar and Hogni,

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did likewise.³⁰⁸ This custom – which, by the way, was usually restricted to the Yule-feast among the early Scandinavians – is mentioned in a number of works that Morris is known to have mead – namely, in one of the prose passages in “Helgakviða Hiǫrvarsonar,”³⁰⁹ in Thorpe’s Northern Mythology,³¹⁰ and in De la Motte Fouqué’s Sintram.³¹¹ It is only in the first of these accounts, however, that the term “Sonargőltr,” which Morris renders in his poem as the “Boar of Sôn,” is used. The description in the poem of the procedure followed in the swearing of brotherhood is likewise almost entirely an addition by Morris. In the Vőlsunga saga, when Sigurd marries Gudrun, we are simply told that he and Gudrun’s brothers swore oaths of brotherhood;³¹² later in the story there is a brief allusion to the blending of blood on this occasion,³¹³ but there is no reference in the original tale to the so-called “turf-yoke.” Morris, however, presents a detailed account of the procedure,³¹⁴ very likely drawing upon the description in the Gísla saga³¹⁵ for his information. He states that Sigurd, Gunnar, and Hogni went to the “Doom-ring,” loosened a strip of turf, raised it on two spears, crawled under it, cut open a vein in their

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arms, let their blood drip and mix on the soil beneath the cut turf, and then swore oaths of eternal loyalty and friendship.

The additions that Bartels shows were made by Morris are by no means the only steps Morris took to develop in greater detail the early Scandinavian background of his story. Especially numerous are the allusions he seems to have added for this purpose to the mythology of the early Norsemen. Throughout the poem we find references, not in his immediate originals, to Balder,³¹⁶ Thor or Vingi-Thor,³¹⁷ Mimir,³¹⁸ the Allfather, the Father of the Slain,³¹⁹ Fenris-

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Wolf,³²⁰ the Midworld’s Serpent,³²¹ Odin’s Choosers,³²² the Uttermost Horn,³²³ God-home,³²⁴ the House of Gold,³²⁵ the Midworld,³²⁶ and the Day of Doom or Ragnarők.³²⁷ With all this material Morris had undoubtedly become acquainted through Thorpe’s Northern Mythology and Mallet’s

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Northern Antiquities. Moreover, the references found in the poem to the use of “peace-strings” on swords,³²⁸ to the fighting of duels on “the hazelled field,”³²⁹ and the passing of judgment in the hallowed “Doom-rings”³³⁰ are not in the original versions of the Vőlsung story, but were added by Morris. With the “peace-strings” or “friðbőnd” found on Norse swords and with the custom of fighting “holmgangs” we have already seen that he was acquainted.³³¹ With the term “doom-ring” and the plan of the Old Norse courts which gave rise to this name he had very likely become familiar through the account of the early Scandinavian “doom-rings” given in Mallet’s Northern Antiquities³³² and through the allusions to “doom-rings” in some of the sagas he had read with Magnússon.³³³ Finally, I should like to point out that Morris introduced into his poem two proverbs which are not in his originals but which he had

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met with in the Grettis Saga – namely, “Best unto babe is mother”³³⁴ and “Old friends are last to sever.”³³⁵ It should also be noted that the descriptions of mountain scenery found throughout the poem were almost certainly influenced by Morris’s travels in Iceland.³³⁶

Bartel’s work is not the only study that has appeared of the relation of Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung to the Old Norse prose and poetical versions of the tale of Sigurd. In February, 1923, Geroge T. McDowell published an article on the same topic in Scandinavian Studies and Notes,³³⁷ which, though it is accurate³³⁸ and well-written, adds little or nothing to the subject. He compares Morris’s poem with the Vőlsunga saga, and finds, as Bartels did, that Morris made numerous omissions, additions, and changes. The most important difference between Morris’s tale and the original is, he feels, the manner in which Morris sentimentalized and romanticizes his characters, and throws a “golden haze” over many of his scenes; on the basis of this consideration he concludes that “William Morris can

