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cimoreneI should probably already have a William Morris tag, since I am such a passionate fan of both his art (textiles and wallpapers, as well as beautiful engravings and illustrations) and his writing, but I don't.
I've posted quotes from his "medieval romances" and talked about them here before. They're an interesting step on the way to the evolution of the fantasy genre, written before the other early high fantasy works like Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, Hope Mirlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, and the works of Tolkien and Lewis.
The Victorian era saw a huge swell of interest in the middle ages: there's the landmark cultural impact of Scott's Ivanhoe in 1819, the neogothic fashions in architecture and design, and the huge interest in fairytale books for children associated with the Golden Age of Illustration. William Morris himself was closely associated with the pre-Raphaelites (his wife Jane is one of the best-known faces of the period thanks to being one of Rossetti's favorite models). The idealized fantasy of the Age of Chivalry portrayed in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites and alluded to in the beautiful images created by William Morris as a designer is probably the perfect visual accompaniment to his novels modeled on medieval romances.
Morris's adventure stories contain plenty of magic and in modern terms don't fall outside the high fantasy genre, but they make a lot more sense if you read them understanding the context that the genre didn't really exist yet. A lot of their raw material comes from the world of medieval romances like the Arthurian stories, Breton lays, and epic poetry of Scandinavia, but their narrative style is more similar to Ivanhoe than to any of these. Morris's language is lyrical and carefully, beautifully constructed, with an almost Tolkienesque approach to lending it a historical glow. I'd say Morris uses just about as much Middle and Old English as Tolkien uses his invented languages.
And I have a lot more I'd like to say about them! I've read as much as I could find that other people have written about them, but there's distressingly little discussion; I find it baffling because of how much I like them, and it's hard to believe there are so few other people who find it equally fascinating. I keep thinking I have surely just not quite found it yet.
I have read all his novels before, and I recently decided to start rereading all of them, and to write a little bit about each of them for my own future reference, if nothing else.
1891's The Story of the Glittering Plain follows Hallblithe, a young warrior of the House of the Raven in a Viking-like culture, and his quest to the mysterious Land of the Glittering Plain to recover his troth-plight maiden, the Hostage, kidnapped by warriors of the Sea Eagle. The Glittering Plain is a supernatural place - echoes of the Undying Lands, but also of Faery and the Netherworld.
(The fact that the Hostage is never given another name is fascinating to me especially. In the text it's treated as if "The Hostage" IS her name, but the entire plot revolves around her being kidnapped, at first ostensibly for ransom, so this is obviously her role, and that gives the whole thing an air of allegory.)
The sea-reavers (more Vikings, but from over the sea) who take the Hostage at first leave behind one man, the Puny Fox, in a smaller sailboat, who persuades Hallblithe to come alone with him after them, promising to take him to her; he sails to the Isle of Ransom, where the Sea Eagle clan have their stronghold. And then he sneaks away in the night, leaving Hallblithe alone to find his way to their house, where he is invited in by the retired former chieftain, who says he will bring Hallblithe to the Glittering Plain and that he can find her there.
This turns out to also be part of the ruse. The Glittering Plain is a land of plenty where people don't grow old and die; just being there causes them to become young again, and they live an idyllic life free from conflict, with shades of creepy childlikeness akin to that seen in suspect utopian societies in sf. The Glittering Plain also exerts a soporific effect that tends to make them forget the details of their previous lives. Hallblithe takes his petition to the king of the land, who appears beautiful and endlessly benevolent, but tries to trick Hallblithe into marrying his daughter instead and becomes angry at Hallblithe's continued determination to find the Hostage. He tries walking through the mountains and across a desert to escape and succeeds only in nearly starving to death and rescuing some dying pilgrims, but eventually builds a sailboat and sails back to the Isle of Ransom, where he is greeted by his initial betrayer, who now wants to be his bff and helps him trick his way back into the stronghold of the Sea Eagles... where the chief just produces the Hostage for him with essentially no explanation.
