Isegoria

John Rateliff describes M. R. James’s “fantasy” classics, his Collected Ghost Stories:

“The reading of many ghost stories has shown me that the greatest successes
have been scored by the authors who can make us envisage a definite time
and place, and give us plenty of clear-cut and matter-of-fact detail, but who,
when the climax is reached, allow us to be just a little in the dark…”

— M. R. James

The lines between modern fantasy and its two literary cousins, the genres of science fiction and horror, have always been blurred. If science fiction is essentially concerned with presenting possibilities (however improbable) and fantasy with the impossible, it must nonetheless be admitted that many works considered science fiction by their authors (Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series) are read by their fans as fantasy, pure and simple. Similarly, fantasy and horror can both be divided into two main types, with considerable overlap between the two genres. In the case of fantasy, the division lies between Wordsworthian Fantasy, in which fantastic elements intrude into our own mundane world, and Coleridgean Fantasy, which are works set in some imaginary world like Tolkien’s Middle-earth or Eddison’s Zimiamvia or Dunsany’s Pegana. With horror, the break comes between stories where it is revealed that monsters walk among us (say, a certain Transylvanian Count) or where the threats break into our world from beyond (like a Great Old One or its mindless maleficent minions), and those where the “monsters,” while grotesque, are all too human, like Hannibal Lector or Norman Bates or Jack the Ripper. Naturally, between Wordsworthian fantasy and Lovecraftian horror there is a good deal of common ground, and often only tone and emphasis determine whether a work is fantasy (like Emma Bull’s The War for the Oaks) or horror (like King’s Salem’s Lot).

“… the merits… of a perfectly ordinary setting, a horrid catastrophe,
and a curiosity legitimately excited, and not satisfied, in the mind
of the reader.”

The quintessential case of some monster entering into our world with dire consequences is the ghost story. And when it comes to ghost stories, no one does them better than Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), who is universally hailed as The Master.

Unlike more prolific writers, James’s output was relatively small, primarily because he wrote only one story a year. [1] He would mull over various plots and ideas, eventually select the best one, and then write it up, reading the results aloud to friends on Christmas Eve. [2] When he had enough to make up a volume, he would publish a collection: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904, eight stories), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911, seven stories), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919, five stories), and finally A Warning to the Curious (1925, six stories), the whole collected along with four other tales and an essay (“Ghost Stories I Have Tried to Write”) into Collected Ghost Stories (1931). His work has never gone out of print in all the years since — a “classic” status very few books achieve. [3]

“[H]ow does he contrive to inspire horror? It is partly, I think, owing
to the very skillful use of crescendo, so to speak. The gradual removal
of one safeguard after another, the victim’s dim forebodings of what
is to happen gradually growing clearer…

– M. R. James on fellow writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu

James’s style and technique was diametrically opposed to the gore-besplattered serial killer/slasher direction taken by late twentieth century horror. Instead of the gross-out, he advocated reticence, preferring to let the reader work out for himself or herself exactly what happened. In some calm, everyday setting — a university library, a seaside hotel, the garden of a country house, an old church — his protagonist unwittingly comes into contact with the supernatural, often by unknowingly violating some prohibition or removing some barrier. This might take the form of clearing away an unsightly post in your rose garden that had kept a ghost pinned quiescent beneath it (“The Rose Garden”), damaging an old tomb while renovating a church (“An Episode in Cathedral History”), or deciding to reopen the old maze on the grounds of your new house, allowing something no longer human to slip out (“Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance”).

