Cimorene

I've been thinking about Wake Up Dead Man some more even though I haven't gone and looked up the list of books, because I am not ready to purchase new ebooks yet, and that's what I'll have to do for the ones there I haven't read before.

Meanwhile though, I have been rereading some Agatha Christie. I am not exactly a giant Christie fan, but I have read most of Agatha Christie's works (and usually multiple times) because I like Golden Age mystery as a genre and my MIL was a superfan, so I have had convenient access to paperbacks of Christie's works.

And I realized with a start yesterday that while the setting and setup in Wake Up Dead Man is in some respects is EXTREMELY typical of Golden Age detective fiction, in another it's very very unusual - ( Some spoilers )

I have been reading and skimming 1920s magazines and have not got tired of that yet. I have learned so much more about the period, and have a much firmer grip on the idiom of the time.

It was a didactic article about world literature from one of these 20s women's magazines that actually made me curious about the Arabian Nights - I didn't read the whole article, bc racism, but the brief history inspired me to read on Wikipedia. The history and background there fascinated me, and I wanted to read the translation of

[t]he Leiden Edition, prepared by Muhsin Mahdi, [...] the only critical edition [...] to date,[48] believed to be most stylistically faithful representation of medieval Arabic versions currently available. [... It] was rendered into English by Husain Haddawy (1990).[61] This translation has been praised as 'very readable' and 'strongly recommended for anyone who wishes to taste the authentic flavour of those tales'.

It is very readable and really entertaining! In fact I've stayed awake longer than I meant to several nights this week because of wanting to finish one of the stories.

I've also realized that the... maybe not exactly subgenre; category? of Arabian fantasy is all stylistically influenced by them. That seems painfully obvious now that I've thought it, but I've never thought about it before! I have not read much of it, though, and I know there are newer fantasy novels in that setting that are not written by white people, some on my to-read list; they are possibly quite different or more diverse. But in the past (mostly childhood), I've read

• Castle in the Air by Diana Wynne Jones (1990), set in the universe of Howl's Moving Castle


• The Harem of Aman Akbar by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1984)


• Night's Master and Death's Master by Tanith Lee (1978-79)

Oh, Wikipedia even says on the page for the last series that it's inspired by the Thousand and One Nights. I must've seen that before I read them (it was only like five years ago maybe) and forgotten.

I haven't been able to get invested in reading a specific fandom in several years. Every now and then I look at fandoms I have read in the past and manage to spend a few weeks rereading some of them before I run out of patience to keep looking, but that's not very long.

