William Morris's literary work is an expression of the climax of his time: the gothic revival of the Victorian era aimed at evoking a fantasy Middle Ages, an invention to be contrasted with modernity. Thus Morris re-elaborates and retrieves symbols, themes and topoi of romances and poems of the medieval age: the cyclical journey, of initiation, of the hero protagonist, the trials to be overcome represented by the "merciless lady" and the perilous wood, the romantic nostalgia for forgotten times, for remote places that belonged to a mythical past. Everyone fears that Tolkien he will make his own and present them in a new light, renewing them, in "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".
di Nicholas May
Cover: William Morris, The Well at the World's End
William Morris and JRR Tolkien:
the birth of modern fantasy
Europe of the nineteenth century is crossed by an imposing and original Revival of forms, styles, literary models ofmedieval age: it's chanson de geste, the romance in Old English, the epic sagas of Northern Europe, the troubadour compositions, the lyrics in the language of oc, to be rediscovered and published, often strongly reworked, in harmony with the nascent romantic sensibility, and to represent, for many intellectuals, the founding myth of ethnic / national origins, whose research represents the common thread that binds the oppressed European states, fighting for independence with their glorious medieval past.
Johann Gottfried Herder he discovers, for example, German popular poetry and raises it as a symbol of folk spirit, the unifying and national "spirit of the people"; Jacob Bodmer retrieves and publishes the Germanic poems the Parzival and Nibelungenlied, which will inspire numerous romantic authors, painters and artists, such as Richard Wagner; James Macpherson re-elaborates Gaelic songs and ballads, writing what has rightly been judged the fake of the century, The Songs of Ossian, poem fruit of invention but presented and felt as authentically medieval, destined to become, in the course of Romanticism, the symbol of that medieval Nordic spirit and of those values of purity, value, spirituality that they wanted to re-establish in the nineteenth century.
An attitude to which Morris, as already anticipated, does not remain extraneous but is indeed actively involved in the cultural and poetic inclement weather of the time. For the craftsman of the "Art's and Craft”The Middle Ages represents a nostalgic time / space, of which he feels the inevitable loss in modern society; this is in fact guilty, according to the author, of having sacrificed true heroism, ancient beauty, the ethical relationship with nature, the Christian virtues of communion and work in the name of the Church, for personal purposes and for the benefit of material interests (l industrialization, urbanization, the exploitation of the countryside, the birth of the society of capital).
The Morrissian Middle Ages, to be recreated both in architecture, in craftsmanship, in literary work and in human activity, is a model of universal brotherhood and organic community, to be reborn in modern capitalist society as a valid alternative, both economic and social, through, for example, a form of Christian neo-corporatism on the example of Medieval Guilds of Arts and Crafts or the revaluation of manual craftsmanship as a work of art, both artistic and religious.
These intentions are sincerely pursued by Morris in his political activity - he himself is a supporter of utopian socialism, treasurer and founder of the "Socialist League" since 1884 - intellectual, in the conception of his "arts and crafts", Tending to restore idealized and virtuous medieval models, as well as in the architectural work (an example is the Red House built together with his friend Philip Webb, also Pre-Raphaelite, for his wife Jane, in neo-Gothic forms) and in the militancy with the Pre-Raphaelites.
However the Medievalism Morris also has a literary aspect which, strongly opposed to the academicism and the recovery of the realist novel of many intellectual circles in England of his time, identifies and emerges to be anti-realist, fantastic, surreal and, at times, allegorical ; picking up the "matter of Brittany" and the Germanic sagas Morris wrote a collection of poems in verse dedicated to his beloved Jane, The defense of Geneva (The Defense of Guenevere, 1858), The Earthly Paradise (The Earthly paradise, 1868-1870), an epic poem in four books entitled Story of Sigurd the Volsungo , Fall of the Nibelungs (The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of Niblungs) from 1876, English version of the original poem, and seven chivalrous novels - in order: The House of Wolves (The House of the wolves, 1888), The roots of the mountains (The Roots of the Mountains, 1889), The history of the Sparkling Plain (The Story of the Glittering Plain, 1890), The forest beyond the world (The Wood Beyond the World, 1894), The source at the edge of the world (The Well at the World's End, 1895), The water of the wonderful islands (The Water of the Wondrous Isles, 1896), The universal flood (The Sunderling Flood, 1896) - and, as a philologist and expert in Germanic and Old English languages, he translated the ancient Icelandic sagas, including the heimskringla (with Eirikur Magnusson) and the Beowlf from Old English, along with AJ Wyatt.
