During these years Morris learned Icelandic, and his next published works were translations of some of the Icelandic sagas, writings composed from six to nine hundred years ago, and containing a mass of legends, histories and romances finely told in a noble language.  These translations were followed in 1876 by his great epic poem, “Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs.”  In that poem he retold a story of which an Icelandic version, the “Volsunga Saga,” written in the twelfth century, is one of the world’s masterpieces.  It is the great epic of Northern Europe, just as the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of Homer are the chief epics of ancient Greece, and the “AEneid” of Virgil the chief epic of the Roman Empire.  Morris’s love for these great stories of ancient times led him to rewrite the tale of the Volsungs and Niblungs, which he reckoned the finest of them all, more fully and on a larger scale than it had ever been written before.  He had already, in 1875, translated the “AEneid” into verse, and some ten years later, in 1886-87, he also made a verse translation of the “Odyssey.”  In 1873 he had also written another very beautiful poem, “Love is Enough,” containing the story of three pairs of lovers, a countryman and country-woman, an emperor and empress, and a prince and peasant girl.  This poem was written in the form of a play, not of a narrative.

To write prose was at first for Morris more difficult than to write poetry.  Verse came naturally to him, and he composed in prose only with much effort until after long practice.  Except for his early tales in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and his translations of Icelandic sagas, he wrote little but poetry until the year 1882.  About that time he began to give lectures and addresses, and wrote them in great numbers during the latter part of his life.  A number of them were collected and published in two volumes called “Hopes and Fears for Art” and “Signs of Change,” and many others have been published separately.  He thus gradually accustomed himself to prose composition.  For several years he was too busy with other things, which he thought more important, to spend time on storytelling; but his instinct forced itself out again, and in 1886 he began the series of romances in prose or in mixed prose and verse which went on during the next ten years.  The chief of these are, “A Dream of John Ball,” “The House of Wolfings,” “The Roots of the Mountains,” “News from Nowhere,” “The Glittering Plain,” “The Wood beyond the World,” “The Well at the World’s End,” “The Water of the Wondrous Isles,” and “The Sundering Flood.”  During the same years he also translated, out of Icelandic and old French books, more of the stories which he had long known and admired.  “The Sundering Flood” was written in his last illness, and finished by him within a few days of his death, in the autumn of 1896.

INTRODUCTION TO SIGURD

By The Editors