We talked about "The Well at the World's End" in the previous post: here I want to talk about the second novel - sorry, romance - of Morris I know about. It is not one of his most famous pieces, but it is a very interesting and fascinating one: The Water of the Wondrous Isles.
It was part of the recent French translations that were published, and as with the last post I will info-mine the préface written for it, this time by William Blanc - and titled "The first feminist Arthurian romance".
Despite the old age of The Water of the Wondrous Isles - first published in 1897 by Kelmscott Press - it manages to be a very modern work, that predicted several evolutions of the fantasy genre nearly a century before they happened. Today it is culturally common to do a "feminine" or "feminist" version of the Arthurian myth (those two are not the same thing), in the wake of Marion Zimmer Bradley's very popular 1982 "The Mists of Avalon" which told the story of Camelot from the point of view of Morgan, reinvented as a great pagan priestess. You also find this with the bow-wielding Guinevere of Fuqua's 2004 "King Arthur" movie. But in a certain way, The Water of the Wondrous Isles did a "feminine Arthuriana" first.
William Morris, like the rest of Victorian society, was fascinated by the legends of the Round Table - he dedicated several of his youth productions to this myth. However unlike Alfred Tennyson, who was a poet adored by the upper-society of England and who liked to depict Camelot in a very misogynistic and conservative way, Morris was basically working for the "counter-culture" by making female characters his protagonists and his heroines. Already in his "Defence of Guinevere" (a verse work published in 1858) he depicted the queen of Camelot put on trial for her adulterous relationship with Lancelot: she offered a speech that turned the accusations on their head, to denounce the sordid institution of arranged marriages. For Morris, it is this tradition which is to be blamed, instead of the legitimate desire of women.
Forty years later, with his "Well at the World's End", Morris offers a variation of the quest for the Holy Grail, where a man and a woman quest as equals. H.G. Wells himself wrote about "The Well", in 1896, praising it for being a version of Malory's works where women are placed on the same rank as men. But what about "The Water of the Wondrous Isles"? A first obvious thing is that one of the main characters is called Arthur, and becomes the lover of the heroine Birdalone. Even better: after many adventures, he has a "madness episode" during which he flees to the depths of the wild forest for several years, almost turning into an animal. This is a common trope of the medieval tales of Camelot: a knight in love loses all reason because of his passion (see Tristan, Lancelot or Galehaut). But Morris, an admirer of the Arthurian myth, turns the tables and changes the tale so that his story corresponds to his political views and so that, more importantly, he can mock the Victorian sanitized versions of the Arthuriana. Here, it is not Lancelot or Tristan who becomes mad, it is rather a character with the name of the king of the Round Table - Morris has his "Arthur" wearing rags, wandering in the wilderness, not as a ruler but as a simple knight in love. So that Arthur takes on the role of the very man who, in the legends, seduced his wife. It is even more striking to notice that, in the medieval texts of the 13th or 15th centuries, once the knight is healed from his madness he returns into the warrior-aristocracy of their society. Within Morris works, such a "return to normal" never happens.
However, it is Morris' handling of female characters which requires a comparison with the Arthurian texts to fully understand his project.
The protagonist, Birdalone, is snatched away from her mother by a witch who turns her into a servant. She escapes by using a magical boat which allows her to cross the lake forming the titular "water of the wondrous isles". Yet, the boat is strange, because to work it requires the blood of its user to be spilled. This dangerous navigation, in which the heroine can lose her life, recalls another famous 19th century figure: the Arthurian poem of "The Lady of Shalott", by Alfred Tennyson (1832). To offer a brief recap, a young woman named Elaine of Astolat lives in a tower where she works on a tapestry. Seeing Lancelot by her window, she falls in love with him, abandons her weaving work, gets out of her tower, takes a boat leading her to Camelot, but dies as a result of her uncontrolable passion devouring her from the inside. Tennyson, with this tale, translates one of the fears of the Victorian patriarchy: to see women escape the domestic space in which they are confined, to see them express freely their desire. The poet warns maidens that such a behavior will lead to a harsh and horrible downfall (see 2000's "Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain. The Legend of King Arthur and Robin Hood", Oxford University Press).