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hardly be termed a just or wholly trustworthy interpreter of the spirit of the Icelandic sagas of the Volsungs.”³³⁹

In the British Museum, London, are deposited three manuscripts of Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung: two of them, Add 27497 and Add 27498, are quarto notebooks, presenting approximately the last third of the first version of the poem, together with numerous revisions at the close of the last volume; the third, Eg 866, is a folio volume, containing the final draft of the complete work, with several revised passages at the end.³⁴⁰ The greater part of the poem appears in these

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manuscripts in the same form as in the printed text, except of course for occasional minor, verbal changes; there are seven passages, however, each one dealing with one of the crucial moments of the story, which have been extensively revised and in pars even completely rewritten in the manuscript. In her Preface to Volume

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Twelve of Collected Works,³⁴¹ and in her William Morris: Artist Writer Socialist,³⁴² Miss Morris refers briefly to some of these revisions and discusses one -  the rewriting of the account of the final meeting between Sigurd and Brynhild – in detail, quoting the greater part of the early version of this scene. The other revisions also, it seems to me, are very interesting and deserve careful consideration, for they all throw light on the steps in the evolution of the poem in Morris’s mind and on the aims he kept before himself in writing the tale.

The first of these revisions, the reworking of the account of the birth of Sigurd, is chiefly interesting because it shows in a very striking manner the extent to which Morris improved the poem, from a literary point of view, in the course of rewriting certain sections.³⁴³ One of the loveliest passages in the whole work, as we have it in printed text, is the dialogue between King Elf and the women who come to show him the new-born babe;³⁴⁴ this scene, with its very effective suspense and climax, is entirely missing in the original version. There the child is presented to Kind Elf without any introductory comment, and he arises and delivers a long speech

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summarizing the early history of the Volsung family; the account given here of Sigi, Rerir, and the birth of King Volsung is found at the very beginning of the Vőlsunga saga,³⁴⁵ but Morris had omitted it at this point in his own version of the tale. When Morris rewrote this scene, he struck out this speech of King Elf; the only mention of the early Volsungs in the revised version occurs in the twelve-line account, at the end of this section, of the songs of the minstrels, in the course of which Sigi and Rerir are merely named.³⁴⁶ Perhaps Morris felt that this long speech with its indirect references to the early Volsungs would not only be unintelligible and therefore tedious to the majority of his readers, who would very likely be unacquainted with the Vőlsunga saga itself, but would also retard the action of the story too much at this significant moment. There can be no doubt that the dialogue which replaced it, with its air of unrestrained joy mingled with wonder and awe at the event which has just taken place, is far more effective.

In Manuscript Eg 2866 there is also found an early version of Sigurd’s fight with Fafnir on the Glittering Heath;³⁴⁷ in revising this description, Morris not only improved the passage as poetry but he also completely altered the details of the story itself. In the

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revised account Sigurd meets Odin as soon as he arrives on the glittering Heath, and Odin instructs him to dig a pit in the path of the serpent and to conceal himself therein; Sigurd follows the directions, and when Fafnir glides over the pit, the hero thrusts his sword into the monster’s heart, giving him his death wound; then ensues a dialogue between Sigurd and Fafnir, in which the latter foretells the future. In this version Morris follows substantially the story given in the Vőlsunga saga.³⁴⁸ In the earlier account, however, there is no mention of Odin; Sigurd does not construct a pit, but fights with Fafnir entirely on the surface of the ground; and the serpent dies without speaking. It is difficult to perceive what reason Morris could have had for originally presenting the story in this form. It seems almost impossible that he could have forgotten the method in which Sigurd killed the dragon and the conversation which he had with Fafnir that morning, for both these features are unusual and they are found not only in the Vőlsunga saga but also in “Fáfnismál”³⁴⁹ ; on the other hand, it seems very unlikely that Morris

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could have remembered these details, and that he could have omitted them deliberately. Miss May Morris, speaking of this passage, says that in the early form Fafnir is “a blind force of Hatred, dying without speech”; that Morris seems to have been afraid that if he left the scene in this form his readers might misunderstand the significance of this episode and might “attribute the slaying of Fafnir to small human things, as the hatred of Regin”; and that he therefore rewrote this section, introducing Odin and “the wonderful death-dialogue.”³⁵⁰ That the version in the printed text is superior is obvious; Morris’s motives for presenting the episode in the first form are, however, by no means clear.