It's strongly hinted that there IS a long story to be told, but nobody tells it. We end the book knowing only that the king of the Glittering Plain, who commands the Sea Eagles, somehow forced them to trick Hallblithe against their (Fox's, chieftain's and chieftain emeritus') will. I conjecture that his motive was to get Hallblithe to marry his daughter willingly, and that it's his daughter's decision to release Hallblithe... but Hallblithe only meets her in dreams and she never has any dialogue, and we are left wondering how and why she was told, or taught, that Hallblithe would be her husband in the first place. It doesn't seem to be a case of her having supernaturally picked him out at a distance, because when the situation is introduced she is portrayed studying a painted portrait of Hallblithe on a page of an illuminated book. I'm inclined to think this means it was the king's choice, but we can't know for sure. And that would be an awfully big gap in a modern novel, but it's exactly the kind of thing that goes unexplained in medieval romances.
***
1856's The Hollow Land was apparently Morris's first book, and it is both shorter and less structured than most of his other medieval romances.
The narrator is Florian de Liilis, and the story is told in the first person, as if orally. The story opens when he is a child and sees his brother Arnald, a young knight, publicly humiliated by an evil lady named Swanhilda, who later becomes the queen and murders the king. The real action begins when Florian is just barely old enough to be knighted, and his brother is now the head of their house, the House of the Lily, which apparently is very important, having its own local church and enough clan-associated retainers and troops to half fill the town. His elder brother arranges for them to sneak into a monastery at night, taking the queen by surprise and killing her and her guards in revenge for that past insult. Her son, Red Harald, and the rest of the kingdom come after them and destroy their entire house, finally driving them from the town and across a nearby reputedly-haunted moor, until most of their men surrender and Florian and his brother alone fling themselves over a mysterious cliff that wasn't there before. He wakes up disoriented in the Hollow Land, which is a mysterious land rumored to be found somewhere in the haunted moor that he always thought was just a myth. Shades of Faery, but there's a strong religious undertone and the place is actually apparently a kind of purgatory, where Florian meets his Love. He woke up on the ground in the woods with his head in her lap and recognizes her at once, and we learn that she grew up in the Hollow Land and has known all her life that she is predestined to love him and has been waiting for him. Together they find and bury his brother's body, and she gives him a religious speech about why his brother's revenge plot was wrong; then they find a lady dressed in red crying in the woods alone and become afraid and run away.
The next chapter, "Fytte the Second," starts with Florian waking up alone, middle-aged ("past my prime") and weak, and not knowing his surroundings or how he got there. He's dressed in rags and rotting armor that falls off him when he gets up and he wanders aimlessly, almost drowns, and is saved by a man who spears him through the shoulder and pulls him out of the river. The spear wound doesn't hurt. He finds an empty castle, occupied only by the man who stabbed him engaged in painting murals all over the great hall, but all the murals are of Florian and his brother, Swanhilda, Red Harald, and a woman Florian doesn't recognize (his Love, or maybe Red Harald's?). The murals are painted entirely in red and yellow because, the man explains, blood and gold mean Hell, and they have a swordfight and then agree that the man will teach Florian to paint in exchange for Florian teaching him about "God's judgements". They follow this plan for years, and gradually the murals change from yellow and red to green and purple.
Then one day they witness a funeral procession for a dead king who obviously represents Jesus, and there are like three pages of descriptions of the people in the funeral procession, and after it Florian is able to call the man Harald and the man recognizes it as his name. They get dressed properly in their own armor (magically whole and fine) and soon meet a lady in red crying in the road, and Harald has a lock of her hair, so evidently she's his predestined Love. He tells Florian to go on to the Hollow Land without him and kisses him and stays with her, and Florian does.
