Cimorene

[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... )

People have noted the similarities in the romance plots (among other elements) found in LOTR with those from William Morris's 1889 novels The House of the Wolfings and especially The Roots of the Mountains, which helped spark my curiosity to read them. The mentions in the Wikipedia article about Morris's influence on Tolkien and in Seaman's intro to ROTM are of the Aragorn-Arwen-Eowyn love triangle and the character trajectory of Eowyn, but there wasn't much detail. But I found more than just that!

Mortal-Immortal romance in The House of the Wolfings

I didn't see any mention of HOTW (the first book in the series) in association with Tolkien, only ROTM. However, while there is a love triangle - or actually a love pentacle - of cross-cultural romances in ROTM, there are not any gods or immortals on the page. There is a callback to the idea: when the protagonist meets the mysterious and nomadic People of the Wolf (forest-dwelling throwbacks to the age of heroes who dedicate themselves to protecting the borders of the sheltered little agrarian civilization), he is so awed at first that he imagines they (particularly his future wife and her brother) may be gods or spirits. But in The House of the Wolfings, the love story is between the brave war leader of the Wolfings and an immortal nature spirit - a dís - who wants to preserve his life and asks him to wear an enchanted hauberk or coat of mail. ( Read more... )

Love Pentacle in The Roots of the Mountains

As far as parallels to the romances in LOTR, ROTM offers: a woman disappointed in love who goes to war (two of them); a noble hero who reflects the past glory of his clan in a cross-cultural romance with a wise and beautiful woman of an even more noble background than his; and one of the disappointed-in-love warrior women being wounded in battle and having a dramatic cross-cultural romance with another brave warrior/political ruler character. (Also - and this isn't part of the romances - a character who like is just kind of. Hawkeye. Her entire thing is just being an amazing, unironically unbelievably the best, acknowledged master archer who is almost supernatural. She is one of the pentacle though.) Before I explain these claims, I must briefly introduce the five main characters.

1. Protagonist and hero Face-of-god, alderman's son of the House of the Face in the small walled city of Burgdale. ( Read more... )


2. His childhood sweetheart and (at the beginning of the novel) promised bride, the Bride, eldest daughter of the House of the Steer. She is athletic and beautiful (like at least one heroine in every Morris novel, her description is recognizably that of Morris's wife, Jane, whose likeness is preserved in many of the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rosetti). ( Read more... )


3. The war-leader of the House of the Wolf, Folk-might, who has loved the Bride ever since he glimpsed her and wants to fight Face-of-God for falling in love with Folk-might's sister instead. ( Read more... )


4. Folk-might's sister and Face-of-god's new love, the Sun-beam, the young political strategist of the House of the Wolf.( Read more... )


5. The Sun-beam and Folk-might's foster-sister Bow-may of the House of the Wolf, unironically the best archer imaginable, possibly a bit supernatural about it, and a blithe, jolly shieldmaiden who knows no fear. She is a little bit hopelessly in love with Face-of-god, but she's resigned to it. ( Read more... )

A woman goes to war after being disappointed in love.

For Eowyn going to war is an act of rebellion which she has to accomplish by dressing as a man and running away. That makes her gesture far more momentous than that of the Bride, who literally does decide to go to war because she is heartbroken, ( Read more... ) and shocks her people by doing it, but doesn't break any norms; in fact there are quite a few other women from Burgdale and the shepherds and woodsfolk who go to battle, and an even larger share of the women of the House of the Wolf. Far from running away, the Bride actually stands up at the folkmote and announces her intentions to the people, and thereafter becomes a sort of figurehead and morale-booster, inspiring other young women to fight: ( Read more... )

(Two of them)

Bow-may also goes to war and is disappointed in love, but it doesn't really count because she was going to go to war either way. You can't keep her away from the war. However, she is still lowkey tragic about it: ( Read more... )

A noble hero who reflects the past glory of his people finds himself in a cross-cultural romance with a wise, beautiful woman of an even more noble background than his.

Face-of-god grows from a youth to a man during this novel and is well-liked by the people before he is chosen to be their war-leader at the folkmote, but over the course of the novel others remark on his growth and likeness to a hero of bygone days. The Sun-beam, meanwhile, comes from the House of the Wolf, the clan who led the entire Gothic peoples a few hundred years ago in HOTW, defeating an attempted Roman invasion. ( Read more... )

A warrior woman disappointed in love is wounded in battle and has a dramatic cross-cultural romance with another brave warrior/political ruler character.

As mentioned, Folk-might actually falls in love at first sight after glimpsing the Bride from afar while on a covert fact-finding mission to Burgdale, but they become engaged after she is wounded in battle. ( Read more... )



Footnotes:
1. Týr (but would be spelled slightly different in Gothic - I found a source of comparative names in various germanic languages including Gothic on one of my 4 am googling-names-from-this-book binges, but now I can't find it again)
2. Likely Dagr, or possibly his father Dellingr (but would be spelled slightly different in Gothic)

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.

