House of the Wolfings: The William Morris Book that Inspired J. R. R. Tolkiena *s The Lord of the Rings (2 page)

Morris can stimulate us in this fashion
because of something special about his writing. Like Tolkien, the
fact that he wrote of a long-ago world has led some to accuse him
of being escapist. Not so, says Lewis. Morris (and by implication
Tolkien) has “faced the facts” of modern life. “This is the paradox
of him. He seems to retire far from the real world and to build a
world out of his wishes; but when he has finished the result stands
out as a picture of experience ineluctably true.” Morris presents,
“in one vision the ravishing sweetness and the heart-breaking
melancholy of our experience.” He shows, “how the one continually
passes over into the other.” Most important of all, he combines
everything into “a stirring practical creed,” that “all our
adventures, worldly and other-worldly alike, must take into
account.”

The same can be said of Tolkien.
The Lord
of the Rings
ends with both “ravishing sweetness” and
“heart-breaking melancholy.” Sauron is defeated and Middle-earth is
free, but both Bilbo and Frodo are so badly wounded, they must seek
relief over the sea. To wed Aragorn—a happy event—Arwen must
separate herself from her family and face eventual death. Even the
brave Ents, whose role in the victory was considerable, will never
find the Ent-wives they love. As in life, the sweet and bitter are
mixed together.

Tolkien recognized the literary debt he
owned to those ancient tales and to Morris himself in a letter he
wrote to his future wife in the fall of 1914 (now the first letter
in
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
). There he spoke of
introducing a fellow student to the delights of “
Kalevala
the Finnish ballads.” Tolkien went on to say that he hoped to turn
one of those ballads, “which is really a great story and most
tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances
with chunks of poetry in between.”

Forty-six years later, in a letter written
at the very end of 1960, Tolkien continued to honor his debt to
Morris when he wrote that the landscape of “The Dead Marshes and
the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France
after the Battle of the Somme [where Tolkien fought in World War
I]. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in
The House of the Wolfings
or
The Roots of the
Mountains
.” (That remark became the inspiration for a book
combining those two tales under one title,
More to William
Morris
, as well as separate printed editions of each book.)

In
The Road to Middle-earth
, T. A.
Shippey described what Tolkien hoped to do and how it linked to
Morris: “Like Walter Scott or William Morris before him, he felt
the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered
from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a
story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any
complete ones left;
Beowulf
or
The [S]aga of King
Heidrek
stimulated the imagination but did not quite satisfy
it.”

After Tolkien died in 1973, many of his
admirers hoped that stories similar to
The Lord of the Rings
existed in manuscript form among the author’s large collection of
papers. Unfortunately, time has demonstrated that was only partly
true. Fragments of tales and plots that might have become great
epics do exist and have been published in
The Silmarillion
and
Unfinished Tales
. In addition, many of the attempted
plots and variations in plot that lie behind
The Lord of
Rings
have been included in Christopher Tolkien’s “History of
Middle-earth” series. But almost all lack the wide appeal of
Tolkien’s masterpiece. What he left behind is as fragmentary and
incomplete (and thus as uninteresting for most readers) as the
Northern tales he loved so much. For completed tales like
Tolkien’s, we must turn to one of his richest literary sources. We
must turn to William Morris.

C. S. Lewis would have agreed. Morris’
stories, he wrote, provide readers with “a pleasure so
inexhaustible that after twenty or fifty years of reading they find
it worked so deeply into all their emotions as to defy analysis.”
Morris’ stories were almost certainly among those Lewis meant when
he told Tolkien, “if they won’t write the kind of books we want to
read, we shall have to write them ourselves.”

Readers should keep one thing in mind. In
Morris, you won’t find an epic as broad or as extraordinarily
complex as Tolkien’s tale of the Ring. Instead you find stories
having the same flavor, with heroes and heroines from long ago
fighting to stay free in a hostile and dangerous world. You will
find descriptions of forests and nature every bit as marvelous as
anything in Tolkien and tales that stresses the importance of
remaining loyal to those close to us, whatever the cost. Finally,
you’ll find something Tolkien is often accused of neglecting, warm
romances between men and women.

