Too often dismissed as the self-indulgent meanderings of waning years, Morris’ novels offer us not the melancholy of life drawing to a close, but a bright, green and growing world, fresh from rain, sparkling in the dawn. The next five novels, however, mark the inventing of the first original fully realized fantasy worlds: The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) and finally The Sundering Flood (published posthumously in 1897). Previously, he had written two “prose romances”, The House of the Wolflings and The Roots of the Mountains (novels that were to spark he interest of an Oxford student named Tolkien) but these were not new Sir Walter Scott had established the genre a generation before. In 1891, William Morris, in the crepuscule of his life, picked up his pen, as he had done countless times before.Īrtist, editor, designer, poet, printer, translator, feminist, socialist, a man of prodigious energy who had seemingly packed several lives in one, William Morris picked up his pen and invented modern fantasy.
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