[In the following excerpt, Esheleman asserts that Morris found echoes of his revolutionary sentiments in the Volsunga Saga.]

In examining the basic ideas of Morris's literary works one finds that his observations regarding life, history and art are in distinct agreement with his views concerning the individual and society under varying historic conditions. One will note, too, that these views led him eventually to the cause of the people—to an attempt to repurify decadent modern civilization—and that the ideas which pervaded his earlier poetry were not lost sight of, but found a richer and fuller expression in the poetry and prose of his later years.

While he was reading and translating the old Norse literature he became much interested in the religion of the Norsemen, and especially in the legend of ragna rök, the decline and fall of the gods in their last great battle. This made upon Morris's mind an indelible impression. Henceforth “The Doom of the Gods” and “The Dusk, or Twilight, of the Gods” frequently occur as expressions used by Morris to indicate the “great change” in an old order and the antecedent of a new. As time went on he was to believe more and more firmly in a coming great change, or revolution, within society. In the preceding chapter we have noted that as early as March, 1874, Morris had certainly been thinking of the “revenge of the Gods” against modern civilization.

What Morris did was to fit the ideas of Norse mythology into his own creed. That it helped him to become the Pagan which he afterward claimed to be, there can be little doubt. That Norse ideas and ideals made a more favourable impression upon him than did those of his own time and civilization there can also be but little doubt. As Morris himself once wrote, he found his Icelandic studies a good corrective for “the maundering side of medievalism.”

A skeptic might infer that Morris came under the influence of Professor Magnússon, his Cambridge tutor and collaborator, or of Professor John Henry Middleton, whom he had met on his foreign tours, or of the Icelanders themselves, and that consequently his ideas on Northern superiority were not typical of him. As a matter of fact, however, it is in Morris's own writings and not in the ones done in collaboration that such ideas come most forcefully to the front. Even in the earliest of Morris's Oxford poems—a poem of considerable length written in 1853 and entitled The Dedication of the Temple—he wrote:

O, South! O, sky without a cooling cloud;
O, sickening yellow sand without a break;
O, palm with dust a-lying on thy leaves;
O, scarlet flowers burning in the sun:
I cannot love thee, South, for all thy sun,
For all thy scarlet flowers or thy palms;
But in the North forever dwells my heart.
The North with all its human sympathies,
The glorious North, where all amidst the sleet,
Warm hearts do dwell, warm hearts sing out with joy;
The North that ever loves the poet well. …

This is no isolated instance. Morris's whole life is an exemplification of the fact that Northern and Western ideas and ideals were typical of all that he did and of all that he stood for. Doctor Mackail has said that there seemed to be so much of the Viking spirit in Morris that even his best friend, Edward Burne-Jones, once declared that Morris was really a sort of Viking, set down in these strange times, and making art because there is nothing else, nowadays, for a Viking to do.

In the Northern Love Stories, in the translations of the Grettis Saga and the Völsunga Saga, one sees, presumably, the learning of Magnússon and the literary art of Morris; but one sees also the spirit of the Old Norse heroes implicit in their pages. But one looks in vain for the insertions of typically socialistic Morrisiana, such as distinguish his own writings, or for Northern racial and cultural preferences such as distinguish certain pages of The Earthly Paradise, Sigurd the Volsung, and the later prose romances. Of the latter, The House of the Wolfings sets forth in no uncertain terms the virtues of the Germanic Goths as contrasted with the decadence of the effete Romans; while in The Roots of the Mountains the Germanic tribes of the Alps are the heroes who stand opposed to the Asiatic Huns.

In Sigurd the Volsung there are lines referring to

The last of the days of battle, when the host of the Gods is arrayed
And there is an end forever to all who were once afraid;

and to the time,

When the new light yet undreamed of shall shine o'er earth and sea;

and there are the famous lines, after Sigurd kills Regin:

Dead are the foes of God-home that would blend the good and ill;
And the world shall yet be famous, and the Gods shall have their will.
Nor shall I be dead and forgotten, while the earth grows worse and
                    worse,
With the blind heart blind o'er the people, and binding curse with curse.

