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