Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 1344614" data-attributes="member: 1645">Some excerpts from the essay on <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=books/dnd/classics" target="_blank">The Well at the World's End</a>, by William Morris (1896): Morris not only served as Tolkien's personal role-model as a writer but is also responsible for fantasy's characteristic medievalism and the emphasis on what Tolkien called the subcreated world: a self-consistent fantasy setting resembling our own world but distinct from it. Before Morris, fantasy settings generally resembled the arbitrary dreamscapes of Carroll's Wonderland and MacDonald's fairy tales; Morris shifted the balance to a pseudo-medieval world that was realistic in the main but independent of real-world history and included fantastic elements such as the elusive presence of magical creatures.Ironically, Morris did not intend to help create a new genre but was seeking to revive a very old one: He was attempting to recreate the medieval romance -- those sprawling quest-stories of knights and ladies, heroes and dastards, friends, enemies, and lovers, marvels and simple pleasures and above all adventures. The most familiar examples of such tales to modern readers are the many stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but these were merely the most well-known among a vast multitude of now-forgotten tales. Morris deliberately sat down to write new stories in the same vein and even something of the same style, right down to deliberately archaic word choice. But just as the creators of opera thought they were recreating classical Greek drama a la Aeschylus and wound up giving birth to a new art form instead, so too did Morris's new medieval tales belong to a new genre: the fantasy novel.[...]Then too, the book contains a number of striking scenes, characters, and motifs that could be transplanted into an ongoing campaign and are worth reading in their own right: the Champions of the Dry Tree, which is a slightly sinister Robin-Hood like band of greenwoods robbers; their mortal foes, the men of the Burg of the Four Friths, who wage constant raids on their neighbors to acquire sex-slaves; the rebellion of the slave-women (the Wheat-Wearers), who take up arms to save themselves when no one else is willing to help them; the Lady, a sexy yet ambiguous figure whose history forms a novella within the work as a whole; the Well whose waters grant youth, beauty, and longevity but not immunity to a violent death; and perhaps above all the chapters describing Ralph and his lover's grisly journey across the Thirsty Desert, which drives home the point that many undertake the quest but only the fortunate few, the destined heroes, achieve it. [3] The Dry Tree at the heart of the desert is also a striking motif and is encountered many times as a sigil or emblem before revealed to actually exist in physical form. [...][3]SPOILER: [Spoiler]In one of the book's most striking scenes, the young lovers crossing the desert begin to find the bodies of those who failed in the quest before them -- first one or two whom they stop to bury, then a whole line of desiccated corpses marking a grisly path across the wasteland where they laid down to die along the way. The Dry Tree itself, when they finally reach it, is revealed as a vast dead tree rising up out of a pool of water at the heart of a natural amphitheater, every seat filled with the bodies of men and women who fell under the Tree's allure, questers who sat down to die here with a smile on their faces. Along with the vivid depiction of the Wheat-Wearers' mistreatment and rebellion and the sudden brutal death of one of the three main characters, the Dry Tree remains in the reader's memory after the details of the rest of the book have faded.[/Spoiler]</blockquote>

Verification