The account of Sigurd’s drinking of Grimhild’s magic potion, as a result of which he forgets Brynhild and marries Gudrun, also appears in a different form in one of the manuscripts.³⁵¹ The early version of this episode differs considerably from the revised account, but in rewriting this scene Morris in the main simply expanded his original description without changing the actual facts of the story. In only two cases, in fact, do the two passages disagree in the details 

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of the action itself, and neither one of these two changes is significant: in the original version, Sigurd, after drinking Grimhild’s cup, broods in silence for a moment, and then strides out of the hall while the feasters sit bewildered, but in the printed account Sigurd remains in the hall throughout the evening, his silence throwing a hush on the rest of the company, and he does not set out on his ride until the others are departing from the feast and going to bed; moreover, at first Morris represented Sigurd as visiting Brynhild’s home twice during his ride, once during the night and again the following morning, but in the rewritten account he mention only one visit to the burg of Brynhild. Both these changes, as I have already stated, are without importance. Moreover, the question whether the first or the revised description follows the original account more closely in these respects does not arise, for both versions are entirely Morris’s own; the Vőlsunga saga, the only one of his sources that mentions Grimhild’s potion of forgetfulness, merely states that Sigurd drank the cup Grimhild offered him and then forgot Brynhild.³⁵² As I stated above, the main difference between the original and the revised account of this scene lies in the length of the two, but

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this difference in length is important, for in the additional material found in the later version Morris seems definitely to be striving to impress upon his readers the significance of the event he is describing. He first presents a long Homeric simile, in fourteen lines, comparing the silence that came over the Niblungs after Sigurd had drunk Grimhild’s cup and his face had become stern and moody to the hush that might fall on a group of feasters on a beautiful summer day when the eastern sky suddenly becomes murky with an approaching thunder-storm. He then relates that a short time after Sigurd drained the cup, marvelous flames leaped up around the hall where Bryynhild sat dreaming of the Volsung hero. Finally he describes how Grimhild called for music to drive away the melancholy and gloom that had settled on the Niblung warriors, and how the music of the harp went unheeded by the men who could do nothing but gaze upon the face of Sigurd and long for the sunny morning. Very likely Morris rewrote the scene, keeping Sigurd in the hall throughout the feast and introducing this additional material illustrating the intensity of his gloom because he felt that if he left the scene in its original form his readers might fail to realize the tremendous influence Grimhild’s magic potion was destined to have upon the remaining days of Sigurd and the Niblungs.

The fourth important revision, that of the scene between Brynhild and Sigurd after the quarreling of Brynhild and Gudrun, has been fully discussed by Miss May Morris in the Preface to Volume

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Twelve of the Collected Works.³⁵³ She there points out that the most striking difference between the first and the revised version is the elimination in the latter of “the note of human tenderness and suffering” that Morris had originally introduced into the scene; she thinks that her father rejected the first version of this episode because it was out “of scale with the epic place” of the whole poem.³⁵⁴

In my summary of Bartel’s study of the sources of Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, I have already pointed out that the last part of the poem shows the influence of the Nibelungenlied to a marked degree.³⁵⁵ In the Vőlsunga saga Atli, soon after his marriage to Gudrun, begins to long to possess the treasure of the Niblungs, and he invites Gunnar and Hogni to a feast in his hall in order that he may have an opportunity to fall upon them with a superior force and overcome them and so gain the gold; Gudrun, suspecting her husband’s designs, ties to warn her brothers against accepting the invitation.³⁵⁶ In Morris’s poem, however, the destruction of the Niblung kings by Atli is the deliberate work of Gudrun; even after she has been married to Atli, she does not forget her brothers’ murder of Sigurd, and in order to obtain revenge, she stirs up her second husband’s desire for the Niblung gold and induces him to bid Gunnar and Hogni come and