Unlike the ghosts of folklore, James’s ghosts are always malevolent, hungry, and vengeful things that are no longer human and that often take bestial or monstrous forms. To draw their attention is nothing short of disastrous, as the vacationing professor finds when he unwisely blows the curious whistle he finds in the ruins of an old medieval church by the sea in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. A similar lesson is learned, too late, by the gentleman who stands next to a tomb and whimsically expresses out loud a wish to meet its occupant (“Count Magnus”); we are told that seven members of the coroner’s jury fainted upon seeing the ultimate result. Only rarely are the warning signs obvious, except in retrospect, when, of course, it is far too late. Instead, we get little disquieting hints that all is not right, slowly building to a climax which, if he is lucky enough to survive at all, leaves the protagonist badly shaken and firmly determined never to meddle in such matters again.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of a James ghost story is its deliberately limited range. The horrors in a typical Lovecraft story threaten the entire world, if not reality itself, with tiresome regularity. By contrast, the ghost in an M. R. James story seeks the destruction of the single victim that has exposed himself to its power. By keeping the focus on the personal rather than the cosmic, James brings home the horror in a way that a grander but more diffuse focus could not — in his own words, the reader should think “If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!” (Preface to More Ghost Stories). He furthers this goal by describing events with nightmarish clarity; at least one of his tales was based on an actual nightmare, and they have certainly inspired many a nightmare among his readers. Consider, for example, such instances as reaching under your pillow at night and touching “a mouth, with teeth… not the mouth of a human being” (“Casting the Runes”), or seeing a hole in a piece of paper which grows larger and larger and out of which comes “a burnt human face… with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple there clambered forth… a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them” (“Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance”), or “see[ing] a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed” (“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”).

To achieve the same goal of reader identification with the characters, James held that ghost stories should be set within the lifetime of their audience, although he often violated this rule in his own work — thus “The Mezzotint,” “A Warning to the Curious,” “The Uncommon Prayer-Book,” “Casting the Runes,” and others are set in or near the present-day (in other words, the 1890s through the 1920s), while “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance” takes place as far back as 1837, “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” about 1810-1817, “Lost Hearts” in 1811, “An Evening’s Entertainment” sometime back in the early 18th century, and the bulk of “Martin’s Close” in the 1680s. This variety is actually one of James’s great strengths as an author: Since the events that lead to a haunting often took place long ago, he masterfully creates old documents telling of long-past events and inserts them in his stories, reconstructs dialogue to fit various eras, and generally brings to life a wide array of folk of grand or humble estate, each of whom has something to contribute to the evidence of what happened and why.

For James often does not give us the whole story — only such fragments as his narrator is able to piece together. In “Martin’s Close,” for instance, the local who knew all about the haunting has died before the narrator ever appears on the scene, and the latter must reconstruct the long-past events from old court records and the like. Judicious research and the lucky discovery of pertinent documents can cast some light, but some questions are always left unanswered — what exactly was the “Black Pilgrimage” that Count Magnus is said to have undertaken? And what manner of creature exactly was the familiar he brought back with him, described only as “a strange form… for the most part muffled in a hooded garment that swept the ground. The only part of the form which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm… [but a] tentacle”? What was the “secret” the creator of the maze boasted of in “Mr. Humphreys and His Inheritance” or the goal of the secret worship undertaken by the two cultists in “An Evening’s Entertainment”? These answers died with the characters, but the gaps in the readers’ knowledge actually adds to the verisimilitude of the stories — after all, in the real world we always have to make do with partial information yet can form conclusions from what we do know; James’s technique makes his stories more believable (and hence more disturbing) than the neater, more pat efforts of lesser imitators.