In short, if you like what Tolkien wrote
about Aragorn and his Rangers, if you admire the bravery of the
Riders of Rohan, if you long for more tales of travel in an
unspoiled wilderness, and if you wish that Tolkien had more to say
about the courage of women or about romance between men and women,
then you’ll be delighted by tales from the pen of William
Morris.

We should always remember that William
Morris, the writer who delighted and inspired Tolkien, can also
delight and inspire those who love the marvelous stories that
Tolkien wrote.

Introduction to The Roots of the
Mountains

by Michael W. Perry

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s great epic,
The
Lord of the Rings
, the climax of the Council of Elrond comes
when the decision is made that “the Ruling Ring must be destroyed.”
When the noon-bell rings, a silence falls on the group as they
ponder who will take up this seemingly impossible task. At that
moment Frodo, the central character in the tale, is filled with
dread, “A overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by
Bilbo’s side in Rivendell filled all his heart.” With a great
effort, he makes his choice, “I will take the Ring,” he said,
“though I do not know the way.”

In this earlier tale by Morris, the central
actor, Thiodolf, faces a similar choice, one linked to a magical
hauberk (a coat of chain mail) rather than a Ring. Like Frodo, he
must choose either to live, remaining close to someone he loves
(Wood-Sun) or face the near certainty that he will die defending
his people.

Morris said as much in a 1888 letter when he
wrote that
The House of the Wolfings
“is a story of the life
of the Gothic tribes on their way through Middle Europe, and their
first meeting with the Romans in war. It is meant to illustrate the
melting of the individual into the society of the tribes: I mean
apart from the artistic side of things that is its moral—if it has
one.”

Although it is no more than a coincidence,
both Frodo and Thiodolf see in its starkness the choice they must
make in the fourteenth chapter of their respective tales. For Frodo
the choice was clear beyond doubt. He must carry the Ring to
Mordor. But for Thiodolf, the choice was at that time no more than
a dark suspicion, “that a curse goeth with the hauberk, then either
for the sake of the folk I will not wear the gift and the curse,
and I shall die in great glory, and because of me the House shall
live; or else for thy sake I shall bear it and live, and the House
shall live or die as may be, but I not helping, nay I no longer of
the House nor in it.”

Like Tolkien, Morris set his story within a
larger history. Although there is no exact parallel between what
happens in
The House of the Wolfings
and any particular
historical event, the great struggle between Rome’s drive to
civilize and enslave their way into Central Europe and the Gothic
(Germanic) tribes willingness to fight for their independence is a
fact of history.

Perhaps the most important battle in that
struggle between Romans and Germans was one in A.D. 9 between the
Roman general Varus and Gothic soldiers led by Arminius, a German
whose talent had been recognized the Romans, who attempted to buy
his allegiance by giving him Roman citizenship and military
training. He would use that training against them.

Knowing that troop strength and military
skill gave the advantage to Rome, in September Arminius lured Varus
out of his Westphalian fortress to put down what the Romans thought
was a minor revolt. They were tricked into entering a wooded and
hilly region, where heavy rains made movement difficult. Arminius
then launched a series of lightning attacks on the Roman army,
using every advantage imaginable. (Much as in Morris’ tale, one key
battle took place on a forested ridge.) In the end, Varus committed
suicide to avoid capture and most of his army was either killed in
battle or sacrificed to blood-thirsty pagan gods. Rome was left
angry and bitter by the defeat, but in the end both sides were
forced to come to an uneasy truce with the Rhine River as a
boundary line. Later, barbarian tribes coming out of Central Europe
would weaken and then destroy the Roman empire. Morris tells that
history from a Gothic perspective in
The Roots of The
Mountains
, where the Huns are the Wolfings’ new foes.