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visit him, so that he may bring them into his power.³⁵⁷ Morris’s Gudrun, therefore, shows a closer resemblance to Kriemhild of the Nibelungenlied than to Gudrun of the Vőlsunga saga.³⁵⁸ That Morris is to depart from the Norse story in his portrayal of Gudrun is first revealed to us in the scene in which Grimhild, Gunnar, and Hogni come to the home of Queen Thora for the purpose of inducing Gudrun to accept Atli’s suit for her hand in marriage.³⁵⁹ In the Vőlsunga saga and in “Guðrúnarkviða II” we are told that when Gudrun drank the magic cup of forgetfulness she lost all memory of Sigurd’s murder;³⁶⁰ but in Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung we read that

many a thing she forgat
But never the day of her sorrow, and of how o’er Sigurd she sat.³⁶¹

In one of the manuscripts, Add 37498,³⁶² is found an early version of this scene which is very interesting, for in this account Morris places much greater stress on Gudrun’s recollection of the slaying of her husband, and he seems to hint that it was simply because of the possibility that she might receive aid from Atli in obtaining

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revenge that Gudrun finally accepted his suit. In writing this first account Morris may have definitely had in mind the corresponding scene in the Nibelungenlied; there Kriemhild is at first utterly opposed to Etzel’s offer, but consents when Rűedegêr swears that he and his men will do their utmost to help her obtain revenge for the loss of Siegfried if she marries Ezel.³⁶³ It is also interesting to note that in this early version Gudrun does not make her decision on the first day, as she does in the Vőlsunga saga, but thinks about it during the night and decides on her answer the next morning, just as in the Nibelungenlied.

Perhaps the early version of this scene, with its resemblances to the Nibelungenlied, may be taken as an indication that Morris originally intended to make the whole ending of his poem much more like the German epic than it actually is. He may at first have planned to make Gudrun more like Kriemhild, - a cruel, heartless woman who would stop at nothing in her craving for revenge; as he proceeded with his story, this portrayal of Gudrun may have become distasteful to him, and he may also have come to realize that it was not necessary to make Gudrun such an inhuman woman as Kriemhild in order to bind the conclusion of the tale into closer unity with the preceding episode, than was the case in the Vőlsunga saga, by making the death of Gunnar and Hogni in the land of Atli the result

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of Gudrun’s desire for revenge for Sigurd’s death. In the description of the fight in Atli’s hall, Morris’s Gudrun of course shows a closer resemblance to Kriemhild than to the Norse Gudrun, but she is far from being the fiendlike creature that Kriemhild is; in Morris’s poem Gudrun watches the capture of her brothers but remains a passive spectator throughout the scene;³⁶⁴ in the corresponding passage in the Nibelungenlied, however, Kriemhild passionately urges her men to attack her brothers again and again, and when Hagen and Gunther are finally captured and brought before her, she slays Hagen with her own hand.³⁶⁵ Perhaps it was in order to make the scene in Queen Thora’s home more consistent with this later softening of Gudrun’s character that Morris rewrote his first version of the fetching of Gudrun, removing the emphasis on her undying hatred for her brothers and omitting any hint that, like Kriemhild, she consented to marry Atli merely because of her hope of thereby securing her revenge.