Tennyson's poem was fitting perfectly within the British society of the 19th century, and thus was illustrated many times. It was notably loved by the Pre-Raphaelite Confrery, which had many of its member later becoming friends of Morris: Elizabeth Siddal, in 1853, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1857 both illustrated the poem. William Holman Hunt also made a drawing of Elaine in 1857, depicting her engulfed in her madness (symbolized by her disheveled hair, with the weaving of her tapestry mimicking a spider web). The colorized version of this drawing (1888-1905) is even more explicit: the young woman turns her back on a depiction of the Virgin Mary (see Jeffers Thomas' "Tennyson's Lady of Shalott and Pre-Raphaelites renderings: statement and counterstatements"). And of course, John William Waterhouse offered two different paintings of the tragic fate of Elaine, one in 1888 and one in 1894.
William Morris has this entire set of imagery in his head when he write "The Wondrous Isles", but he inverts it: the boat of Birdalone does not take her to her doom, but rather helps her escape imprisonment - she flees the domestic slavery in which the witch maintained her and lives various adventures. [In the text, Morris has the witch call Birdalone her "thrall", a term from the Old Norse society to designate a slave - the use of such an archaism is a manifestation of Morris' fascination for Old Norse texts]. To get out of the house is to encounter life, not death. In fact, we see here Morris criticizing the harsh conditions house-workers lived in as they toiled in the homes of upper-class Victorian families. When "The Water" was written, a third of the employed women were house-workers, and they were roughly in their twenties, just like Birdalone (see Davidoff Leonor's "Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England", and Theresa M.'s "The Domestic Revolution: The Modernization of Household Services in England and France 1820-1920").
Birdalone escaping through the boat is Morris' way to represent a woman free of the weight of the conservative Victorian society: she is free to go wherever she want, and to love whoever she wants. But these adventures have their dangers: throughout her journey she meets brutal men who, to possess her, threaten her and wound her - some even openly claiming they will rape her, such as the Red Knight. We find here a recurring theme in Morris' Arthurian texts, who is likely inspired by the murder of Morgause at the hands of her own son (who accuses her of adultery) in the medieval "Morte d'Arthur" ; he might also be influenced by the fate of Guinevere. Morris often depicts a masculine and patriarchal violence against women, but only to denounce them, such as through the trial of the queen of Camelot in "The Defence of Guinevere" ; or with the murder of the Sun Knight's wife in "The Well at the World's End" (the Sun Knight himself being a clear reference to Gawain).
But Morris doesn't depict the tragic condition of women as a fatality: on the contrary, his heroines fight back against the masculine aggression. Guinevere has her long defence-speech to denounce all those that condemn her relationship with Lancelot, Birdalone fights at first with a bow (a weapon commonly associated with women in Victorian England, as they practiced archery for sport), then wears an armor and uses a sword to attack and defend herself or her kin. Of course, Morris is still a man of his time, and so he depicts Birdalone easily outmatched every time she fights a man... But in this end of the 19th century, to have a woman fighting is a shocking thing. In the USA, one would have to wait forty more years before the fantasy pulps starting putting as main characters female warriors - such as C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry or Robert E. Howard's Dark Agnes.
Birdalone does not just go through her trials by fighting. As Florence Boos noted, the heroine of "The Water" uses the help and assistance of other women (Boss Florence, "The Socialist New Woman in William Morris' The Water of the Wondrous Isles): the three maidens, Aurea, Atra and Viridis, but first and foremost Habundia, the "Lady of the Wood" who helps Birdalone flee the house of the witch.
Habundia has a unique place within the text: associated with magic and the forest while clearly not being part of the human species, she reminds of another famous Arthurian woman at the time: Viviane. Just like with the Lady of Shalott, Tennyson gave Viviane a bad name in his poems. In his "Idylls of the King" (1859), he depicts Vivien as the one who trapped Merlin with her spells, in the heart of the forest, to steal his powers before locking him inside an oak-tree. We find back this fear of the Victorian patriarchy that is the "fallen woman", the "prostitute, the temptress, the archetype of the woman who, just likes Eve, drags men to their downfall (see Auerbach Nina's "Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth"). Like in medieval literature, the male doom is tied to the forest, perceived as a wild and dangerous space. In Gustave Doré's engravings for Tennyson's Vivien, we see Merlin as a very old man trapped between the young seductress and a tree whose roots wrap themselves around the couple.
