Sigurd the Volsung and Morris's Norse Epics

The poem and its date

The Encyclopaedia Britannica records the work under its full title, the Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, and dates it to 1876. The same account states that Morris wrote it after his study of medieval prose narratives. Those two points, the title and the date, are the firmest facts the record offers about the poem.

Within Morris's writing life, the poem belongs to his verse rather than his prose. An overview of Morris's poetry places it among the longer works of a career that also produced The Earthly Paradise.

Where the poem sits in Morris's writing life

To read the poem in context, it helps to see the shape of Morris's literary career around it. The V&A describes The Earthly Paradise as an epic poem with an anti-industrial message that established Morris as one of the foremost poets of his day. That standing as a poet is the backdrop against which the 1876 Sigurd epic appeared.

The verse career gave way, in time, to prose. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, News from Nowhere, published in 1890, presents a vision of England in 2090 as a dream. The Victoria and Albert Museum records it as Morris's most celebrated prose narrative, infused with his socialist ideas and romantic utopianism. More on News from Nowhere shows how far Morris had travelled from the long poem to the utopian romance by the end of the century.

A further marker of the late career is the Kelmscott Press. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1891, the same year he turned down the Poet Laureateship after the death of Tennyson, Morris set up the Kelmscott Press. The press belongs to the printing and design side of his life, but it marks the point at which the literary career and the making career visibly met.

Medieval prose narratives and the Iceland connection

The Britannica account ties the poem to Morris's study of medieval prose narratives. That is the extent of what the supplied evidence says about the poem's origins: it does not name the texts he studied, and it does not describe how he worked from them. Readers should treat the connection as documented in general terms only.

Morris's engagement with the medieval North is a broader subject in its own right, covering his travels, his translations and his reading. Our guide to William Morris and Iceland follows that thread in detail, and it is the natural next step for anyone wanting the fuller Nordic context behind a poem like Sigurd the Volsung.

What the record does not tell us

Honesty about gaps matters on a research page, and the gaps here are substantial. The following points are not established by the evidence used for this article:

• No quotation from Morris himself about the poem appears in the record, so his own account of it cannot be given here.
• The medieval prose narratives Morris studied are not named, so the specific source texts behind the poem cannot be listed.
• The poem's subject, structure, metre and length are not covered beyond the 1876 date and the full title.
• Whether the poem was translated, adapted from Icelandic sources, or based on particular Norse epics is not stated in the evidence.
• No reception history or critical response to the poem is recorded, and no surviving editions, manuscripts or illustrations of it appear in the material used here.

Where a claim about the poem's sources, form or reception cannot be traced, this page leaves it out rather than filling it in. Readers who need those details should consult a scholarly edition directly.

Why the poem matters for Morris readers

The poem matters as the major Norse epic of Morris's poetic career, set beside The Earthly Paradise, which the V&A credits with establishing him as one of the foremost poets of his day, and beside the prose works that followed. The dream-vision England of 2090 in News from Nowhere shows how his writing carried his social ideas as well as his medieval interests.

For readers interested in Morris's wider literary afterlife, see our feature on how William Morris influenced Tolkien.