Fytte the Third is just him waking up again to his Love singing about the Hollow Land and they kiss and walk together to a beautiful fair palace and there's a lot of emotion about it, so, Heaven, I guess, THE END. His Love's name is Margaret, which is an interestingly real name. If she was born in the magical purgatory-like place because he was destined to die young before they could have met and then to go to purgatory before going to Heaven, but she's actually a normal person - so is the same true of Red Harald's predestined Love? Is everyone predestined to love a certain other person and all the people who are destined to die young have soulmates (or whatever) who are just. Born in purgatory, taught by their mothers the names of their predestined Loves, and they sit around waiting and singing songs and stuff??? I wonder if Morris really thought all this through.
Oh, and also, the main clue about the, er, religious cosmology of this story is this passage from before Florian dies, where an old retainer tells him: "Men say that at your christening some fiend took on him the likeness of a priest and strove to baptize you in the Devil's name, but God had mercy on you so that the fiend could not choose but baptize you in the name of the most holy Trinity: and yet men say that you hardly believe any doctrine such as other men do, and will at the end only go to Heaven round about as it were, not at all by the intercession of our Lady; they say too that you can see no ghosts or other wonders, whatever happens to other Christian men." Is this an indication that he is destined for the Hollow Land instead of regular Heaven? And his and Red Harald's mutual healing in the Hollow Land is a penance that allows them to move to real Heaven? (Or possibly to a Hollow Land version of Heaven?)
***
1894's The Wood Beyond the World is more like the modern idea of a fantasy adventure quest novel than the other two. This book is... preoccupied with the virginity and the virtue, and lack thereof, of women. Or I suppose you could say the book is about those things, to put it more kindly
The story starts with the narrator, Golden Walter, the son of a prosperous sea trader, who has an unfaithful wife. He hates her but he doesn't want to shame her by sending her back to her kindred, and he doesn't want to publicly accuse her, necessarily, so he tells his father he would like to see the world by leaving on the next merchant vessel. As he goes to view the ship for the first time he sees a vision of a scary little person, followed by a richly dressed supernaturally beautiful lady, followed by a beautiful barefoot maiden with an iron around her ankle. He thinks they are real at this point, but later that day he sees them come out of a door near him and walk around a corner and disappear.
Some time passes and a messenger from home comes on another ship to tell him his father has died in battle because he sent Walter's faithless wife back to her family with an intermediate amount of shame ("with no honour, and yet with no such shame as might have been"), but they took offense and went to war against Walter's family. Walter agrees to sail with him back home, but on their way to the ship, both Walter and the messenger see a vision of the three characters, and Walter hears that the other guy saw them. They sail away and are soon blown off course to a land none of them have ever seen or heard of, where they are met by a hospitable old man who offers lodging for the night and food and tells them Walter about two passes through the mountains around his house: one which leads to the country of the Bear folk, who are "half wild" and practice human sacrifice and worship "some woman", and the other which is Too Dangerous to even think about, and he refuses to tell Walter anything about it, so Walter of course sneaks away alone in the middle of the night that way.
He walks for a week through the mountains and down into a green wood (The Wood Beyond the World) and soon meets the little man, who talks mysteriously about "his Lady" and "the Wretch", which he says he and the Lady both hate. Also that his Lady probably "made" both him and "the Bear folk", and that terrible things will happen if the Lady finds out that he "said too much", and leaves Walter some food and runs away again. Walter continues through the wood and soon meets the Maiden, who tells him that they have fallen in love with each other at first sight and that she can save his life and get them both out of the magical land if he agrees to trust her (he agrees to all of this). She explains that the Wood Beyond the World is ruled by her mistress, an evil sorceress, who has drawn Walter there as her latest catch because she has the habit of luring beautiful young men to be her lovers, and discarding them one after the other (not necessarily killing them, but it's implied that she manipulated the old man Walter met into killing his predecessor back in the day). Walter and the Maiden can't touch because the sorceress would know, but she doesn't know about their conversations and secret meetings, and everything will be fine if Walter does what the Maiden says and trusts her completely. And he does. The Maiden is also, in a smaller and slightly different way, a sorceress, which apparently is partly why the immortal sorceress hates her (but also why she keeps her around even though she hates her, because she needs her).