Morris rejects this imagery: just like with Elaine or Guinevere, he inverts the tradition. Habundia offers a positive Vivien: with her, the forest and magic are not perdition, but salvation. Inverting Tennyson's discourse is not just a way for Morris to oppose himself to the famous conservative poet ; it rather takes place in a larger political context. Ever since hs youth, Morris has been influenced by the progressist Romantics. In the early 1880s, he engaged himslf in socialist revolutionnary movements: in 1883 he joined the Democratic Federation of Henry Hyndman, before co-founding at the end of 1884 the Socialist League and becoming the chief redactor of its newspaper, "Commonweal", to which participated Paul Aveline and Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx). While they mostly focused on questions of "classes", they still formed a thought about the life conditions of women, and denounced the bourgeois patriarchy. In 1885, they published the English translation of August Bebel's 1879 Woman and Socialism (Bebel was one of the leading figures of the German socialist movement). Simultaneously, a scandal erupted when William Thomas Stead published an investigation about child prostitution. All of this pushed Eleanor Marx to write with Paul Aveline, in 1887 "The Woman Question" (see Kapp Yvonne's "Eleanor Marx, a biography"). One year later, Morris and other members of the Socialist League supported the strike of female workers in the match-making factories of London (see Taylor Rosemary's "The city of dreadful delight: William Morris in the East End of London").
The institution of marriage is the focus of the socialist critique against women's life-conditions in Victorian society. The manifesto of the Socialist League, published in the first issue of "Commonweal" and cosigned by Morris and Eleanor Marx, compares marriage to prostitution. Eleanor Marx goes further in september 1885 by claiming that the sexual exploitation of women is the same as the salarial exploitation of capitalism. All of this transpires in the fate that the witch prepares for Birdalone: she is born from a poor family, her body is entirely offered to her new "mistress", and said mistress not only uses the girl for manual work, but also plans during her teenagehood to prostitute her. A passage of "The Water" seems to take back the same comparison Eleanor Marx makes between domestic work and prostitution.
In front of all this, Birdalone does not find a solution in the protection of a male figure: rather, she emancipates herself through her own work, notably her mastery of embroidery. The witch wants her to use this art to better seduce men, but Birdalone transforms it into a tool to gain her freedom.
"The Water of the Wondrous Isles" prefigures several motifs that shall become central in 20th and 21st century fantasy, but it also depicts something original for fantasy: a fantasy world where a lot of focus is given to crafts and the artisanal world ; something quite unusual in an epic genre that often ignores handwork.
Morris is a socialist, but also a heir of John Ruskin, who opposed the alienation of the 19th century factory-worker, used in a chain-work to reproduce endlessly the same calibrated ugly objects, to the (very idealized) freedom of the medieval craftsman, able to be autonomous in his work and to create unique (and thus beautiful) items. Morris put this thought in practice: all throughout his life, he interested himself in the "decorative arts", creating furnitures, wallpapers, staine glass and tapestries. He founded his very own society, Morris and co., in 1861, and thirty years later he opened his own publishing house, Kelmscott Press, in which he tried to create books imitating medieval manuscripts. Morris does not separate craftsmanship from his literary productions, the two are linked: the beautiful book is a box containing the beautiful text, and together they form a prolongation of his political engagement, an answer to the ugliness produced by the industrial capitalism.
In "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" Birdalone embodies this political valorization of labor. Her goal in life is not to marry a beautiful prince or to have children, but to become autonomous through her work. An entire part of the book depicts her leaving her friends to work with her own hands in the City of the Five Crafts. This industrious community evokes the descriptions Tolkien would write sixty years later of the Shire, in The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien was five when "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" was published) ; but whereas Tolkien's creation is a small countryside society, Morris presents an entire city where the handwork is not decorum but rather the heart of the action: when she arrives, Birdalone proves her talent and is quickly accepted by a local guild. She later creates her own workshop, and for five years she wlecomes numerous women in it, before leaving and offering her business to her coworkers. This reminds us of the activities of Morris, with his "Morris and co." and "Kelmscott Press" ; it also reminds us of the "socialist future" imagined by Morris, a future in which the guild system of the Middle-Ages returned, to oppose the capitalist exploitation (this idea of the future is what later gave birth in the British Left to the "Guild Socialism").
