Laura Miller (30 page)

Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites celebrated the art and literature of the Middle Ages at a time when conventional wisdom held up the Renaissance as the pinnacle of European culture and Raphael as the quintessential Renaissance master. The centuries between the Fall of Rome and the rediscovery of classical antiquity were at that time (as they occasionally still are now) dismissed as the “Dark Ages.” This was sheer bias, in Morris’s opinion, rooted in the eighteenth century’s overvaluation of the disciplined, balanced formality of classical art. Historians were wrong, he wrote, when they portrayed the medieval period as “lawless and chaotic; its ethics a mere conscious hypocrisy, its art gloomy and barbarous fanaticism only, its literature the formless jargon of savages.”

Like many of the Romantics, Morris saw vigor and truth in the eccentricities of individual expression, which, he argued, had been allowed freer rein in the Middle Ages than in the Renaissance. You could see this in the very objects that filled the medieval world: the chairs and wall hangings, the pitchers and illuminated books, each with its own handmade beauty. The Renaissance cathedral is an orderly, Palladian symphony of columns and arches, speaking persuasively of reason. The walls of a Gothic church, by contrast, teem with carvings of saints, allegorical figures, gargoyles, and other grotesqueries climbing improbably upward until they vanish into the shadowy mysteries of pointed vaults. Where the quintessential Renaissance structure — St. Peter’s Basilica or the Campidoglio in Rome — presents a refined, controlled ideal, orchestrated by a single master, the medieval public building is the work of dozens of unnamed craftsmen, each adding his own idiosyncratic touch.

With the Renaissance came not only the institution of a uniform classical style of beauty but — and worse yet in Morris’s view — the dawn of capitalism. Compared to the industrial workers of his own century, Morris felt, even medieval serfs had more varied, less alienating work and more free time. But it was the artisans who most captivated his imagination. A medieval guild craftsman, he wrote, was “master of his time, his tools, and his material, was not bound to turn out his work shabbily, but could afford to amuse himself by giving it artistic finish; how different that is from [the] mechanical or trade finish some of us, at least, have learned.” A world furnished with a few cherished possessions made in the old, authentic ways was an infinitely healthier and more joyful place to live, he believed, than one cluttered with cheap, mass-produced junk built by bored, miserable workers.

If, for inspiration, Morris looked even more intently to the past than the earlier Romantics had, he still shared their belief in the possibility of a redeemed future. His own infatuation with Norse legends and sagas (several of which he had translated) led him to visit Iceland; there he had seen people living in simple, wholesome (if sometimes harsh) circumstances and in communities without great disparities in wealth. This experience further fired his interest in socialism, and when not designing furniture or directing the publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer (one of the most beautiful books ever printed), Morris could be found on the streets of London attempting to rally the proletariat. His time-travel narrative,
News from Nowhere,
imagines a twenty-first-century England that has restored the virtues of the fourteenth century with a few key alterations. In fact, Morris’s utopian vision resembles the Shire — a cheerful, unassuming, agrarian society with few machines and a reverent respect for the natural world and its rhythms — but unlike Tolkien’s hobbits, the inhabitants of Morris’s future England have organized their economy along strictly communal lines.

In Morris’s prose romances, the politics are much more subdued (though perhaps no more detached from reality). Lewis first came across a copy of Morris’s
Well at the World’s End
on a shelf at Arthur Greeves’s house when he was in his early teens. The book single-handedly revived his childhood penchant for “knights in armor,” and soon “the letters WILLIAM MORRIS were coming to have at least as potent a magic in them as WAGNER.” Tolkien wasn’t much older when he used a small cash prize he’d won in an academic competition to buy a copy of
The House of the Wolfings
. That book, the story of a tribe of pre-Roman Goths, gave him the idea of adapting a tale from the
Kalevala
“along the lines of Morris’s romances” (as he put it in a letter to his wife-to-be). His prime candidate for this adaptation was the Finnish legend of Kullervo, a hapless young man who winds up inadvertently committing incest and precipitating other catastrophes during an attempt to avenge the massacre of his family. (This idea, transplanted to Middle-earth, eventually became the story of Túrin Turambar, a cursed hero who endures a string of similar misfortunes, published posthumously in 2007 as
The Children of Húrin.
)