Very interesting also is the early version of Gunnar’s song in the snake-pit, found in manuscript Eg 2566.³⁶⁶ Both the original and revised accounts are entirely Morris’s invention, for his Norse

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sources merely state that Gunnar sang so sweetly in the pit that he lulled to sleep all the adders except one, this one stinging him to death.³⁶⁷ Nevertheless, Morris’s two descriptions of the scene differ radically. In the early version, the first part of Gunnar’s song consists of rather vague and colorless allusions to his past life; in the second half the Niblung hero sings of his approach to Valhalla as he dies. In the second version, however, when Gunnar is thrown into the snake-pit, he breaks the silence of this last night that he is alive by raising his voice and singing of the glory of the creation of earth and of man. As he feels his end approaching, he sings in a more subdued tone of his own life on this earth, not, however, referring to past events, as in the first version, but dwelling upon the joy he has always felt in this glorious world, and solacing himself, as he dies, with the thought that he has always lived nobly and bravely, without complaining and without questioning the plans of the gods. In the original version Gunnar is clearly much more human than in the second: having come face to face with death, he lingers lovingly on the happy scenes of his past. In the revised account, the personal element is minimized: Gunnar’s thoughts turn away from himself and go back to the dawn of the world, and he deals with the vast conceptions of the origin of the universe; when he speaks of himself, it is the god-like, not the human, side of his character that he shows. Certainly this second account harmonizes

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much more fully than the first with the nobility, dignity, and sustained grandeur of the poem as a whole; it is not at all unlikely that Morris cancelled the first version and substituted in its place the passage in the printed text for the very purpose of making this scene contribute to the heroic tone he was trying to impart to his whole tale.

Less interesting but demanding a few words of comment is the last revision, which comes at the very close of the whole poem. The original conclusion, found in manuscript Add 37497, is somewhat longer, more diffuse in its effect, and considerably weaker than the ending given in the printed text;³⁶⁸ in this first account, after Gudrun has thrust a sword into Atli and fled, the poem runs on for forty-nine lines, but in the revised version there are only twenty-six lines from that point to the end. The additional material in the earlier description consists mainly of an account of the glorious time that is to come when Balder returns to the earth; then it will be known, says the poet, what happened after Gudrun leaped into the waves, and then men will tenderly recall the whole tragic story of the Volsungs and Niblungs as well as the tragedy of other men who fought nobly and bravely though doomed to defeat. The whole passage seems particularly lacking inspiration; it was apparently composed very hurriedly, for some of the lines are metrically faulty, and 

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others, because of omissions and other mistakes Morris made in writing out his thoughts, are unintelligible as they stand. Much more effective is the terse account given in the revised version: here the poet merely states that Gudrun leaped into the sea, and he professes ignorance of what happened thereafter; he concludes the whole work with a brief summary, in eight lines, of the theme of his tale, emphasizing the divine origin of his hero, Sigurd the Volsung.

An examination of the major revisions that Morris made in writing out Sigurd the Volsung throws much light then, as I have indicated in the foregoing discussion, on the principles that he had in mind in composing the poem. In the first place, his alterations make it clear that he was very eager to impart to the tale, as far as possible, a tone of dignity, grandeur, and majesty, - in short, to give it true epic proportions. Sometimes, in the course of writing out the story, he was so deeply moved by the suffering and tragic fate of his characters that he momentarily forgot the heroic atmosphere for which he was seeking, and introduced into the poem a sympathetic and tender portrayal of their sorrow; two of the major revisions which I have discussed, one treating the final meeting of Brynhild and Sigurd and the other dealing with the death of Gunnar in King Atli’s snake-pit, are devoted to the cancellation of such infusions of sentiment and to the substitution, in their place of more objective treatments. In the case of the first of these two revisions, we find that Morris was willing to sacrifice a passage of infinite tenderness and beauty for the sake of preserving the heroic tone of

