[LWI]⇒ PDF Free The Well at the World End A Tale William Morris 9781544884707 Books

The Well at the World End A Tale William Morris 9781544884707 Books

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The Well at the World's End A Tale by William Morris

The Well at the World End A Tale William Morris 9781544884707 Books

I am contributing this review because Amazon's author page for this book, an early classic of fantasy, shows the wrong William Morris. The author (?) pictured, at least at the time I am writing this in Jan. 2018, is a modern man wearing a rugby shirt and standing next to cars and a canoe. The author of this book, The Well at the World's End, was an English poet, writer, textile designer and social commentator who lived decades before cars. Amazon also often has reviews mixing up or combining the reviews for completely different editions of a book or for different books with the same name or similar names, or of authors with similar names. This potentially causes great confusion for readers and, one can tell from the resultant reviews, creates a lot of annoyed buyers. I have noticed this happening many times on Amazon - often to the detriment of a good author who shares a name with an indifferent one. I am sure this is unintentional, just as it is for Amazon to confuse reviews of similar but different products. I would like to know if there is a convenient way to contact Amazon to correct this. It is bad for Amazon and for its customers.

Product details Paperback 448 pages Publisher CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (April 13, 2017) Language English ISBN-10 1544884702

Tags : The Well at the World's End: A Tale [William Morris] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Well at the World's End: A Tale by William Morris,William Morris,The Well at the World's End: A Tale,CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform,1544884702,General,FICTION Fantasy General,Fiction,Fiction General,FictionGeneral
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The Well at the World End A Tale William Morris 9781544884707 Books Reviews

Surprizingly good. I was wandering through Wikipedia and it mentioned that William Morris had influenced some of my favorite authors and "The Well at the Worlds End" particularly. So I downloaded it for the .

The Well at the Worlds End is the story of Ralph the youngest son of a minor King who runs away from his peaceful home to seek adventure. On his way he learns of "The Well at the World's End". Those who drink from the Well become imbued with strength, youth and immortality, but it is clear that the waters transform more than the bodies of those who drink from the well. Still the bulk of the story deals with how Ralph learns about life and good and evil along the way. Like some of the other reviewers I expected to grow tired of the medieval narrative style and the victorian morality, but then I found it harder and harder to put down. The style is not too heavy, and despite the morality it does hint at the dilemmas and difficulties Ralph struggles with to stay on an honorable path while at the same time experiencing all the wonderful new things he is exposed to after his quiet life in his father's tiny kingdom. Morris shows how Ralph struggles to understand who is good and who is evil and try to do the right thing, and doesn't always. The narrative teases the reader just as it does the hero Ralph, a King's son who is not yet a Knight. At the same time it is fascinating to see the elements of Morris's work that have been picked up by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and even Lovecraft. It is also very compelling to read the elements in Morris's writing that come from Ariosto and Spencer and the same themes that infiltrate the art work of Waterhouse and the romantics and then picked up later by Pyle, Rackham and the Wyeths. Morris inserts the elements of the supernatural and magic very lightly, unlike the heavy handed magical elements in todays fantasy fiction.

Morris's prose is much lighter than Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan" and E.R. Eddisons "Worm Ouroboros". Though you may have to show a little fortitude in working through Morris's style if instead you think more about the imagery and Ralph's dilemmas you will find the story compelling and definitely as one reviewer wrote "haunting".
I've read many books and fantasy tales but this has to be my favorite. Written in a somewhat difficult style of language, its a little hard to read but take your time and enjoy the story. I generally read one or two books a week, this took me two weeks because I read it slow enjoying the story. If you like fantasy this will become your new favorite.
Dig around in fantasy enough and eventually you get to William Morris. Granted, you've probably got a long way to go from George R.R. Martin to Tolkien to CS Lewis to Lord Dunsany to finally get there but if you're persistent enough he waits for you at the end of the line, like all those SF scenarios where when you get too far back in time you wind up running smack dab into the Big Bang.

I'm not sure if Morris can be considered the ur-author from which all epic high fantasy eventually emerged but I'm pretty sure the case had been made at one point or another. For one, reading it at times can feel like a proto-Tolkien without the insane attention to details of history and language. Heck, there's even someone named Gandalf who appears at one point, and a lot of other details are going to be familiar to anyone who has spent many an afternoon with their nose buried in a story about some strange and distant land where everyone carries a sword and says "thee" a lot. You've got that here as well but Morris wound up beating almost everyone else to the starting gate by publishing his book in 1896 (to put that into perspective, when Tolkein was about four years old) where he basically had the whole fantasy section in the bookstore to himself.

Not that there weren't fantasyesque books that existed before his, but what set Morris apart was his creation of an entire realm that clearly wasn't set in the distant past or existed in a sort of dream state or forgotten land (Morris' previous book, 1894's "The Wood Beyond the World" has plenty of fantastic or supernatural elements but also clearly takes place on Earth, just on a part that's not super easy to get to). For some reason this had never really occurred to anyone before and while I don't know how popular it was among the public at the time, it wound up being a little like the Velvet Underground, where even if you've never heard of them pretty much every band you like is influenced by them in some way.