My copy of Morris’s
Well at the World’s End
comes in a double volume, bound together with a similar work,
The Wood Beyond the World,
and published by Inkling Books, a one-man concern in Seattle. The collective title given to this volume by its conservative Catholic publisher,
On the Lines of Morris’ Romances,
is taken from Tolkien’s letter to his fiancée, and the subtitle is
Two Books That Inspired J. R. R. Tolkien.
If that’s not sufficient to get the point across, a back-cover blurb appeals directly to “Tolkien fans who long for more of the same delight that they get from
The Lord of the Rings.
” (In truth, the stately, rambling narratives of Morris’s romances are unlikely to beguile any but the most patient and scholarly aficionados of Middle-earth, and even then their interest will probably be more historical than anything else.) The introduction to
The Wood Beyond the World
takes pains to assure readers that this “uncomplicated romance” contains “no hidden messages about contemporary social issues,” presumably a reference to Morris’s politics. Lewis and Tolkien, too, were more than capable of reading selectively, extracting what they liked from the romances, while leaving Morris’s socialism on the plate.

What they liked was something that had never quite been attempted before.
The Well at the World’s End
and
The Wood Beyond the World,
written in the 1890s, are entirely original stories, set in imaginary lands that resemble the mystical Britain of the Arthurian tradition combined with the timeless noplace where fairy tales transpire. Morris was the first writer to do this — devise a whole new world for his romances, rather than setting them in “Faerie Land” or a semi-mythologized version of a place that actually existed. From his example grew Tolkien’s concept of the secondary world and, eventually, Middle-earth itself. In a way, the socialist Morris was the grandfather of a vast and highly lucrative genre of popular fiction, even though what he’d set out to do was revive a beloved, forsaken form.

The heroes in Morris’s romances, like the heroes in the medieval romances he emulated, are knights who set forth in search of adventure, passing through castles, towns, and isolated cottages, battling other knights, rescuing ladies, swearing loyalty to leaders and companions, and encountering supernatural wonders like giants or sorceresses. They become embroiled in complicated questions of honor and often struggle to figure out who among the strangers they meet can be trusted and who cannot. A beautiful maiden might turn out to be a foul crone or even a serpent in disguise; a magnificent palace might conceal an ugly secret. As is often the case in romances, the Morris hero pursues a quest; he searches for a kidnapped lady, or a magical object or place. In
The Well at the World’s End,
Ralph, the youngest son of the king of Upmeads, leaves home without a particular goal in mind, but soon decides to seek the eponymous well, whose waters will renew a drinker’s youth and fortitude.

All of these elements are as familiar to us as cops and robbers, even if we’ve never heard of Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
or
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The iconography of medieval romance is woven into our world and our language. The knight in shining armor, the damsel in distress — these are half-mocking labels we use to tease people for acting out roles from an idealistic, outdated notion of chivalry. The Holy Grail or the dragon that requires slaying are metaphors invoked in newspaper or magazine articles to indicate that a particular goal or challenge has some extraordinary significance. Four hundred years ago, Cervantes mercilessly parodied the clichés of the romance in
Don Quixote,
but his mockery didn’t slow it down; romance mutated and evolved, manifesting in dozens of new forms: the gothic tale, magic realism, the road novel. It lives on in comic books, science fiction, movies and television series, even video games. Once you learn how to recognize it, you see it everywhere, especially in narratives (whatever the medium) that speak to the young.

Northrop Frye, one of the last great literary critics to flourish before the advent of structuralism, defined the classic romance as belonging to “the mythos of summer,” in which the essential element is “adventure.” This observation comes from
Anatomy of Criticism,
Frye’s attempt, in 1957, to devise a systematic, objective catalog of literary modes and forms. As a student at Oxford in the 1930s, Frye attended Lewis’s famous lectures on medieval literature, and I can’t help wondering if he recognized in himself the two qualities Lewis listed as the defining traits of the medieval thinker. The medieval scholar was “bookish,” Lewis wrote, and above all “an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted ‘a place for everything and everything in the right place.’”