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the whole. Moreover, it was evidently for the same reason that he rejected the original ending of the whole poem. In the first draft, as I have already pointed out, the conclusion is rather weak because it is unduly lengthy and lacks unity of effect; furthermore, in that version Morris introduces a personal note, for he dwells on the happy time to come, when a new world will be created and Balder will return to life, and says that then it will be pleasant to recall this and other tales of tragedy and woe. In the revised form of the poem he has completely cancelled this original ending, and has inserted in its place a passage which is characterized by terseness and conciseness and which is entirely objective in point of view. Furthermore, the revisions Morris made indicate that he realized that the Old Norse story he was retelling had a rather complicated and involved plot, which his modern English readers would perhaps find hard to follow, for in several of the revisions which he made in the original draft of the poem he seems to striving to render the story more readily intelligible by bringing into clear relief the main incidents in the tale and by emphasizing the unity of the whole. Thus, in the first version of Sigurd’s fight with Fafnir, Morris for some unaccountable reason neglected to mention Sigurd’s conversation with the dying Fafnir, but in the rewritten form he presents a full account of this dialogue; the inclusion of this part of the scene is very important if we are to understand the later development of the story, for in this passage we are told of the curse resting on Fafnir’s gold and this curse, with its effect on all possessors of the gold, is the central theme of the whole story. Similarly, as I have already

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pointed out, the account of Sigurd’s drinking of Grimhild’s cup of forgetfulness was originally much shorter than it is in the printed text; probably Morris developed this scene more fully in the rewritten version so that his readers would not overlook the importance of this episode. It is also possible that in the scene describing the birth of Sigurd, Morris omitted in the final draft the original speech of King Elf, in which he summarized the early history of the Volsungs, for the reason that he was afraid that these brief and indirect references to events in the lives of Sigurd’s ancestors, all of whom are of distinctly minor importance for the story as a whole, would be confusing to his readers. Finally, several of the revisions show that Morris was endeavoring to add spontaneity and vigor to his account in order to prevent the dignified and exalted style of the poem from becoming dull; two of the most effective passages in the whole poem, one containing the dialogue between King Elf and the nurses of the baby Sigurd and the other presenting the conversation between Sigurd and Fafnir, were added by Morris in revising the first draft, as I have already indicated.

As I have stated above, Morris considered the Icelandic story of the Volsungs and Niblungs one of the greatest tales in the world, and felt that it had inspired him to produce his best poem; but long before his Sigurd the Volsung was finished, he began to fear that the reading public world would not understand and appreciate his retelling of this Northern saga. In a letter written to his wife in the summer of 1876, he said, in referring to the publication of Athenæum of a portion of the unfinished “Tale of Aristomenes,”

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By the way the Athenaeum has been very civil to me about that scrap of poem I published in it the other day, though it was not worth publishing either, and sent me L20; it seems, such is the world’s injustice and stupidity that it was a success – never mind; I shall pay for it when my new poem comes out….³⁶⁹

As a matter of fact, his prophecy came true; when Sigurd the Volsung was published in November, 1876, it was received with much less enthusiasm than his preceding works, both by his friends and by the public as a whole, and the sale of the book lagged.³⁷⁰ Contrary to his usual attitude toward the public reception of his literary productions, Morris at first expressed impatience with the people for their failure to appreciate this poem into which he felt he had put his best work; but two months after its publication he had become reconciled to the coldness with which it had been met, and he wrote in a letter to a friend, “My ill temper about the public was only a London mood and is quite passed now: and I think I have even forgotten what I myself have written about that most glorious of stories, and think about it all (and very often) as I did before I began my poem.”³⁷¹

If we examine the reviews of the work that appeared in the contemporary periodicals, we find that the critics took widely divergent views of the poem; some saw only defects in the work, others were extremely lavish in their praises, while a few of the more sober critics presented a more balanced criticism of the poem. Henry G. Hewlett, writing in Fraser’s Magazine, was especially harsh; in support of his opinion that the poem would in all probability never be very popular, he said,

