JRR Tolkien’s admiration for the historical romances and epic poems of the late 19th century British writer and illustrator, William Morris, has been referenced by critics and fans of the Oxford professor for many decades. From the 1850s to the 1890s the Essex-born artisan and socialist thinker produced numerous novels and stories, many of them in a style we would now classify as high fantasy. In a letter to L. W. Forster, written in December 1960, Tolkien acknowledged a debt to his literary predecessor:
The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.
Indeed it is only by reading Morris’ best known novels that one can appreciate their clear influence upon the Lord of the Rings and some other Middle-earth legendarium. For instance this description in the opening passage of The Roots of the Mountains (1889) contains elements that could equally apply to the valley-town of Dale on the River Running near the Lonely Mountain and the Long Lake in The Hobbit (1937), or to the fortress of Hornburg in Helm’s Deep, part of the territory of Rohan in The Two Towers (1954).
Once upon a time amidst the mountains and hills and falling streams of a fair land there was a town or thorp in a certain valley. This was well-nigh encompassed by a wall of sheer cliffs; toward the East and the great mountains they drew together till they went near to meet, and left but a narrow path on either side of a stony stream that came rattling down into the Dale: toward the river at that end the hills lowered somewhat, though they still ended in sheer rocks; but up from it, and more especially on the north side, they swelled into great shoulders of land, then dipped a little, and rose again into the sides of huge fells clad with pine-woods, and cleft here and there by deep ghylls: thence again they rose higher and steeper, and ever higher till they drew dark and naked out of the woods to meet the snow-fields and ice-rivers of the high mountains. But that was far away from the pass by the little river into the valley; and the said river was no drain from the snow-fields white and thick with the grinding of the ice, but clear and bright were its waters that came from wells amidst the bare rocky heaths.
The upper end of the valley, where it first began to open out from the pass, was rugged and broken by rocks and ridges of water-borne stones, but presently it smoothed itself into mere grassy swellings and knolls, and at last into a fair and fertile plain swelling up into a green wave, as it were, against the rock-wall which encompassed it on all sides save where the river came gushing out of the strait pass at the east end, and where at the west end it poured itself out of the Dale toward the lowlands and the plain of the great river.
Now the valley was some ten miles of our measure from that place of the rocks and the stone-ridges, to where the faces of the hills drew somewhat anigh to the river again at the west, and then fell aback along the edge of the great plain; like as when ye fare a-sailing past two nesses of a river-mouth, and the main-sea lieth open before you.
Besides the river afore-mentioned, which men called the Weltering Water, there were other waters in the Dale. Near the eastern pass, entangled in the rocky ground was a deep tarn full of cold springs and about two acres in measure, and therefrom ran a stream which fell into the Weltering Water amidst the grassy knolls. Black seemed the waters of that tarn which on one side washed the rocks-wall of the Dale; ugly and aweful it seemed to men, and none knew what lay beneath its waters save black mis-shapen trouts that few cared to bring to net or angle: and it was called the Death-Tarn.
Other waters yet there were: here and there from the hills on both sides, but especially from the south side, came trickles of water that ran in pretty brooks down to the river; and some of these sprang bubbling up amidst the foot-mounds of the sheer-rocks; some had cleft a rugged and strait way through them, and came tumbling down into the Dale at diverse heights from their faces. But on the north side about halfway down the Dale, one stream somewhat bigger than the others, and dealing with softer ground, had cleft for itself a wider way; and the folk had laboured this way wider yet, till they had made them a road running north along the west side of the stream. Sooth to say, except for the strait pass along the river at the eastern end, and the wider pass at the western, they had no other way (save one of which a word anon) out of the Dale but such as mountain goats and bold cragsmen might take; and even of these but few.
This midway stream was called the Wildlake, and the way along it Wildlake’s Way, because it came to them out of the wood, which on that north side stretched away from nigh to the lip of the valley-wall up to the pine woods and the high fells on the east and north, and down to the plain country on the west and south.
Now when the Weltering Water came out of the rocky tangle near the pass, it was turned aside by the ground till it swung right up to the feet of the Southern crags; then it turned and slowly bent round again northward, and at last fairly doubled back on itself before it turned again to run westward; so that when, after its second double, it had come to flowing softly westward under the northern crags, it had cast two thirds of a girdle round about a space of land a little below the grassy knolls and tofts aforesaid; and there in that fair space between the folds of the Weltering Water stood the Thorp whereof the tale hath told.
The men thereof had widened and deepened the Weltering Water about them, and had bridged it over to the plain meads; and athwart the throat of the space left clear by the water they had built them a strong wall though not very high, with a gate amidst and a tower on either side thereof. Moreover, on the face of the cliff which was but a stone’s throw from the gate they had made them stairs and ladders to go up by; and on a knoll nigh the brow had built a watch-tower of stone strong and great, lest war should come into the land from over the hills. That tower was ancient, and therefrom the Thorp had its name and the whole valley also; and it was called Burgstead in Burgdale.
Of course, in terms of their politics and social attitudes the two men were, if not worlds apart, certainly on different islands. However their mutual love of language and history, artistry and poetry, not to mention very modern notions about cultural heritage and the environment, would have united them.
The original works of William Morris can be read at his collection on the Project Gutenberg website and are well worth a look for any Tolkien fan interested in the literary roots of Middle-earth.
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JRR Tolkien’s admiration for the historical romances and epic poems of the late 19th century British writer and illustrator, William Morris, has been referenced by critics and fans of the Oxford professor for many decades. From the 1850s to the 1890s the Essex-born artisan and socialist thinker produced numerous novels and stories, many of them in a style we would now classify as high fantasy. In a letter to L. W. Forster, written in December 1960, Tolkien acknowledged a debt to his literary predecessor:
Indeed it is only by reading Morris’ best known novels that one can appreciate their clear influence upon the Lord of the Rings and some other Middle-earth legendarium. For instance this description in the opening passage of The Roots of the Mountains (1889) contains elements that could equally apply to the valley-town of Dale on the River Running near the Lonely Mountain and the Long Lake in The Hobbit (1937), or to the fortress of Hornburg in Helm’s Deep, part of the territory of Rohan in The Two Towers (1954).
Of course, in terms of their politics and social attitudes the two men were, if not worlds apart, certainly on different islands. However their mutual love of language and history, artistry and poetry, not to mention very modern notions about cultural heritage and the environment, would have united them.
The original works of William Morris can be read at his collection on the Project Gutenberg website and are well worth a look for any Tolkien fan interested in the literary roots of Middle-earth.
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