About a month ago, I tried to read some 911 fic from waxjism's spreadsheet. She is keeping a spreadsheet of every fic in this fandom she has read. She records the title and author; pairing (even though they're all the same pairing); summary - which is sometimes the author summary and sometimes she writes something in this field like a comment, or a whole rant, that doesn't actually include a summary; a column called "good/no" where she categorizes them as very good, good, above mid, mid, "sub mid", or bad; and a column called "comments" where she sometimes rants, or continues the rant from the summary columnn, and sometimes just says things like "fun-ish" or "not flawless" or "pretty hot" or "unbearably written by a child or a super-offline person". This is different from how I, at least, used to keep track of a recs list when I had to do it manually, because she puts in everything she starts even if she DNF immediately, and also it's for private use. I tried to use it to find things to read, and it's not like I'm unfamiliar with reading fanfiction without canon but also I had seen some of this show accidentally while she was watching it. I did keep trying for a while and I read... some... number of the ones she marked very good or good, based on the comments and summaries, but I kept getting bored and annoyed at the characters. It just wasn't grabbing me. Very disappointing because there would've been a lot to read. (A huge amount of the things on this spreadsheet are marked bad or sub-mid even by her, and I think she is in general more forgiving in judging quality than I am even though unlike me she never reads things that seem kinda bad or mediocre to her for fun. And she has never gone archive-spelunking or read directly from the tag: she ONLY reads from recs and bookmarks. There's no control to test it here, but I think this bears out my personal conviction that there is a 0% increase in quality from recs and bookmarks (of random people that you don't know as opposed to someone vetted and trusted) vs. the slushpile (the entire content of the archive at random)).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a post on Tumblr that said something like, paraphrased, "There's a very popular notion that in the past all literature was good quality compared to now, but that's not true. This is survivorship bias. The stuff we still know and read in the present day is the good stuff, but a vast quantity of bad and mediocre stuff is lost to time." Someone responded by linking to The Westminster Detective Library, a project investigating the earliest history of the detective fiction genre. Apparently the professor who began it was initially inspired by a conviction that Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue was not actually the first detective short story based on features of its writing which in his opinion betrayed the signs of a genre history. The website contains transcribed public-domain detective fiction that was published in American magazines before the first Sherlock Holmes story's publication. I have been enjoying reading through it chronologically since I read the post. Reading in one genre is a bit like reading in one fandom, and reading very old fiction has several special points of interest to me because I love learning about history and culture in that way. Of course on the minus side, it isn't gay. But I'm getting fascinating glimpses of the history of the genre and the history of jurisprudence in both America and Britain. And although there is definitely mediocre and "sub-mid" writing published in the periodicals of the 18th-19th centuries, awash in silly cliches and carelessly proofread if at all, they are still slightly more filtered for legibility and literacy than the experience of reading modern fanfiction (even, as mentioned in the last paragraph, from recs lists and bookmarks, unless you have a supply of trusted and well-known reccers to follow. I sometimes come near tears remembering the days when I could always check what thefourthvine and norah were recommending, but I can't blame them for the decline, either, because I was generally reading and at least bookmarking if not reccing just as productively at the time).

The other thing that has happened to affect my reading is that my little sister's high school best friend got engaged and invited my sister to her engagement party in Florida, which is going to be "Gatsby-themed". The 1920s is possibly my single oldest hyperfixation, dating from before the age of 10, and it's the historical period that I know and care the most about. For the past ten years or so the term "Gatsby" has, consequently, inspired me with the most intense rage and irritation, because its popularity after the movie version of The Great Gatsby flooded the internet with so much loathesomely inaccurate "information" about and imagery of the 1920s as to actually make it harder to find real information, and nearly impossible to filter out this dreck. So my sister began shopping for her Engagement Party Outfit, which is supposed to be "Gatsby"-themed, and I am the permanent primary audience for this (just as she is the permanent primary audience any time I am planning outfits or considering my wardrobe). This has led me to reading 1920s magazines online from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust - initially the middle-class fashion magazine McCall's; then also Vogue and Harper's Bazar (much more pretentious and bourgeois). I tried to branch out into interior design magazines of the same period (House & Garden and Better Homes & Gardens), but it has been harder to find scans of them. I find 1920s romantic fiction (serialized copiously in all these magazines) much less readable and enjoyable than the 1920s detective fiction which I am more familiar with (I've read plenty of it thanks to my interest in Golden Age detective stories)... but I've also learned a lot more physical and aesthetic details about women's fashion and interiors from the romantic fiction, which makes me think I perhaps need to seek out more of it.

[H]e saw a slender glittering warrior come forth from the door [...], who stood for a moment looking round about, and then came lightly and swiftly toward him; and lo! it was the Sun-beam, with a long hauberk over her kirtle falling below her knees, a helm on her head and plated shoes on her feet.

—William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains

Mentions of this book before I read it indicated to me that it was the inspiration behind several chunks of The Lord of the Rings for Tolkien, one of these being the "warrior women". There is a woman who swears herself to the war-god as a result of being disappointed in love, and some other echoes of Eowyn's story discussed in my previous post on the subject, The romances of Morris's Roots of the Mountains as forerunners of those in LOTR. But saying that The Roots of the Mountains' fighting women inspired LOTR, though possibly true, is quite misleading, because there is so much more warrior woman in The Roots of the Mountains.

In The Roots of the Mountains, Victorian socialist and medieval fanboy William Morris created a fantasy version of pre-Christian central european Gothic tribes in an idyllic egalitarian agrarian society where women hold political influence and freely fight in war against barbaric colonizing enslavers.

