Sacred Texts: Legends and Sagas

The Sundering Flood: Chapter LI. Osberne is Beguiled by F...

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"The Sundering Flood" is a late Victorian prose romance by William Morris, written in an archaic, medievalizing style modeled on Old Norse sagas and medieval English narrative. This chapter follows Osberne, a renowned warrior who has spent five years searching for a stolen maiden, and depicts his near-fatal deception: a stranger approaches him in the woods claiming his master holds information about the missing woman, lures him two hundred nobles poorer into a wooded ravine, and has him stabbed from behind while he drinks from a stream. A mysterious figure called Steelhead — apparently supernatural or at least uncanny, as the attackers flee at the sight of him sitting by the wounded man — carries Osberne to a hermit's cottage and secures his care. Osberne survives but recovers in ignorance of his rescuer's identity, and the chapter ends with his despair that the one lead he had has again come to nothing. The passage is characteristic of Morris's late romances in its blend of chivalric adventure, quasi-supernatural intervention, and elegiac longing — the hero's grief over a lost love driving the plot more than martial ambition.

The Sundering Flood: Chapter LI. Osberne is Beguiled by F...

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