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    The Wood Beyond the World
    The Wood Beyond the World
    The Wood Beyond the World
    Ebook170 pages3 hours

    The Wood Beyond the World

    By William Morris

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The Wood Beyond the World is a fantasy novel by William Morris, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature.
    When the wife of Golden Walter betrays him for another man, he leaves home on a trading voyage to avoid the necessity of a feud with her family. His efforts are fruitless, as word comes to him enroute that his wife's clan has killed his father. As a storm then carries him to a faraway country, the effect of this news is merely to sunder his last ties to his homeland.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooklassic
    Release dateJun 18, 2015
    ISBN9789635241446
    Author

    William Morris

    William Morris (1834-1896) was an English designer, poet, novelist, and socialist. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, he was raised in a wealthy family alongside nine siblings. Morris studied Classics at Oxford, where he was a member of the influential Birmingham Set. Upon graduating, he married embroiderer Jane Burden and befriended prominent Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With Neo-Gothic architect Philip Webb, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, he designed the Red House in Bexleyheath, where he would live with his family from 1859 until moving to London in 1865. As a cofounder of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., he was one of the Victorian era’s preeminent interior decorators and designers specializing in tapestries, wallpaper, fabrics, stained glass, and furniture. Morris also found success as a writer with such works as The Earthly Paradise (1870), News from Nowhere (1890), and The Well at the World’s End (1896). A cofounder of the Socialist League, he was a committed revolutionary socialist who played a major part in the growing acceptance of Marxism and anarchism in English society.

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    Reviews for The Wood Beyond the World

    3.5/5

    95 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Dover chose to reprint this is the typeface designed by the author so it is high quality medieval fakery. The story whose language is very "White Company" fake medieval, still conveys the story quite well. The effect is to make modern typeface versions of Morris' fantasy works to seem a little cheap. oh, it is a love story, and has a happy ending. There are bears, for Tolkien fans...and a town named Starkwall for the Game of thrones people.The novel was written prior to 1894.
    • 4/5
      It takes a while to get into the flow of this book; it's written in an old English style. Kind of a strange book and I didn't always quite know where this book was going. By the end I really liked it. Perfect fantasy kind of ending.
    • 3/5
      This is clearly an ancestor of Narnia, what with the evil queen and her dwarf servant, and their enemy the lion. As an actual reading experience it's rather weird, with the forced archaic language and the very shallow depth of realism to the characters. As literary history, the inspiration for people like Lewis and Tolkien who are the fathers of modern fantasy writing, it's fascinating.
    • 4/5
      "The Wood beyond the World" is considered to be the first novel of modern fantasy ever written.

      The plot briefly: Walter, a brave and honest young man, escapes from his mean wife and embarks on a ship to explore the world and its wonders. A storm leads him and his fellows in a strange land where he will find adventures, perils, enchanting maids, evil dwarfs and wicked mistresses.

      I found "The Wood beyond the World" to be a very pleasant story. Of course from a modern reader point of view the plot can seem naive, but many of today's so-called "New Tolkien" are far worse (and let me say much more cliched).

      The main weakness of the book is its language, a Shakespeare-inspired Elizabethan English quite difficult to understand. Non English-speakers will need a lot of patience to get through this, but if you are really interested in the genre it will not be a waste of time, given the importance of this piece of literature in the evolution of fantasy.

