The House of the Wolfings
William Morris with Michael W. Perry
The Book that Inspired J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
“The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, 1960
The House of the Wolfings
Copyright © 2009 by Michael W. Perry/ All rights reserved.
Published 2009 by Inkling Books, Seattle
Smashwords Edition 1.1, November 2009
William Morris and J. R. R. Tolkien
by Michael W. Perry
In her introduction to the fourteenth volume of The Collected Works of William Morris (1912), Morris’ daughter May said that, “In The House of the Wolfings and in The Roots of the Mountains my father seems to have got back to the atmosphere of the [ancient Northern European] Sagas. In that it is part metrical, part prose, the Wolfings may be held experimental, but in this tale of imaginary tribal life on the verge of Roman conquest—a period which had a great fascination for the writer, who read with critical enjoyment the more important modern studies of it as they came out.”
The impact of those “modern studies” must have been great, for May Morris went on to note with amusement, a “German professor who, after the Wolfings came out, wrote and asked learned questions about the Mark, expecting, I fear, equally learned answers from our Poet who sometimes dreamed realities without having documentary evidence of them.” The hot-tempered Morris’ own response to that professor was amusing. “Doesn’t the fool realize,” he shouted, “that it’s a romance, a work of fiction—that it’s all lies!”
As Morris well knew, we know almost nothing the day-to-day life of these brave and intelligent, but typically illiterate Central and Northern European tribes. In the Middle East, a dry climate, the widespread use of stone and clay, and the early spread of a written language preserved much. In a region that J. R. R. Tolkien would also make such a prominent part of his Middle-earth, a wet climate, the limited use of writing, and the common use of wood and leather left little for future generations to study. What little we do know has as its source the far from objective remarks of foes, such as the Romans, and literary fragments that have come down to us across the centuries, preserved in poetic sagas about great heroes and their accomplishments.
Both Morris and Tolkien drank deeply from those ancient literary wells of “Northerness.” Morris did so as part of a broad artistic genius that included the translation of ancient tales—such as his 1870 Volsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs. Tolkien did so as part of his professional life as an Oxford professor and a leading expert on the ancient languages and literature of Northern Europe.
These two men knew either much (Morris) or most (Tolkien) of all that was known about these people and their lives. They used that wealth of knowledge to create “dreamed realities” (Morris) or an “imaginary history” (Tolkien) about what it might have been like to live in those days. While what they wrote wasn’t necessarily true in a strict sense, both knew enough about the past and were talented enough as writers that what they wrote creates a strong sense that they describe what might have been.
Their readers certainly sense this. One wrote Morris that his tales, “convey the impression of your having lived in the time to describe what you have seen.” The effect of Tolkien is even more startling. Friends of his fans often complain that those who drink deeply of Middle-earth act as if Tolkien’s created world were more real than the one in which they live. In his Rehabilitations, Tolkien’s close friend C. S. Lewis said much the same when he noted of Morris, “All we need demand is that this invented world should have some intellectual or emotional relevance to the world we live in. And it has.”
Without a doubt, both Morris and Tolkien achieved that most difficult of all tasks for an author. They imagined a world with such skill that those who inhabit it seem as real as our next-door neighbor. Morris made clear that was his intent in a July 1889 paper in which he discussed romantic literature and said that, “As for romance, what does romance mean? I have heard people miscalled for being romantic, but what romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present.” Both Morris and Tolkien were geniuses at doing just that.
Of course there are also differences in how the two men wrote. Morris was relatively indifferent to the broader picture. In The House of the Wolfings it was enough for him that his tale resembles the battles that Germanic tribes once fought with encroaching Roman armies. He has no desire to link his tale to actual battles fought on certain dates with specific Roman generals. The same is true of geography in The Roots of the Mountains. His description of the local geography and its forests is as marvelous as anything in Tolkien and that geography plays a major role in his story. But we are left uncertain about what would seem to be an important fact, which particular mountain range provides a backdrop for the story. May Morris believed the story was set in “the wonderful land at the foot of the Italian Alps” that her father loved so dearly. Others, with perhaps more an eye on history, place it in the German Alps or even in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe. Even more surprising, although we are left with the impression that the people in Roots are descendants of those in Wolfings, the actual ties between the two was left unclear. For Morris those things simply did not matter. It was enough for him that his tales could be fitted, however loosely, into European history.
In contrast, as his readers know, Tolkien did not place his tale within the recorded history of Europe. The events he described are assumed to have taken place in a past so distant that no independent history or artifacts from the age remain. Only the faintest echoes of what happened then have been preserved in extinct languages and ancient tales about dwarves, elves and dragons. In fact, so much (imaginary) time has passed that even the geography of Middle-earth only loosely resembles that of the Western Europe on which it is modeled.
