SOURCE: Spatt, Hartley S. “Morrissaga: Sigurd the Volsung.” ELH 42, no. 2 (summer 1977): 355-75.

In the following essay, Spatt presents a comparative analysis of the Volsunga Saga and Morris's late-nineteenth-century epic Sigurd the Volsung.

During the forty years of his career, William Morris sought—at first confidently but later with desperation—a religion which might replace the inadequate Christianity of his youth. He embraced the grandeur of the lost cause in his early poems about Camelot and Troy; he moved on to the archetype of the quest in The Earthly Paradise; and he placed his central faith in “the greatest story of the world,”¹ the epic religion of Scandinavia. For ten years, during his prime of life, Morris struggled with the Norse sagas in a vain attempt to recreate their passionate nobility in a form accessible to the enervated Victorian. Finally, he achieved the work which encompassed all prior attempts...