I read this when I was young but did not recall any of the story. It is interesting to see the elements which later influenced Dunsany and Lewis and Tolkien, but the prose is so affected that it isn't easy to read. The ending is a little strange. Overall, I found this book to be more intellectually interesting than emotionally gripping. ( )

Even though it is not really deserving of five stars, I'm feeling generous today, so there.

I confess to being a fan-girl of William Morris, and as far as I am concerned everything he has ever created deserves eleven out of ten stars. Those wallpaper designs.......the man is a god............Red House, do you need more proof than that?

To me this fantasy is an exercise in wish fulfillment. Golden Walter is clearly an autobiographical character. Jane Morris is the lady.....as to the true identity of the maid......? any theories?

Oh, and yeah, I know that this book is unacceptable to politically correct literary deconstructivists......they kinda hate this book a lot. Another motive for the five star rating, and just because I can. ( )

William Morris was a forerunner of the modern fantasy.

The Wood Beyond the World is a fantasy novel by William Morris, first published in 1894. It is perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature.When the wife of Golden Walter betrays him for another man, he leaves home on a trading voyage to avoid the necessity of a feud with her family. As a storm then carries him to a faraway country, the effect of this news is merely to sunder his last ties to his homeland. Walter comes to the castle of an enchantress, from which he rescues a captive maiden in a harrowing adventure (or rather, she rescues him). They flee through a region inhabited by mini-giants and have many adventures.

So they came to their fire and sat down, and fell to breakfast; and ere they were done, the Maid said: “My Master, thou seest we be come nigh unto the hill-country, and to-day about sunset, belike, we shall come into the Land of the Bear-folk; and both it is, that there is peril if we fall into their hands, and that we may scarce escape them. Yet I deem that we may deal with the peril by wisdom.”
“What is the peril?” said Walter; “I mean, what is the worst of it?”
Said the Maid: “To be offered up in sacrifice to their God.”
“But if we escape death at their hands, what then?” said Walter.
“One of two things,” said she; “the first that they shall take us into their tribe.”
“And will they sunder us in that case?” said Walter.
“Nay,” said she.
Walter laughed and said: “Therein is little harm then. But what is the other chance?”
Said she: “That we leave them with their goodwill, and come back to one of the lands of Christendom.”
Said Walter: “I am not all so sure that this is the better of the two choices, though, forsooth, thou seemest to think so. But tell me now, what like is their God, that they should offer up new-comers to him?”
“Their God is a woman,” she said, “and the Mother of their nation and tribes (or so they deem) before the days when they had chieftains and Lords of Battle.”
“That will be long ago,” said he; “how then may she be living now?”
Said the Maid: “Doubtless that woman of yore agone is dead this many and many a year; but they take to them still a new woman, one after other, as they may happen on them, to be in the stead of the Ancient Mother. And to tell thee the very truth right out, she that lieth dead in the Pillared Hall was even the last of these; and now, if they knew it, they lack a God. This shall we tell them.”

—The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

The version I own is a facsimile of the Kelmscott Press edition with calligraphy and illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. It’s beautiful and an absolute bitch to read out loud; the odd hyphenated breaks, the antiquated language, the dialogue within a block of text with only tree leaves as markers. Man, oh man. The story’s really just a series of “and then this happened”, which, to be fair, was the usual form for fiction from the mediaeval era which this book is affecting. But I don’t really find that so much as a failing as much as an immersion into a style that is largely lost now. With adverbs and conjunctions like “sithence” and “whenas” and “betimes”, I can’t help except feel the restoration of missing pieces to an inscription in ancient low-relief. It’s certainly a challenge for me, but not in the usual sense. Kind of like when I read “Anna Karenina” in the Doubleday edition from 1934 or “Don Quixote” from Thomas Shelton’s Jacobean-era translation in the Collier edition—a veritable eye exam as well as cognitive test.

Despite its visual appeal, the words are starting to crawl and crash into one another, becoming a kind of cross-eyed palimpsest. How did those scribes not go crazy, oh . . . I guess any mortification of the flesh, even if it is just the fingertips and eyeballs, is enough to assure your bench at the table of the great Scriptorium in the sky. I think I would’ve rather preferred to be a flagellant, using that damn scourge on others instead.
Well, we’ve all got our forms of personal torture. And apparently mine is trying to read crammed font in a half-assed British accent to the wife while she nearly burns herself on the baking stone. Forsooth, I fear the fury of the Kitchen Maid and her ceaseless birching, and so I must needs read on! ( )

It takes a while to get into the flow of this book; it's written in an old English style. Kind of a strange book and I didn't always quite know where this book was going. By the end I really liked it. Perfect fantasy kind of ending. ( )