The sources, of course, are those of the "Nordic" Middle Ages, from Saga of the Volsunghi al Arthurian cycle, from Beowulf ai romance, the same ones that, otherwise, will inspire Tolkien in the creation of the Middle-earth, Arda and the events of Il Lord of the Rings and the The Silmarillion. Indeed Morris is, in fact, together with George McDonald (author of The fairies of the shadow of 1858 and de The princess and the goblins of 1872), considered the father of modern fantasy and, as confirmed by the most in-depth recent studies, the inspiration of two of the greatest fantasy writers of the twentieth century, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.
Especially in Tolkien it is possible to find a choice of themes that are anticipated by Morris (the hero's experiential journey, the protagonist's temptation, the fall, the risk of corruption, the virtuous rebirth, the rejection of industrialization and the "machine", the crisis of individuality, nostalgia for the past, suffered love), but the literary connections are even deeper and are, indeed, strengthened by the profound knowledge and consideration that the Oxford professor has in the course of his career and activity for William's works.
Morris's influence on Tolkien has been widely recognized by several authors over time: WG Hammond and C. Scull discuss it in their The JRR Tolkien. Companion and Guide (2005); Michael Perry mentions it in a specific entry in Michael Drout's encyclopedia (2007); in his Tales before Tolkien, published in 2003, Douglass Anderson includes a short story by Morris, The Falk of the Mountain Hall; Jessica Yates has compiled a bibliography containing about seventy entries from works concerning Morris's influence on Tolkien; an edition of The roots of the mountains, known and owned by Tom Shippey, has the caption "A book that inspired JRR Tolkien"(" A book that inspired JRR Tolkien ").
Tolkien himself mentions Morris's work in the course of his career: in 1914 Tolkien claims that he is trying to transform a part of the Finnish Kalevala into a "short story in the style of Morris' novels" - news contained in the letters of author selected by Humphrey Carpenter - who would later become The story of Kullervo and one of the three "Great Tales" of the Silmarillion; the same year he won a university prize in money, and among what he bought with the sum received were three works by Morris, mentioned, among other things, by the Italian scholar Oronzo Cilli, who counts eleven works of the pre-Raphaelite belonging to Tolkien; finally, on the author himself and on the poem Sigurd the Volsungo, Tolkien gave a lecture in 1941, as scholars Scull and Hammond confirm.
After all, Morris is one of the most widely read authors between the end of the nineteenth century and the years of World War I, alongside HG Wells, Rider Haggard, John Buchan, the latter much appreciated by Tolkien: his The sparkling plain (1891) was printed at least seven times before 1912 and, as Paul Fusseli noted in his great book The Great War and modern memory:
At the front, between 1914 and 1918, there was hardly a man of letters who had not read The Source at the edge of the world and had not been struck by it in his youth.
In the same text the author reports the memoirs of the economist Hugh Quigley, Passchendaele and the Somme, where the latter, a young volunteer, wrote:
The terrifying canal of Ypres… reminiscent of the poison pool under the Dry Tree de The Source at the edge of the world, around which lie bodies with "leather-like faces" ... contracted in a grimace, as if they had died in pain. Everything happened in a land of horror and horror from which few return, equal to that country described by Morris in The Source at the edge of the world.
References of this kind abound in war memorials, where a constant connection to the Morrissian source: the contaminated canals, the destroyed fields, the wastelands that are filled with trenches, mud and corpses, consequence of the terrible battles of Thiepval, Ypres, Yser, are a chilling scenario that awakens in the soldiers the assimilation with "The land of horror and horror" of Source at the edge of the world, same impression that CS Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien's friend and colleague, who bought the work in 1917, before leaving for the front.
