Morris & Tolkien

I’ve been reading Tolkien to our seven-year-old on and off this year. We’re already through The Hobbit (and the first two movies) and we’ve started reading The Fellowship of the Ring.

We’ve been reading these books at night at home, which just happens to be a Craftsman house. These homes are sometimes referred to as Arts & Crafts houses, a movement popularized by English textile designer and artist William Morris. It came about as a rejection of industrialization, where artists and architects favored a return to handcrafted work and back to living with goods made by humans instead of mass-produced by machines. A few chapters into LoTR, we started digging into a search of Tolkien’s character development, inspirations for language and drawings of Middle Earth. There, I found out there was a connection between Morris and Tolkien:

J. R. R. Tolkien went to Exeter College, Oxford, as William Morris had done. Both men disliked capitalism and industrialisation; and both wrote fiction that proposed an alternative, non-industrial, society. Tolkien followed Morris, too, in the habit of weaving poems, legends, and proverbs into his novels. Tolkien read Beowulf while at school, possibly in Morris and A. J. Wyatt’s 1895 translation. Like Morris, he studied Icelandic and became familiar with Norse history and mythology. Both men published translations before writing works of their own. In 1914, Tolkien won the Skeat Prize for English, using the money to buy some of Morris’s books including The House of the Wolfings and his prose translation of the Völsunga Saga. Christopher Tolkien stated that his father owned most of Morris’s written works, including his fantasies, poetry, and translations.

I love when things connect like this. I think the intersection of two works, two totally different concepts, two totally different people are where some of the best new ideas come from. In their case, it was a rejection of one world which led to the creation of myths in another. Often, books give you that – blending many worlds and characters together in your mind. It was wonderful to get lost reading something one man created while sitting in a house, the design of which was thought up by another.