Even though I was already super into the medieval pastiche novels of my pal William Morris, a big part of my motivation for finishing The House of the Wolfings and reading The Roots of the Mountains was learning that these books were a major, perhaps the primary traceable literary influence on LOTR. I was suddenly curious! My reading in a brief web search promised that The Roots of the Mountains influenced:

✒️ The Dunedain as a proud wandering people descended from a great and noble culture in a more heroic past, dedicated to protecting the less warlike civilizations around them (inspired by the Sons of the Wolf in ROTM)

✒️ A culture with warrior women (the article that said he probably borrowed this is hilarious, given that the only culture with warrior women in Tolkien is actually a culture where the woman has to crossdress and sneak away to war; The Sons of the Wolf actually have warrior women)

✒️ The armies of orcs are said to be inspired by the "Huns" in ROTM, which, as I've mentioned in the past, are actually an army of demonic? monsters? apparently in spite of the name. (I still haven't reached their part in ROTM yet, but if it turns out that JRRT borrowed the idea and all his changes made it LESS racist that will be funny.)

✒️ Apparently the cross-cultural romances in general and the Aragorn-Arwen-Eowyn triangle in particular have clear antecedents in ROTM. I've seen the beginning of this already, but I'm assured that the novel contains five couples and am intrigued to find out where the others are going.

So far I've only read about 10% of The Roots of the Mountains, but I've already noticed that its gender politics (and its other politics) are more progressive than LOTR's (ROTM was published in 1889, LOTR 1954-55; Morris was born in 1834, Tolkien in 1892). Truly, as one of the websites I read said (paraphrasing), a chunk of LOTR is a reactionary Catholic reimagining of Morris's radically socialist fantasy.

This reminds me of how Morris & Co was also notably less sexist in the Victorian era than the supposedly progressive idealists at the Bauhaus in the 1920s-30s.

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. ( Read more... ) 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.

Some very medieval eclectic Morrissine turns of phrase:

• A few shepherds they fell in with, who were short of speech, after the manner of such men, but deemed a greeting not wholly thrown away on such goodly folk as those wayfarers.



• So they ate their meat in the wilderness, and were nowise ungleeful, for to those twain the world seemed fair, and they hoped for great things.



• So they went thence, and found the master-church, and deemed it not much fairer than it was great; and it was nowise great, albeit it was strange and uncouth of fashion.



• However, all men were armed, and they had many bows, and some of the chapmen's knaves were fell archers.



• [...] where was much recourse of merchants from many lands, and a noble market.



• When they came up to the wall they saw that it was well builded of good ashlar, and so high that they might not see the roofs of the town because of it;



• “I shall lead thee whereas we shall be somewhat out of the way of murder-carles.”

And now, on another note... here are some pieces of National Romantic myth-making working to build a peculiarly English (pre-Norman) history encompassing a society that for Morris, because of his passionate socialist beliefs, must also be inherently virtuous, comparatively equitable, and comparatively Utopian (in contrast to the evils of his time). (I conjecture that this is why the more popular targets of National Romantic myth-making in Britain, such as the Matter of Britain and Celtic folklores, are not the main meat of Morris's medieval eclectic quest novels.)

These passages show the knowledgable godfather of our young hero, Ralph, delivering some big packages of worldbuilding in infodump form and describing the less free and equal, more evil foreign lands which the quest leads them through (and which Ralph ultimately helps to free from tyranny). The passages are particularly revealing because the phrasing makes very clear, by contrast, just what are the social system and values of Ralph's homeland (the mythical pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon Britain of Utopian agrarian equality, although again, this fictional world doesn't share our geography). These shockingly (to Ralph) tyrannical foreign lands are uhhhhh not described as Eastern or Oriental in the book, and I think he is maybe trying not to make them thus - and given the time he was writing, he was probably thinking very much of colonialism and the evils of his present day in contrast to his utopian agrarian past, and not JUST of foreign people... but they are very much recognizable nonetheless as Orientalist in the context of his pseudo-medieval history. Anyway, here are three significant passages delivered by Clement as the quest progresses towards the mountains and the Well at the World's End and describing the increasingly tyrannical governments of the city-states they are passing through:

( Read more... )

I wrote a long and minutely detailed summary of the last Morris novel I read, The Well at the World's End, a couple of days ago here.

In a more brief and analytical tone, one might say that this story diverges from folktales about the quests of multiple brothers and incorporates a successful quest to the fountain of youth (not that I can think of any folktales specifically about this right now. If only I had an academic library login to check Arne Thompson...).

