SOURCE: Hoare, Dorothy M. “The Dreamer in Contact with Icelandic Saga.” In The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature, pp. 50-76. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1937.

[In the following excerpt, Hoare examines Morris' translations and adaptations of the Volsunga Saga, arguing that his rendition of it changes the nature of the original text and replaces its direct style with dense medieval prose.]

It is this writer [William Morris] (who is following his own natural bent when describing the slow-moving pictures of his fancy) who attempts to deal with the vivid, impressive, passionate strength of the Norse tales. How individual a body of literature they are has already been seen; how different, too, from the “sweet” pathos, the dallying sentiment, the tender feeling, which is evident often in Morris' original work. This difference is emphasised strikingly, in a comparison of Morris' translations and free renderings of the Norse matter with the originals.

Morris' work in connection with the Norse sagas consists (1) in the translations which he and Magnússon jointly made from a selected number of them, and of certain of the Edda poems belonging to the matter of the Völsunga Saga; and (2) in the free paraphrases and re-tellings which Morris made of the Norse matter, including two of the greatest stories: the Laxdœla Saga and the Völsunga Saga.

1 (A). MORRIS' TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SAGAS

Any comparison of a translation with the original from which it has been translated is interesting. There is bound to be a difference; something of the essence of the original escapes; something of the essence of the new language enters in. From the point of view of obtaining an exact estimate of the original, this difference is a loss; from another point of view, it may be a gain, by emphasising the difference between two modes of thought. A good translator ought to reduce this difference to a minimum; he ought to be so imbued with the proper tone and atmosphere of what he translates, that the miracle of capturing that in other words is almost achieved. But when one finds that the difference has become so great as to make the translation quite a different thing from the original, one is able sometimes, on examination, to find a sufficiently convincing reason for it.

Morris had a sincere interest in the Norse sagas, spent much time over them, translated and paraphrased and re-told them, and made two journeys to Iceland. This last fact is considerable evidence of the deep interest he had in the Norse matter; the journey to Iceland entailed a fair amount of hardship; once arrived there, there was the rough life, the difficult and even sometimes dangerous travelling by horseback through comparatively uninhabited and unknown country, to be undergone. Morris, the most stay-at-home and contented man, did not relish this when he set out; he was away for six weeks, and, as he himself confesses, was often uneasy and homesick. Yet so much had he been stirred by the poems and tales he had read that, knowing the difficulties which would have to be undergone, he went through with the journey, and two years afterwards went a second time to Iceland. He was quite sincerely and deeply attracted to it; in spite of this, the Norse matter which he deals with turns in his hands to something quite other than its real nature.

His translations,¹ as will be seen from any comparison with their originals, change the vitality, directness and freedom of the Icelandic prose to a kind of weighted medieval utterance. For example, in Grettis Saga:²

Hinn þriðja dag fór prestr með þeim ok leituðu allan daginn ok fannȝ Glámr eigi. Eigi vildi prestr optar til fara, en sauðamaðr fannȝ þegar prestr var eigi í ferð. Létu þeir þá fyrir vinnast, at foera hann til kirkju, ok dysjuðu hann þar, sem hann var kominn. Lítlu síðar urðu menn varir við þat, at Glámr lá eigi kyrr.

[On the third day the priest went with them, and they searched all day but Glamr was not found. The priest would not go again; but the shepherd (i.e. Glamr) was found as soon as the priest was not with them. Then they stopped trying to bring him to church, and they buried him in a cairn, in the place where he was. Shortly afterwards people became aware that Glamr was not at rest.]

This has humour, vitality, a neat and direct expression. Morris renders it thus: “The third day the priest fared with them, and they sought all day, but found not Glam. The priest would go no more on such search, but the herdsman was found whenso the priest was not in their company. Then they let alone striving to bring him to church, and buried him there, whereto he had been brought. A little time after men were ware, that Glam lay not quiet.”³ In the ingenious search for the words which come nearest to the actual form of the Icelandic, the life and nearness, the directness has vanished. Again, in his effort to come near the original, he deliberately uses in his translation words which are not modern, forgetting, or not realising, that Icelandic prose is colloquial and rapid. The effective, quiet energy of what is not said, in Icelandic, loses its point in the long drawn out and rounded translation, as for instance, again from the same saga:⁴

þat var einn morgin er Grímr kvam heim af veiði, at hann gekk inn í skállann, ok stappaði fótum ok vildi vita hvárt Grettir svaefi; en hann brá sér hvergi við ok lá kyrr; … gjörir hann nú hark mikit, svá at Grettir skyldi orð finnast, en at var eigi.