The sejourn of Birdalone in the City of the Five Crafts, which forms the introduction of the sixth part of "The Water", is not just an aside: it is a central element, because Morris shifts again a traditional motif. The one of Cinderella: in the version that the brothers Grimm popularized and that Morris is aware of (he asked Edward Burne-Jones in 1864 to make ceramic ornaments depicting the Grimm's Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella), Cinderella, a girl from a modest background, marries a prince. Morris' similarly humble heroine meets the beautiful knight Arthur, but their relationship does not elevate Birdalone in society. On the contrary, Arthur and her leave the castle and settle themselves in the birth-town of the young woman, governed by a council. Here, Arthur becomes part of this tiny republic, earning a role that Morris explicitely compares to a Roman consul. Meanwhile Robert, a former employee of Birdalone who worked with her at the City of Five Crafts, marries Aurea, a noble friend of Arthur. The tale ends in a hamlet of craftsworkers where the frontiers between the classes are broken: only remains a community of free workers, the medieval town becoming an allegory of the future socialism.
The political fight of Morris is mixed with a fascination for, and an idealization of, the Middle-Ages. His vision mixes progressist hope and a nostalgia for a lost era. He explored it in his 1890's utopia, "News from Nowhere", and we find it here through the character of Habundia. Unlike the other companions of Birdalone, at the end of the story she does not live within the city, but in the nearby forest. She does not embody Middle-Ages of guilds, but rather the Middle-Ages which are (ever since the 18th century) associated with an idealized nature, the druids, the fairies and the elves. The Lady of the Wood is "not from the race of Adam", she is not a human being, but she is far wiser than humans and owns an ancient knowledge that she describes as a "great book of nature", a knowledge that she transmits to Birdalone.
We find here a typical motif of fantasy: the "wise one" from a non-human race who lives in an ancient forest. It is Galadriel, from The Lord of the Rings, it is Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back. Morris doesn't invent this motif: it already existed at the end of the 14th century, in Chaucer's "Tales of Canterbury", within the story of The Wife of Bath. Taking place in Arthurian times, the texts opens with a description of the Queen of the Elves dancing merrily with her subject, before holy Churchmen banish them away. Morris knows this text, and Kelmscott Press published in 1896 a beautiful edition of the Tales of Canterbury, illustrated by Edward Burne Jones (in general, many echoes of The Wife of Bath's Tale can be found within The Water of the Wondrous Isles). But whereas Chaucer rejoices in the disappearance of the elves, Morris regrets them. This nostalgia, which will be found again in Tolkien's works, is a new thing for the Victorian era, and it translates a new fear: the one of seeing nature disappear because of industrialization. Morris interwoves this with a political thought: at the end of the 19th century it was a common thing to believe, in socialist circles, that many pre-industrial ancient societies were organized in a communist way. This "proto-communism" was explained by the fact these ancient societies were supposedly dominated by women, a trait thought to have survived in the Norse and Germanic societies of early Middle-Ages but that disappeared with the apparition of "private property", which imposed a patriarchal power.
This idea, originally created by Friedrich Engels in his 1884's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, heavily influenced Morris. (See Boos Florence's "Gender-Division and Political Allegory in the Last Romances of William Morris", and Eller Cynthia's "Gentlemen and the Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory") This imagery, which was a very idealized version of the past, fully played in the creation of Habundia. She embodies the perfect "original past", a past without economical property, without social property, without sexual property. If we admit that the city where the adventures end symbolizes an utopia, a prefiguration of socialism, the last pages of "The Water" allow an idealized past to neighbor a desired future: the primitive-communism of Habundia and the democratic city of the free craftsmen. Between the two is a nightmarish aside, the one of the industrial and patriarchal capitalism, in which the reader lives, and expressed through the character of the witch, who took Birdalone from her mother, abused her, and is never forgotten.
And now that I have met Trogool, I can add him to the chain of cosmic eternal readers - at the very beginning, in fact, since you won't tell me later characters like The Old Man of the Wandering Mountain and Destiny of the Endless were not inspired by him.
I need to dig more into this type of character - world-changing books I have known since the Book of Ages (JCA) and the In-Octavo (Discworld) but here I am speaking of an eternal/cosmic reader. I might have to check "The Book of Life" next.
I actually read before The Gods of Pegana proper, but online and it wasn't working much for me. I'm reading it now physical format, and it is like reading it for the first time anew.
This was a plan for a wall mural I made for the child of a friend. These are the elements he wanted, which suited me down to the bones. I made this drawing in 2003, and I think I finished the mural that year, too. The wall mural didn't end up quite as detailed, and it's possible that I went back to this plan drawing later on and added more detail for my own amusement. (I was keeping the murals relatively simple back then.)
I made this with ink, marker, and Prismacolor pencil.
The mural, shown below in an unfortunately blurry photo, was done with interior latex. I worked from 1-gallon cans of red, yellow, blue, black, and white, mixing all the other colors by hand.
