The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs
Author | William Morris "Author of 'The Earthly Paradise'" |
---|---|
Illustrator | Edward Burne-Jones |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Genre | Epic poem |
Publisher | Ellis and White |
Publication date | 1876 |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 392 pp |
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876) is an epic poem of over 10,000 lines by
Synopsis
Book I: Sigmund
The poem opens with the marriage of king Volsung's daughter Signy to Siggeir, king of the Goths. The bridal feast is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger, the god Odin in disguise, who drives a sword into a tree-trunk. Though everyone tries to draw the sword, Volsung's son Sigmund is the only man who can do it. The disappointed Siggeir takes his new wife home, inviting Volsung to visit him. When Volsung does so he is killed by Siggeir, and his sons are taken prisoner. While in captivity they are all killed by a wolf, apart from Sigmund who escapes into the forest. Signy sends Sigmund her two sons to help him in avenging their family, but Sigmund accepts only Sinfjotli, the hardier of the two. Sigmund and Sinfjotli kill Siggeir and burn down his hall, then return to their ancestral home, the hall of the Volsungs. Sigmund marries Borghild, while Sinfjotli goes abroad with Borghild's brother, quarrels with him, and kills him. On his return Sinfjotli is poisoned by Borghild, and she is turned out by Sigmund, who instead marries Hiordis. Sigmund is killed in battle, and the pregnant Hiordis is taken to live in the hall of King Elf in Denmark.
Book II: Regin
There she gives birth to
Book III: Brynhild
The scene changes to the court of Giuki, the Niblung king. Giuki's daughter Gudrun has a dream in which she encounters a beautiful but ominous falcon and takes it to her breast. Anxious to learn the meaning of the dream she rides to visit Brynhild, who tells her that she will marry a king, but that her life will be darkened by war and death. Gudrun returns home. Sigurd revisits Brynhild and they again declare their love for each other. He then rides to the Niblung court, where he joins them in making war on the Southland, winning great glory for himself. The witch Grimhild, Gudrun's mother, gives Sigurd a potion that makes him fall in love with Gudrun. Completely under her spell, he marries her and sets out to win Brynhild for Gudrun's brother Gunnar. Visiting Brynhild again, this time magically disguised as Gunnar, and again penetrating the fire that surrounds her, he reminds her that she is promised to whoever can overcome the supernatural fire, and so deceives her into reluctantly vowing to marry Gunnar. Brynhild goes to the Niblung land and carries out her promise. She is distraught at this tragic outcome, and doubly so when Gudrun spitefully tells her of the trick by which Sigurd deceived her into an unwanted wedding. Brynhild now urges Gunnar and his brothers Hogni and Guttorm to kill Sigurd. Guttorm murders Sigurd as he lies in bed, but the dying Sigurd throws his sword and kills Guttorm as he leaves. Brynhild, filled with remorse, commits suicide so that she and Sigurd can be burned on a single funeral pyre.
Book IV: Gudrun
The widowed Gudrun now marries Brynhild's brother, king
Genesis
Morris first came across
Composition
While still working on the prose translation Morris wrote to Charles Eliot Norton:
I had it in my head to write an epic of it, but though I still hanker after it, I see clearly it would be foolish, for no verse could render the best parts of it, and it would only be a flatter and tamer version of a thing already existing.[14]
Morris visited Iceland in 1871 and 1873. Also in 1873 he was aware that Richard Wagner was writing Der Ring des Nibelungen, and wrote:
I look upon it as nothing short of desecration to bring such a tremendous and world-wide subject under the gaslights of an opera: the most rococo and degraded of all forms of art – the idea of a sandy-haired German tenor tweedledeeing over the unspeakable woes of Sigurd, which even the simplest words are not typical enough to express![15]
Morris began work on Sigurd the Volsung in October 1875, completing it the following year. In the end the poem extended to over 10,000 lines.[16] He took both the Volsunga Saga and the corresponding poems of the Poetic Edda|Elder Edda as his basic sources, but felt free to alter them as he thought necessary.[17] The poem is in rhyming hexameter couplets, often with anapaestic movement and a feminine caesura. In keeping with the Germanic theme Morris used kennings, a good deal of alliteration, and wherever possible words of Anglo-Saxon origin.[18] This resulted in a difficult and archaic diction,[19] involving such lines as:
The folk of the war-wand's forgers wrought never better steel
Since first the burg of heaven uprose for man-folk's weal.[20]— Book 1, lines 137-138
and
So they make the yoke-beasts ready, and dight the wains for the way,[21]
— Book 3, line 109
Critical reception
According to Morris' daughter May it was the work he "held most highly and wished to be remembered by".[3] Contemporary reviewers mostly agreed. In America The Atlantic Monthly compared it to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, writing that
Sigurd, the Volsung is the second great English epic of our generation...and it ranks after Tennyson's "Arthuriad" in order of time only. It fully equals that monumental work in the force and pathos of the story told, while it surpasses it in unity and continuity of interest.[22]
A poem...which, like Sigurd, reflects, with hard, uncompromising realism, an obsolete code of ethics, and a barbarous condition of society, finds itself irreconcilably at discord with the key of nineteenth-century feeling. Deprived of its strongest claim to interest, a sympathetic response in the moral and religious sentiment of its readers, it can only appeal to the intellect as a work of art, or as a more or less successful attempt at antiquarian restoration. It may be admired and applauded by the lettered few; but it will not be taken to the nation's heart.[26]
