WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Supposedly the longest completed poem in the English language, it's actually an anthology of 25 stories, two for each month of the year plus a frame narrative, loosely stitched together by a storyteller layer. Each month pairs a story from medieval European legend and one from Greek mythology, being related by two groups of older men, one descended from a lost Greek colony, the other a group of mixed northern European voyagers, to console their age and entertain the young.
Morris is very Victorian, in that he is a peculiar mix of pessimistic & optimistic and that does not believe terseness is a virtue; also, his stories are very much about the character growth of men as opposed to women. Within those restrictions, though, he is strikingly modern in his concern with framing and point of view, and forward-looking in his eroticism.
And it is a wellspring of striking poetry. Of striking NARRATIVE poetry. He is, in this book, most like Chaucer than any other predecessor.
And because of that concern for framing, there are a lot of layers to look through and decode and examine, in a way that fanfic is so EXCELLENTLY suited for.
WHERE CAN I FIND IT?: My preferred source is the William Morris Archive, which has older editions plus the relatively recent scholarly edition edited by Florence S. Boos. Archive.org also has several editions, and this site has a convenient ebook. (Project Gutenberg, bizarrely, has only part 2 of a three-volume edition.)
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WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Supposedly the longest completed poem in the English language, it's actually an anthology of 25 stories, two for each month of the year plus a frame narrative, loosely stitched together by a storyteller layer. Each month pairs a story from medieval European legend and one from Greek mythology, being related by two groups of older men, one descended from a lost Greek colony, the other a group of mixed northern European voyagers, to console their age and entertain the young.
Morris is very Victorian, in that he is a peculiar mix of pessimistic & optimistic and that does not believe terseness is a virtue; also, his stories are very much about the character growth of men as opposed to women. Within those restrictions, though, he is strikingly modern in his concern with framing and point of view, and forward-looking in his eroticism.
And it is a wellspring of striking poetry. Of striking NARRATIVE poetry. He is, in this book, most like Chaucer than any other predecessor.
And because of that concern for framing, there are a lot of layers to look through and decode and examine, in a way that fanfic is so EXCELLENTLY suited for.
WHERE CAN I FIND IT?: My preferred source is the William Morris Archive, which has older editions plus the relatively recent scholarly edition edited by Florence S. Boos. Archive.org also has several editions, and this site has a convenient ebook. (Project Gutenberg, bizarrely, has only part 2 of a three-volume edition.)