But his song and his fond desire go up to the cloudy roof,
And blend with the eagles' shrilling in the windy night aloof.
It is at the end of the book of Regin that Sigurd finds Brynhild
asleep
on the tower-top of the world,
High over the cloud-wrought castle whence the windy bolts
are hurled;
and from the moment he awakens her new light and life break into the
narrative. Not only in their troth-plighting is a new note of human
passion struck, but the Volsung spirit in Sigurd undergoes a change
and takes on a larger charity and a more beneficent purpose.
So the day grew old about them and the joy of their desire,
And eve and the sunset came, and faint grew the sunset fire,
And the shadowless death of the day, was sweet in the
golden tide;
But the stars shone forth on the world and the twilight
changed and died;
And sure if the first of man-folk had been born to that
starry night,
And had heard no tale of the sunrise, he had never longed
for the light:
But Earth longed amidst her slumber, as 'neath the night
she lay,
And fresh and all abundant abode the deeds of Day.
And these abundant deeds of day are deeds of peace and healing.
Sigurd among Hemir and his 'Lymdale forest lords' brings the dawn of
a new age, when
The axe-age and the sword-age seem dead a while ago,
And the age of the cleaving of shields, of brother by
brother slain,
And the bitter days of the whoredom, and the hardened lust
of gain;
But man to man may hearken, and he that soweth reaps,
And hushed is the heart of Feurir in the wolf-den of the
deeps...
and again, when he rides to the Niblungs it is with peace and
comfortable words upon his lips--
For peace I bear unto thee, and to all the kings of earth
Who bear the sword aright, and are crowned with the crown
of worth;
But unpeace to the lords of evil, and the battle and the death;
And the edge of the sword to the traitor, and the flame to
the slanderous breath:
And I would that the loving were loved, and I would that the
weary should sleep,
And that man should hearken to man, and that he that
soweth should reap.
Now wide in the world I fare, to seek the dwellings of kings,
For with them would I do and undo, and be heart of their
warfarings;
So I thank thee, lord, for thy bidding, and here in thy house
will I bide,
And learn of thy ancient wisdom till forth to the field we ride.
It is in this mellowing of the fierce Volsung strain that the
redemption of the cosmic spirit of the epic is found. To show this
is a purpose not less noble than that of Milton when he robed himself
to justify the ways of God to man, and it is one which must be
clearly understood before we can hope to grasp the imaginative
impulse that runs as a central thread through all the coloured jewels
of Morris's masterpiece. This new chastening of the humanity in
Sigurd not only makes the life among which he moves sweeter, but it
reacts upon the most tragic judgments of the gods. Nothing could be
finer than the way in which we are shown the ennobling influence that
it has upon so terrible an event as the betrayal of Sigurd by the
Niblung Gunnar and his brothers. It is an act of the blackest
treachery, a violation of sacred vows sworn under the roof-tree of
their home, an act which in the world of Sigmund would have been
merely horrible. But here it is transfigured by the elemental
humanity working along the logical ways of cause and effect in the
heart of Sigurd and from him into the action of his betrayers, into
pure tragedy. Before this quickening, enmity between man and man was
a sullen and savage thing, some blinding of their eyes by the hands
of mocking gods, but now it springs from the clear conflict of
essential emotions and it has in it a new element of pity. Gunnar
knows that the ravelled web can be straightened only in this way, but
there is no loveless exultation in his mood, and in after days he
cherishes the great memory of the man whom he has slain. And Sigurd
knows of the coming end, but there is no hatred in him--
the heart of Hogin he sees,
And the heart of his brother Gunnar, _and he grieveth sore for
these_.
In detail Morris discovers a wealth of inventiveness that appears to
be inexhaustible. He never allows his beauty of expression to be
isolated in such a way as to interfere with the swiftness of
narration, but there are many more instances of separable splendours
in _Sigurd_ than in any other of his poems. When Sigurd tells King
Elf, his stepfather, that he would go out into the world, the King
answers--
Forsooth no more may we hold thee than the hazel copse
may hold
The sun of the early dawning, that turneth it all into gold.