Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites celebrated the art and literature of the Middle Ages at a time when conventional wisdom held up the Renaissance as the pinnacle of European culture and Raphael as the quintessential Renaissance master. The centuries between the Fall of Rome and the rediscovery of classical antiquity were at that time (as they occasionally still are now) dismissed as the “Dark Ages.” This was sheer bias, in Morris’s opinion, rooted in the eighteenth century’s overvaluation of the disciplined, balanced formality of classical art. Historians were wrong, he wrote, when they portrayed the medieval period as “lawless and chaotic; its ethics a mere conscious hypocrisy, its art gloomy and barbarous fanaticism only, its literature the formless jargon of savages.”
Like many of the Romantics, Morris saw vigor and truth in the eccentricities of individual expression, which, he argued, had been allowed freer rein in the Middle Ages than in the Renaissance. You could see this in the very objects that filled the medieval world: the chairs and wall hangings, the pitchers and illuminated books, each with its own handmade beauty. The Renaissance cathedral is an orderly, Palladian symphony of columns and arches, speaking persuasively of reason. The walls of a Gothic church, by contrast, teem with carvings of saints, allegorical figures, gargoyles, and other grotesqueries climbing improbably upward until they vanish into the shadowy mysteries of pointed vaults. Where the quintessential Renaissance structure — St. Peter’s Basilica or the Campidoglio in Rome — presents a refined, controlled ideal, orchestrated by a single master, the medieval public building is the work of dozens of unnamed craftsmen, each adding his own idiosyncratic touch.
With the Renaissance came not only the institution of a uniform classical style of beauty but — and worse yet in Morris’s view — the dawn of capitalism. Compared to the industrial workers of his own century, Morris felt, even medieval serfs had more varied, less alienating work and more free time. But it was the artisans who most captivated his imagination. A medieval guild craftsman, he wrote, was “master of his time, his tools, and his material, was not bound to turn out his work shabbily, but could afford to amuse himself by giving it artistic finish; how different that is from [the] mechanical or trade finish some of us, at least, have learned.” A world furnished with a few cherished possessions made in the old, authentic ways was an infinitely healthier and more joyful place to live, he believed, than one cluttered with cheap, mass-produced junk built by bored, miserable workers.
If, for inspiration, Morris looked even more intently to the past than the earlier Romantics had, he still shared their belief in the possibility of a redeemed future. His own infatuation with Norse legends and sagas (several of which he had translated) led him to visit Iceland; there he had seen people living in simple, wholesome (if sometimes harsh) circumstances and in communities without great disparities in wealth. This experience further fired his interest in socialism, and when not designing furniture or directing the publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer (one of the most beautiful books ever printed), Morris could be found on the streets of London attempting to rally the proletariat. His time-travel narrative, News from Nowhere, imagines a twenty-first-century England that has restored the virtues of the fourteenth century with a few key alterations. In fact, Morris’s utopian vision resembles the Shire — a cheerful, unassuming, agrarian society with few machines and a reverent respect for the natural world and its rhythms — but unlike Tolkien’s hobbits, the inhabitants of Morris’s future England have organized their economy along strictly communal lines.
In Morris’s prose romances, the politics are much more subdued (though perhaps no more detached from reality). Lewis first came across a copy of Morris’s Well at the World’s End on a shelf at Arthur Greeves’s house when he was in his early teens. The book single-handedly revived his childhood penchant for “knights in armor,” and soon “the letters WILLIAM MORRIS were coming to have at least as potent a magic in them as WAGNER.” Tolkien wasn’t much older when he used a small cash prize he’d won in an academic competition to buy a copy of The House of the Wolfings. That book, the story of a tribe of pre-Roman Goths, gave him the idea of adapting a tale from the Kalevala “along the lines of Morris’s romances” (as he put it in a letter to his wife-to-be). His prime candidate for this adaptation was the Finnish legend of Kullervo, a hapless young man who winds up inadvertently committing incest and precipitating other catastrophes during an attempt to avenge the massacre of his family. (This idea, transplanted to Middle-earth, eventually became the story of Túrin Turambar, a cursed hero who endures a string of similar misfortunes, published posthumously in 2007 as The Children of Húrin.)
My copy of Morris’s Well at the World’s End comes in a double volume, bound together with a similar work, The Wood Beyond the World, and published by Inkling Books, a one-man concern in Seattle. The collective title given to this volume by its conservative Catholic publisher, On the Lines of Morris’ Romances, is taken from Tolkien’s letter to his fiancée, and the subtitle is Two Books That Inspired J. R. R. Tolkien. If that’s not sufficient to get the point across, a back-cover blurb appeals directly to “Tolkien fans who long for more of the same delight that they get from The Lord of the Rings.” (In truth, the stately, rambling narratives of Morris’s romances are unlikely to beguile any but the most patient and scholarly aficionados of Middle-earth, and even then their interest will probably be more historical than anything else.) The introduction to The Wood Beyond the World takes pains to assure readers that this “uncomplicated romance” contains “no hidden messages about contemporary social issues,” presumably a reference to Morris’s politics. Lewis and Tolkien, too, were more than capable of reading selectively, extracting what they liked from the romances, while leaving Morris’s socialism on the plate.
What they liked was something that had never quite been attempted before. The Well at the World’s End and The Wood Beyond the World, written in the 1890s, are entirely original stories, set in imaginary lands that resemble the mystical Britain of the Arthurian tradition combined with the timeless noplace where fairy tales transpire. Morris was the first writer to do this — devise a whole new world for his romances, rather than setting them in “Faerie Land” or a semi-mythologized version of a place that actually existed. From his example grew Tolkien’s concept of the secondary world and, eventually, Middle-earth itself. In a way, the socialist Morris was the grandfather of a vast and highly lucrative genre of popular fiction, even though what he’d set out to do was revive a beloved, forsaken form.