Interesting but hard work
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I am a huge fan of Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, etc, reading them many many times before the films came out. So I was very interested to discover William Morris's books.
They are very well written stories with a lot of detail and its amazing to see where Tolkien got his some of his ideas, names etc from. However I found it was very much in the same style as reading The Silmarillion. So if you enjoyed that you will like this. If you prefer the style of Lord of the Rings then you may not get it straightaway. But worth a read.
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Fantasy writing started right here
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There are two wonderful books between these covers. They are:
The House of the Wolfings
A people of the Goths, made up of family units living in the scattered communities of Nether-mark, Mid-mark and Upper-mark, along a section of river running through a forest called Mirkwood, are threatened by an army of Rome, marching from the south. They are not prepared to wait for the onslaught, but arrange a war council at their traditional gathering place, the Folk-Thing. There they choose battle leaders and formulate a plan of campaign. One of the leaders, the War-duke Thiodolf of the House of the Wolfings, has a secret lover called The Wood-Sun and she is a daughter of the gods. It is a matter of great concern to her that Thiodolf should not be killed in battle so she tries to protect him with a special dwarf-wrought hauberk. She is not entirely honest with Thiodolf about the powers of this hauberk and he has a bad feeling about it, so she has to use all her powers of persuasion to induce him to wear it. It's an act of selfishness on her part because she knows that Thiodolf is more concerned about the preservation of his people than the preservation of himself and her priorities are somewhat different. There are several battles and skirmishes and things could go either way. The Romans are courageous and disciplined and there are many of them, but they are fighting a strong and valiant people who know the local area and who, moreover, have more to lose than the Romans. One of the biggest dangers for the kindreds of the Goths, is the possible failure of morale. Thiodolf is a great hero of the people and if they should see his courage falter, all could be lost. The problem is that the magical artefact that gives a sort of protection also has a power to contort and diminish the mind of the wearer.
The Roots of the Mountains
Some hundreds of years after the battles between the Goths and Romans as told in The House of the Wolfings, their descendants are found in new locations at The Roots of the Mountains. Now there is a different persecutor threatening their peace and stability: the Huns. There are murderous hordes of these Dusky Men, as the folk of Burgstead and Shady Vale call them, sweeping all across the land from the east, killing and destroying as they come. They had already driven the kindreds from their forest home and forced them to find new lands to cultivate. A section of one of the families, The House of the Wolf, became divided from the rest of the kindreds during the course of their migration through the mountains and the two groups lost touch with each other. When the Huns' continued westward surge again threatens the newer settlements, the sundered community of the Wolf is the first to suffer and have to flee again. They find new hope when they discover the whereabouts of the rest of the kindreds and are able to join forces with them to try to drive out the usurpers and enslavers who have invaded their territory.
These two stories were first published in the 1880s and, as it says on the cover, Tolkien took inspiration from Morris's stories. Both authors loved the myths of northern Europe and the way they were written in verse. Morris was the first to try to translate the spirit of northern myth and legend into stories that could be understood and enjoyed by modern readers. His style is more difficult than Tolkien's. He employs a more archaic style of English and includes more and longer sections of verse. In The House of the Wolfings, people often even speak to each other in verse whereas, in The Roots of the Mountains, most of the verse is confined to occasions where people burst into song. The style does take a little getting-used-to, but the stories are wonderful and I just wish I'd found these books sooner. One thing I found a bit of a struggle, was the many descriptions of geographical location. I have no spatial ability worth mentioning but I can manage if there's a map or two. I hope a future publisher will commission some artistic cartographer to draw a couple of maps, like those helpful ones in Lord of the Rings.
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