The "medieval eclectic" pastiche language of William Morris's quest novels

[cimorene]

When I first picked up one of the so-called "quest novels" of admired comrade William Morris (socialist, furniture and wallpaper designer, passionate medievalist fanperson), I was a little put off by the density and wordiness, as well as the ways they deviate from the modern novel. These are Victorian adventure novels inspired largely by medieval romance (eg Arthuriana), written in an artificially archaic style sprinkled with Middle English vocabulary (although I have since learned that a lot of it was actually from Scots, or rather was both, and he probably picked it up from Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, which were apparently his childhood favorites).

But after a while it was just this language - which I saw an academic in a Youtube lecture call "medieval eclectic" - that enchanted me the most about them. Morris essentially created his own very unique style: obviously these novels don't sound like Middle English (they'd have to be translated to even read), nor Chaucer nor Shakespeare. They don't sound like Gothic novels or the other famous novels of his contemporaries. They don't sound like any medieval romances I have read, really, although I have had to read these in translation, so that is harder to say. They mix various archaic-sounding constructions and expressions with a sprinkling of terms which really refer to the pre-Norman society he idolises, but with a deliberate elegance which goes beyond that of Scott (Walter Scott did turn a very nice phrase and was admired by his contemporaries - a few generations prior to Morris - for various lyrical passages). I absolutely am in love with Morris's medieval eclectic language, and that fact is hilarious, because essentially... it's one man's Victorian Renfaire speak (which I have, at times, hated): an artificial and inaccurate hodgepodge of inconsistent references to disparate periods with the intent of sounding oldey timey.

This is partly why I'm currently rereading all of them, after finishing the last one last year - I didn't have anything else to read that sounds like them. (But it's interesting reading them when I know more of the context, too.) In order of publication, then, this is where it stands: The Hollow Land (1856), A Tale of the House of the Wolfings, and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse (1889) & its sequel The Roots of the Mountains (1889), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1895), The Well at the World's End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), The Sundering Flood (1897).

So why are The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains in italics? Well, that's because I have tried three times before to read The House of the Wolfings and I kept failing out of it because (1) it's about 30% rhyming poetry instead of prose, like a musical: the characters sometimes just break out into rhyming poems. (2) it's one of the least fantastic of his novels: it's about germanic tribes fighting the roman expansion from the tribes' point of view, and the fantastic elements are limited to the existence of magical dwarf-forged armor and seers with true visions of the future. (The Roots of the Mountains is a sequel, but generations later.) These are the only ones that aren't rereads, but I ran out of other ones, so I am determined this time. Also, I read Graham Seaman's 2003 introduction to The Roots of the Mountains:

If The House of the Wolfings was an admiring reconstruction of old Germanic clan-based society as a self-contained world, The Roots of the Mountains shows the ability of that society to revitalise others. The "others" in this case are another Germanic people; one settled in small towns and villages in the valleys at the foot of the mountains. They are a people in the process of losing their past[... ]; the heroic age is over for [them] [...]. Into this quiet, unromantic rural world come two outside forces: the descendants of the Sons of the Wolf themselves [...] who have migrated west to the mountains [...]; and the Huns, or 'Dusky Men'. Depleted in numbers (many have gone to fight as mercenaries for the Romans), evicted from their settlement by the Huns, the Sons of the Wolf still remember Thiodulf and their heroic past [...]. The Roots of the Mountains seems to be the story that inspired the subplot of the Dunedain, wanderers of fading heroic past defending the frontiers of the Shire against the Orcs, and the loves of Aragorn, Eowyn, Faramir, and Arwen in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

This sounds like it won't be mostly battles, hopefully, and it also sounds different from any of the other quest novels! But I have to finish the first one first.

Comments

[lobelia321]

Rhyming dialogue! Whoa. I had no idea.

Oh yeah, it's bonkers. Have an example:

[cimorene]

And when the old carle saw the guests, he fixed his eyes on Thiodolf, and presently came up and stood before him; and Thiodolf looked on the old man, and greeted him kindly and smiled on him; but the carle spake not till he had looked on him a while; and at last he fell a-trembling, and reached his hands out to Thiodolf’s bare head, and handled his curls and caressed them, as a mother does with her son, even if he be a grizzled-haired man, when there is none by: and at last he said:

“How dear is the head of the mighty, and the apple of the tree
That blooms with the life of the people which is and yet shall be!
It is helmed with ancient wisdom, and the long remembered thought,
That liveth when dead is the iron, and its very rust but nought.
Ah! were I but young as aforetime, I would fare to the battle-stead
And stand amidst of the spear-hail for the praise of the hand and the head!”

a sample with a dialogue tag that acknowledges he is breaking into rhyme

[cimorene]

[T]he Beaming man laid his hand on Wolfkettle’s rein and said: “Lo you, neighbour, if thy Vala hath seen nought, yet hath this old man seen somewhat, and that somewhat even as the little lad saw it. Many a mother’s son shall fall before the Welshmen.”

But Wolfkettle shook his rein free, and his face reddened as of one who is angry, yet he kept silence, while the Elking said:

“Let be, Toti! for he that lives shall tell the tale to the foreseers, and shall make them wiser than they are today.”

Then laughed Toti, as one who would not be thought to be too heedful of the morrow. But Wolfkettle brake out into speech and rhyme, and said:

“O warriors, the Wolfing kindred shall live or it shall die;


And alive it shall be as the oak-tree when the summer storm goes by;


But dead it shall be as its bole, that they hew for the corner-post


Of some fair and mighty folk-hall, and the roof of a war-fain host.”