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The House of the Wolfings
The House of the Wolfings
The House of the Wolfings
Ebook297 pages5 hours

The House of the Wolfings

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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The House of the Wolfings is a romantically reconstructed portrait of the lives of the Germanic Gothic tribes, written in an archaic style and incorporating a large amount of poetry. Morris combines his own idealistic views with what was actually known at the time of his subjects' folkways and language. He portrays them as simple and hardworking, galvanized into heroic action to defend their families and liberty by the attacks of imperial Rome.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 10, 2019
ISBN9781787360426
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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Rating: 3.968749975 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An idealized account of the lives of the Germanic Gothic tribes. It is very engrossing if you can get yourself into the flow of the story, very poetic. I really enjoyed it but I feel that many today would find it rather out of fashion or to romanticly inclined in vision. I would say, though, give it a chance for a few chapters if you are not hooked by then you never will be.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I still recall the encounter of these noble Germanic tribesmen with the "Welsh" (used in the original sense as foreigners, i.e. Romans)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ya know how documents, museum exhibits, and nonfiction books occasionally frame their expository information in the form of narratives? For instance, a museum exhibit featuring cavemen might trace the life of a child through sequential displays, or a documentary might name an animal and follow it over the course of ninety minutes. In each case, the purpose of the narrative isn't really to tell a good story for story's sake, but to provide a framework in which the audience can follow along, making the factual expository information more palatable. That's pretty much how I felt while reading The House of the Wolfings. William Morris's agenda seems to be to explore the world and lifestyle of ancient Teutonic peoples, with characterization and plot coming second to that. There's nothing wrong with it, and I anticipate reading it again at some point in the future. The light touches of fantasy, such as the dwarf-forged hauberk, were perhaps the most interesting of Morris's flourishes. But essentially this is a novel written for another age, the nineteenth century, when people had fewer resources at their hands to learn about the pre-Westernized word of Northern Europe. In modern times, I don't see much of a purpose for it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Disappointingly, I found this fairly boring on the whole (war stories just don't do it for me) but interesting in the context that Tolkien referred to this book specifically as an inspiration, and you can really see that in a lot of places.

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The House of the Wolfings - William Morris

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