The people of the small towns and villages at the foot of the mountains were losing their past when the Dusky Men and the children of the Sons of the Wolf migrated into the mountains . . . in its way, this story may be the one that inspired Tolkein to write of the Dunedain -- the Rangers descended from the Great Kings of the past. Certainly there is a certain correspondence, just as the semihuman enemies are strikingly similar to Tolkein's orcs . . .

A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark is a fantasy novel by William Morris, 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.

COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME William Morris was a Renaissance Man who left interesting marks across a variety of fields -- he was an artist, a philosopher, a politician, a utopian fantasist and as this wonderful tale will demonstrate, a man with the capacity for romance on an epic scale.

The story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Raven the Skald is the first Icelandic saga to be published in an English edition. William Morris is normally thought of as a fantasy precursor of Tolkien, having written The Wood Beyond the World among others. But he was also a translator, along with EirIkr MagnUsson, of tales originally in old Icelandic. Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Raven the Skald is one of those efforts. It's an Icelandic saga composed in the 13th century, concerning the tragic rivalry of two poets, Gunnlag and Hrafn, for the hand of orsteinn Egilsson's daughter, Helga the...

Son of King Sigmund, young Sigurd is taught the ways of kings by the ancient, mysterious Regin -- who then sets him upon the seemingly impossible task: to steal the divine armor guarded by the Wallower on the Gold -- the great serpent Fafnir. Astride the war-steed Grayfell and armed with a sword named the Wrath of Sigurd, the young hero crosses the Glittering Heath in pursuit of peril, glory -- and the Treasure of Andvari.

Son of King Sigmund, young Sigurd is taught the ways of kings by the ancient, mysterious Regin -- who then sets him upon the seemingly impossible task: to steal the divine armor guarded by the Wallower on the Gold -- the great serpent Fafnir. Astride the war-steed Grayfell and armed with a sword named the Wrath of Sigurd, the young hero crosses the Glittering Heath in pursuit of peril, glory -- and the Treasure of Andvari.

John Ball encounters strangeness after strangeness, waking from his modern-day slumber . . . to find himself beside a quiet country road, garbed in an old-fashioned cloak, watching a horseback knight in armor passing by. He walks into a village where the buildings are all hand-fashioned -- with stone-dust from the building of the church still fresh upon the sward. He has been transported centuries into the past The struggle against tyranny, and the goodness of life in the wildwood and the heath -- these are among the themes threaded into this embroidered tapestry of a romance, from the...

Here Morris explores many of the ideas and themes that would provide continued inspiration throughout his long and influential career -- especially those arising out of the Arthurian tradition, such as "King Arthur's Tomb," and "Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery." And ever the great bell overhead Boom'd in the wind a knell for the dead -- Though no one toll'd it, a knell for the dead -- "The Blue Closet"

This is England -- but an England none have ever seen and perhaps none will ever see: for it is a country of the future, when the blights of poverty and inequity have been corrected and cured and when the sky-blackening industries of the Modern Age have been transformed . . .While those words from the utopian novel News from Nowhere describe the setting of a fictional character, they apply as well to its Herculean author, William Morris (1834-1896).