Why would an Englishman like Morris take
pride in a long-ago victory by a distant tribe when his own
homeland, England, had been successfully occupied and colonized by
Rome? The reason is simple. In his day, many educated Englishmen
believed that their racial (‘blood’) roots lay in the Germanic
tribes of this era. In his often-reprinted 1851
Fifteen Decisive
Battles of the World
, Edward S. Creasy made the bold claim
that, “an Englishman is entitled to claim a closer degree of
relationship with Arminius than can be claimed by any German of
modern Germany.” Strange as it may sound today, the Englishmen of
Morris’ day had no problem imagining themselves as brave and fierce
Wolfing warriors, even as a heavily industrialized Great Britain
ruled a Rome-like empire that bore little resemblance to a Gothic
village.

Those who have read Tolkien’s
The Lord of
the Rings
will notice similarities. There is a forest named
Mirkwood in Morris, although it is not as dark and mysterious as
Tolkien’s. (Both have as their source the Nordic
Elder Edda
saga.) In Chapter 2, a messenger brings to the Wolfings (as to
Rohan) a “war-arrow ragged and burnt and bloody” that is a call to
war. And, much like Bilbo and Frodo, Thiodolf acquires a protective
coat of mail (hauberk) made by dwarves and having, in addition,
dangerous and hidden powers much like the Ring that both Hobbits
bear. But while the Ring can bestow an unimaginably dangerous power
on its possessor, the hauberk has a far different effect. In both
tales, however, the plot hinges on the hero making the right choice
about the use of the powerful weapon he has been given.

With that, I leave you to enjoy Morris’
marvelous tale.

Whiles in the early Winter eve

We pass amid the gathering night

Some homestead that we had to leave

Years past; and see its candles bright

Shine in the room beside the door

Where we were merry years agone

But now must never enter more,

As still the dark road drives us on.

E’en so the world of men may turn

At even of some hurried day

And see the ancient glimmer burn

Across the waste that hath no way;

Then with that faint light in its eyes

A while I bid it linger near

And nurse in wavering memories

The bitter-sweet of days that were.

Contents

1. The Dwellings of Mid-mark

2. The Flitting of the War-Arrow

3. Thiodolf Talketh with the Wood-Sun

4. The House Fareth to the War

5. Concerning the Hall-Sun

6. They Talk on the Way to the
Folk-Thing

7. They Gather to the Folk-Mote

8. The Folk-mote of the Markmen

9. The Ancient Man of the Daylings

10. That Carline Cometh to the Roof of the
Wolfings

11. The Hall-Sun Speaketh

12. Tidings of the Battle in Mirkwood

13. The Hall-Sun Saith Another Word

14. The Hall-Sun Is Careful Concerning the
Passes of the Wood

15. They Hear Tell of the Battle on the
Ridge

16. How the Dwarf-Wrought Hauberk Was
Brought Away from the Hall of the Daylings

17. The Wood-Sun Speaketh with Thiodolf

18. Tidings Brought to the Wain-Burg

19. Those Messengers Come to Thiodolf

20. Otter and his Folk Come into
Mid-mark

21. They Bicker about the Ford

22. Otter Falls on Against his Will

23. Thiodolf Meeteth the Romans in the
Wolfing Meadow

24. The Goths Are Overthrown by the
Romans

25. The Host of the Markmen Cometh into the
Wild-wood

26. Thiodolf Talketh with the Wood-sun

27. They Wend to the Morning Battle

28. Of the Storm of Dawning

29. Of Thiodolf’s Storm

30. Thiodolf Is Borne Out of the Hall and
Otter Is Laid Beside Him

31. Old Asmund Speaketh Over the War-dukes:
The Dead Are Laid in Mound

Chapter 1

The Dwellings of Mid-mark

The tale tells that in times long past there
was a dwelling of men beside a great wood. Before it lay a plain,
not very great, but which was, as it were, an isle in the sea of
woodland, since even when you stood on the flat ground, you could
see trees everywhere in the offing, though as for hills, you could
scarce say that there were any; only swellings-up of the earth here
and there, like the upheavings of the water that one sees at whiles
going on amidst the eddies of a swift but deep stream.