The Story of Sigurd the Volsung
1876
In the halls of the Volsungs, fate is a blade unsheathed long before the hero is born. William Morris weaves the ancient Norse saga of Sigurd, a warrior whose dragon-slaying earns him cursed treasure and the love of a valkyrie, but whose greatest battle is against the treachery of those he calls kin. Drawing from the Volsunga Saga, Morris retells a story where every oath carries weight, every betrayal echoes across generations, and the gods watch with cold amusement as mortals grasp at glory and love. The poem opens with the blood-soaked lineage of the Volsungs: King Volsung's ten sons, their sister Signy trapped in a marriage to the恶意的Goth king Siggeir, and the terrible vengeance that spans decades. This is not a tale of good triumphing over evil, but of how heroism and ruin are often two faces of the same fierce heart. Morris's Victorian prose crackles with archaic power, imitating the sagas while adding his own layer of romantic melancholy. For readers who feel the pull of dark forests, broken oaths, and heroes who are great precisely because they are doomed.