At the Maiden's direction, in a series of secret meetings, Walter comes to the magical palace where the Lady is entertaining a King's Son, a handsome and cruel young man whom she is almost tired of and who has been trying to catch the Maiden and rape her as well for fun, but she has been able to avoid him thus far. The Lady plays the two men off against each other for a while, at first treating Walter politely and distantly, then inviting him to go hunting with her, and eventually makes him her lover. The Maiden drugs the King's Son, uses sorcery to disguise him as Walter, and lets the Lady kill him herself out of jealousy because she overhears the Maiden purporting to make an assignation with him. Then the Lady becomes hysterical with grief and kills herself, sparing them the trouble. The little man follows them as they flee on foot to the Bear people, but Walter is able to shoot him with his bow and arrows, and the Maiden tells Walter that they can't sleep together yet because she needs to use magic some more, and her magic is a special kind of magic that only works because she's still a virgin.
They walk to the land of the Bear people and the Maiden does some minor miracles, making cut and dead flowers bloom unseasonably a few times, and tells them she is their goddess reborn (actually the Lady was their goddess and used some small feats of magic to gain their worship so that they act as border guards and give her stuff), and on the strength of that, she commands them to stop practicing human sacrifice and promises that she'll come back soon and teach them agriculture (she does this in a brief episode at the end of the book), and then she uses her powers to appear to vanish. Walter has to walk a few days to catch up with her, and then they walk together to the nearest outpost of civilization, which is a beautiful walled city with the quaint tradition of taking the first stranger who walks up to them as their new king after their king dies, provided he passes a couple of tests. Walter passes these tests by being beautiful and strong and by choosing armor over a fancy suit when they offered him two outfits with no words of explanation, and he and the Maiden get married and rule the city the rest of their lives happily ever after, her magic having been erased by losing her virginity, and then the city also abandons their tradition so that Walter's descendants can be their rulers. The end.
ETA: Obviously a lot to unpack here, but I will talk more about it in future posts. I wanted to get this down before I forgot too much to summarize TWBTW and The Hollow Land.
I've posted quotes from his "medieval romances" and talked about them here before. They're an interesting step on the way to the evolution of the fantasy genre, written before the other early high fantasy works like Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, Hope Mirlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, and the works of Tolkien and Lewis.
The Victorian era saw a huge swell of interest in the middle ages: there's the landmark cultural impact of Scott's Ivanhoe in 1819, the neogothic fashions in architecture and design, and the huge interest in fairytale books for children associated with the Golden Age of Illustration. William Morris himself was closely associated with the pre-Raphaelites (his wife Jane is one of the best-known faces of the period thanks to being one of Rossetti's favorite models). The idealized fantasy of the Age of Chivalry portrayed in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites and alluded to in the beautiful images created by William Morris as a designer is probably the perfect visual accompaniment to his novels modeled on medieval romances.
Morris's adventure stories contain plenty of magic and in modern terms don't fall outside the high fantasy genre, but they make a lot more sense if you read them understanding the context that the genre didn't really exist yet. A lot of their raw material comes from the world of medieval romances like the Arthurian stories, Breton lays, and epic poetry of Scandinavia, but their narrative style is more similar to Ivanhoe than to any of these. Morris's language is lyrical and carefully, beautifully constructed, with an almost Tolkienesque approach to lending it a historical glow. I'd say Morris uses just about as much Middle and Old English as Tolkien uses his invented languages.
And I have a lot more I'd like to say about them! I've read as much as I could find that other people have written about them, but there's distressingly little discussion; I find it baffling because of how much I like them, and it's hard to believe there are so few other people who find it equally fascinating. I keep thinking I have surely just not quite found it yet.
I have read all his novels before, and I recently decided to start rereading all of them, and to write a little bit about each of them for my own future reference, if nothing else.