This fantasy society isn't closely based on any sources - the nearest is the bits of the poem Hlöðskviða or "The Battle of the Goths and Huns" preserved in a 13th century Icelandic "legendary saga" (fornaldarsaga) (ie not a historical saga; though the poem doubtless has its origin in some real poems/songs) - and while the image of the Germanic warrior woman or Valkyrie certainly exists in Norse and germanic folklore, Morris's world in ROTM goes far beyond that. ( Read more... )

Of the three female main characters (out of five) in The Roots of the Mountains, one is The World's Greatest Archer, typically a woodswoman and huntress, and a fierce fighting maiden all the time; one is a young athlete who was always skilled at fighting and makes a vow to go to war as a result of her broken heart, but throws herself gloriously into the fighting as a leader of the people; and one is a wise political leader who refuses to take up arms herself, but goes into the battle in full armor with her people.

‘And when I go down to the battle,’ said he, ‘shalt thou be sorry for our sundering?’

She said: ‘There shall be no sundering; I shall wend with thee.’

Said he: ‘And if I were slain in the battle, would’st thou lament me?’

‘Thou shalt not be slain,’ she said.

There are still plenty of women who don't go to battle in The Roots of the Mountains, too, and their choice is valid! But the ability to fight and the will to fight are fully accepted and fairly widespread for women throughout the four societies he portrays, (1) the Burgdalers (town dwellers), (2) the shepherds, (3) the woodsfolk, and (4) the Children of the Wolf, who have been living hidden in Mirkwood, the forest which lies between the dalesmen and the eastern invaders, and protecting the border from their SECRET BASE in the hidden Shadowy Vale.

First we learn of the fighting women of the Children of the Wolf - a mysterious, rather fantastical people, throwbacks to the heroic age, and thus possibly more apt to exotic things like warrior maidens:

Then the Sun-beam spake to Gold-mane softly, and told him how this song was made by a minstrel concerning a foray in the early days of their first abode in Shadowy Vale, and how in good sooth a maiden led the fray and was the captain of the warriors:

‘Erst,’ she said, ‘this was counted as a wonder; but now we are so few that it is no wonder though the women will do whatsoever they may.’

(In The House of the Wolfings - that is, before the Wolfings came to the Shadowy Vale, and at least a couple of hundred years before ROTM - the army is made up mostly of men, but ( Read more... )) The Sun-beam's foster sister Bow-may intended from the first to fight, and takes the first opportunity to ask Face-of-god where he got his extremely good armor, and if she can have some:( Read more... )

But next we learn that the settled town-dwelling society of Burgdale, which at first seemed like a traditional early medieval setting, enthusiastically accepts the vow of the Bride to dedicate herself to the war god and fight in the battle for her people, and that many other young maidens are inspired to follow her example:( Read more... )

And finally when the fighters muster we see how many fighting women there are in the whole host: apparently eight, counting the Bride, out of 1 581 fighters from the Dale (Woodlanders and Folk of the Vine ie grape-growers); 50 women out of 235 Children of the Wolf. A sample of the muster scenes: ( Read more... )

Of the female fighters, we later learn that another besides the Bride was injured, and Bow-May's hand gets hurt and her bow broken, but she keeps fighting. Morris also portrays them fighting heroically alongside the male warriors in his battle scenes: ( Read more... )

This duology by the author of Waverley and Ivanhoe was published in 1820 and concerns the progress of the Protestant reformation in Scotland:

• The Monastery is set in the 1550s and centers on the takeover by Protestants of the lands of Melrose Abbey (a 12th c. monastery) and the conversion to Protestantism of a fictional noble family. The family's guardian spirit, a sprite called the White Lady who speaks entirely in rhyme, interferes chaotically and helps bring about the happy ending of a romance, the conversion of the young couple and their vindication and installation in a Castle, and the downfall of the abbey. There is a lot of comedy of manners and minor adventures in this novel which I greatly enjoyed and will likely reread sometime; but the surrounding political violence is too real and chilling to go over lightly, so the mood felt uneven.