By contrast, the North American Review believed it to be Morris's method "To reproduce the antique, not as the ancients felt it, but as we feel it,– to transfuse it with modern thought and emotion."[27]
After Morris's death interest in his poems began to fade, but a few enthusiasts for Sigurd the Volsung continued to speak out in its favour. Arthur Symons wrote in 1896 that Sigurd the Volsung "remains his masterpiece of sustained power", and in 1912 the young T. E. Lawrence called it "the best poem I know"[4][28] According to the philologist E. V. Gordon Sigurd the Volsung is "incomparably the greatest poem – perhaps the only great poem – in English which has been inspired by Norse literature", and George Bernard Shaw went so far as to call it "the greatest epic since Homer".[5][29] However the novelist Eric Linklater, while acknowledging that "Morris tells his story with endless invention, with a brilliant profusion of detail", complained that the poem's "Thames-side heroism" conveyed too facile a sense of tragedy.[30] It has never had a wide readership, and contemporary judgements on Sigurd tend to depend upon the judge's opinion of Morris's verse in general. Some find its length and archaic diction off-putting, but many modern critics agree with Morris that it is his finest poem.[6][31][32][33]
Editions
The poem was published by Ellis and White in November 1876, although the date appeared on the imprint as 1877. They issued a second edition in 1877 and a third in 1880. The book was brought out again in 1887 by Reeves and Turner, and in 1896 by Longman.[10][34] In 1898, two years after Morris's death, a revised text was published by the Kelmscott Press in an edition limited to 160 paper copies and 6 vellum copies, with wood cuts by Sir Edward Burne-Jones.[35] In 1910 Longman issued an edition in which some passages were replaced with prose summaries by Winifred Turner and Helen Scott.[36] In 1911 the same firm reprinted the original version as volume 12 of The Collected Works of William Morris, with an introduction by May Morris; in the absence of a critical edition this is the one generally cited by scholars.[37] In recent years Sigurd the Volsung has been frequently reprinted, sometimes in the Turner and Scott abridged version.[38][39][40]
Influence on later fantasy writers
Magnússon and Morris remained the only English translation of
In contrast to Morris’ work, written as it is in heavily archaic, difficult-to-penetrate prose, Tolkien's recently-published draft[42] was closer in both style and content to the heroic sagas of The Poetic Edda.[19]
Other authors have been inspired more or less directly by the
Fight for Right
In 1916, during World War I, composer Edward Elgar set to music words taken from The Story of Sigurd, producing the song "Fight for Right". It was dedicated to Members of the Fight for Right Movement, a pro-war organisation dedicated to continuation of the war until victory. William Morris' words were deemed fitting to express this idea.[44]
References
- ^ "Siegfried". Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins. 2003.
- ^ Ennis, Jane Susanna (1993). "A Comparison of Richard Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen and William Morris's Sigurd the Volsung" (PDF). University of Leeds. Retrieved 3 February 2013.
- ^ a b Henderson, Philip (1967). William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 170.
- ^ ISBN 0-271-02612-X.
- ^ ISBN 978-3-11-011498-0.
- ^ ISBN 0-8153-1785-9.
- ^ ISBN 0-520-27299-4.
- ISBN 9780714647128. Retrieved 31 January 2013.
- ISBN 0-8153-1785-9.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-903521-76-5.
- ^ Mackail, J. W. The Life of William Morris (London: Longmans, 1922) vol. 1, p. 46.
- ISBN 0-8214-0706-6. Retrieved 29 March 2012.
- ^ Morris, William (1870). Völsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda. Magnússon, Eiríkr (trans.). London: F. S. Ellis. p. xliv–xlv. Retrieved 23 January 2010.
- ISBN 0-8047-1509-2.
- ^ Mackail, J. W. (1901). The Life of William Morris, vol. 1. London: Longmans. p. 319. Retrieved 24 January 2010.
- ISBN 0-7190-2418-8.
- ISBN 978-0-903521-76-5.
- ISBN 0-404-18399-9.
- ^ .
- ^ Morris, William (1877). The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs. London: Ellis and White. p. 6.
- ^ Morris, William (1877). The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs. London: Ellis and White. p. 172.
- ^ Faulkner 1995, p. 249
- ^ Faulkner 1995, p. 233
- ^ Faulkner 1995, pp. 243–245
- ^ Faulkner 1995, pp. 230–232
- ^ Faulkner 1995, pp. 261–263
- ^ Faulkner 1995, p. 247
- ^ Symons, Arthur (1897). Studies in Two Literatures. London: Leonard Smithers. p. 157. Retrieved 24 January 2010.
- ISBN 0-7190-2418-8.
- ^ Simpson, Jacqueline (1965). The Northmen Talk. London: Phoenix House. p. x.
- ISBN 0-19-283149-6.
- ISBN 0719024196.
- ^ Horsley, Edith M. (1970). The McKay One-Volume International Encyclopedia. New York: McKay. p. 754.
- ^ Morris Online Edition.
- ^ Catalogue entry at Copac. Copac.ac.uk. 1897. Retrieved 30 March 2010.
- ^ "Reprint edition from Archive.org". Retrieved 30 March 2010.
- ^ Catalogue entry at Copac. Copac.ac.uk. 1896. Retrieved 18 March 2012.
- ^ "WorldCat Catalogue entry". Retrieved 30 March 2010.
- ^ "Open Library Catalogue entry". Retrieved 30 March 2010.
- ^ "Copac Catalogue entry". Retrieved 30 March 2010.
- ^ Carpenter 2023, letter no. 1 to Edith Bratt, n.d. (October 1914)
- ^ a b Tolkien, J. R. R>. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. 2009. ASIN: B004SHWTNM
- ISBN 0-571-14844-1
- ISBN 0-19-315414-5
Sources
- ISBN 978-0-35-865298-4.
- Faulkner, Peter (1995). William Morris: The Critical Heritage. London: ISBN 0-7100-7520-0.