[One morning when Grimr came home from fishing, he went into the hut and stamped his feet and wanted to find out whether Grettir was sleeping; but he lay still and did not move. Then he made a great noise so that Grettir should break into words, but he did not.]

The merit of this consists largely in its simplicity and utmost clearness as of a person relating what he has just seen. Morris at once destroys this: “But one morning whenas Grim came in from fishing, he went into the hut and stamped his foot and would know whether Grettir slept; but he started in nowise, but lay still: so he made a great noise that Grettir should chide him therefore, if he were awake, but that befell not.”⁵ This use of semi-biblical and dignified language, where such an effect is entirely incongruous, spoils the essential meaning of the passage.

Again, Morris' manner—in his effort to impose a tone of dignity—has often the effect of making his translation appear unintelligible to a reader who has no knowledge of Icelandic, for example:

• (1) Hjarandi said he would not bring his brother to purse.⁶

• Hjarrandi kvazt eigi mundu bera bróður sinn í sjóði.

• [Hjarandi said he would not take compensation for his brother's death.]

• (2) They said that they wotted not if he would drag the rule west of the sea to King Harald.

• Eigi sögðust þeir vita, at hann draegi Haraldi konungi ríki fyrir vestan haf.⁷

• [They said that they did not know that he would obtain a dominion for King Harald in the British Isles.]

• (3) The body of Bergðor was covered over with a tilt for the night.

• En þar var tjaldat yfir Bergðóri um nóttina.⁸

• [A cloth was hung over Bergthor's body for the night.]

Sometimes indeed a wrong impression is conveyed, e.g.

And yet withal it misliked them both.

Ok likaði þo hvargi vel.⁹

[Yet neither was pleased.]

—which might mean that both had a foreboding of what was to come, which is by no means indicated in the saga. Or again, in full medieval cry—

Then they tilted over a wain in most seemly wise.

þeir tjölduðu vagn allvegligan¹⁰

[They put a canopy over a splendid carriage.]

—which surely conveys, if any meaning, the utterly inappropriate picture of a kind of leisurely wrestling.

It is evident that Morris did not grasp the nature of the style and the matter with which he was dealing, or the result would not have been so entirely different from the effect which is obtained on reading Icelandic for oneself. His faults in manner—of reducing the speed, economy, plainness and vividness of the original to diffuseness, false rhetoric, obscurity, unfamiliarity, by making too literal a translation where the idiom needs to be translated by a corresponding English idiom, or by using phrases and syntax not in modern usage, and thus giving a kind of remote, medieval flavour to what is fresh and modern in spirit—may ultimately be reduced to the same first cause, the idea that the life dealt with was heroic in the ideal sense, a kind of earthly paradise where men were simple and free and noble, and untroubled by the misfortunes and oppressions of the modern world. This pre-misconception is what makes his style pitched up, and hollowly dignified. Because of this, the spirit of the Norse matter is altered.

1 (B). TRANSLATIONS FROM THE “EDDA” POEMS

So much for the translation of the sagas. Morris also translated certain of the Edda poems. It is difficult to deal with Morris' work in this connection; again it is obvious that for some reason he appreciated the Norse poems; this time, too, not for a quality superimposed by himself, a romantic feeling for the past, as in the sagas, but apparently with a direct realisation of their proper worth. In the preface to the Völsunga Saga,¹¹ where the translations of the poems are incorporated, Morris and Magnússon say: “As to the literary quality of this work we might say much, but we may well trust the reader of poetic insight to break through whatever entanglement of strange manners or unused element may at first trouble him, and to meet the nature and beauty with which it is filled: we cannot doubt that such a reader will be intensely touched by finding, amidst all its wildness and remoteness, such a startling realism, such subtilty, such close sympathy with all the passions that may move himself to-day.”

On the other hand, one cannot count much artistically on Morris' rendering of the Norse poems; it is not quite his own effort. Magnússon and he read the poems together, Magnússon then produced a literal version from which Morris proceeded to his rendering—a method of collaboration which is unhappy even in the case of a first-rate poet. It comes, in fact, to a poetising of a prose translation; hardly the best way in which to reproduce the spirit of the original.

It will be seen that the same faults are evident as in the saga translations, and it must be said (in spite of the contradictory evidence quoted above) for the same reason, an incapacity to comprehend the spirit which looks on life and death with equal courage and acceptance, which faces facts as they are and deals with them in full knowledge of their value.

