ABSTRACT
Nothing, surely, could be further from a description of William Morris’s aesthetics than his praise for the final scene between Sigurd and Brynhild in the Icelandic Volsunga Saga: “complete beauty without an ornament.” Ornament, most scholars would agree, is central to Morris’s work. Morris was, after all, a tireless advocate for the “lesser” arts of ornament and decoration, “that great body of art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to beautify the familiar matters of everyday life.” Morris himself was not shy of the term “ornament” when he wrote about the visual arts or about the material forms of illuminated manuscript or book. But both he and subsequent critics have been wary of extending the term to the verbal arts in the wake of Romantic poets’ rejections of the artificial diction and stale figures that, they believed, characterized too much eighteenth-century poetry.
