DURING THE CLIMACTIC final exchange between Sigurd and Brynhild in Morris's adapation of the Sigurðr cycle The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), after the heroine has been overcome by grief at the hero's betrayal of her, Sigurd attempts to console her with an exhortation to resolute activity. Initially associating the dawning of a new day with the opportunity for optimistic endeavour – ‘Awake, arise, O Brynhild! for the house is smitten through | With the light of the sun awakened, and the hope of deeds to do’ – he subsequently offers himself as the embodiment of an ideal of action that might serve as an antidote to despair: ‘It is I that awake thee, and I give thee the life and the days | For fulfilling the deedful measure, and the cup of the people's praise’ (CW, xii, p. 222). In an image that evokes a heroic Germanic lord providing drink for his retainers, Sigurd implies that the accomplishment of a certain kind of purposeful conduct (the fulfilment of the ‘deedful measure’) for the general good of the community (the cup of the people's praise) is a fundamentally hopeful and valuable approach to life.

As inspiration for this scene, Morris had drawn on the episode in Völsunga saga that depicts the last conversation between Sigurðr and Brynhildr, which in 1869 he had declared to have touched him more than anything he had ever met with in literature: ‘there is nothing wanting in it, nothing forgotten, nothing repeated, nothing overstrained’. Yet, despite the remarkable esteem in which Morris held the episode in the saga, a close inspection reveals that it contains no such invocation to heroic action. When the saga's Sigurðr encourages Brynhildr to rise from her bed, he does not seem motivated by any explicit reason other than perhaps the broad intimation that cheerful behaviour is preferable to misery: ‘vaki þú, Brynhildr! sól skín um allan bainn, ok er arit sofit; hritt af per harmi ok tak gleði’ (VÖL, p. 194). By contrast, in the hero's appeal to Brynhild in Sigurd, Morris appears to offer an entire ethos that has the potential to invigorate life with new meaning and might be described as ‘deedfulness’.