• The Abbey is a sequel about a young man adopted (sort of) and raised (for about ten years) by the couple who were united in The Monastery: a Protestant knight close in the service of the bastard half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots who was instrumental in deposing her in favor of her infant son, and his wife, the scion of the ancient and noble house of Avenel whose castle they inhabit. The book is about this youth recovering from two sets of very bad parenting and outgrowing the violence, impulsivity, pride, and petulance which resulted from them... by being sent as a representative of BOTH the Protestant government AND the Catholic conspiracy in support of Mary, Queen of Scots to Castle Lochleven where she is being imprisoned. ( Read more... )
  Roland is a purely fictional character, but the surrounding history is real, and it's pretty good; but the fact that so much of the interest is the real people makes the protagonist feel pastede on. In short, I think there was a better book hiding in there that was simply a novelization about Mary Queen of Scots at Lochleven without an invented protagonist and definitely without the ties to the other book. ( Also the child abuse plot is not saved by the fact that Scott knew it was what he was portraying. )

The Protestant Reformation famously, along with the destruction of the political power and wealth of the Catholic church as an institution, produced the physical destruction of numerous beautiful buildings and works of art: in many churches this took the form of removing statues, destroying carvings and stained glass windows, and painting over the wall paintings. But there were also many buildings that were torn down, burned, etc. This mob-violence aspect of the Reformation is presented in both novels in a way that is quite interesting, and succeeds in showing the issue's complexity, I think.

The introduction to The Monastery already warns the reader that Scott approaches the whole project from a perspective of hating Catholicism. Reading this, though, did not exactly prepare me for the prejudices of these novels. Hating the medeival Catholic church, the corrupt institution whose power had a stranglehold on Europe (and indeed much of the world) at the time of the Protestant reformation seemed like a reasonable middle-of-the-road position to me. I wasn't prepared for Scott apparently hating Catholicism:

the Catholic, defending a religion which afforded little interest to the feelings, had, in his devotion to the cause he espoused, more of the head than of the heart,

—The Monastery

Don't mistake me: he doesn't hate Catholic people or make them villains. But he views the entire project of struggling for Catholic control of a country to be inherently corrupt and evil, and all the people sincerely engaged in these projects are sadly deluded, or laughably illogical, if sincere. The monks in The Monastery couldn't present a more stark contrast to the monks in the Brother Cadfael novels: he has set two sincerely religious and moral, intelligent, admirable men among them, and the others, however sympathetic, are lazy, cowardly, intellectually negligble social parasites (the monastery is a feudal landowner and its monks are supported by the labor of indentured peasants, until the Protestant troops reposess its lands at the end of the first book).

In my early posts about William Morris's The Roots of the Mountains I raised issues of anachronisms (here and here) and this led to a conversation with mildred_of_midgard that was really fun about brasilwood and medieval trade! Also, ultimately she made a very good point about my statements relating to dating these novels, namely: they are not exactly meant to be datable, because they aren't really historical fiction in the traditional sense. ( Read more... )

So yes, it's completely legit to observe that dating their events, or identifying contradictions in the dating thereof, is beside the point to the same extent that this is true of medieval romances or epic poetry. However, even though that's true, it doesn't mean that there's no value in investigating the real history behind the folklore. Even if the main value is fun. And in my case, ( picturing the clothing, because I'm into medieval clothing. ) So anyway, what CAN be pinned down about the time/setting of HOTW and ROTM?

• HOTW deals with a massive alliance of germanic tribes successfully repelling a Roman invasion from their forest home of Mirkwood, which is definitely somewhere on the continent, but that's all we got. Goths have already joined the Roman army, but this is evidently only a recent development, and these traitor-Goths are responsible for leading the Romans to their homeland. At the beginning of HOTW the Romans are still a distant rumor, basically new to most of the members of these tribes. So it likely takes place quite early in the history of Roman-germanic conflicts, perhaps somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE.