Frye took this mentality to its logical extreme by devising a codification for all books, slotting the vast, multifarious body of English literature into a gridlike system of classifications. He called his approach “archetypal criticism.” Although it has since fallen out of fashion and at times seems almost pathologically optimistic (Frye describes his project as based on “the assumption of total coherence”), the aerial view it offers of literature’s evolution shows us connections not visible from any other angle.

Since the romance’s essential element is adventure, Frye observed that it is “necessarily a sequential and processional form.” Travel is its central metaphor. A beginning that involves the hero “setting forth” is more crucial to making a story a romance than whether that hero is a young man in armor, or a young man at all. “Of all fictions,” Frye wrote, “the marvelous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted, and it is this fiction that is employed as a parable in the definitive encyclopedic poem of the mode,” which is Dante’s
Divine Comedy.

The
Divine Comedy
is a rare romance of middle age, beginning with its narrator midway through “the journey that is our life,” lost and desperately in need of someone to show him the path forward. Most romance, however, belongs to youth and speaks to the desire to get out in the world and prove oneself, which may be why the form proliferates most luxuriantly and in some of its purest strains in children’s fiction. I knew as a little girl that there were really two kinds of readers: those who liked
Little Women
and those who preferred
The Phantom Tollbooth,
but it wasn’t until I was much older and learned to think like a critic that I understood exactly where the difference lies:
Little Women
is a novel;
The Phantom Tollbooth
is a romance.
Little House on the Prairie
is a novel;
The Wizard of Oz
is a romance. Magic is, without a doubt, a fictional device you almost never see outside of romance, but not all romances are magical.
Island of the Blue Dolphins
has neither magic nor a traveling protagonist, but the main character’s journey from helpless child to self-sufficient adult, a destination reached via a series of often desperate but also exhilarating adventures, makes it a kind of romance, the romance of survival.

Frye defined his literary modes (they are: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic) according to the relationship between the main character and the reader. A hero who is superior “in kind” to the reader — in other words, a divine being — marks the story as a myth. A hero who is human, but possessed of superior rank and qualities, a king or other leader, is the sign of a high mimetic narrative, usually a tragedy or epic. The low mimetic hero, the figure at the center of most realistic novels and comedy, is the reader’s approximate equal. The ironic portrays characters we look down upon or pity. The classic hero of romance is human, like the high mimetic hero, but capable of “marvelous” actions. He inhabits “a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended,” and is assisted or hindered by “enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power.”

Narnia and Middle-earth are worlds of this kind, and so is the Land of Oz and the wizarding community of the Harry Potter series. But the main characters in these books are not always capable of marvelous actions or singled out from the ordinary run of mortals. Harry, it’s true, has much in common with King Arthur in his boyhood; he is a hero with a special destiny as well as a past shrouded in mystery. But Dorothy Gale is no more than a plucky little American girl of unexceptional descent, and Milo, the listless hero of
The Phantom Tollbooth,
is distinguished only by the enigmatic package he receives at the moment when his chronic boredom seems about to blossom into full-fledged depression.

As for the Pevensie siblings, we do learn of a prophecy in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
a poem predicting that evil won’t be driven from the land until “Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone” sit at “Cair Paravel in throne.” However, Lewis believed people ought to be discouraged from thinking of themselves as singled out for an extraordinary, exalted fate; that way lies the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride. In the Chronicles, it’s the selfish villains like Jadis and Digory’s uncle Andrew who talk of having “a high and a lonely destiny.” Narnia is meant to be ruled by human beings, and the Pevensies are simply the human beings who happen to come along to do it. Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are ordinary children, much like the readers for whom the Chronicles were intended; it is Narnia that makes kings and queens out of them. In Frye’s terminology, the Pevensies are low mimetic characters, the kind of people routinely found in novels, but somehow they have stumbled into the realm of romance.