Although the Edda poems are in the heroic manner and dignified, they are not static; the verse is compressed, allusive, packed full with meaning, but at the same time it has a fire and energy of speed. The poems are not cold though they are constrained; nor does their energy cloud the flame of high spirit which is evident in them. The words do not make us pause; they are molten and flexible because of the feeling which fills them. In Morris' version because he, whose virtue is a characteristic leisureliness and pleasant discursiveness, is dealing with matter wholly different, he interprets literally, apparently with the desire to imitate the multum in parvo of the Norse. Sometimes the result is merely ludicrous—in the translation of the Runes of Brynhild:¹²

Brimrúnar skalt kunna
ef vilt borgit hafa
á sundi seglmörum.

[Thou must know sea-runes if thou wilt have safety for the floating ships (lit. sail-steeds).]

Sea-runes good at need
Learnt for ship's saving
For the good health of the swimming horse.

Sometimes it is easily apparent that Morris has given himself over to the delight of building up words, of embroidery: as for example in his translation of “ok biðja a dísir duga” [and pray for the help of the dísir (goddesses)], “call for the good folk's gamesome helping”, which at once throws in the antique, pseudoromantic feeling. Sometimes, again, he makes strange and unreal what is said with fierce directness:

Melta knátt móðugr
manna valbráðir
eta at ölkrásum. …(13)

[You are proudly digesting human flesh and consuming it as a dainty with your ale.]

In most heavy mood
Brood over venison of men.

It is very significant that where he is able to catch the tone of the original, and render it without loss, it is when he has an opportunity of dealing, in images, with the softened note of romance. The Lay of Helgi Hundingsbane opens characteristically with the passion, fierceness and energy of the North: Sigrun's immediate outbreak into curses on the news of her lover's death. Yet the poem as a whole belongs to romance rather than to epic; the last verse, which brings one away from the unearthly meeting to the cold twilight on the hillside, strikes a note which is to be heard again and again in balladry. And precisely because of this, Morris' touch in his translation is more certain. Indeed at one point he manages the metaphors well, in the passage:

Svá bar Helgi                    af hildingum
sem ítrskapaðr                    askr af þyrni
eða sá dýrkalfr                    döggu slunginn,
es efri ferr                    öllum dýrum
(ok horn glóa                    við himin sjalfan).(14)

[So did Helgi surpass the warriors as a graceful ash (surpasses) a thorn, or the deer who moves, bedewed, higher than other beasts—and its horns glitter to heaven itself.]

Morris:

As high above all lords
Did Helgi bear him
As the ash-tree's glory
From the thorn ariseth
Or as the fawn
With the dew-fall sprinkled
Is far above
All other wild things,
As his horns go gleaming
'Gainst the very heavens.

It is a different matter when he deals with such a characteristic poem as The Whetting of Gudrun.¹⁵ The value of this lies in the exceedingly swift and stern narration, not a word given more than is absolutely necessary, and yet each helping to convey fully the force and passion of the whole. In Morris the expression loses all its sharpness, and becomes clogged and heavy. The first verse, for example, is quite alien to the terse, pointed phrase of the original:

þá frák sennu
slíðrfengligsta
trauð mál talið
af trega stórum.(16)

[Then I heard most dire words of strife, words uttered with difficulty out of mighty grief.]

Words of strife heard I
Huger than any
Woeful words spoken
Sprung from all sorrow.

Again, the mournful emphasis of the Icelandic is destroyed by a banality of rhythm and iteration which is ludicrous:

ól ek mér jóð
erfivörðu
erfivörðu
Jónakrs sonu.(17)

[I brought forth children, the sons and heirs of Jonakr.]

Offspring I brought forth
Props of a fair house
Props of a fair house,
Jonakr's fair sons.

Any translation of such compressed, fiery and allusive utterance is difficult. Indeed, parts of the poem seem almost untranslatable, their peculiar virtue residing in the sound and stress of the words by which the meaning is attained, e.g.

hvítum ok svörtum
á hervegi
gráum gangtömum
Gotna hrossum.(18)

[(Trodden) on the warpath by the white and the black and the grey well trained pacing horses of the Goths.]

Or the fiery scorn which leaps through Gudrun's bare words:

hví sitið ér?
hví sofið lífi?
hví tregrat ykr
teiti at maela … ?(19)

[Why do you sit idle? Why do you sleep away your life? Why does it not grieve you to speak cheerful words?]

The characteristics of this kind of poetry are its speed, its compression, and its pride. Matthew Arnold, in his essay on Homer and the epic way of writing, has laid his finger on the essential thing about it: “That severity of poetical style … which comes from saying a thing with a kind of intense compression or in an allusive, brief, almost haughty way, as if the poet's mind were charged with so many and such grave matters that he would not deign to treat any one of them explicitly.”

