Roots

William Morris is generally (and probably accurately) considered the inventor of the modern high fantasy novel. In ‘The Well at the World’s End’ and other tales penned late in his life, he created autonomous fantasy worlds with no connection to that in which we live (essentially, the description of what makes a story high fantasy). These books certainly influenced those fantasy writers who followed.

But before these came the two Wolflings novels, ‘The House of the Wolflings’ (or, in full, ‘A Tale of the House of the Wolflings and all the Kindreds of the Mark’) and ‘The Roots of the Mountains.’ These could best be described as historic fantasy, stories set among the Goths at some point in Antiquity. There is magic, but it is relatively low-key (prophecy, primarily) and the gods seem to take some interest in the doings of men. There is more of that sort of thing in ‘House;’ the supernatural element is barely to be found in ‘Roots.’

They are, in some respects, more accessible than the high fantasies that came later, if only because he avoided some of their archaic pseudo-medieval language. These were also influential novels. Their mark is all over Tolkien’s tales. His Goths are the template for the Rohirrim. That’s the most obvious borrowing from Morris, but we find echoes of the older writer’s work throughout Tolkien. Even the poetry is sometimes surprisingly similar.

Morris was not the writer Tolkien was. The novels are good enough, but neither masterpieces nor epics. The plots are straightforward, even a bit pedestrian. An enemy appears, there is fighting, some thoughts on mankind’s fate are thrown in. There is not a great deal of tension, no deep questions about good and evil, to be resolved by victory. This does not keep them from being perfectly good stories, and worth reading. For someone new to Morris, I would tend to recommend ‘The Roots of the Mountains’ as a starting place—especially if one already knows Tolkien! This book, and much of William Morris’s fiction, is available as free ebooks at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.