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Its inordinate length alone will deter some readers even on the threshold; and the diffuseness of style which has now, we fear, become habitual with Mr. Morris, will probably weary others before they reach the end. The diction, however appropriate, is almost pedantically close in imitation to its model, the identical similes and metaphors employed by the Sagaman being often reproduced with some rhetorical amplification. Passages of novel and pictorial description are frequent, but the prevailing tenor of the narrative seldom rises above mediocrity; and beyond an occasionally nervous or graceful phrase, and a line or two exceptionally musical, the memory finds little to carry away, and the ear still less to haunt it…. The verbal archaisms are not, perhaps, in excess, considering the poet’s proclivities and the special character of his subject, but, to our thinking, are distinctly tiresome.³⁷²

The writer of the article on Sigurd the Volsung in the North American Review was somewhat less severe, but the general tone of his criticism also was adverse. The chief fault that he found with the poem was that it failed to reproduce faithfully the spirit of its source. The original tale, he said, was too savage and barbarous for modern English readers, and therefore Morris “recast it …  in the forms of modern sentiment”; in dealing with his material in this way, Morris was following the fashion of his time, for to “reproduce the antique, not as the ancients felt it, but as we feel it,- to transfuse it with modern thought and emotion,- that is the method now ‘in the air,’ as the French say, among Mr. Morris’s fellow artists….” Because of this treatment of the original material, the reviewer feels that the poem “is too much the outcome of a transient vogue in sentiment to insure a very long rememberance.”³⁷³ This criticism is of course to a great extent justified; but it is also true that Morris resisted to a surprising degree the temptation to introduce a modern tone into his retelling of this ancient tale, and as a result his Sigurd the Volsung is far freer from modern sentiment than his earlier Lovers of Gudrun or

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Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Furthermore, the Old Norse material which Morris elaborated in his poem is far from being so primitive, rude, and barbarous as the writer of this review asserts, and Morris was not compelled to make such extenwsive alterations in remodelling it as this critic implies. The rest of the article in the North American Review was concerned with minor defects: the writer said that the “imitation of the archaic style is, indeed, carried to excess, as if to cover the lack of the antique spirit,” that in the narrative itself there was “a deficiency in rapidity and directness,” and that the metre “is flexible and musical, though it does not escape the dangers of monotony.”³⁷⁴

Entirely different in tone are the notices of the poem that appeared in the Saturday Review, the London Quarterly Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. The first of these periodicals stated, “We regard this Story of Sigurd as his [i.e. Morris’s] greatest and most successful effort; of all poetical qualities, strength, subtlety, vividness, mystery, melody, variety – there is hardly one that it does not exhibit in a very high degree.”³⁷⁵ The critic in the London Quarterly Review began his article with the assertion that “The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs is probably the single book published within the last twelve months which it would be safe to set aside as the most certain of a place in the regards of the poetic readers of the next generation,”³⁷⁶ and he concluded his discussion in the same tone with the statement,

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Be it recorded…that the style and metrical qualities are surprisingly fine – that beside the clear panoramic evolution of the story we have to praise a most pure and vigorous poetic diction; and mysteries of subtle effect in rhyme and metre such as are not to be found in any work of this latter day – and of a higher quality than anything later than the best works of the Laureate – higher, that is to say, than anything published in England since 1855.³⁷⁷

The reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly lavished praise on the beauty and nobility of the poetry, the majesty, as well as gracefulness, of the metre, and the archaic diction, which is “so exactly suitable to the character of his [i.e. Morris’s] present work as to blend with its faultless general harmony and be hardly noticeable in it”;³⁷⁸ concerning the description of Sigurd’s first meeting with Brynhild on Hindfell, he exclaimed, “We may live and read long before we meet with poetry more noble in thought, more celestially sweet and satisfying in form, than the pages which describe the meeting and mutual recognition of these lovers.”³⁷⁹

Especially interesting are two reviews that appeared but a few weeks after the publication of the poem – one in the Athenæum, the other in the Academy; both these critics presented a somewhat mature attitude toward the work, for they saw both defects and virtues. The author of the article in the Athenæum regretted that Morris departed from his Old Norse source at the end of the tale and made the death of Gunnar and Hogni the result of Gudrun’s craving for revenge for Sigurd’s murder, as in the Nibelungenlied, for by making this change he failed to incorporate in his tale one of the chief excellences of the Vőlsunga saga – namely, the sense of unity resulting from “the