As the trials of the Old Norse heroes were done away with in the death of the old gods—the doom of ragna rök and the coming new day when peace and happiness will abide in the world—so Morris transferred the situation metaphorically to make it apply to the evils of his own society. There can be no doubt that he hoped for the transformation of mercenary ideals, of competitive commerce, and of all the “old gods” of modern law, of modern morality, of social conventionalities in the Victorian sense, of modern art, and of modern politics and religion. And, if necessary, he wanted them to be destroyed by a revolution in society which would make mankind happy by replacing false and ugly ideals and beliefs with those which Morris felt to be superior. Then man will grow to be an intelligent and artistic animal, experiencing beauty in life and joy in work rather than ugly surroundings and sordid tasks; and this will bring a new fellowship among men.

And thus, although in Sigurd Morris was working on the creation of a great epic poem for the race, designed primarily as literature and not as propaganda, and although he was following closely the Old Norse models, he could not help registering his disgust with conditions under the “old gods”—with materialistic concepts—and, by the introduction of his own ideals, hint at the nature of things as they should be.

So it happens that at the very beginning of Sigurd, when the people are putting out from shore, we are informed that

The kings' sons dealt with the sail-sheets, and the earls and dukes
                    of war
Were the halers of the hawsers and the tuggers at the oar.

Again, at the beginning of the second book, in writing of the birth of Sigurd, the son of Sigmund, Morris says:

Peace lay on the land of the Helper and the house of Elf his son;
There merry men went bedward when their tide of toil was done,
And glad was the dawn's awakening, and the noon-tide fair and glad;
There no great store had the Franklin, and enough the hireling
                    had. …
'Twas a country of cunning craftsmen, and many a thing they wrought,
That the lands of the storm desired, and the homes of warfare sought.

These last lines suggest Morris's hatred of commercial competition and the imperialistic struggles bred by it. Materialistic ambition he detested, and so, in describing the villainous Atli, who wanted to marry Gudrun in order to secure the wealth of the Niblungs, Morris wrote:

Now there was a king of the Outlands, and Atli was his name,
The lord of a mighty people, a man of marvellous fame,
Who craved the utmost increase of all that kings desire;
Who would reach his hand to the gold as it ran in the ruddy fire,
Or go down to the ocean-pavements to harry the people beneath,
Or cast up his sword at the Gods, or bid the friendship of death.

Again and again in Sigurd the poet himself seems to look forward to a time when “the new light yet undreamed of shall shine o'er earth and sea,” and to a “day of better things,” and to “many a hope accomplished, and many an unhoped change.”

The conflict in Sigurd resolves itself not only around love and greed and envy, but around war and peace as well. When coming war threatens, one feels the poet himself, in keeping with the Norse spirit, rise to higher levels. Thus does Grimhild bid King Giuki's sons good-bye, and thus do they depart:

Be wise and mighty, O kings, and look in mine heart and behold
The craft that prevaileth o'er semblance and the treasured wisdom
                    of old;
I hallow you thus for the day, and I hallow you thus for the night,
And I hallow you thus for the dawning with my father's hidden
                    might.
Go now, for ye bear my will, while I sit in the hall and spin;
And tonight shall be the weaving, and tomorn the web shall ye win.
So they leap to the saddles aloft, and they ride and speak no word,
But the hills and the dales are awakened by the clink of the sheathéd
                    sword:
None looks in the face of the other, but the earth and the heavens gaze,
And behold the kings of battle ride down the ancient ways.

Yet another and more pacific spirit sometimes prevails above the warlike longing, however less spectacular it may be:

And I would that the loving were loved, and I would that the weary
                    should sleep,
And that man should harken to man, and that he that soweth should
                    reap.

The symbolism of Sigurd was excellently summed up by Arthur Clutton-Brock when he wrote that these struggles of which Morris tells do not result from “old, unhappy, far-off things,” but rather from the same struggle of forces that produce our own modern conflicts. Morris himself wrote of the original Völsunga Saga that “When the change of the world has made our race nothing more than a name of what has been—a story too—then it should be to those who come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.”