But of course the problem with these first out of the gate books is that sometimes there's a reason they tend to remain obscure and you tend to approach it cautiously, like taking a chance by sitting next to that stranger on the train who might regale you with a witty anecdote or tell you a rambling boring story for the next few hours. Just because people thought it was swell at the turn of the last century doesn't mean it plays as well now. Society thought human zoos were a reasonable thing as well around that time. Sometimes its best to leave things where they are.

But surprisingly you can generally see what people like HG Wells and Lewis and Tolkien all saw in this book, as its got a certain charm to it that's pretty undeniable. The plot mostly centers around Ralph, the son of King Peter, who allows three of his four sons to head off on adventures so they can see the world. Ralph, not wanting to stay behind, decides to sneak off to find the fabled Well Beyond the World's End, the water of which is supposed to bestow wondrous vitality on all who drink it. Well, eventually that becomes his goal. Before that he just kind of wanders around until someone gives him the idea.

And that right there should tell you what kind of book you're walking into. Anyone who has read books written in the nineteenth century probably has figured that their idea of "thrilling" wasn't quite the same as ours and a gentle, easy pace was their version of "pulse pounding." If you're looking for a deep plot or Tolkien's epic pitting of good against evil, you may have to head back into Hobbit country because is a kind of paen to old time Romantic literature, where the plot exists, but its mostly an excuse to have a series of adventures that tie back to the main thrust in a general sense, giving it a very episodic feel.

Its also written in a style that is unabashedly medieval and while its not quite you-swear-he-wrote-it-while-wearing-armor-in-a-castle level of insanity that Eddison committed to during "The Worm Oroborus" to say it takes a while to get used to it is probably putting it mildly. Sentences play out languidedly, like a cat stretching in the sun, words like "therewith" are used without any irony and there's enough "Thou"'s to make even hardcore LARPers ask to dial it down a notch. Its a book that you probably have to decide to read for lengthy periods, only because once you immerse yourself in the rhythms of the language it gets easy but diving back in repeatedly will make you feel like one of those people who voluntarily run into freezing cold water. Get the shock over with it and plow onward, its easier that way (I read most of the second volume on a long plane flight).

Still, is it good? I say yes, with some qualifications. The early stages before the plot really kicks in can be rough going in spots because its mostly Ralph wandering and having reasonable conversations with people and while the fantastic setting has some merit, just because its set in a fantasy world doesn't automatically make it fascinating. There's very little feel of magic at play and not in the wizardy sense but a sense of strangeness and otherness that comes from existing right on the edge of what's known.

Fortunately, the Lady of Abundance shows up and rescues us all.

Her appearance, nearly a hundred pages in and for some people probably in the nick of time, finally gives you an idea of what people saw in this book, as she tells Ralph the story of her childhood and her encounter with the well, a sequence that honestly feels like watching a myth of the collective unconscious being born before your eyes. Her presence not only gives the book a focus but also an added emotional heft that wasn't quite present earlier . . . a sequence where Ralph mourns the death of someone close to him feels honestly touching even through the flowery language.

From there its more episodic encounters but now with a little bit of focus we actually feel like we're going somewhere. The addition of a possible love interest (though either hotties are scarce in Ralph's world or they're all a bunch of hippies because pretty much every lady with eyes falls in love with Ralph, making this truly a fantasy) and an evil warlord gives the proceedings a bit more spice and by the time the first volume closes I had to admit I was being fully entertained, even while my brain was screaming at having to slog through deciphering the language into the simple words and sentences it craved (keep a reference for medieval words on hand is my advice). By the time I had reached the end of the first volume (because its fantasy, so of course it takes place across multiple books) I was honestly curious to see where he was going with this. Archaic as it comes across, it has a feel both new and old, where it taps into a sense of a long-ago past to create something entirely different and even if it feels like well-trod territory now, its really only because everyone else has been following and messing up the landscape with all their stomping around.
I am contributing this review because 's author page for this book, an early classic of fantasy, shows the wrong William Morris. The author (?) pictured, at least at the time I am writing this in Jan. 2018, is a modern man wearing a rugby shirt and standing next to cars and a canoe. The author of this book, The Well at the World's End, was an English poet, writer, textile designer and social commentator who lived decades before cars. also often has reviews mixing up or combining the reviews for completely different editions of a book or for different books with the same name or similar names, or of authors with similar names. This potentially causes great confusion for readers and, one can tell from the resultant reviews, creates a lot of annoyed buyers. I have noticed this happening many times on - often to the detriment of a good author who shares a name with an indifferent one. I am sure this is unintentional, just as it is for to confuse reviews of similar but different products. I would like to know if there is a convenient way to contact to correct this. It is bad for and for its customers.