This compression and intensity turns in Morris' hands to obscurity and heaviness. His translation is effortful, striving after something which is alien from himself and which he does not seem to understand. In the attempt to come near his original, he uses the same kind of metre, without appearing to realise that the authentic use of it, with the immense stress laid on assonance and alliteration, is entirely different from an imitation of it in English which does not lend itself to that kind of handling, but depends to a much greater extent on accent and rhyme. Even when he is comparatively successful, with the rare occurrence of imagery, something is wanting. Compare the two versions:

Einstœð emk orðin,                    sem ösp í holti,
fallin at fraendum                    sem fura at kvisti,
vaðin at vilja                    sem viðr at laufi,
þás en kvistskœða                    kemr of dag varman.(20)

[I am become solitary, as an aspen tree in a wood, deprived of kinsmen, as the fir-tree of branches, bereft of joy, as the tree of leaves, when the bough-breaking ()(21) comes on a warm day.]

All alone am I now
As in holt is the aspen
As the fir-tree of boughs
So of kin am I bare:
As bare of things longed for
As the willow of leaves
When the bough-breaking wind
The warm day endeth.

The metre which Morris chooses is evidently modelled on the two-stressed half-line of the original; but the long drawn out mournful cadence with its double emphasis at the beginning of the line, and the wavering echo of it at the end, has become a jog-trot and monotonous rhythm.

Morris, then, in his translations of the Norse matter somehow turns the bright bare sword-spirit to quaintness and medievalism. In reading his versions we hear no echo of that poignancy and passion which expresses itself most truly and forcibly in its reservations. This is partly because he translated too literally; his literal versions have the fault of all literal versions, that they remove the original from the reader and substitute something false and unreal, because of the emphasis on what is quaint and unusual in English, and which is not so in Norse. But Morris' versions have this fault doubly aggravated, because he not only translated literally, but his translation was coloured by his attitude to the originals, the feeling that they were remote from present life, in the past, ideal and equable. This changes the intense fire of the poems to a level heaviness which is dull when it is not curious; and which becomes medieval and romantic when Morris has an opportunity to treat it more freely. From any point of view the translations are failures; they are too exact in their effort to follow the words and syntax and they fail lamentably to give the particular feeling of the original. Nor are they changed by the poet's personality into a new and living thing. They are, in a sense, negative.

2. FREE RENDERINGS OF THE NORSE MATTER

THE LAXDæLA SAGA AND THE VöLSUNGA SAGA

It is different when Morris deals freely with the stories of Iceland, which he re-expresses for himself; and here one is on more fruitful soil. Here is a critical test and one which gives unmistakable evidence of the incompatibility between Morris and the Norse matter. Even more than in the translations, an examination of both brings out as much the strength of the one as the weakness of the other, throws in higher relief the distinctive characteristics of each. Just because the versions are free, they reveal Morris. Because they represent Morris and not saga, they make more evident what the standard is to which they have not reached. Morris' work in the free rendering of Norse saga and the expression of what it meant to him consists mainly in four things: (1) the scattered verses in Poems by the Way, including a ballad paraphrased from an episode in Landnáma Bók, (2) The Fostering of Aslaug, (3) The Lovers of Gudrun, (4) Sigurd the Volsung. Of these the last two are the most important.

In Poems by the Way, To the Muse of the North shows his genuine attraction to the old stories, and his weakness in grasping where their virtue lies:

                                                  Made life a wondrous dream
And death the murmur of a restless stream

is hardly an accurate expression of the Norse attitude. The feeling that life is a wondrous dream runs through his own work, and he transfers it to the Norse. For the most part, here as elsewhere, he is content to express a vague and blurred emotion, thickened by words. So with Iceland first seen the first two verses express very well the desolation and strength of the land seen at close quarters for the first time, but afterwards the original impression is lost. The last verse:

Ah when thy Baldur comes back, and bears from the heart of the sun …

has nothing of the Norse feeling, and most of the Morris weakness, the indefiniteness of expression and the softness. Or again, in Gunnar's Howe above the House at Lithend, the just and quiet impression of the heroic memory of the dead, which is adequately given at the beginning, is turned at the close to poetisation, an artificial raising of the tone.

On the other hand, occasionally he can render the thing in his own way and carry it off. The Wooing of Hallbjorn turns the bare facts of Landnáma Bók into a spirited ballad. It shows the picturesque way in which Morris' fancy seized on the wild episode. In Landnáma Bók the situation is bitter, terse, realistic. Hallbjorn drags Hallgerda by the hair before striking her with the knife. Morris turns the story into the romantic ballad atmosphere:

He drew her by the lily hand;
“I love thee better than all the land.”
He drew her by the shoulders sweet;
“My threshold is but for thy feet.”

