Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/231

210 on the ground of its great length into two parts, "Bellerophon in Argos" and "Bellerophon in Lycia"; "The Golden Apples," a brief and rather vague rendering of the story of the eleventh labour of Hercules: two mediæval subjects of the earlier semi-mystical manner, "The Ring given to Venus" and "The Hill of Venus": and another northern poem, "The Fostering of Aslaug," in which the old and new manners are combined with exceptional skill and unique fascination.

Thus "The Earthly Paradise" stood complete. It may not be inappropriate to add a brief account of the sources from which the stories are derived. For the Greek stories little use was made by Morris of recondite authors; and indeed the whole body of Graeco-Roman mythology has long been so fully explored, and so systematically set forth in dictionaries, that it is accessible to all the world alike. The only one of the twelve tales which is not generally familiar is "The Story of Rhodope." It is founded on a romantic story related by Strabo and Ælian of the beautiful Thracian slave, Rhodôpis of Naucratis, who received imperishable fame from the sisterly jealousy of Sappho, and who became strangely identified in legend with Queen Netaqerti of Egypt, the traditional builder of the Third Pyramid nearly three thousand years before. Morris turned the name Rhodôpis into Rhodope by pure inadvertence, and was a good deal vexed when he found out the mistake. But the poem was then published, and there was no help for it.

For the non-classical stories the originals are at once more various and less matter of common knowledge. "The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon" was suggested to Morris by Thorpe's "Yule-tide Stories," a book already mentioned as having