Tolkien saw this historical vacuum as an opportunity. Into that vast gap, he thrust his own history for a world that, by his account, was just over seven thousand years old when the main events of The Lord of the Rings took place. He gave his Middle-earth a history and geography so complex, that numerous books have been written to describe it. In fact, I was able to write a 251-page chronology (Untangling Tolkien) in which I describe, typically to the year, the complex and quite plausible chain of events that led to Frodo acquiring the Ring, as well as a precise and detailed day-by-day account of Frodo’s quest to rid Middle-earth of the Ring, aided by his friends. Morris, although almost as talented as a story teller, did nothing on that grand a scale.
That said, what Morris and Tolkien had in common is far more important than their differences. May Morris expressed it when she said that her father’s writings were “experimental.” In biblical language, he was trying to see if the ‘old wine’ in the ancient Northern tales that he loved so well—tales that were fragmentary and typically told in poetic forms that were no longer popular—could survive being put into the ‘new wineskins’ of a modern historical novel, with only an occasional burst of poetry. In that he proved quite successful, although much of his success would come through others, such as Tolkien, and through a new form of literature called fantasy, that he helped to create out of ancient folk and fairy tales.
/> Of course, the fact that Morris was building on those tales, did not mean he slavishly followed them. C. S. Lewis readily admitted that, “Morris invented for his poems and perfected in his prose-romances a language which has never at any period been spoken in England.” But he went on to point out that, “The question about Morris’s style is not whether it is an artificial language—all endurable language in longer works must be that—but whether it is a good one.”
Lewis, a great writer in his own right, believed Morris had succeeded marvelously. Morris’ style, he wrote, “is incomparably easier and clearer than any ‘natural’ style could possibly be, and the ‘dull finish,’ the careful avoidance of rhetoric, gloss and decoration, is of its very essence.” In words that apply equally well to Tolkien, Lewis said that it was the very “matter-of-factness” of the tales, that make them seem true. “Other stories have only scenery: his have geography. He is not concerned with ‘painting’ landscapes; he tells you the lie of the land, and then you paint the landscape for yourself. To a reader long fed on the almost botanical and entomological niceties of much modern fiction—where, indeed, we mostly skip if the characters go through a jungle—the effect is at first very pale and cold, but also very fresh and spacious. We begin to relish what my friend called the ‘Northerness.’ No mountains in literature are as far away as distant mountains in Morris.”
There is also, Lewis said, a remarkable vividness in Morris’ descriptions of human society. Unlike many other romantic writers, Morris did not glorify the individual, making him almost God-like in his independence. Lewis wrote that Morris “immerses the individual completely in the society. ‘If thou diest today, where then shall our love be?’ asks the heroine in the House of the Wolfings. ‘It shall abide with the soul of the Wolfings,’ comes the answer.”
Lewis pointed out that many writers who try to describe an ideal society are “dull” because they fail to define the value of “x” that tells us what is Good. But he goes on, “The tribal communities which Morris paints in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains are such attempts, perhaps the most successful attempts ever made, to give x a value. . . . A modern poet of the Left, praising that same solidarity with the group which Morris praises, invites a man to be ‘one cog in the singing golden hive.’ Morris, on the other hand, paints the actual goings on of the communal life, the sowing, planting, begetting, building, ditching, eating and conversation. . . . Morris . . . brings back a sentiment that a man could really live by.”
Lewis could have said much the same of the imaginary communities that his friend Tolkien created. The Shire, Rivendell and Rohan have ways of life many find appealing, however different they may be from modern life. Each sets before us what seems to be a reasonable standard by which we might live. All are real enough we can imagine them as home.
Lewis also believed that Morris might bridge a gap he saw developing in 1939 society and that has grown wider since. “The old indeterminate, half-Christian, half-Pantheistic, piety of the last century is gone,” he wrote. “The modern literary world is increasingly divided into two camps, that of the positive, militant Christians and that of the convinced materialists.” Both camps, Lewis noted, can “find in him something that they need.”
Christians can benefit from Morris’ honesty. As a Pagan poet, Morris was “content to merely state the [ultimate human] question . . . uncontaminated by theorizing.” Within his tales we sense the great Pagan “thirst for immortality, tingling alive,” but also totally devoid of the answers that Christianity would later bring to a Pagan Europe. As a “prophet as unconscious, and therefore as far beyond suspicion as Balaam’s ass,” Morris, Lewis said, testifies to the importance of that thirst in itself and not merely as a prelude to a presentation of the Christian gospel.