At the same time, his rendering has a vividness and vigour, which, in the fresh expression of the beginning at least, makes it attractive. It is not trying to imitate the manner of the original, or to render its feeling. Simply, it seizes on the elements of the story, and changes them to a different thing which is complete in itself.

This is evident also in the first considerable work of re-expressing what he found in the Norse, The Fostering of Aslaug. The material for the poem is given partly at the end of the Völsunga Saga, and partly in Ragnars Saga Loðbrókar. The saga gives the tale in two broken pieces: it is a romantic tale, and romance is not the virtue of saga; the method of allusiveness and compression does not suit this kind of tale so well. What the saga cannot do, Morris can; he seizes on the hints and single phrases of the original, and works them up into a consistent whole, consistent, because it is informed by his imaginative sympathy with the life of the young girl, and with the simplicity of the woodland. The poem has a delicate, fresh beauty, a clear sweet tone that lingers in the memory, in spite of many obvious faults of management.

It is entirely the reverse in his handling of the central theme of the Laxdæla Saga in The Lovers of Gudrun. We have already seen that the saga is at once fierce and collected, clear-sighted and tragic. Morris cannot grapple with so comprehensive a thing. He picks out from it the elements already familiar to him and embroiders them. The result is that tragedy is turned “to favour and prettiness”.

The kind of leisurely and pensive quiet seen in a typical passage

                                                            How armed at last
The men of Iceland up the long street passed
And saw few men there; wives and children stood
Before the doors to gaze, or in his hood
An elder muttered, as they passed him by,
Or sad-eyed maids looked at them longingly.

—is not true to the swift keen active life of the saga. It gives a false background to the dark strength of feeling revealed in the original, and with this false background the characters of Morris are in keeping. When Bolli leaves Gudrun with the news that Kjartan does not intend to return that year he is represented as overcome with the weariness of passion:

Therewith he rose, and towards the hall-door went
Nor heard her voice behind him, as she bent
O'er the tear-wetted rushes of the floor.
Sick-hearted was he when he passed the door,
Weary of all things, weary of his love
And muttering to himself hard things thereof.

The strength of the original has departed, and in its place comes the languor and weakness of sentiment.

Morris alters the story at various points in order that it may accord with his softened conception of it. He is at pains, for example, to represent Bolli as the long-suffering man whose love is excusable, but sinful, and as such brings suffering upon himself and the other characters concerned. The saga is not concerned with any specific question of morals. Stormy hearts beat themselves out against mischance and show their strength in passion. The merit of the fully-feeling nature is revealed, with a sense of its tragic possibilities. In Morris, pity and languor take the place of strength and bitterness, and a biased weighting of the balance in Bolli's favour contrasts with the unprejudiced and impartial, completer view of the saga.

His softening and reducing of the tone comes out most clearly in the central situation. Gudrun is changed from the passionate strong woman who conceals her love and hate in brief words, to a languid romantic figure, heavy with the fevered anguish of love and with knowledge of the complex threads entangling herself and those around her. In the saga, Gudrun faces facts, with the resoluteness of the strong mind, able to bear what it cannot avoid. There is no sentimental dallying with the situation. In Morris, this is turned to an empty gust of sighing.

Similarly, the death of Kjartan in the saga relieves the air and produces the fitting “reconciliation” of tragedy. In Morris, what is in the saga clean-cut and deep becomes lingering, sickly, a prolonged attempt at the pathetic. Bolli's silence over the dead man (in the saga), which needs no expression because of the action which speaks for it, is not kept by Morris. He invents for Bolli a reason for his attack on Kjartan, in order to soften the guilt which Morris felt he laboured under, and to ennoble his character:

Where was thy noble sword I looked to take
Here in my breast, and die for Gudrun's sake
And for thy sake?

The intrusion of such an element of the chevaleresque into the crisis of a tale which deals with feelings at the root of human nature is unpardonable. The saga has the inclusion and intensity of tragedy. Morris dissipates, and includes elements which do not properly belong to the theme, without any attempt at co-ordination. The saga crisis is unified; Morris' version is a series of situations strung on the same chain, but forming no significant pattern. The central situation is the same; the way in which the characters deal with the situation is entirely different. Instead of the gravity and depth of comprehension which expresses itself in few meaningful words behind which is all the fire of passion, there is a sense of impotent striving against the fret of life, expressed diffusely and elaborately. The final impression left by The Lovers of Gudrun is that of superficial sentiment, of a rhetorical expansion of the situation, of languor, in contrast to the terseness of the saga, which is stern in its suppression of feeling and yet vivid and quick with the realisation of the liberating value of passion fully felt.

