page_title: The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs
section_title: Genesis
hierarchical_section_title: The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs / Genesis
caption_attribution_description: English: First page of First Edition, dated MDCCCLXXVII (1877), actually 1876 English equivalent of Siegfried epic. "There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old ..."
context_page_description: The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs is an epic poem of over 10,000 lines by William Morris that tells the tragic story, drawn from the Volsunga Saga and the Elder Edda, of the Norse hero Sigmund, his son Sigurd and Sigurd's wife Gudrun. It sprang from a fascination with the Volsung legend that extended back twenty years to the author's youth, and had already resulted in several other literary and scholarly treatments of the story. It was Morris's own favorite of his poems, and was enthusiastically praised both by contemporary critics and by such figures as T. E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw. In recent years it has been rated very highly by many William Morris scholars, but has never succeeded in finding a wide readership on account of its great length and archaic diction. It has been seen as an influence on such fantasy writers as Andrew Lang and J. R. R. Tolkien. The Story of Sigurd is available in modern reprints, both in its original form and in a cut-down version, but there is no critical edition.
context_section_description: Morris first came across the story of the Volsungs, "the grandest tale that ever was told" as he later called it, as a young man, when he read a summary of it in Benjamin Thorpe's Northern Mythology, which became a favourite book of his. In his The Earthly Paradise (1868–70) he included a versification of the story of Sigurd's daughter Aslaug, which he may have taken from Thorpe. In 1868 he began to learn Old Norse from the Icelandic scholar Eiríkr Magnússon, and embarked with him on a series of collaborative translations from the Icelandic classics. In 1870 they published Völsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, claiming uncompromisingly in the preface that "This is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks".
caption: First page of first edition. "In this book is told of the earlier days of the Volsungs, and of Sigmund the father of Sigurd, and of his deeds..."
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