ut in 1869 he took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr.
Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he issued a number of
translations.[54] "The Lovers of Gudrun" in "The Earthly Paradise" was
taken from the "Laxdaela Saga," and is in marked contrast with the other
poems in the collection. There is no romantic glamour about it. It is a
grim, domestic tragedy, moving among the homeliest surroundings. Save
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,