Likewise the Death Marshes of Middle-earth they reflect the terrible experience of the Somme, personally lived by Tolkien, but it is the author himself who declares his debt to William Morris. In this regard Tolkien in fact declares in his letters:
The Dead Marshes and the approach to the Morannon owe something to northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe much more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of Wolves o The roots of the Mountains.
The soldiers, among whom there are also young hopeful students like Tolkien and Lewis, therefore find in chivalrous romances of Morris not just a moment of escapism but also a comfort, as they offer a term of comparison with the anxieties, fears and terror of war, behind which lies the possibility of redemption and salvation: a cathartic function, after all, which the novel with a social background, such as the one that inspired the texts of Henry James, cannot provide him.
Other points of contact between Tolkien and Morris are to be found in the willingness of the Oxford professor and his fellow TCBS students, students in the early twentieth century, to imitate the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Morris, and in Tolkien's desire to start devoting himself to writing of long narrative poems, such as the The Lays of Beleriand, begun in the XNUMXs, based on the example of Heaven on earth Morrisiano and degli Idylls of the King of Tennyson (1859-1885), in contrast with a large section of the Academy which, in the same years, moved towards ironic, allusive and difficult poetry (such as The wasteland of Elliot) and towards the short novel - reflections from which it is also possible to deduce a certain anti-academicism as a point of contact between the two authors, which also has different reasons and ways of expressing itself.
Certainly the poems of Morris and Tennyson, as well as the Songs of ancient Rome by Macaulay (1842), inspired Tolkien in the elaboration of his works, such as The legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, which, according to Tom Shippey, is an attempt to match The story of Sigurd the Volsungo (1876) by the pre-Raphaelite author, while The fall of Arthur (texts that remained unpublished for a long time) certainly represents a "modern" replica to the Idylls of the King, To Defense of Geneva and to other Arthurian poems, from which he still draws inspiration and inspiration.
The "dream" novels:
between medieval utopia and revolutionary socialism
Given the vastness of William Morris' literary production, the article examines above all the works that have characteristics in common with the fantasy genre and, therefore, points of contact with Tolkien's work, epic poems and chivalrous novels, in the what happens that reworking of the Middle Ages, a peculiar characteristic of the romantic phenomenon and typical in numerous other nineteenth-century writers (Ann Radcliff and Horace Walpole, initiators of the Gothic genre; Bram Stoker, author of Dracula; Alfred Tennyson, author of the Idylls of the King inspired by Mallory's Arcturian Cycle; John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, etc.), while the “political” novels, in which the author's utopian / socialist manifesto, is reflected only briefly here.
The latter are John Ball's Dream (The Dream of John Ball, 1888) e News from Nowhere (News from Nowhere, 1891), belonging to the so-called utopian anarchist vein, in which the author reflects his political thought but also the profound knowledge of Germanic societies. Both novels are the result of Morris's ideological and social vision who, from the study of Icelandic sagas, takes up the theme of Norse doomsday, the Ragnarok (event triggering the destruction of Midgard and Asgard, source of inspiration, among others, for Richard Wagner, who re-elaborates the "Fate of the gods") and the idea, actually a romantic construction, ofegalitarianism of Germanic societies, which will influence his personal idea of revolutionary socialism.
In the author, therefore, as part of a single theory, Germanic eschatology and Marxist "messianic" thought, the latter focusing on the advancement of human societies through the evolution of the modes of production, therefore from primitive communism, through different historical phases, to the bourgeois / industrial mode of production and, finally, to the communist society, the final stage, in which every form of division by classes disappears, reached as a result of the revolution of the proletariat, destined for final victory.
We are far from the clear but inert rejection of modernity expressed by Pugin, Ruskin and Carlyle, whose thinking does not go beyond theorization: Morris's Medievalism is positive, it is the bearer of a social and valence characterized by a progressive vision of society, it is recovery of the Past translated into concrete action whose fruits are the conception of "Arts and Craft", the London printing house "Kelmscott Press" (1891), specialized in luxury editions of the classics of medieval literature and in the use of decorations inspired by engravings sixteenth century, the company "Morris e Co", with which it intends to restore the aesthetics of medieval craftsmanship and deliver to the people the beauty, the art, the feeling of manual work through corporatism.
