Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/233

212 a great magician like Michael Scott. The story of "Ogier the Dane" follows pretty closely the fourteenth-century French romance of "Ogier le Danois." "The Hill of Venus" was suggested by the version of this very widely diffused legend given in Tieck's "Romances." The story of "The Man who never Laughed again" is substantially that of the fifth Wezeer in the story of "The King and his Son and the Damsel and the Seven Wezeers," as given in the twenty-first chapter of Lane's Arabian Nights. "The Fostering of Aslaug" follows closely the story as epitomized from the older sources in Thorpe's "Northern Mythology." "The Lovers of Gudrun" was taken directly from the original Icelandic of the Laxdaela Saga.

It must be understood that the stories as they reshaped themselves in Morris's mind often became quite different from the form in which they are given in the older sources, and that, except in the case of the great legends where no material change is possible, he gave his imagination free play in re-shaping and combining them. It might happen that, as in the stories of Aslaug and of Cupid and Psyche, the traditional form and detail of the story was quite satisfying to him; in these the original sources are followed with great fidelity. But in telling the story of "The Writing on the Image," he makes the magician shut up in the death-trap from which he escapes in the mediæval story; and in "The Land East of the Sun" the story takes an entirely new course after the first waking, and goes wandering through new and strange realms. This last poem represents the culmination of the romantic-mediæval method in the strongest antithesis to the epic treatment of a given story. The mediæval mysticism in matters of religion is a familiar and accepted fact. Yet the modern divorce between religion