• All the peoples in HOTW dwell in wooden longhouses, which, accurate. You can read on Wikipedia about how Tolkien just copied Meduseld from HOTW and therefore introduced the word "louvres", which historians later accused Tolkien of being anachronistic for because the word 'louvres' wasn't present in Anglo-Saxon England, lol. Yes okay Wikipedia, point taken. I'm trying not to be quite that silly.



• ROTM takes place many generations, perhaps a few hundred years, after The House of the Wolfings. The tribe of the Wolfings live in the forest, protecting the boundaries of a small settlement of farmers and shepherds in a peaceful valley at the foot of the mountains. The shepherds and farmers are allied germanic tribes and all are still pagan. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Goths converted to Christianity in the late 4th century AD and were one of the first germanic peoples to do so. This is covered extensively in Jordanes (Morris was certainly familiar with it, and drew on it for these books otherwise, although that's no guarantee he intended to treat it as canon).



• The settled germanic tribes in ROTM still preserve a basically egalitarian society based on seasonal Thing assemblies in a stone circle ("[In] Finland [so-called "court stones"] are found in Eura, Ulvila and Kokemäki. They date typically [to] during the Pre-Roman Iron Age and the Roman Iron Age. In Sweden, they are called Domarringar (judge circles), Domkretsar (judge circles) or Domarsäten (judge seats). In Finland they are called Käräjäkivet (court stones). In some places in [the] Nordic countries they were used [for Thing assemblies] until [the] 17th century"), but they have hereditary chieftains now instead of their former method of elected war leaders from HOTW.



• The society of ROTM have a fortified city with stone houses. I don't think this can be used to date anything though, because as far as I know, there is no stone architecture from pagan germanic tribes currently available to architectural historians. I think this was just Morris letting his fancy run away with him, to be frank.

(Regarding my two posts about anachronisms: if ROTM is intended to be set in Crimea, which is possible, the brasilwood dye is probably fine even as far back as the 200s or 300s CE; but if you want to use the existence of the bowed string instruments to date it the whole thing would have to be pushed forward to around the 10th century CE, when like, almost everyone was converted to Christianity: they established the Archbishopric of Uppsala in Sweden in 1164 and that's the furthest Northwest they had to go. Yeah, I'm not serious about dating it then. Possibly he just didn't care but probably he was just plain wrong about the bowed string instrument.)

I was originally (before looking up a ton of stuff) thinking 5th or 6th century AD might be the intended ballpark target time period, because there were many more Asian incursions into germanic tribal territory in those centuries; but that is actually way too late for them to all be pagans. Of course, Morris might have just kept them pagan because he loved germanic paganism and was a Norse saga fanboy, while still imagining his setting in the 5th or 6th centuries. But on the whole - and this conclusion is definitely pretty much vibes-based -, I am thinking 3rd-4th century CE for ROTM and 1st century BCE or CE for HOTW. To the extent that that is valid. Which is like... maybe roughly 20%.

I did finish The Roots of the Mountains and The House of the Wolfings, and I did get quite interested in the romantic plots and depictions of women fighting in war therein, which certainly do seem to have inspired LOTR. But another issue fascinated me alongside it, namely the orcs.

For context, my opinion, prior to my recent reading of and about these two Morris books, of the whole issue of orcs and goblins in LOTR was that they are essentially racist. I think any attempt to portray a humanoid fantasy species that are inherently evil would be inevitably (with the possible exception of a hypothetical situation where exploring and deconstructing that exact issue was the whole point). I had garnered the impression that the dehumanification of orcs was done with the intention of making it less agonizing/harrowing/tragic, to allow the Good characters to be fighting and killing a depersonalized Evil, but that Tolkien himself (eventually?) even was aware of (? or uncomfortable with?) the implications. (I set aside the film portrayal, which made it worse, but I'm just discussing the books here.) But I haven't investigated that issue or the scholarship about it that I recall, just read posts and essays in fandom and online about it. (I know there is scholarship about it, but I haven't looked.)