In the end, of course, there is no substitute for simply reading the stories, savoring the prose, and risking a few nightmares. Those who merely want a taste should start with three of his very best: “Casting the Runes” (tracing the course of a very unpleasant curse on a hapless victim) “The Tractate Middoth” (a masterpiece about a ghost-haunted book), and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” Those with a little more time should add “The Mezzotint” (a sinister little picture whose scene keeps changing), “Count Magnus,” “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” (about the fate that befalls a pious murderer) “Martin’s Close,” “Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance,” “A Neighbour’s Landmark” (“That which walks in Betton Wood/Knows [not] why it walks or why it cries”), “A View from a Hill” (e.g., a gallows hill, and the danger in looking through a dead man’s eyes), “A Warning to the Curious” (“Sometimes, you know, you see him, and sometimes you don’t, just as he pleases, I think: he’s there, but he has some power over your eyes”), and “Rats” (“Have scarecrows bare bony feet? Do their heads loll on their shoulders?… Can they get up and move, if never so stiffly, across a floor…”), rounded out with the plots described in “Stories I Have Tried to Write” (“There is a touch on the shoulder that comes when you are walking quickly homewards in the dark hours, full of anticipation of the warm room and bright fire, and when you pull up, startled, what face or no-face do you see?”). Those who like what they read should devour all thirty stories; even James’ lesser tales have vivid images, interesting concepts, and striking lines compared with run-of-the-mill authors.

Readers who like James may also want to check out the work of John Bellairs, who was heavily influenced by James and uses many of his motifs to good effect, creating the same nightmarish feel in The Face in the Frost (1969) and his later young adult horror books; his series has since been carried on by Brian Strickland in such works as The Doom of the Haunted Opera. “Casting the Runes,” arguably James’s best story, has also inspired some film adaptations: the old black and white movie Curse of the Demon (which makes the mistake of actually showing the monster at the end), a scene in Cast a Deadly Spell, and the more recent Japanese film The Ring. His influence is heavy on both the ghost story and horror gaming such as Call of Cthulhu. His stories have transcended their own time and become classics of the genre, much imitated but never equaled.

“Do I believe in ghosts?…
I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.”

— M. R. James

M. R. James and Your Game

Essentially, any M. R. James story is a top-notch ready-made Call of Cthulhu scenario focusing on conventional horrors rather than the Mythos (thereby confounding those who see a Great Old One behind every mystery). His bestial ghosts (who only rarely maintain their human form and cunning) and demonic familiars could complicate the life of any horror RPG character and quite possibly bring it to an abrupt end. The method of cursing a character described in “Casting the Runes” presents an interesting dilemma of passing along the curse before the time limit runs out. James himself would make an interesting NPC in a Gaslight (1890s) or 1920s Call of Cthulhu campaign set in England — after all, he has access to every library in the United Kingdom and presents himself over and over in his stories as the sort of person to whom others confide their odd or occult experiences. The writings left behind by such Jamesian villains as Mr. Abney (“Lost Hearts”) and Karswell (“Casting the Runes”) could easily be transformed into minor Mythos tomes. But above all, James’s technique of gradually building suspense as the barriers separating the ghost from the protagonist’s world fall one by one serves as a model for any Keeper or DM on how to well and truly creep out your players.

[1] James’s literary output was small because he devoted most of his time to other pursuits; a librarian and museum director at Cambridge and later a senior official at Eton, he was famous for organizing and cataloguing collections of manuscripts throughout England and for his interest in Biblical apocrypha. Among his publications are a catalogue of Dr. John Dee’s library and an edition and translation of noncanonical books of the Bible. His scholarly activities exercised a strong influence on his ghost stories, and the tradition of an erudite scholar discovering horrors while conducting his research in Call of Cthulhu derives directly from his work (as well as the importance of researching a haunting before trying to confront it).

[2] The English have a tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmastime, not Halloween (which is more of an American holiday). This may derive ultimately from the old belief that ghosts did not appear at Christmas, perhaps making it safer to discuss them on that day. At least one modern writer followed James’ example, the Canadian Robertson Davies, whose High Spirits (1982) collects his own once-a-year ghost stories, which are all of a humorous bent.

[3] For true James enthusiasts, the definitive collection is A Pleasing Terror: The Complete Supernatural Writings (Ash Tree Press, 2001), which includes all his published stories plus uncompleted fragments of stories, a few uncollected tales, some medieval ghost stories James found in a 14th century manuscript, essays (mostly on the work of Sheridan Le Fanu, James’ favorite ghost story writer), his only novel (a short children’s fantasy called The Five Jars, 1922), a critique of Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, and various other odds and ends. For more on James, see Ghosts & Scholars, a literary journal devoted to his work that recently transformed itself into a website.

