sagas, is generally acknowledged to be the first to have brought the elements of
traditional narrative together in novel form to create a secondary world within which to
set fantastic tale told in a high style (Carter 1973:25). There were certainly tales which a
modern reader would call fantastic written and told before Morris wrote The Wood
Beyond the World (1895), but they were not deliberate attempts to create a logically
cohesive secondary world.
We have no way of knowing what cultures previous to the renaissance thought was
mimetic and what they thought was fantastic; those categories were not then the
mutually exclusive categories we consider them today. In fact, they may not have been
mutually exclusive for British culture (and by extension American culture) until some
time in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The novel, developed from the
factual prose of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was initially mimetic, if at
times certainly exaggerated; and Morris was the first to consciously break from that
realistic tradition and create the world in which the action of The Wood Beyond the
World is set.
Morris’s story begins in Langton on Holm, certainly an English-sounding place name,
with a hero named Golden Walter who is, we are told, the son of Bartholomew Golden of
the Lineage of the Goldings. Walter, following a disastrous first marriage, decides to
depart on one of his father’s ships and see something of the world. After seven months
of travel and several encounters with a mysterious trio—a woman, a young girl and a
dwarf- Walter receives word that his father has died and sets out for home. The ship is
blown off course, and Walter leaves a world at least objectively like our own for a
secondary world in which he will encounter aspects of the fertility goddess. Having seen
the old goddess destroyed and having himself slain the dwarf, Walter will marry ‘the
maid’ (a goddess as well), descend from the wilderness to the secondary world’s major
city, and become king.
The Wood Beyond the World contains elements from all of the traditional sources. The
old goddess’s sacrifice so that the young goddess can marry and assume her role as
fertility figure is a variant of a pattern common in ancient mythology. Golden Walter’s
taking his father’s last name as his first is evidence of Morris’s interest in Scandinavian
traditions. The journey across the ocean to a vastly different world is based on voyage
literature from a variety of Western European literary traditions, including the legend
and the folk-tale. The technology of wooden sailing ships, the descriptions of clothing,
and the swords, knives, and bows and arrows are all found in medieval romance. The
language of the novel, including such words as ‘mickle’ for ‘much’ and ‘wot’ for ‘know,’
has a late-medieval ring to it, and Morris’s overall style is reminiscent of the medieval
romances he is known to have studied. Although he wrote many other books, William
Morris and The Wood Beyond the World deserve their initial place in the development of
high fantasy.
The possibilities for fantasy broadened considerably in the late years of the nineteenth
century and the early years of the twentieth. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the
Willows, Beatrix Potter’s various animals and their adventures,J. M.Barrie’s Peter Pan,
A.A.Milne’s Pooh books, and L.Frank Baum’s Oz books, to name but a few of the most
famous, opened the door wide for fantasy written and marketed for the young reader.
Another major publishing series was undertaken by Howard Pyle; his most famous
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