SIGURD THE VOLSUNG

When Morris comes to deal with the Völsunga Saga he fails again to deal adequately with his material, but for a slightly different reason. In The Lovers of Gudrun, he has been led away by the romance latent in the situation to deal with tragedy as though it were something soft, piteous, lamentable. In Sigurd the Volsung he attempts to reproduce the heroic pitch of the Völsunga Saga, and fails, not because he is consciously mistaken, but because he substitutes something else for it. In a sense, the Völsunga Saga itself is not properly epic, because the main action is brought out by magic and the supernatural: but what is striking about it is, that though this is true, none the less the human interest is what presses on the reader. That wild dark spirit which knows the value of loyalty, the bitterness of love suppressed, the violence of jealousy, and is conscious at the same time that men, though foredoomed, must be brave, leaps at the reader through the bare words of the saga and in spite of the savagery and primitive feeling. Indeed, to deal adequately with such forceful and rending passions as it does, brevity is the condition of success—a flash, and the heart of darkness is exposed. But if the intensity of feeling has not quite been realised, as with Morris, then it is tempting to use many words, to pitch the thing up so that it sounds heroic. This is what happens in Sigurd the Volsung. Morris is not quite sure of his grasp on the reality of the feeling; he is interested in sentiment and situation more than in character and passion.

The Völsunga Saga itself is not a perfect artistic masterpiece. It is a prose redaction of the matter of the Edda poems, and combines some of the distinct traditions of legends in a confused way. In the Edda poems Brynhild is in some cases distinguished from the Valkyrie, whom Sigurd meets on Hindfell, as a separate and different character. Again, there is a hint of an older tradition that Sigurd marries Gudrun as a peace offering from her brothers after he has stormed their fortress and defeated them. The Völsunga Saga shows that it knows this tradition, while making no use of it, which is confusing; but it unifies Brynhild and the Valkyrie into one person, thus making for coherence and artistic unity—the interchange of rings on Hindfell leads to the development of the crisis.

More significant are the varying accounts of Gudrun's revenge, of which the Nibelungenlied gives one version and the Völsunga Saga another. In the Nibelungenlied, the tradition which Morris at this point follows, Gudrun is the avenger of Sigurd on her brothers through Atli as her tool. In the Völsunga Saga, Atli is represented as jealous of their powers; Gudrun sends warning messages to them, but in spite of her help they are trapped and killed. She avenges them on Atli. The Völsunga Saga seems to follow the Edda version, which is fairly consistent in this, although perhaps one or two separate references might be strained to bear the first interpretation.

But in spite of the confusing hints of differing traditions which crop up unexpectedly in the Völsunga Saga and show the flaws in workmanship, the whole thing stands together and has compelling power because of the way in which it handles the chief interest of the story—the central situation between the characters—and its perfect comprehension of the value of the most fundamental human feelings.

Morris' version is artistically more complete. He leaves out the gaps and ragged edges and makes a neat finish, but he does not present anything like the force and tragic power of the original. He has used both version of the story and adopted the Nibelungenlied notion of Gudrun as the avenging woman, a change entirely justifiable if it had been carried out successfully. But, for success, Gudrun would have to be shown as passionate, fierce, wild and resolute in her character, as Signy is in the beginning of the Völsunga Saga, who has a wild consistency of her own which makes her accepted as real. Now Morris in his handling of Signy reduces the savagery and fierceness as much as possible. If he alters the wild strength of a character who does not play much part in the central drama, it is an indication that he will not be very successful in a deliberate attempt at depicting his principal heroine as so moved by fierce passion that she is able to forget the natural love of her brothers. That he does make this attempt is obvious; in the quarrelling and recriminations and tauntings it is Gudrun who is the aggressor, and Brynhild is comparatively weak. She is made proud and bitter, exulting in the wounds she gives Brynhild, and though she repents of her words it is so that “with kind words she may hide it”, and when Brynhild does not accept her overtures, she grows hard and angry again. Brynhild is racked by passion, by the impotence of unrestrained and ineffective feeling. The poetical force and fire of the Völsunga Brynhild is missed. Again restraint is turned into the looseness of romantic feeling. But when Morris comes to the final scene of Gudrun the avenger, his weakness is more evident; Gudrun becomes merely a statue, looking on passively at the struggle which she has brought about, but taking no part in its action nor showing any faint interest in it, an almost lifeless figure, although Morris by reiteration and emphasis tries to make us believe that she is fateful and important. The situation becomes one of rhetoric rather than of passion:

… They look aloft to the high-seat, and lo! a woman alone,
A white queen crowned, and silent as the ancient shapen
          stone
That men find in the dale deserted. …
So Hogni seeth Gudrun, and the face he used to know,
Unspeakable, unchanging, with white unknitted brow,
With half-closed lips untrembling, with deedless hands and
                    cold
Laid still on knees that stir not, and the linen's moveless fold.