    • 2/5
      A fairy tale, as expected, but too silly for my tastes.
    • 4/5
      "The Wood Beyond the World" is many things but let me discuss what it is not. It is not a work of modern fantasy - that is, it does not have a high-paced plot full of swords and sorcery, peopled with rogues, wizards, goblins and elves. There is no attempt at the epic here. The story takes place with a limited cast of characters and only a modicum of natural magic. The lack of sword-play and the slow plot build-up may bore those accustomed to more "riveting" modern tales although patience is rewarded for the more persistent.The book is also, most definitely, not a fairy tale for children. The hero, Walter, leaves his first wife for unfaithfulness and fares forth on a sea voyage, during the course of which he stumbles onto the wood beyond the world. Here he encounters difficulties of a romantic nature when he falls in love with the maidservant of the Mistress of the Wood. How Walter and the maid escape the Mistress' wiles is subsequently described in fairly adult terms, the Mistress doing her best to seduce the innocent Walter. While C. S. Lewis may have received inspiration for the Narnia series from this book (the Mistress seems an archetype of the White Witch and has Walter slay a Lion at one point) Morris addresses themes of purity and temptation with considerably more directness.It is also not a typical Victorian novel, dealing with social mores, societal injustice or unrequited love. Rather it is an attempt to create a myth. Walter's entanglement with the Mistress of the wood and his eventual escape play out as a battle between seduction and guile on the one hand, and innocence and honesty on the other. The issue of trust and betrayal is of fundamental importance."The Wood Beyond the World" is, however, a splendid little tale, told in a romantic style and written in a pseudo-archaic English (a little practice with a King James Bible might be in order if you are rusty). The plot is full of tension and the descriptions of the Wood, the characters and the rustic scenery are all exquisitely painted. Morris was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and perhaps the best way to think of this story is as the literary equivalent of a Waterhouse painting - brooding, mysterious and enchanted.
    • 4/5
      Very likely the first fantasy novel, defined as a heroic adventure set in an imaginary world where magic works.Morris's prose is deliberately archaic and fans of Lord Of The Rings and similar will find it hard to read but this is where it all started.
    • 3/5
      So they came to their fire and sat down, and fell to breakfast; and ere they were done, the Maid said: “My Master, thou seest we be come nigh unto the hill-country, and to-day about sunset, belike, we shall come into the Land of the Bear-folk; and both it is, that there is peril if we fall into their hands, and that we may scarce escape them. Yet I deem that we may deal with the peril by wisdom.”“What is the peril?” said Walter; “I mean, what is the worst of it?”Said the Maid: “To be offered up in sacrifice to their God.”“But if we escape death at their hands, what then?” said Walter.“One of two things,” said she; “the first that they shall take us into their tribe.”“And will they sunder us in that case?” said Walter.“Nay,” said she.Walter laughed and said: “Therein is little harm then. But what is the other chance?”Said she: “That we leave them with their goodwill, and come back to one of the lands of Christendom.”Said Walter: “I am not all so sure that this is the better of the two choices, though, forsooth, thou seemest to think so. But tell me now, what like is their God, that they should offer up new-comers to him?”“Their God is a woman,” she said, “and the Mother of their nation and tribes (or so they deem) before the days when they had chieftains and Lords of Battle.”“That will be long ago,” said he; “how then may she be living now?”Said the Maid: “Doubtless that woman of yore agone is dead this many and many a year; but they take to them still a new woman, one after other, as they may happen on them, to be in the stead of the Ancient Mother. And to tell thee the very truth right out, she that lieth dead in the Pillared Hall was even the last of these; and now, if they knew it, they lack a God. This shall we tell them.”—The Wood Beyond the World by William MorrisThe version I own is a facsimile of the Kelmscott Press edition with calligraphy and illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. It’s beautiful and an absolute bitch to read out loud; the odd hyphenated breaks, the antiquated language, the dialogue within a block of text with only tree leaves as markers. Man, oh man. The story’s really just a series of “and then this happened”, which, to be fair, was the usual form for fiction from the mediaeval era which this book is affecting. But I don’t really find that so much as a failing as much as an immersion into a style that is largely lost now. With adverbs and conjunctions like “sithence” and “whenas” and “betimes”, I can’t help except feel the restoration of missing pieces to an inscription in ancient low-relief. It’s certainly a challenge for me, but not in the usual sense. Kind of like when I read “Anna Karenina” in the Doubleday edition from 1934 or “Don Quixote” from Thomas Shelton’s Jacobean-era translation in the Collier edition—a veritable eye exam as well as cognitive test.Despite its visual appeal, the words are starting to crawl and crash into one another, becoming a kind of cross-eyed palimpsest. How did those scribes not go crazy, oh . . . I guess any mortification of the flesh, even if it is just the fingertips and eyeballs, is enough to assure your bench at the table of the great Scriptorium in the sky. I think I would’ve rather preferred to be a flagellant, using that damn scourge on others instead.Well, we’ve all got our forms of personal torture. And apparently mine is trying to read crammed font in a half-assed British accent to the wife while she nearly burns herself on the baking stone. Forsooth, I fear the fury of the Kitchen Maid and her ceaseless birching, and so I must needs read on!

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    The Wood Beyond the World - William Morris

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