SOURCE: Boos, Florence S. “Morris' Radical Revisions to the Laxdaela Saga.” Victorian Poetry 21 (1983): 415-20.

In the following essay, Boos details Morris's reworking of the second half of the Laxdaela Saga into his poem “The Lovers of Gudrun,” calling it the transformation of “a feud-narrative of property negotiations and family rivalries into an exemplum of doomed friendship and heterosexual love.”

“The Lovers of Gudrun” provides one of the most interesting examples of Morris' reworking of an earlier narrative, for both the Laxdaela Saga and “The Lovers of Gudrun” are in their divergent ways impressive literary works. “The Lovers of Gudrun,” published in December, 1869, was Morris' first poetic narrative based on an Icelandic saga, and its dramatic qualities may seem to reflect his temperamental identification with medieval Norse literature. In fact, no Earthly Paradise tale shows more fidelity to the historical letter of its original, and few more infidelity to...