1891's The Story of the Glittering Plain follows Hallblithe, a young warrior of the House of the Raven in a Viking-like culture, and his quest to the mysterious Land of the Glittering Plain to recover his troth-plight maiden, the Hostage, kidnapped by warriors of the Sea Eagle. The Glittering Plain is a supernatural place - echoes of the Undying Lands, but also of Faery and the Netherworld.
(The fact that the Hostage is never given another name is fascinating to me especially. In the text it's treated as if "The Hostage" IS her name, but the entire plot revolves around her being kidnapped, at first ostensibly for ransom, so this is obviously her role, and that gives the whole thing an air of allegory.)
The sea-reavers (more Vikings, but from over the sea) who take the Hostage at first leave behind one man, the Puny Fox, in a smaller sailboat, who persuades Hallblithe to come alone with him after them, promising to take him to her; he sails to the Isle of Ransom, where the Sea Eagle clan have their stronghold. And then he sneaks away in the night, leaving Hallblithe alone to find his way to their house, where he is invited in by the retired former chieftain, who says he will bring Hallblithe to the Glittering Plain and that he can find her there.
This turns out to also be part of the ruse. The Glittering Plain is a land of plenty where people don't grow old and die; just being there causes them to become young again, and they live an idyllic life free from conflict, with shades of creepy childlikeness akin to that seen in suspect utopian societies in sf. The Glittering Plain also exerts a soporific effect that tends to make them forget the details of their previous lives. Hallblithe takes his petition to the king of the land, who appears beautiful and endlessly benevolent, but tries to trick Hallblithe into marrying his daughter instead and becomes angry at Hallblithe's continued determination to find the Hostage. He tries walking through the mountains and across a desert to escape and succeeds only in nearly starving to death and rescuing some dying pilgrims, but eventually builds a sailboat and sails back to the Isle of Ransom, where he is greeted by his initial betrayer, who now wants to be his bff and helps him trick his way back into the stronghold of the Sea Eagles... where the chief just produces the Hostage for him with essentially no explanation.
It's strongly hinted that there IS a long story to be told, but nobody tells it. We end the book knowing only that the king of the Glittering Plain, who commands the Sea Eagles, somehow forced them to trick Hallblithe against their (Fox's, chieftain's and chieftain emeritus') will. I conjecture that his motive was to get Hallblithe to marry his daughter willingly, and that it's his daughter's decision to release Hallblithe... but Hallblithe only meets her in dreams and she never has any dialogue, and we are left wondering how and why she was told, or taught, that Hallblithe would be her husband in the first place. It doesn't seem to be a case of her having supernaturally picked him out at a distance, because when the situation is introduced she is portrayed studying a painted portrait of Hallblithe on a page of an illuminated book. I'm inclined to think this means it was the king's choice, but we can't know for sure. And that would be an awfully big gap in a modern novel, but it's exactly the kind of thing that goes unexplained in medieval romances.
***
1856's The Hollow Land was apparently Morris's first book, and it is both shorter and less structured than most of his other medieval romances.
The narrator is Florian de Liilis, and the story is told in the first person, as if orally. The story opens when he is a child and sees his brother Arnald, a young knight, publicly humiliated by an evil lady named Swanhilda, who later becomes the queen and murders the king. The real action begins when Florian is just barely old enough to be knighted, and his brother is now the head of their house, the House of the Lily, which apparently is very important, having its own local church and enough clan-associated retainers and troops to half fill the town. His elder brother arranges for them to sneak into a monastery at night, taking the queen by surprise and killing her and her guards in revenge for that past insult. Her son, Red Harald, and the rest of the kingdom come after them and destroy their entire house, finally driving them from the town and across a nearby reputedly-haunted moor, until most of their men surrender and Florian and his brother alone fling themselves over a mysterious cliff that wasn't there before. He wakes up disoriented in the Hollow Land, which is a mysterious land rumored to be found somewhere in the haunted moor that he always thought was just a myth. Shades of Faery, but there's a strong religious undertone and the place is actually apparently a kind of purgatory, where Florian meets his Love. He woke up on the ground in the woods with his head in her lap and recognizes her at once, and we learn that she grew up in the Hollow Land and has known all her life that she is predestined to love him and has been waiting for him. Together they find and bury his brother's body, and she gives him a religious speech about why his brother's revenge plot was wrong; then they find a lady dressed in red crying in the woods alone and become afraid and run away.
