Yet I know that the world is wide, and filled with deeds unwrought; And for e'en such work was I fashioned, lest the songcraft come to nought, When the harps of God-home tinkle, and the Gods are at stretch to hearken: Lest the hosts of the Gods be scanty when their day hath begun to darken.
In Book II we have other great speeches that the poet has put into the mouth of his characters with little or no justification in the original saga. Chap. XIV of the saga contains Regin's tale of his brothers, and of the gold called "Andvari's Hoard," and that tale is severely brief and plain. The account in the poem is expanded greatly, and the conception of Regin materially altered. In the saga he was not the discontented youngest son of his father, prone to talk of his woes and to lament his lot. In the poem he does this in so eloquent a fashion that almost we are persuaded to sympathize with him. Certainly his lines were hard, to have outlived his great deeds, and to hear his many inventions ascribed to the gods. The speech of the released Odin to Reidmar is modeled on Job's conception of omnipotence, and it is one of the memorable parts of this book. Gripir's prophecy, too, is a majestic work, and its original was three sentences in the saga and the poem _Grípisspá_ in the heroic songs of the _Edda_. Here Morris rises to the heights of Sigurd's greatness:
Sigurd, Sigurd! O great, O early born! O hope of the Kings first fashioned! O blossom of the morn! Short day and long remembrance, fair summer of the North! One day shall the worn world wonder how first thou wentest forth!
Those who have read William Morris know that he is a master of nature description. The "Glittering Heath" offered a fine opportunity for this sort of work, and in this piece we have another departure from the saga, Morris made hundreds of pictures in this poem, but the pages describing the journey to the "Glittering Heath" are packed with them to an extraordinary degree. Here is Iceland in very fact, all dust and ashes to the eye:
More changeless than mid-ocean, as fruitless as its floor.
We confess that there is something in the scene that holds us, all shorn of beauty though it is. We do not want to go the length of Thomas Hardy, however, who, in that wonderful first chapter of _The Return of the Native_ has a similar heath to describe. "The new vale of Tempe," says he, "may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young.... The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the mournful sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain, will be all of nature that is absolutely consonant with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtlegardens of South Europe are to him now." Is it not a suggestive thought that England and the nineteenth century evolved a pessimism which poor Iceland on its ash-heap never could conceive? William Morris was an Icelander, not an Englishman, in his philosophy.