Returning to the novels, both open with a dream setting: the protagonist of the John Ball's Dream, the narrator himself, anesthetized by the scents of a strange white poppy (flower symbol of oblivion, eternal sleep and drowsiness), dreams of being projected into the past, in a peasant revolt of 1381 in the broader context of the Hundred Years War, while in News from Nowhere, the protagonist William Guest ("guest"), in which the author himself is reflected, who fell asleep during an assembly of the Socialist League, is catapulted, upon his awakening, in a Futuristic London in which wage labor, capitalist exploitation and authoritarian institutions no longer exist.
The peasant revolt of the preacher John Ball, a real figure, with whom the narrator / protagonist imagines having a heated political and social debate, reveals the revolutionary intent of Morris, inclined to support the rebellion of the disadvantaged classes, their rights to earth, against the models of feudal production, embodied in the novel by the local squires and prefiguring the dictatorship of the capitalist bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century England.
Morris therefore looks back, to the Middle Ages, to track down the models of the revolution proletarian to be fulfilled in the present in order to realize the socialist dream represented by the utopian London of News from Nowhere, a city free from large industrial plants, from dirt, from darkness and from profit-making companies, immersed in the green of the free and spontaneous countryside, bathed by the clear and crystalline waters of the Thames, now a pleasant place for meeting and peace.
Work destined for vast success, News from nowhere, inspired by the author's libertarian ideals, was defined by Prince PA Kropotkin as "the best description of a future society organized under the sign of anarchist communism», To underline its political incisiveness. Curiously, this utopian novel, one of anticipation and political fiction, has also been linked to the nascent literature of the fantasy genre and, in particular, to The time Machine (The Time Machine) by Herbert Gorge Wells of 1895, published just four years after Morris's work.
The poems and i chivalrous romances
The first product of Morrisian literary medievalism is The Defense of Geneva, published in 1858, dedicated to his beloved Jane. It is a collection of poems that provides a new, modern, vision of medieval woman, who openly takes sides against the stereotype of the male hero, champion of the Victorian age.
The values recovered from a fictionalized medieval world are catapulted here: sexual instincts, subversion, the loss of honor due to ruinous passion, are the elements that make the text original, in which the brilliant creative and ironic ability of Morris emerges who, taking a cue from Death of King Arthur by Mallory, creates an original, voluptuous, ambiguous and devious character, one Unpublished Geneva who attempts her self-defense at all costs against the accusations of adultery for which she was tried.
The poem has different intentions The earthly paradise, published in 1870. Narrative poem, it refers to the folklore of Northern European countries, the classic epic and Icelandic sagas, presenting different themes. The story of the poem has as its protagonist a group of Norwegian wanderers in search of the land of eternal life. Having escaped the pestilence, tired of the sufferings of the world, the companions set sail towards the West where, according to ancient legends, the immortal land is found, the place where no one gets old; after a hard journey, not having found it, the companions return tired, worn out, bent and "gray", due to the long wanderings.
Finally they come in an ancient city without a name, located in a distant and unknown sea, where the cult of Some greeks. Welcoming guests, they will spend the rest of their lives here. Each month the wayfarers participate in a feast consisting of telling two stories or tales every month, one narrated by a sage of the city and another narrated by one of the vagabonds. The stories are divided as follows: twelve of classical subjects told by the Greeks and twelve dealing with Norse matter and medieval epic (for this reason the Morrissian poem is divided into twelve books). In the work there is a theme that will be dear to Tolkien: that of poignant lack and vain (but human) search of Immortal land, which in the Tolkenian Universe becomes Aman or Valinor, Land of the gods, the Ainur (Valar, major deities, and Maiar, minor deities).
Towards the end of the seventies Morris begins to take a greater interest in Icelandic sagas, translating some of the most important, but also to get closer to the typical narrative form of the romance medieval, preferring shorter compositions, in the style of chivalric romances. The themes and characters of his new works are archetypal models, stately, powerful and ideal figures, which Morris moves within a fantastic setting where the struggle between Good and Evil is constantly in force. In particular, it is through the study of two Icelandic sagas, the Gunnlaugs saga and Grettla, which Morris comes to define the purpose of fictional literature: to represent reality through pure, strong, uncorrupted, primal human emotions, and thus provide a maximum example, always valid, to be put into practice in everyday life, in everyone's life. the days.
