Morris was so powerfully drawn to the Old Norse literature that he made two visits to Iceland, to verify the local references in the sagas and to acquaint himself with the strange Icelandic landscapes whose savage sublimity is reflected in the Icelandic writings.  “Sigurd the Volsung” is probably the most important contribution of Norse literature to English poetry; but it met with no such general acceptance as “The Earthly Paradise.”  The spirit which created the Northern mythology and composed the sagas is not extinct in the English descendants of Frisians and Danes.  There is something of it in the minstrel ballads; but it has been so softened by modern life and tempered with foreign culture elements, that these old tales in their aboriginal, barbaric sternness repel.  It is hard for any blossom of modern poetry to root itself in the scoriae of Hecla.

An indirect result of Morris’ Icelandic studies was his translation of Beowulf (1897), not a success; another was the remarkable series of prose poems or romances, which he put forth in the last ten years of his life.[55] There is nothing else quite like these.  They are written in a peculiar archaic English which the author shaped for himself out of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century models, like the “Morte Darthur” and the English translation of the “Gesta Roroanorum,” but with an anxious preference for the Saxon and Danish elements of the vocabulary.  It is a dialect in which a market town is called a “cheaping-stead,” a popular assembly a “folk-mote,” foresters are “wood-abiders,” sailors are “ship-carles,” a family is a “kindred,” poetry is “song-craft,” [56] and any kind of enclosure is a “garth.”  The prose is frequently interchanged with verse, not by way of lyrical outbursts, but as a variation in the narrative method, after the manner of the Old French cantefables, such as “Aucassin et Nicolete”; but more exactly after the manner of the sagas, in which the azoic rock of Eddaic poetry crops out ever and anon under the prose strata.  This Saxonism of style is in marked contrast with Scott, who employs without question the highly latinised English which his age had inherited from the last.  Nor are Morris’ romances historical in the manner of the Waverley novels.  The first two of the series, however, are historical in the sense that they endeavour to reproduce in exact detail the picture of an extinct society.  Time and place are not precisely indicated, but the scene is somewhere in the old German forest, and the period is early in the Christian era, during the obscure wanderings and settlements of the Gothic tribes.  “The House of the Wolfings” concerns the life of such a community, which has made a series of clearings in “Mirkwood” on a stream tributary to the Rhine.  The folk of Midmark live very much as Tacitus describes the ancient Germans as living.  Each kindred dwells in a great common hall, like the hall of the Niblungs or the Volsungs, or of King Hrothgar