John Rateliff discusses the relatively recent fantasy classic, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld:

Not every “classic” of fantasy was written a century ago. Books as good as any ever published by the late great masters of the genre — Dunsany, Eddison, Morris, Cabell, et al. — were also being written in the 1960s (The Face in the Frost, A Wizard of Earthsea), the 1970s (Watership Down), the 1980s (The Bridge of Birds) and even the 1990s (The Golden Compass), many of them by authors still alive today. All are remarkable not just for their exceptional excellence but because they break new ground rather than follow current trends (masterpieces always defy conventional wisdom), although ironically some of them have themselves become much imitated in turn.

One book that stands alone is The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, as it has no obvious precursor nor inspires a subgenre or “school” of followers; there is nothing else quite like it, even among McKillip’s other writings. Whereas some fantasy classics dazzle the reader by the twists and turns of their plot or enthrall them with a seductively appealing subcreated world, McKillip’s stands out by the sheer beauty of the writing. Some say that modern fantasy is today’s equivalent of the pulp novel of the 1920s and 1930s, and readers who have become accustomed to the adequate prose of a generic trilogy manipulating standard characters through a conventional plot, where the villain dies in the next-to-last chapter with the final few pages for happily-ever-after, may have their breath taken away by McKillip’s evocative, lapidary style:

“The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone,
and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind,
and he died of what he saw there.”

Through her style and imagery, McKillip harkens back both to fairy tales and Celtic legend, particularly those tales recorded in the Welsh Mabinogion, which includes stories both grim and with a sense of wonder, as if the reader is only being told fragments of much longer tales now forgotten. The sense of untold stories haunts this book: echoes of other tales that are mentioned only in passing. Indeed, one such fragment, a single sentence in length, was later expanded by McKillip into an entire trilogy (The Riddle-Master of Hed/Heir of Sea and Fire/Harpist in the Wind). Even at the time of the book, the various tales alluded to have been forgotten by all but a few of the characters, and the Beasts themselves have slipped into legends remembered only by seers and loremasters and that most folk disbelieve. These elusive allusions give McKillip’s world a sense of depth — a very Tolkienesque feeling that it has existed long before the story began. Events have a context, even if it’s not one familiar to the reader, and the world feels more solid and realistic than a backdrop conjured up just for the current story. And it follows, inescapably, that within that world our tale’s heroine and hero will one day be remembered only as a similar cryptic little fragment of a tale, with all their experiences boiled down into a gnomic sentence or two left behind to serve as warning or inspiration to others.

For the story is, above all else, about the characters: Sybel the White Lady and Coren, prince of Sirle. In the best saga manner the book opens with a brief genealogy telling how three generations of wizards (Heald, Myk, and Ogam) led at last to a sixteen-year-old girl with ivory hair living alone in a white house atop Eld Mountain. Unlike LeGuin, McKillip does not distinguish between wizardry and “woman’s magic”: Sybel is a “wizard woman,” the last and most powerful of her line, with all the gathered power of her predecessors at her disposal, wishing nothing but to continue her magic researches in splendid isolation from the outside world. But into her demesne comes a disruptive force: Coren, the seventh son of a seventh son, who brings her infant cousin Tamlorn (Tam) for her to raise, there being nowhere else where the tiny royal heir would be safe. She reluctantly agrees and thus becomes entrapped in a web of conflicting loyalties, for Tam is the only son of a powerful king, Drede, who is at war with Coren and his brothers. Eventually Coren returns — ostensibly to retrieve Tam to use as a pawn in their ongoing rivalries but actually because he has fallen in love with the remote and beautiful sorceress and seeks to persuade her into leaving her mountain to live with him in the world below. King Drede also learns of his son’s whereabouts and arrives to claim him and court his guardian. Sybel tries to stand above it all and refuses to take one side or the other or share in their feuds and hatred. However, she finds that once she has started to love other people she cannot return to her previous isolation. There is also the fact that, once they have become aware of her, the forces in the outside world cannot afford to ignore her but struggle to win her to their side by means both fair and foul.

