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.

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 "cheap