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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Hollow Land," William Morris weaves a rich tapestry of medieval fantasy, drawing upon his deep-rooted interests in Norse mythology, folklore, and the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement. This narrative unfolds in a dreamlike, mythical landscape, where the interactions of knights, goblins, and enchanted creatures reflect Morris's belief in the intrinsic value of beauty and craftsmanship. The prose is laden with lush descriptions and poetic rhythms, evoking a sense of wonder while inviting critical reflections on the nature of civilization and the allure of a simpler, more meaningful existence amid industrialization's creeping shadows. William Morris was not only a writer but also a renowned designer, social activist, and key figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, deeply engaged with the themes of art, labor, and society. His admiration for medieval art and craftsmanship propelled him to create this narrative, a counterbalance to the industrial age's dehumanization. Morris's fascination with the past, coupled with his progressive ideologies, aimed to inspire readers to reconnect with a more fulfilling and artistically enriched life. "The Hollow Land" is an essential read for anyone captivated by fantasy literature, offering a profound exploration of the human spirit's quest for beauty and meaning. Morris's ability to merge artistic vision with literary narrative creates a transcendent experience, making this work a timeless classic that resonates with contemporary readers. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Hollow Land
Table of Contents
Introduction
A solitary traveler crosses into a valley where time folds like mist, and love becomes a vow against oblivion. The Hollow Land begins with the pull of desire and ends with the gravity of endurance, casting its spell through a landscape that seems at once remote and intimately familiar. William Morris crafts a threshold world in which the boundaries between waking life and vision blur, and in that hovering space he asks what we are willing to risk for fidelity. The tale’s power lies in its quiet audacity: to make devotion a journey, and the journey a measure of the soul.
This work holds its classic status because it shows, in concentrated form, the imagination that shaped modern fantasy and revived medieval romance for a new age. Its poise between lyric meditation and narrative movement became a touchstone for later writers seeking mythic resonance without abandoning human feeling. Readers return to it for the way it dignifies longing, renders time as a palpable presence, and frames moral testing without sermon or spectacle. The Hollow Land endures as a slender yet resonant artifact, a work whose disciplined beauty and visionary reach exemplify the Pre-Raphaelite ambition to marry art, history, and ethical seriousness.
William Morris (1834–1896), the English poet, designer, and social thinker, wrote The Hollow Land during the mid-Victorian period. It first appeared in 1856 in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, a short-lived periodical produced by Morris and his circle, and has since been reprinted in various collections of his early prose. Neither novel nor lyric poem, it is a brief prose romance shaped by medieval models and a dream-vision tradition. Composed when Morris was in his early twenties and deeply engaged with Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, it presents an inward quest set against a haunting, otherworldly terrain, without the scaffolding of modern realism.
At its core, the tale traces a wandering figure drawn into a realm where ordinary measures—daylight, distance, memory—no longer behave as they should. This traveler pursues a beloved presence across thresholds and signs, undergoing trials that are less feats of arms than tests of constancy and endurance. The landscapes encountered feel emblematic rather than geographical, composed of stillnesses and sudden intensities, like stations on a pilgrimage. The Hollow Land offers a narrative arc that is simple enough to summarize—a search set in motion, a passage undertaken—yet too intricately shaded to reduce to plot points without sacrificing its atmosphere and inwardness.
Morris’s purpose, evident from first page to last, is to restore the textures of medieval romance to English prose while retaining a modern sensitivity to inner life. He writes in cadences that echo ballad and chronicle, but the result is neither pastiche nor antiquarian exercise. The story uses an archaic tone to sharpen, not blur, emotion, presenting fidelity and patience as radical forms of courage. In doing so, Morris advances a broader artistic program already visible in his early career: the conviction that beauty, craft, and moral imagination can resist the flattening pressures of industrial modernity by reawakening older narrative forms.
The book’s lasting impact is inseparable from Morris’s influence on later fantasy and romance. While his later prose romances would expand the template, The Hollow Land already displays the dignified diction, patterned journeys, and mythic restraint that inspired authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien and E. R. Eddison, among others, to reimagine secondary worlds in elevated prose. It stands within a continuum that includes medieval vision literature and Victorian aesthetic revival, acting as a hinge between them. Its dreamlike logic and ethical clarity helped legitimate fantasy as a serious literary mode rather than a mere diversion or children’s entertainment.
