for the lawlessness of a primitive state of society which gave free play to the workings of the passions, the story might have passed in Yorkshire or New England.  A book like “Wuthering Heights,” or “Pembroke,” occasionally exhibits the same obstinate Berserkir rage of the tough old Teutonic stock, operating under modern conditions.  For the men and women of the sagas are hard as iron; their pride is ferocious, their courage and sense of duty inflexible, their hatred is as enduring as their love.  The memory of a slight or an injury is nursed for a lifetime, and when the hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonest human instincts—­such as mother love—­can avert the blow.  Signy in the “Voelsunga Saga” is implacable as fate.  To avenge the slaughter of the Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea.  When incest seems the only pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment’s hesitation.  The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over her own little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readiness of the fierce Medea to sacrifice her young brothers to Jason’s safety; more terrible by far than the matricide of Orestes.

The colossal mythology of the North had impressed Gray’s imagination a century before, Carlyle in his “Hero Worship” (1840) had given it the preference over the Greek, as an expression of race character and imagination.  In the preface to his translation of the “Voelsunga Saga,” Morris declared his surprise that no version of the story yet existed in English.  He said that it was one of the great stories of the world, and that to all men of Germanic blood it ought to be what the tale of Troy had been to the whole Hellenic race.  In 1876 he cast it into a poem, “Sigurd the Volsung,” in four books in riming lines of six iambic or anapaestic feet.  “The Lovers of Gudrun” drew its material from one of that class of sagas which rest upon historical facts.  The family vendetta which it narrates, in the Iceland of the eleventh century, is hardly more fabulous—­hardly less realistic—­than any modern blood feud in the Tennessee mountains.  The passions and dramatic situations are much the same in both.  The “Voelsunga Saga” belongs not to romantic literature, strictly speaking, but to the old cycle of hero epics, to that earlier Middle Age which preceded Christian chivalry.  It is the Scandinavian version of the story of the Niblungs, which Wagner’s music-dramas have rendered in another art.  But in common with romance, it abounds in superhuman wonders.  It is full of Eddaic poetry and mythology.  Sigmund and Sinfiotli change themselves into were wolves, like the people in “William of Palermo”:  Sigurd slays Fafnir, the dragon who guards the hoard, and his brother Regni, the last of the Dwarf-kin; Grimhild bewitches Sigurd with a cup of evil drink; Sigmund draws from the hall pillar the miraculous sword of Odin, and its shards are afterwards smithed by Regni for the killing of the monster.