Recently I did a websearch about William Morris's HOTW/ROTM and discovered (as mentioned in a couple of previous posts) some indications that these books, specifically, had inspired bits of LOTR, and my curiosity determined me to finish wading through the boringness/rhyming poetry of HOTW in order to finally read ROTM. And I read it! Part of what I found in that websearch was the Wikipedia article called William Morris's influence on Tolkien, which is a bit of a grab bag but included this:

Morris describes the Dusky Men as "long-armed like apes", "as foul as swine", fighting with crooked swords, and forming "a stumbling jostling throng".[24] Massey comments that their nature is dehumanised, so they can be slaughtered "with impunity", and that Tolkien modelled the Orcs on them.[24]

[24] Massey 2007, pp. 130–132.

Massey, Kelvin Lee (2007). The Roots of Middle-Earth: William Morris's Influence upon J. R. R. Tolkien. University of Tennessee (PhD thesis).

And then also, in Graham Seaman's 2003 Introduction to The Roots of the Mountains (also mentioned in a previous post), this: ( Read more... ) Therefore, I started reading the book after these two passages with the impression that the "Huns" or Dusky Men of Morris's ROTM were going to be a fantasy race: definitely not human - acting like zombies, incapable of breeding with people (and also inherently evil). Please note: I do not unquestioningly accept that quote from Jordanes and what it is apparently arguing, but I wanted to investigate the matter further myself. But even if I didn't swallow the argument whole, I did still expect this passage to be factual - that is, for the Dusky Men to actually be unambiguously, in the text, a fantasy race, not just human beings, who are inherently evil and all that jazz.

But they aren't.

Surprise!

So now I have to deal with what they actually ARE in the text before I come back to whether Jordanes, et. al. absolves Morris and Tolkien, or to what it could mean.

Are the Huns unambiguously inhuman fantasy monsters? No. Are they like orcs, goblins, or zombies? No. They are described as ugly, short-necked, small-eyed, etc., but none of the physical descriptions go beyond the standard anti-Asian racism discussed so extensively in Said's Orientalism. They are guys who are not as smart or good at fighting as the heroic germanic tribesmen - that's why they formed a stumbling, jostling throng in that quote: because they weren't all drilled and prepared to take up orderly formations and obey the orders of their commanders. They were just panicking. Can they interbreed with humans? Yes. And they do. Are there half-breeds to deal with? Yes. They are either raised as Dusky Men or murdered as infants by them. So, then, is it possible that they are actually human? Again, not really, if you take the testimony of the various characters who relate exposition about them as true (and it is true within the story, I would say), but I don't think that's intentional. Here is a small selection of the most relevant quotations about them:( Read more... )

So to sum up: ROTM's Dusky Men are an all-male, all-warrior parasitical society. All its citizens are warriors who do no other labor, and they keep a proportionally massive enslaved population, whom they abuse egregiously. Their natural children by their captives usually resemble their fathers but not always, and are not infrequently born with severe cognitive disabilities; of the apparently healthy offspring, the male ones are raised as Dusky Men and the female ones murdered. They travel in groups, but they are not nomadic: they look for a comfortable place they can exploit and move in there to stay. Further groups of Dusky Men arrive over time, but this seems to be the result of having exhausted natural resources or grown too numerous for their previous residences, or from being driven out in war.

They very definitely aren't the historical Huns, because they don't fight on horseback, and don't even seem to move their people on horseback, and they don't arrive with herds of livestock. (Also we know the Huns didn't practice universal female infanticide.) (If Wikipedia is to be believed, Jordanes wrote about the Hunnic Altziagiri tribe's summer and winter pasturage in Crimea, so this lack of herding is a deliberate departure on Morris's part: he puts quite a lot into emphasizing the Dusky Men's refusal to do any labor at all, which is certainly his socialism showing. More on this later.) They also very definitely aren't a possible depiction of any other real civilization in history, because of ( Read more... ) But given that the Victorian English reader would not find these circumstances implausible, I think they are still compatible with intent to portray a race of people, not a race of orcs or monsters. ( Read more... )