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dominance of everything – from first to last – by the curse of the gold….”³⁸⁰ He also feels that the verse is musical, but that in a poem of this length Morris’s hexameters are apt to become monotonous.³⁸¹ On the other hand he praised Morris’s sympathy with, and understanding of, the Old Norse attitude toward life, as revealed in his poem; Morris is so completely “soaked in Odinism,” he said, “that the spontaneity – real, and not apparent merely – of this reproduction of the temper of a bygone age is as marvelous as the spontaneity of the form in which it is embodied; while, for purity of English, for freedom from euphuism and every kind of ‘poetic diction’ (so called), it is far ahead of anything of equal length that has appeared in this century.”³⁸² A few lines later he added, “On the whole, we cannot but think this poem Mr. Morris’s greatest achievement. It is more masculine than ‘Jason’ – more vigorous and more dramatic than the best of the stories in the ‘Earthly Paradise.’”³⁸³ Edmund Gosse, the writer of the review in the Academy, expressed a fear that Morris’s poem would not be popular on account of his extensive use of archaisms and Old Norse kennings.³⁸⁴ Like the author of the article in the Athenæum, but for different reasons, Gosse found fault with the conclusion Morris had given his tale. He regretted that Morris did not make clear the fact that Brynhild was the sister of Atli, for by omitting any reference to this relationship, the modern poet “deprived himself of a valuable connecting link in the chain of retribution”:³⁸⁵ according to one Scandinavian tradition, which we find, in the “Drap Niflunga,” Atli’s feeling of

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hostility toward Gunnar and Hogni was the result of their share in the death of Brynhild. It is true, of course, that Morris could have given his tale a certain unity by remaining faithful to his Scandinavian sources, either as the reviewer in the Athenæum or as Gosse suggested; but it seems very probable that Morris preferred to bind the last episode to the body of the story by attributing the slaying of Gunnar and Hogni to Gudrun’s craving for revenge for Sigurd’s death for the reason that in this way he focused the attention of his readers on Sigurd throughout the tale, and it was in presenting Sigurd as a great heroic figure that his chief interest lay. Besides pointing out these defects, Gosse found much to praise. Of the poem as a whole he said, “Suffice it to say that Mr. Morris has treated it in a manner fully worthy of the heroic plan. The style he has adopted is more exalted and less idyllic, more rapturous and less luxurious – in a word, more spirited and more virile than that of any of his earlier works.”³⁸⁶ He praised the elevated tone which Morris maintained throughout the poem, and remarked, “In the presence of so much simplicity, and so much art that conceals its art, it is well to point out how supreme is the triumph of the poet in this respect.”³⁸⁷ Thus, although the reading public as a whole did not receive this poem kindly, we learn from these reviews that many of the leading critics of the time, only a few weeks after its publication, understood and appreciated the excellences of Morris’s work.

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The publication of Sigurd the Volsung in November, 1876, brings to a close, as I have already stated, the period 1871 to 1876 when Morris’s interest in early Scandinavia reached its peak. During these six years, as we have seen, Morris had devoted himself almost exclusively to his Norse studies, only two major works that were definitely non-Scandinavian in conception - Love is Enough and a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid – having been produced and published during this time, but at the end of 1876 Morris’s Norse studies came to an abrupt close. There is absolutely no reason to believe, however, that he suddenly dropped his Scandinavian work at this time because his enthusiasm for the North had become exhausted; it is quite clear that he terminated his Scandinavian studies in 1876 simply because, as I shall show in the next chapter, his attention was now for a time diverted into entirely new channels. It is not at all unlikely that if it had not been for these new interests, he would have gone on working on translations from the Scandinavian and on original treatments of Norse themes for several more years, just as he had done in the period we have been considering in this chapter.