Materialists can also benefit. Because Morris considered himself a socialist, many on the Left see him as one of them. But Lewis saw a critical difference between Morris and his political allies. He believed that Morris might force an increasingly secular and politicized Left to face a question it would rather ignore. “The Left agrees with Morris that it is an absolute duty to labour for human happiness in this world,” he wrote. “But the Left is deceiving itself if it thinks that any zeal for this object can permanently silence the reflection that every moment of this happiness must be lost as soon as gained, that all who enjoy it will die, that the race and the planet themselves must one day follow the individual into a state of being which has no significance—a universe of inorganic homogeneous matter moving at uniform speed in a low temperature. Hitherto the Left has been content, as far as I know, to pretend that this does not matter.” Morris made clear that such things do matter and that our longing for immortality raises questions that must be answered.
Morris can stimulate us in this fashion because of something special about his writing. Like Tolkien, the fact that he wrote of a long-ago world has led some to accuse him of being escapist. Not so, says Lewis. Morris (and by implication Tolkien) has “faced the facts” of modern life. “This is the paradox of him. He seems to retire far from the real world and to build a world out of his wishes; but when he has finished the result stands out as a picture of experience ineluctably true.” Morris presents, “in one vision the ravishing sweetness and the heart-breaking melancholy of our experience.” He shows, “how the one continually passes over into the other.” Most important of all, he combines everything into “a stirring practical creed,” that “all our adventures, worldly and other-worldly alike, must take into account.”
The same can be said of Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings ends with both “ravishing sweetness” and “heart-breaking melancholy.” Sauron is defeated and Middle-earth is free, but both Bilbo and Frodo are so badly wounded, they must seek relief over the sea. To wed Aragorn—a happy event—Arwen must separate herself from her family and face eventual death. Even the brave Ents, whose role in the victory was considerable, will never find the Ent-wives they love. As in life, the sweet and bitter are mixed together.
Tolkien recognized the literary debt he owned to those ancient tales and to Morris himself in a letter he wrote to his future wife in the fall of 1914 (now the first letter in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien). There he spoke of introducing a fellow student to the delights of “Kalevala the Finnish ballads.” Tolkien went on to say that he hoped to turn one of those ballads, “which is really a great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between.”
Forty-six years later, in a letter written at the very end of 1960, Tolkien continued to honor his debt to Morris when he wrote that the landscape of “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme [where Tolkien fought in World War I]. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.” (That remark became the inspiration for a book combining those two tales under one title, More to William Morris, as well as separate printed editions of each book.)
In The Road to Middle-earth, T. A. Shippey described what Tolkien hoped to do and how it linked to Morris: “Like Walter Scott or William Morris before him, he felt the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left; Beowulf or The [S]aga of King Heidrek stimulated the imagination but did not quite satisfy it.”
After Tolkien died in 1973, many of his admirers hoped that stories similar to The Lord of the Rings existed in manuscript form among the author’s large collection of papers. Unfortunately, time has demonstrated that was only partly true. Fragments of tales and plots that might have become great epics do exist and have been published in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. In addition, many of the attempted plots and variations in plot that lie behind The Lord of Rings have been included in Christopher Tolkien’s “History of Middl
e-earth” series. But almost all lack the wide appeal of Tolkien’s masterpiece. What he left behind is as fragmentary and incomplete (and thus as uninteresting for most readers) as the Northern tales he loved so much. For completed tales like Tolkien’s, we must turn to one of his richest literary sources. We must turn to William Morris.
C. S. Lewis would have agreed. Morris’ stories, he wrote, provide readers with “a pleasure so inexhaustible that after twenty or fifty years of reading they find it worked so deeply into all their emotions as to defy analysis.” Morris’ stories were almost certainly among those Lewis meant when he told Tolkien, “if they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves.”
Readers should keep one thing in mind. In Morris, you won’t find an epic as broad or as extraordinarily complex as Tolkien’s tale of the Ring. Instead you find stories having the same flavor, with heroes and heroines from long ago fighting to stay free in a hostile and dangerous world. You will find descriptions of forests and nature every bit as marvelous as anything in Tolkien and tales that stresses the importance of remaining loyal to those close to us, whatever the cost. Finally, you’ll find something Tolkien is often accused of neglecting, warm romances between men and women.
In short, if you like what Tolkien wrote about Aragorn and his Rangers, if you admire the bravery of the Riders of Rohan, if you long for more tales of travel in an unspoiled wilderness, and if you wish that Tolkien had more to say about the courage of women or about romance between men and women, then you’ll be delighted by tales from the pen of William Morris.
We should always remember that William Morris, the writer who delighted and inspired Tolkien, can also delight and inspire those who love the marvelous stories that Tolkien wrote.
House of the Wolfings: The William Morris Book that Inspired J. R. R. Tolkiena *s The Lord of the Rings Page 1