In literary history, The Hollow Land marks a moment when magazine culture enabled ambitious experiments that were neither serialized novels nor brief lyrics. Its appearance in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine links it to a community of artists determined to recast medieval subjects with fresh intensity. The piece bridges painting, poetry, and narrative: its scenes often feel composed like panels, suffused with color and stillness, while its language moves with musical deliberation. As a compact artifact of the Pre-Raphaelite imagination, it clears a path toward the English prose romance of the 1890s and, by extension, toward the architecture of modern high fantasy.
Readers encounter themes that remain luminous: steadfast love under pressure of time, the testing of inward vows, the longing for a place where broken promises can be mended, and the peril of confusing escape with transformation. The otherworld functions as a mirror that strips away accident and reveals character. Fate and agency entwine, suggesting that endurance is not passive waiting but an active shaping of the self. The Hollow Land contemplates exile and homecoming without turning to sentimentality, using silence and intervals as meaningfully as action. It invites us to measure what we love by what we are prepared to cross or release.
Stylistically, Morris relies on luminous restraint. His diction is deliberate, slightly archaic, yet transparent in its emotional aims. Repetition becomes a structural ornament, establishing rhythms that guide the reader through episodes like steps in a litany. Images arrive with heraldic clarity—spaces of breadth and hush, forms edged as if by metal or stone—yet they never harden into allegory that can be solved and set aside. Instead, they accumulate a grave beauty. The tale’s architecture is spare, but its atmosphere is dense: a balance that allows the story to be read swiftly and then to continue resonating, like a chant remembered after dusk.
As a reading experience, The Hollow Land is contemplative rather than compulsive, coaxing the reader into a tempo attuned to vow, vigil, and vision. It favors the steady light of moral attention over the flash of incident, but it is never static; its forward motion is interior, like a pilgrimage marked by stations of feeling. Modern readers may find its brevity an invitation to reread, each pass revealing a slightly different emphasis—on the landscape’s hush, on the traveler’s resolve, on the way time loosens and then tightens around desire. It is a book that lingers rather than concludes.
Its relevance today lies in its austerely hopeful account of commitment in a distracted age. The story’s trust in patience, its regard for promises made and kept, and its vision of love as an ethical practice rather than a mere passion speak with uncommon steadiness. In a culture quick to equate novelty with value, Morris’s romance restores the dignity of endurance and the beauty of forms honed by time. It also models an art that is integrative: prose shaped by poetic cadence, narrative informed by visual design, imagination tethered to conscience. These qualities keep the book vivid to contemporary sensibilities.
The Hollow Land endures because it gathers the essentials of Morris’s art into a single, resonant gesture: a journey that is at once outward and inward, a style that is chaste and glowing, a theme that honors fidelity without denying sorrow. As an early landmark of modern fantasy’s lineage and a touchstone of Pre-Raphaelite narrative, it remains a classic not by size but by concentration. Its central ideas—love’s vow, time’s trial, the transforming work of patience—retain their power. For readers now, as then, the book offers a clearing where beauty, courage, and memory quietly keep faith.
Synopsis
William Morris’s The Hollow Land is a short romantic fantasy told in the cadence of medieval legend. It follows a young knight whose steadfast love for a lady defines his purpose and trials. When circumstances separate them, he refuses consolation and dedicates himself to the promise of reunion. Rumors of a realm beyond ordinary time, the Hollow Land, offer a slim path by which lost lovers might meet again. With the courtly world fading behind him and the future uncertain, the knight chooses the long road of fidelity, setting the story’s course from worldly chivalry into visionary quest.
A moment of grace, dream, or revelation confirms the possibility of passage. The knight receives a token and a charge that blends devotion with restraint, suggesting that virtue, patience, and right intention are the only guides through enchanted hazards. He leaves his familiar country, the trappings of fame, and the companionship of comrades to pursue a solitary purpose. Along the way, sacred imagery and echoes of prayer or vow shape his resolve, framing the journey as both spiritual and romantic. The quest’s stakes become personal and metaphysical at once: to find the lady is to preserve hope against time itself.