“Once he could speak,” Coren said.
“Once they all could. They have been wild, away from men so long
that they have forgotten how, except for Cyrin, just as men
— most men — have forgotten their names.”

And then there are the Beasts: legendary creatures of immense power who have been summoned by Sybel, her father, or her grandfather through knowledge of their True Name. Just as with Tolkien’s ents and LeGuin’s wizards, to know the Name of a thing is to gain power over it. There are seven Forgotten Beasts in all (“forgotten” because they have already passed into legend in Sybel’s time): Gyld the dragon (ancient, sleepy, and unbelievably powerful; a true Ancient Wyrm), Ter the falcon (fierce, loyal, and impulsive), the Gules Lyon (golden, sleek, and wise), the Cat Moriah (a huge black cat, sort of an uber-familiar), the Black Swan (the most remote of the group), Cyrin the boar (a figure straight out of Welsh mythology, independent-minded and loving to pose riddles that convey some pungent message to his listener), and the Blammor. Sybel herself summons the Blammor in the course of the story while trying to summon a legendary bird known as the Liralen. But whereas the elusive Liralen is rumored to be a great white bird of pure beauty (rather like Sybel herself), the Blammor is a dark, shadowy thing that kills by frightening its victims to death: It forces them to see the evil within themselves, a process few survive. McKillip’s description of the Blammor may owe something to the Bortion in Roger Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows (1960) but it was more probably inspired by the Todal in James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks (1957), an amorphous creature that “punish[es] evildoers for having done less evil than they should.” Each of the Forgotten Beasts has its own agenda and may subtly attempt to manipulate their Mistress to achieve it but all are also genuinely fond of Sybel, who called them back from their various remote fastnesses into contact with humans again. Their power is glimpsed from time to time in the course of the story, but not until the climax of the book is the true breathtaking extent of what they can do revealed.

There is a cave in the mountains where his bones will never be found.
No. I called you because I was angry, but I am not angry now.

Despite the pain and machinations that ensue, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is at heart a love story: Sybel finds in Coren the one person who shares her interests and understands her way of looking at the world. Legends that she learned from her father or researched in ancient tomes he knows through his dreams, instinctively recognizing the various Beasts that serve her. In the end he loves her enough that he even abandons his hatred of Drede for her sake, patiently waiting until her love for him grows to match his for her.

Entwined with this love story, however, is a cautionary tale about the perils of trying to live apart from the world. Growing up among the Beasts, who never lie, Sybel is disconcertingly honest, both with Coren and Drede. She simply does not know how she appears to others or how they will react to what she says. Eventually this leads to disaster: Not all the powers struggling to win her to their side are as patient as Coren, and once one of them understands just how powerful she is, he feels compelled to capture her at any cost. The brief scene of her captivity McKillip succeeds in making truly disturbing, for her captor intends to alter her memories to make her willingly accept the new future he has in mind for her as his wife and partner, a rape of the mind that would leave her unaware she had ever felt or thought otherwise. This section is fascinating in part because what McKillip and her heroine condemn with horror is performed over and over with casual unconcern by the “heroes” of other stories, such as Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, and of course the Men in Black movies. Our memories are who we are, McKillip seems to be saying; destroying or altering them is an evil beyond murder or physical torture.