Again, in some of the passages dealing with Sigurd and Brynhild, there are indications of how changed the emotional reaction to the situation has become. One passage, afterwards cancelled, is of interest as showing the kind of way in which Morris approached the subject: the meeting of Sigurd with Brynhild before his death:

“O great is the deed,” said the Volsung, “and for this cause
                    hither I came,
To uplift thine heart for the slaying, for fulfilment of our
                    fame.”
          (Brynhild.) “But what tongue shall name the sorrow when
                    I rend the world atwain?”
“Great tidings,” said the Volsung, “when they tell of Sigurd
                    slain”. …
“O Sigurd,” she said, “O mighty, O fair in speech and
                    thought
As thou wert in the days past over: may the high Gods hide
                    it yet
The day and the deed of thy slaying, lest I falter and forget
And we twain grow vile together”. …

This is an attempt at once to justify Brynhild and to emphasise the doom of fate. But it is done at the expense of an essential factor in the saga. It destroys the tragic atmosphere. It is essential that Brynhild should be the slayer of what she loves. In that, after the striving of love and jealous hatred, lies the only measure of relief, and it is necessary that it should be the outcome of the strength of natural feeling. To make Brynhild into a conventional figure impelled by the Norns to avenge a wrong which was unconsciously done, for the sake of a factitious moral value, is to substitute what is false and unreal for what is keen and true. This passage was cancelled, it is true, but the same motive comes out in the poem in Brynhild's incitement of Gunnar:

“O swear it, King of the Niblungs, lest thine honour die of
                    the dearth!
O swear it, lord I have wedded, lest mine honour come to
                    naught,
And I be but a wretch and a bondmaid, for a year's
          embracing bought!”

The same shrinking from a full realisation of the subject is seen in his treatment of the characters of Hogni and Gunnar. In the saga there is no attempt to depreciate them for the sake of heightening Sigurd. Morris is prejudiced and shifts the balance of sympathy from the centre. Hogni is represented as grasping and hard. Gunnar is described as a prey to the suggestions of Grimhild, and actuated chiefly by the desire for gold:

And measureless pride is in Gunnar, and it blends with
          doubt and shame
And the unseen blossom is envy, and desire without a name
.....The words of his mother he gathered, and the wrath-flood
          over him rolled
And with it came many a longing, that his heart had never
          told,
Nay, scarce to himself in the night tide, for the gain of the
          ruddy rings,
And the fame of the earth unquestioned. …

The insistence on the gold motive as a reason for Gunnar's slaying is significant. It is an emphasis by Morris himself. In the Edda poem Sigurðarkviða en skamma, a hint of this is given. Gunnar suggests it to Hogni, and attempts to persuade him:

gótt's at ráða                    Rínar malmi
ok unandi                    auði stýra
ok sitjandi                    sælu njóta.(22)

[It is good to possess the Rhine metal (gold) and to enjoy the possession of wealth, and in quiet to enjoy happiness.]

But this poem is dealing with a different version of the previous story; the assumption is that Brynhild had been given in marriage in order to buy off the siege of Gunnar, Sigurd and Hogni; this explains Gunnar's bitter reference:

þú værir þess                    verðust kvinna
at fyr augum þér                    Atla hjøggim(23)

[You would have had your deserts—no woman more so—had we killed Atli before your eyes.]

and so Brynhild's reply:

né vildak þat                    at mik verr ætti,
áðr Gjúkungar                    at garði riðu.(24)

[I did not wish that any man should wed me, until the sons of Gjuki rode into the courtyard.]

This is all in keeping and perfectly consistent with that view of the story. The Völsunga Saga retains, confusingly enough, part of this tradition (Chap. xxix: “What didst thou with that ring that I gave thee, which King Budli gave me at our last parting, when thou and King Giuki came to him and threatened fire and the sword, unless ye had me to wife?”), but keeps it without using it at all, as part of an old stock which cannot be abandoned. It may be more reasonable, if the question of Gunnar's love for Brynhild does not enter in so much, to use the gold motive, but once the other version of the story is accepted, the action assumes a deeper and more universal significance, as the Völsunga Saga shows in spite of its confusion. In the Goðrúnarkviða II, again a knowledge of the old tradition is hinted at:

sofa né máttut
né of sakar doema
áðr þeir Sigurð
svelta létu.(25)

[They could not sleep nor give judgment until they had caused Sigurd to be killed.]

