The Story of Sigurd the Volsung | Page 2

of art also, both in prose and verse, as a
romance-writer and a poet. But he spoke of it as play rather than work,
and although he spent much time and great pains on it, he regarded it as
relaxation from the harder and more constant work of his life, which
was carrying on the business of designing, painting, weaving, dyeing,
printing and other occupations of that kind. In later life he also gave
much of his time to political and social work, with the object of
bringing back mankind into a path from which they had strayed since
the end of the Middle Ages, and creating a state of society in which art,
by the people and for the people, a joy to the maker and the user, might
be naturally, easily, and universally produced.
Even as a boy Morris had been noted for his love of reading and
inventing tales; but he did not begin to write any until he had been for a
couple of years at Oxford. His earliest poems and his earliest written
prose tales belong to the same year, 1855, in which he determined to
make art his profession. The first of either that he published appeared in
the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which was started and managed
by him and his friends in 1856. In 1858, after he had left Oxford, he
brought out a volume of poems called, after the title of the first poem in
the book, "The Defence of Guenevere." Soon afterwards he founded,
with some of his old Oxford friends and others whom he had made in
London, among whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the leading spirit,
the firm of Morris and Company, manufacturers and decorators. His
business, in which he was the principal and finally the sole partner,
took up the main part of his time. He had also married, and built

himself a beautiful small house in Kent, the decoration of which went
busily on for several years. Among all these other occupations he
almost gave up writing stories, but never ceased reading and thinking
about them. In 1865 he came back to live in London, where, being
close to his work, he had more leisure for other things; and between
1865 and 1870 he wrote between thirty and forty tales in verse,
containing not less than seventy or eighty thousand lines in all. The
longest of these tales, "The Life and Death of Jason," appeared in 1867.
It is the old Greek story of the ship Argo and the voyage in quest of the
Golden Fleece. Twenty-five other tales are included in "The Earthly
Paradise," published in three parts between 1868 and 1870.
During these years Morris learned Icelandic, and his next published
works were translations of some of the Icelandic sagas, writings
composed from six to nine hundred years ago, and containing a mass of
legends, histories and romances finely told in a noble language. These
translations were followed in 1876 by his great epic poem, "Sigurd the
Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs." 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 "Æneid" 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
"Æneid" 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