William Morris

Life

William Morris was born on 24 March 1834 in Walthamstow, then a village northeast of London, into a wealthy family whose fortune came from copper-mine shares. As a boy he rode through Epping Forest in a toy suit of armor and read Walter Scott. At Exeter College, Oxford, he met the painter Edward Burne-Jones, and the two fell under the spell of Malory, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. Morris briefly trained as an architect and a painter, married Jane Burden — a stableman's daughter who became the most painted face of the Pre-Raphaelite movement — and built the Red House in Kent as a medieval dream of a home.

Decorating it launched his career. In 1861 he co-founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., whose wallpapers, textiles, stained glass and furniture made him the leading figure of the Arts and Crafts movement. Meanwhile he became one of the best-selling poets of his day with The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), learned Icelandic, and traveled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873, a pilgrimage he regarded as one of the defining experiences of his life. In the 1880s he became a committed revolutionary socialist, co-founding the Socialist League in 1884, lecturing on street corners and writing the utopian News from Nowhere (1890). In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press, which culminated in the Kelmscott Chaucer of 1896. He died at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, on 3 October 1896; one of his doctors said he had died of being William Morris, having done more work than most ten men.

Work

Morris's fantasy grew out of two passions: the medieval romance and the Icelandic saga. With Eiríkr Magnússon he translated Grettis saga (1869) and the Völsunga saga (1870), and his own epic Sigurd the Volsung (1876) retold the dragon-slayer's story for Victorian readers. Late in life he turned to prose romances in a deliberately archaic English. The House of the Wolfings (1889) and The Roots of the Mountains (1890) imagine Germanic tribes in the forests of an unnamed past. Then came the true innovation: The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and The Well at the World's End (1896), romances set in lands with their own geography and no stated relation to our history — a fully invented Secondary world, decades before the term.

The Well at the World's End, printed by his own press, follows Ralph, the youngest son of a petty king, on a long quest to a well whose water grants long life, through a world of walled towns, perilous wastes and wise women. It is slow, sensuous, strange and enormously long, and it did something that no earlier English novel had done: it treated an imaginary world as a place to travel through for its own sake.

Legacy

J. R. R. Tolkien discovered Morris as an undergraduate; in 1914 he used part of a college prize to buy The House of the Wolfings, Morris's Völsunga saga translation and The Life and Death of Jason. He later wrote that the Dead Marshes owed more to Morris's Huns and Romans than to the trenches of the Somme, and scholars have compared the King Gandolf and the horse Silverfax of The Well at the World's End with Gandalf and Shadowfax. C. S. Lewis also loved the book and wrote about the melancholy of its fading magic. Through them, Morris is a grandfather of High / Epic Fantasy; through his translations of the sagas he is a link between Snorri, The Eddas and the modern Dwarf and Dragon.

Morris is not on Gygax's Appendix N, and no game rule bears his name. His path into games runs through Tolkien — and, more quietly, through the idea he pioneered: that a writer could invent a map from scratch and invite readers to walk it. That idea is the premise of every Campaign setting. Lin Carter recognized the lineage when the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series series reissued The Well at the World's End in two volumes in 1970, putting Morris on paperback racks beside Dunsany and Eddison at the very moment the first fantasy wargamers were reading.