Certainly Sybel emerges from the experience shaken to the core; one of the most remarkable things about The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is that the heroine of the first half of the book is the villain of the second half. Her implacable search to avenge herself while trying not to harm any of the people she loves makes for a fascinating display of the corrosive power of hate, as she descends deeper and deeper into a self-destructive quest for revenge, all the while fooling herself that once she has destroyed her hapless victim she can return to being the person she was before and resume her normal life. Eventually she is forced to confront the truth of what she has become; like the giant Grof, her “eye” turns inward and she sees into the heart of her own self-created darkness:

“Did you nurse revenge from a tiny, moon-pale seedling in the night places of your heart, watch it grow and flower and bear dark fruit that hung ripe — ripe for the plucking?
It becomes a great, twisted thing of dark leaves and thick, winding vines that chokes
and withers whatever good things grow in your heart; it feeds on all the hatred
your heart can bear.”

Few authors would dare take their most appealing characters on such a grim journey, and fewer still could pull it off. McKillip’s book works because all her characters are well-motivated; even her worst villains act for what are, from their point of view, excellent reasons. What’s more, McKillip pulls off the difficult task of making the reader understand that, in his or her own mind, the character is not a villain at all but merely doing what he or she thinks necessary to achieve some desirable goal. One of the prerequisites for doing evil, she seems to be saying, is to lose the ability to see your deeds as they are. But even one who has walked far down that road can still turn back and find redemption.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and Your Game

Any number of elements from this book could be adapted into an ongoing D&D campaign. Sybel’s favorite hobby is teleporting into wizard’s libraries and extracting volumes she needs for her research, meaning that she could be encountered in passing almost anywhere. A group of heroes might be called upon to rescue a powerful character who has suffered the fate Sybel narrowly avoids, of having his or her mind altered; the victim will of course resist any attempts to save him or her. The conflict between Drede and the princes of Sirle also could serve as a long-standing conflict player characters could stumble upon where there is a good deal of right and wrong on both sides. Player characters seeking information might find their way to Sybel’s white house above the Eldwood (her name being obviously derived from “sibyl” or oracle) but would be well advised to bring her some hint or clue useful in her quest for the Liralen in payment for having disturbed her. And of course the Beasts themselves could appear almost anywhere, each supremely powerful, confident, and dangerous: dealing with any one of them, either negotiation or combat, would be an epic encounter. In one of the tales in The Mabinogion, “Culhwch & Olwen,” King Arthur’s entire court was decimated fighting a boar very like Cyrin, who in the end they drove into the sea instead of defeating.

McKillip’s RiddleMaster series, while far inferior to The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, does contain the best treatment of doppelgangers in modern fantasy, although McKillip makes the mistake of making her villains (the doppelgangers) far more sympathetic than the “heroes” fighting them.

Tolkien scholar John Rateliff wrote a number of pieces on the Classics of Fantasy for the publishing arm of Wizards of the Coast, the company that produces Dungeons & Dragons and its associated novels. Those essays have disappeared from the WotC site, but the Wayback Machine has come to the rescue. Here Rateliff describes one of the proto-fantasy works that inspired Tolkien, William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End:

The Well at the World’s End by William Morris (1896)

If modern fantasy as we know it today derives largely from the work of J. R. R. Tolkien (whose The Lord of the Rings stands in relation to fantasy much as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories do to mysteries), then Tolkien, in creating the genre, built upon the work of many precursors. None was more important to him than William Morris (1834-1896), the man who provided the basic blueprint for the epic fantasy novel in such works as The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1890), or his masterpiece The Well at the World’s End (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.

Morris the Fantasist

Despite a major revival in the 1970s in the wake of Tolkien’s phenomenal popularity, when publishers such as Ballantine, Dover, and Newcastle scrambled to reprint old works by fantasy pioneers, Morris is little read today and most of his work is available only from small-press publishers specializing in obscure fantasy. Partly this might be because his best works are his longest, and long fantasies fell out of vogue in the 1970s and 1980s, only returning to favor in the 1990s. Then, too, Morris offers up a distinctive style that takes getting used to: The first few chapters of one of his works feel stiff and unnatural until the reader adjusts to his idiosyncrasies (primarily a love for archaic words). But the initial difficulty is worth it, because the rewards of reading Morris are great.

