too, for he restored the
interpolated song-snatches in his Romances. We are tempted to dwell on
these three love-stories, they are so fine; but we must leave them with
the remark that they show the poet's appreciation of the worth of a
foreign literature, and his great desire to have his countrymen share in
his admiration for them. "The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and
Raven the Skald," and "The Story of Viglund the Fair," are the other two
stories that give the title to the volume, representing the thirteenth
and fifteenth centuries, as "Frithiof" represented the fourteenth.

6.

With _Sigurd the Volsung_ ended the first great Icelandic period of
Morris's work. More than a dozen years passed before he returned to the
field, and from 1889 until his death, in 1896, everything he wrote bore
proofs of his abiding interest in and affection for the ancient
literature. The remarkable series of romances, _The House of the
Wolfings_ (1889), _The Roots of the Mountains_ (1890), _The Story of the
Glittering Plain_ (1891), _The Wood Beyond the World_ (1895), _The Well
at the World's End_ (1896) and _The Sundering Flood_ (posthumous), are
none of them distinctively Old Norse in geography or in story, but they
all have the flavor of the saga-translations, and are all the better for
it. They are as original and as beautiful as the poet's tapestries and
furniture, and if they did not provoke imitation as did the tapestries
and furniture, it was not because they were not worth imitating: more
than likely there were no imitators equal to the task. In these romances
we have men and women with the characteristics of an olden time that are
most worthy of conservation in the present time. The ideals of womanfolk
and manfolk in _The House of the Wolfings_ and _The Roots of the
Mountains_, for instance, are such as an Englishman might well be proud
to have in his remote ancestry. Hall-Sun, Wood-Sun, Sunbeam, and Bowmay
are wholesome women to meet in a story, and Thiodolf, Gold-mane,
Iron-face and Hallward are every inch men for book-use or to commune
with every day. Weaklings, too, abide in these stories, and Penny-thumb
and Rusty and Fiddle and Wood-grey lend humanity to the company.

The two romances last mentioned are so steeped in the atmosphere of the
sagas, that what with folk-motes and shut-beds, and byres, and
man-quellers, and handsels and speech-friends, we seem to lose ourselves
in yet another version of a northern tale. Mor