The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Raven the Skald

William Morris (1834-1896) was an English artist, writer, socialist and activist. He was one of the principal founders of the British arts and crafts movement, best known as a designer of wallpaper and patterned fabrics, a writer of poetry and fiction and a pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain. The Earthly Paradise (1860) was a huge collection of poems loosely bound together. It brought him almost immediate fame and popularity. The last-written stories in the collection are retellings of Icelandic sagas. From then until his Socialist period Morris's fascination with the ancient Germanic and Norse peoples dominated his writing. Together with his Icelandic friend Eirikr Magnusson (1833-1913) he was the first to translate many of the Icelandic sagas into English, and his own epic retelling of the story of Sigurd the Volsung was his favourite among his poems.