In the same way that I described the prior Morris I finished rereading, The Wood Beyond the World, as preoccupied with the virtue and virginity of women, The Well at the World's End is preoccupied with two main clusters of things:

1. Freedom, Justice, the Nature of Society and Humanity, etc.

• slavery (and adjacent classes ie thralldom, serfdom, and highly unequal societies)


• good/just and bad/unjust rulers, with the former being shown explictly to consist in those who actively work to increase the equality and quality of life and freedom not just of their own subjects, but of the entire world


• the necessity and value therefore of war and combat, but the hollowness and ultimate evil of war for the sake of wealth or glory


• the importance of mercy and forgiveness, with the counter-case being shown in the backstory of the villainous warriors of the Burg of the Four Friths who are said to have been peaceful agrarians who were attacked and plundered by a neighboring tribe in the distant past, in response to which they walled their town and changed their whole culture to be based on merciless battle, emphasizing nothing more highly than the trainig and arming of their male populace, who conduct regular raids in revenge on the neighboring culture who supposedly attacked them once in antiquity but unwisely left able-bodied men alive - and as a result of which they invariably plunder absolutely all wealth, livestock and crops, kill all males and enslave all females. Their supposed self-defence turns out to be a lie when they are overthrown and cast out of their city by their victims, and turn themselves into an armed band roving around looking for nearby innocent settlements to steal.

2. Having Two Romantic Interests.

• The younger son starts out by meeting and being attracted to a beautiful peasant girl, but then meets and instantly falls in love with an immortal woman who has been worshiped as a goddess and rules a nearby city as warrior queen, and who is actually a wonderful person, but unfortunately is cursed so that every man who sees her will fall in love with her, possibly as a result of being partly fae. She falls in love with him too and briefly teaches him the ways of love, but during their honeymoon together tells him about the peasant girl and informs him that he is destined to be with said peasant girl and they are perfect for each other. Then she dies tragically and he sets off to rescue the peasant girl, and then to find the fountain of youth with her, and the second two thirds of the book or so are dedicated to their love. The peasant girl rescues herself, by the way, and later more than once rescues the hero. She travels a time armed and armored in a knight's gear and follows the hero into battle in this way more than once. (Morris's feminism is not really modern but he does way better at women being people and doing male tasks than JRRT writing two generations later.)

This isn't the only Morris novel to deal sensitively and empathetically with love triangles (consecutive or contemporaneous), infidelity, or second partners. These views are distinctly non-normative for the Victorian era, although nothing groundbreaking now. Interesting in light of biographical details.

YouTube showed me a video called Bauhaus Women about the female artists and designers associated with the Bauhaus school and movement in 1930s Germany.

I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to learn that basically every famous male name associated with it was kinda a piece of shit. If this documentary is correct (I'm thinking I'll have to buy at least one book about this now) then:

Paul Klee and Wasily Kandinsky both believed that women couldn't do fine art, only crafts, because they don't have the "creative genius" required, and they didn't want to teach them art. (Possibly their fragility was encouraged by the success of female art students in the first year, including Jewish polymath Friedl Dicker, who was later killed at Auschwitz.) (Yeah, it was the 30s, other artists thought this, but not even all the followers of the official Academy styles thought that anymore at this point. So it's even more embarrassing.)

Walter Gropius (founder, boss, ground-breaking architect) initially had very utopian ideals and threw open student recruitment emphasizing gender equality, but after they got more female than male students to begin with, he got SGA/Supernatural syndrome, or at least worried that his and the school's funding and reputation would suffer if they were seen as too female, and made new rules limiting female students to the study of weaving only and announcing that female brains couldn't think in 3D and were not suited for architecture and design. This didn't stop him from making exceptions for female designers whose work was bringing money and media attention to the school.

The lone female professor (of weaving), Gunta Stölzl, was only hired after agitation and campaigning by the students, even though she was running the weaving workshop and for years had been responsible for it bringing in more money than any other department. She still was never given benefits or a permanent contract.

Many of the most commercially successful designers were women (Marianne Brandt, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher) and were pushed out once they married or had children.

All the most famous photographs of the school and in the contemporary catalogs were taken by Lucia Moholy, wife of professor László Moholy-Nagy, for free apparently, and when she had to flee the country due to being Jewish many of her negatives were left behind. She then spent decades battling Gropius for her copyright.

Now, these stories are, after all, not that shocking for the 1930s and university settings. But the Bauhaus was set apart, from its conception and all its self-advertisement as a representative of the progressive wave of modernity, besides explicitly recruiting women with promises that were later walked back. It was full of free love, just not freedom to study architecture and metalwork (Marianne Brandt was given an exemption to do that).

I was struck when watching this by the comparison with William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement. As discussed in this post, there were many ideological similarities between the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus movement, and historical ones too, ie that the designers' ideas about the democratization of art and design, designing beautiful and functional objects for the homes of ordinary people, were ironically lost very quickly, with fashion and manufacturing costs leading them to end up making trendy fashionable overpriced objects for the bourgeois instead, even though in the case of Bauhaus the other big element of the ideology is industrial design. This happened even though they were mass-produced!

William Morris's daughter May was a major designer for Morris & Co in the Victorian/Edwardian era, and she was not the only prolific woman designer employed there before the foundation of the Bauhaus. I have not read much on the history of the company, but at first glance it looks like female artist representation is at least slightly better in the Arts & Crafts movement than in the Bauhaus, and that's. Well.

I do not yet have time to replace all my Klee and Kandinsky etc icons with icons of the work of female avant garde artists, but I am feeling the impulse.

I 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 )

1856's ( The Hollow Land )

1894's ( The Wood Beyond the World )

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.