—which the Völsunga Saga²⁶ thus paraphrases: “Until my brothers envied me such a hero, who was foremost in all things; they might not sleep, until they slew him.”

But in spite of the confusion of the different strands of the story, in the Völsunga Saga the thing most stressed is the fact that Gunnar is prevailed on by love and jealousy, against himself and against Hogni's feeling, to slay his friend. When Brynhild at length tells Gunnar that he must slay Sigurd or lose her, “Gunnar grew sick at heart thereat, and could not see what was most fitting to do”,²⁷ but finally he is persuaded because of his love for Brynhild, and the shame that would be his if she went from him. Hogni is prevailed on very reluctantly and with great misgiving to help Gunnar. In spite of the fact that the gold motive is mentioned, it assumes a very inferior place—the prominent impression is that Gunnar is swayed by love and jealousy (Chap. xxx: “Brynhild is better to me than all things, and she is fairest of all women, and I will lay down my life rather than lose her love”). In the Nibelungenlied, the other tradition is impressed; Hagen is the chief instigator of the slaying of Siegfried. “Yet none had urged it further, had not Hagen tempted Gunther every day, saying that if Siegfried lived not, many kings' lands were subject to him.” Again Morris follows the German version. There are two ways of explaining why he did this: (1) he wished to rationalise Gunnar's slaying of Sigurd because he could not trust simply to the motive of love and jealousy; (2) because he had to work in explicitly the falling of the curse which the gold carries with it.

It is obvious that by using this motif of the curse the story is again more rounded and complete, just as by adopting Gudrun's revenge it becomes so. On the other hand, this very neatness and finality has its limitations. It shifts the centre of interest from the characters to something external and in a sense accidental, from reality to what is a “romantic” notion. In the Völsunga Saga, to repeat what cannot be said too often, in spite of the restrictions of the machinery the characters hold the attention and make the value of the saga; the essential tragic situation is the important thing. In Morris the very reverse happens: the machinery is emphasised (witness also the insistence of the Odin motif which comes in at various crises, the giving of the sword, Sinfjotli's death, Sigmund's last battle, Sigurd's choosing of Grani, etc.) with the intention of giving a kind of cosmic background, a larger and more imposing sense of gravity; and the result is that the characters themselves become less important. Again, if his reason for making the change is (1), it is once more a matter of failing to comprehend the full significance of tragedy. It might seem that Morris is making the thing less barbarous, more humane and understandable, by showing Hogni and Gunnar as already eaten up with the desire for gold and power: in reality, however, it is much more in the nature of tragedy if the evil comes out of an almost clear sky. The completeness and significance of the theme, which the Völsunga Saga, in spite of the difficulties, presses home, lies in the fact that Gunnar, an honourable and loyal friend, is wrought on by overwhelming passion to slay his friend. It is disastrous, but at the same time it is immense, and has a kind of intrinsic value. By imputing to Gunnar the gradual growth of other and meaner feelings, one may work the thing out apparently with more reason, but, in fact, the terror and pity, the fullness of inclusion of tragedy, are thereby lessened. The Völsunga Saga trusts to what is imaginatively true. Morris, curious contradiction, although he indulges in sentiment and the pleasurable, faint emotions, cannot cope with the strength and truth of such root-fast feeling as this. He cannot go deep enough; a superficial feeling he can attain to; but the central force of this is beyond him. Once more it is the difference between the reality and truthfulness, the penetrating force of the saga which knows what it is dealing with, and the vagueness, the weakness of “romance”.

Notes

1. See Morris and Magnússon, The Saga Library.

2. Grettis Saga, xxxii (Boer, Altnord. Saga Bibl.).

3. The italics are mine.

4. Grettis Saga, lv.

5. The italics are mine.

6. Grettis Saga, xxii.

7. Eyrbyggja Saga, i.

8. Ibid. xlvi.

9. Ibid. li.

10. Heimskringla—Halfdan the Black, v.

11. Morris and Magnússon, The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (London, 1878).

12. Sigrdrífumál, 9 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

13. Atlakviða, 37 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

14. Völsungakviða en forna, 41 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

15. Goðrúnarhvöt (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

16. Goðrúnarhvöt, 1 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

17. Ibid. 14.

18. Ibid. 2.

19. Goðrúnarhvöt, 2 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

20. Hamðismál, 6 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

21. Lit. ‘the branch-harming one’. Possibly ‘fire’ or ‘wind’ is understood.

22. Sigurðarkviða en skamma, 16 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

23. Ibid. 32.

24. Ibid. 35.

25. Goðrúnarkviða en forna, 3 (Saemundar Edda, Jónsson).

26. Völsunga Saga, xxxii.

27. Ibid. xxx.