Not only was Morris a trailblazer, but he was also a major talent whose particular niche has never been bettered; no one can conjure up the sense of being inside a medieval romance like Morris, with all its cruelty, beauty, and wonder. It was this quality that Lin Carter meant when he referred to the “fresh, scrubbed morning world” of Morris’s works, bright-colored like a stained glass window or tapestry. Morris is also evocative; C. S. Lewis argued that it would be difficult to write a book worthy of a name as good as “The Well at the World’s End” but judged that Morris had succeeded well enough to be worth reading and re-reading over and over again, adding that “No mountains in literature are as far away as distant mountains in Morris.” While the names of his characters are deliberately plain (Ralph, Roger, Walter, Hugh), being those in common use in the era he is trying to recreate, his place-names create a sense of a real world but not our own: Upmeads, Higham-on-the-Way, the thorp of Bourton Abbas, Hampton under Scaur, Utterbol, and so on. Some names, such as the Dry Tree or the Well itself, gain force from being repeated over and over as the hero hears of them in passing and tries to find out more about them and where to find them.

Love, Sex, War, and Death

The plot of The Well at the World’s End is simplicity itself. Bored with his quiet life, our young hero Ralph of Upmeads[1] leaves home seeking adventure. He soon finds himself upon the quest for the Well at the World’s End, where a single drink from the Well can grant long life, health, and beauty. He acquires lovers, friends, and enemies along the way, finding himself torn between the Lady (who visited the Well generations ago and gained eternal youth) and the Maiden (who seeks the Well on her own quest). It is typical of Morris, a great defender of the rights of women, that two of his three main characters are women, and each are equally capable as the male protagonist: The Lady is something of a sorceress reminiscent of Rider Haggard’s Ayesha (a.k.a. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed)[2] while the no-nonsense Maiden carries a sword and knows how to use it. After the sudden and brutal murder of one of the women by a jilted suitor, a grief-strickened Ralph and the other journey first separately and then together on the Quest. After many adventures, including a harrowing journey across the Thirsty Desert and an encounter with the Dry Tree itself, they reach the Well.

This would be the climax of a typical fantasy novel, but Morris does not stop there; his is a “there and back again” quest, and he devotes the final quarter of the story (Book IV) to describing the couple’s return journey back to Upmeads in the most impressive denouement in fantasy before the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings, a most unmedieval tying up of virtually every loose end raised in the first three-quarters of the novel (Books I-III). The two heroes find that their passage on the journey out has changed the people they came into contact with; tyrants have been overthrown, slaves have rebelled and won their freedom, and deposed villains now threaten Upmeads itself, where Ralph must raise the countryfolk to fight off the invaders. After a rousing final battle comes the satisfying happy ending, even explaining how the story happened to come down to us.

At the World’s End

So what does this century-old attempt to revive an art form that lapsed some five centuries ago offer to us today? Well for one thing, it shows how a lost or dormant genre can be re-created in all its glory by a devotee who grasps its root appeal and then transformed into something that can appeal to his or her contemporaries. It also provides a highly readable, moving story that offers a welcome relief to fantasy fans who are feeling burned out by generic trilogies and who are up to the challenge of something different. Those interested in the major influences on their favorite authors might be surprised to find out just how good some of those “precursors” are compared to their latter-day disciples, and how much the authors writing today owe to authors they’ve never actually read themselves.

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.

In the end Ralph and his companion, their Quest achieved and his homeland rescued, settle down to rule over his land. The Adventure over, they live happily ever after to the end of their days, which were extraordinarily long.

Notes

[1] This being a medieval story, the hero’s name should be pronounced in the medieval fashion: “Raff” rather than “Raulff.”

[2] The title character of She (1886) by H. Rider Haggard; Ayesha gained immortal youth and beauty by bathing in a magical flame, whereas the Lady of Abundance has extended her life far beyond its natural span with her voluptuous beauty intact by drinking from the Well.

[3] 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.