The next chapter, "Fytte the Second," starts with Florian waking up alone, middle-aged ("past my prime") and weak, and not knowing his surroundings or how he got there. He's dressed in rags and rotting armor that falls off him when he gets up and he wanders aimlessly, almost drowns, and is saved by a man who spears him through the shoulder and pulls him out of the river. The spear wound doesn't hurt. He finds an empty castle, occupied only by the man who stabbed him engaged in painting murals all over the great hall, but all the murals are of Florian and his brother, Swanhilda, Red Harald, and a woman Florian doesn't recognize (his Love, or maybe Red Harald's?). The murals are painted entirely in red and yellow because, the man explains, blood and gold mean Hell, and they have a swordfight and then agree that the man will teach Florian to paint in exchange for Florian teaching him about "God's judgements". They follow this plan for years, and gradually the murals change from yellow and red to green and purple.
Then one day they witness a funeral procession for a dead king who obviously represents Jesus, and there are like three pages of descriptions of the people in the funeral procession, and after it Florian is able to call the man Harald and the man recognizes it as his name. They get dressed properly in their own armor (magically whole and fine) and soon meet a lady in red crying in the road, and Harald has a lock of her hair, so evidently she's his predestined Love. He tells Florian to go on to the Hollow Land without him and kisses him and stays with her, and Florian does.
Fytte the Third is just him waking up again to his Love singing about the Hollow Land and they kiss and walk together to a beautiful fair palace and there's a lot of emotion about it, so, Heaven, I guess, THE END. His Love's name is Margaret, which is an interestingly real name. If she was born in the magical purgatory-like place because he was destined to die young before they could have met and then to go to purgatory before going to Heaven, but she's actually a normal person - so is the same true of Red Harald's predestined Love? Is everyone predestined to love a certain other person and all the people who are destined to die young have soulmates (or whatever) who are just. Born in purgatory, taught by their mothers the names of their predestined Loves, and they sit around waiting and singing songs and stuff??? I wonder if Morris really thought all this through.
Oh, and also, the main clue about the, er, religious cosmology of this story is this passage from before Florian dies, where an old retainer tells him: "Men say that at your christening some fiend took on him the likeness of a priest and strove to baptize you in the Devil's name, but God had mercy on you so that the fiend could not choose but baptize you in the name of the most holy Trinity: and yet men say that you hardly believe any doctrine such as other men do, and will at the end only go to Heaven round about as it were, not at all by the intercession of our Lady; they say too that you can see no ghosts or other wonders, whatever happens to other Christian men." Is this an indication that he is destined for the Hollow Land instead of regular Heaven? And his and Red Harald's mutual healing in the Hollow Land is a penance that allows them to move to real Heaven? (Or possibly to a Hollow Land version of Heaven?)
***
1894's The Wood Beyond the World is more like the modern idea of a fantasy adventure quest novel than the other two. This book is... preoccupied with the virginity and the virtue, and lack thereof, of women. Or I suppose you could say the book is about those things, to put it more kindly
The story starts with the narrator, Golden Walter, the son of a prosperous sea trader, who has an unfaithful wife. He hates her but he doesn't want to shame her by sending her back to her kindred, and he doesn't want to publicly accuse her, necessarily, so he tells his father he would like to see the world by leaving on the next merchant vessel. As he goes to view the ship for the first time he sees a vision of a scary little person, followed by a richly dressed supernaturally beautiful lady, followed by a beautiful barefoot maiden with an iron around her ankle. He thinks they are real at this point, but later that day he sees them come out of a door near him and walk around a corner and disappear.