The fruit, in the form of poetry, of this conception, which will be taken up by the fantasy-epic, for example in the tension towards universal values of Tolkien's epic, is The story of Sigurd the Volsungo and the fall of the Nibelungs of 1876. The poem takes up the scheme of romance as regards themes and structure: through the quest painful of Sigurd, dominated by a timeless destiny, the author wants to demonstrate to the reader how in facing only, I knowby breaking through and ultimately overcoming the trials of life, it is possible to achieve a "final" stage of consciousnessa ultimate condition the status human, pure and saving.
Il romance more fully fantasy than William Morris is The source at the edge of the world, published in 1896. The narrative has as protagonist the hero Ralph, who through a fantastic quest will start searching for a mystical well, located on the edge of the known world. Morris here readjusts the chivalric ideals of love, generosity and Christian heroism, represented by characters taken from ancient chivalric poems, placing them in a new medieval and fantastic setting, which acts as a counterbalance to the modern world of industry and machines. The hero's journey takes place symbolically from West to East (the seat of the source), that is towards the origins of life, where the sun is born; during the journey the hero meets increasingly ancient and primitive civilizations, symbol of the original values to be restored in the contemporary world to reform it, and which can only be acquired again by aspiring to the purity of the origins (it is the nostalgia for distant places in space and time that characterizes The Lord of the Rings e The Silmarillion).
Through the quest Ralph grows up, reaches the perfect existential state and, once he has drunk the water from the magical well, the goal of the research, he is able to restore the values of the uncorrupted past, leading them to be reborn in the present (think of Frodo and the the saving journey he makes for the salvation of Middle-earth, the restoration of the natural order and personal redemption). Ralph's journey, from a god's perspective romance medieval, as in Galvano and the Green Knight, is the journey of all humanity, of the hero who accomplishes his final feat not for personal good or glory but the good of the community, of the whole social class to which he feels he belongs.
The theme of quest like impossible journey of the fantastic quest and how personal and human redemption, the "creation" of worlds in which neo-medieval characters are readapted or inserted in new narrative and ideological contexts, are two themes that Tolkien, reader and connoisseur of Morris, will bring to full maturity with his works, mainly with The Lord of the Rings e The Hobbit or the recapture of the treasure.
Bibliography:
1. C. SHORT, From Medieval to Medievalism: Modern Nostalgia (W. Morris, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien), «The literary space of the Middle Ages 2. The vulgar Middle Ages» IV, Salerno Editrice, Rome, 2004, pp. 247-272
2.G.WHITE, The life of JRR Tolkien, trad. it., Publisher Bompiani, Milan, 2002
3. JRR Tolkien, Slightly, Bompiani, Milan, 2018.
4. JRR Tolkien, Slightly, no. 226, pp. 480-481.
5. C. SHORT, From medieval to medievalism, pp. 247 - 251
6. Here we refer to two articles I have already written and published on the Blog "The Annals of Middle-earth" https://annalidellaterradimezzo.blogspot.com/: N. MAY, Frodo's journey. A spiritual experience for mankindin https://annalidellaterradimezzo.blogspot.com/2020/11/il-viaggio-di-frodo-unesperienza.html, November 25, 2020; Id., Professor Tolkien and the Middle Agesin https://annalidellaterradimezzo.blogspot.com/2020/06/il-professor-tolkien-e-il-medioevo.html, June 25, 2020.
7. M. WHITE, The Life of JRR Tolkien, pp. 6 - 50
8. On the theme of the symbolic journey from the East, understood as the place / time / geographical location of the origins, and the West as the destination of the future, of the Sunset, please refer to the excellent ideas and contributions of A. SCAFI, Heaven on earth. Garden of Eden maps, Mondadori, Milan, 2007.
9. J. GARTH, The worlds of JRR Tolkien. The places that inspired Middle-earth, Mondadori, Milan, 2021. In particular, on page 188, the author gives a slightly different interpretation regarding the influence that places, such as the Somme, and the experience of war have had on Tolkien, for him greater compared to what other scholars such as Tom Shippey have claimed.