When you consider that ROTM is a novel from the point of view of the Goths, it is easier to accept that some parts - like the accusations of ugliness - might represent racism on the part of the characters, and not necessarily the author. In other words, the Dusky Men might be intended as a portrayal of a plausible human society of total assholes, whose assholery is in their behavior - enslaving and oppressing other people so that they can be the idle rich, and also sadism and cruelty - and whose appearances are described in all the classic racist cliches from Said's Orientalism because that is, realistically, how medieval central European societies repeatedly described people from Asia. The descriptions are xenophobic and reflective of the worst traditions of Orientalist racism, but they are completely in character for his text, which is essentially a fictional medieval history - it poses as the kind of history composed on the basis of oral folklore, with many appeals to what the fictional oral tradition says, with levels of detail comparable to epic poetry. (Morris was a huge fan of epic poetry and translated a lot of the prose Edda, some of the poetic Edda, Beowulf, and various medieval French romances into English.) Roughly, this book seems to be answering the question, "What if there existed a bundle of orally-transmitted song and poetry about the length of the Iliad about this bit of the history of the Goths (that particular racist one from Jordanes up above, I mean) and the bits around it, and somebody had translated it into graceful and beautiful prose, what might that look like?"

This has accounted for sources and motivations behind a lot of choices here, but it hasn't really settled why his Dusky Men differ in the ways they do from what you might expect of the, you know, horrible enslaving Asian conquering horde in the middle ages. And the answer to all of those whys is probably ultimately "Morris's passionate socialist beliefs", although the connection between those beliefs and the outcome on the page is open to multiple interpretations.

The enslaving Dusky Men's monstrous refusal of labour - which isn't just about becoming social parasites, but is a choice which was inherently destructive of one's moral character and happiness, according to Morris's worldview - is clearly related to socialism. We can detect reflections of growing capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, the oppression of the English working classes, etc. But it's harder to diagnose the universal female infanticide. Is this a choice driven by titillation, essentially - an attempt merely to make them more alien, more horrible? ...No. Spoiler: it's probably because for Morris, socialism includes and implies female equality.

Morris is not a perfect feminist, but his novels, his nonfiction, and his actions as a business owner and political activist were all strongly in support of what we would today call feminism. He believed that women were men's moral and intellectual equals, and his vision of a future socialist utopia is one of full gender equality. In his socialist fantasies women and men share equally in the joyful, physically and morally edifying physical labor of agriculture and figure equally as masters of all the arts and crafts; in his medieval pastiche novels women figure as heroes, warriors and decision-makers, though not always to the same degree. So. That's probably why. Maybe I'll have figured out a theory to explain the connection better by the time I've written the other essay I need to write about the women warriors and politicians in this book.

Oh no, not my guy William Morris putting a New World ingredient in Europe 700 years too early!

...came out of the house clad in a green kirtle and a gown of brazil, with a golden-hilted sword girt to her side.

—The Roots of the Mountains (1889), William Morris

brazil (plural brazils)

Noun. (obsolete) A red-orange dye obtained from brazil wood. [14th–17th c.]

ETA: this might be wrong! Thanks to mildred_of_midgard, I now know the Wiktionary entry quoted above was incomplete 😠 and didn't inform me that brasilwood was a commonly used source of pigment/dye throughout Europe in the high middle ages and came from East Asia, frequently Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). (Brazil, the country, was named for the wood, because a close relative — the plant now known as Brazil wood — was plentiful there before being exploited almost entirely away.) The question remains whether this trade really did go so far back, but it's not so implausible after all. Morris was likely familiar with the dye's usage after 1000 CE and extrapolating backwards, as with the fiddle which was definitely incorrect, but it is possible that the wood was present in the book's setting (probably the 4th - 5th c. CE, somewhere in the a Carpathian region - see Wikipedia Hlöðskviða (also Hlǫðskviða and Hlǫðsqviða), known in English as The Battle of the Goths and Huns and occasionally known by its German name Hunnenschlachtlied for discussion of the possible historical context of the Old Norse heroic poem on the subject).