Some time passes and a messenger from home comes on another ship to tell him his father has died in battle because he sent Walter's faithless wife back to her family with an intermediate amount of shame ("with no honour, and yet with no such shame as might have been"), but they took offense and went to war against Walter's family. Walter agrees to sail with him back home, but on their way to the ship, both Walter and the messenger see a vision of the three characters, and Walter hears that the other guy saw them. They sail away and are soon blown off course to a land none of them have ever seen or heard of, where they are met by a hospitable old man who offers lodging for the night and food and tells them Walter about two passes through the mountains around his house: one which leads to the country of the Bear folk, who are "half wild" and practice human sacrifice and worship "some woman", and the other which is Too Dangerous to even think about, and he refuses to tell Walter anything about it, so Walter of course sneaks away alone in the middle of the night that way.
He walks for a week through the mountains and down into a green wood (The Wood Beyond the World) and soon meets the little man, who talks mysteriously about "his Lady" and "the Wretch", which he says he and the Lady both hate. Also that his Lady probably "made" both him and "the Bear folk", and that terrible things will happen if the Lady finds out that he "said too much", and leaves Walter some food and runs away again. Walter continues through the wood and soon meets the Maiden, who tells him that they have fallen in love with each other at first sight and that she can save his life and get them both out of the magical land if he agrees to trust her (he agrees to all of this). She explains that the Wood Beyond the World is ruled by her mistress, an evil sorceress, who has drawn Walter there as her latest catch because she has the habit of luring beautiful young men to be her lovers, and discarding them one after the other (not necessarily killing them, but it's implied that she manipulated the old man Walter met into killing his predecessor back in the day). Walter and the Maiden can't touch because the sorceress would know, but she doesn't know about their conversations and secret meetings, and everything will be fine if Walter does what the Maiden says and trusts her completely. And he does. The Maiden is also, in a smaller and slightly different way, a sorceress, which apparently is partly why the immortal sorceress hates her (but also why she keeps her around even though she hates her, because she needs her).
At the Maiden's direction, in a series of secret meetings, Walter comes to the magical palace where the Lady is entertaining a King's Son, a handsome and cruel young man whom she is almost tired of and who has been trying to catch the Maiden and rape her as well for fun, but she has been able to avoid him thus far. The Lady plays the two men off against each other for a while, at first treating Walter politely and distantly, then inviting him to go hunting with her, and eventually makes him her lover. The Maiden drugs the King's Son, uses sorcery to disguise him as Walter, and lets the Lady kill him herself out of jealousy because she overhears the Maiden purporting to make an assignation with him. Then the Lady becomes hysterical with grief and kills herself, sparing them the trouble. The little man follows them as they flee on foot to the Bear people, but Walter is able to shoot him with his bow and arrows, and the Maiden tells Walter that they can't sleep together yet because she needs to use magic some more, and her magic is a special kind of magic that only works because she's still a virgin.
They walk to the land of the Bear people and the Maiden does some minor miracles, making cut and dead flowers bloom unseasonably a few times, and tells them she is their goddess reborn (actually the Lady was their goddess and used some small feats of magic to gain their worship so that they act as border guards and give her stuff), and on the strength of that, she commands them to stop practicing human sacrifice and promises that she'll come back soon and teach them agriculture (she does this in a brief episode at the end of the book), and then she uses her powers to appear to vanish. Walter has to walk a few days to catch up with her, and then they walk together to the nearest outpost of civilization, which is a beautiful walled city with the quaint tradition of taking the first stranger who walks up to them as their new king after their king dies, provided he passes a couple of tests. Walter passes these tests by being beautiful and strong and by choosing armor over a fancy suit when they offered him two outfits with no words of explanation, and he and the Maiden get married and rule the city the rest of their lives happily ever after, her magic having been erased by losing her virginity, and then the city also abandons their tradition so that Walter's descendants can be their rulers. The end.
ETA: Obviously a lot to unpack here, but I will talk more about it in future posts. I wanted to get this down before I forgot too much to summarize TWBTW and The Hollow Land.
