more important, to spend time on storytelling; but his instinct forced
itself out again, and in 1886 he began the series of romances in prose
or in mixed prose and verse which went on during the next ten years.
The chief of these are, "A Dream of John Ball," "The House of
Wolfings," "The Roots of the Mountains," "News from Nowhere," "The
Glittering Plain," "The Wood beyond the World," "The Well at the
World's End," "The Water of the Wondrous Isles," and "The Sundering
Flood." During the same years he also translated, out of
Icelandic and old French books, more of the stories which he had
long known and admired. "The Sundering Flood" was written in his last
illness, and finished by him within a few days of his death, in the
autumn of 1896.




INTRODUCTION TO SIGURD

By The Editors


The story of Sigurd is important to English people not only for its
wondrous beauty, but also on account of its great age, and of what it
tells us about our own Viking ancestors, who first knew the story.

The tale was known all over the north of Europe, in Denmark, in
Germany, in Norway and Sweden, and in Iceland, hundreds of years
before it was written down. Sometimes different names were given to
the characters, sometimes the events of the story were slightly
altered, but in the main points it was one and the same tale.