William Morris: The Forgotten Writer Who Inspired Tolkien and Dreamed of a Fairer World

When we think of William Morris (1834–1896), what usually comes to mind are his floral wallpapers, lush tapestries, and his central role in the Arts and Crafts movement. His legacy has become synonymous with fine craftsmanship, artistic resistance to industrialization, and a refined aesthetic. But Morris was also a passionate writer—medievalist poet, utopian novelist, translator of Norse sagas, and political thinker. At a time when debates around capitalism, degrowth, and consumer society are back in the spotlight, rediscovering William Morris means encountering one of the earliest “alter-globalists” of the industrial age.

His first poetry collection, The Defence of Guenevere (1858), draws from Arthurian legend. Its language is surprisingly modern in its rawness and immediacy. Morris rejects the ornamental style of his Victorian peers in favor of a poetry of incarnation and breath—almost theatrical.

This poem is part of a broader artistic and literary movement known as the Arthurian Revival, closely linked to the Pre-Raphaelite artists. During the Victorian era, writers such as Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris sought to reclaim and reinterpret medieval themes — particularly those from the so-called Matter of Britain (the Arthurian legends).

Unlike the moralizing reworkings of Arthurian tales by Tennyson and Arnold, Morris offers a sensual and deeply human vision of love in his poem. Beneath the surface, his work subtly reflects key societal debates of his time, notably concerning property rights, education, divorce, women's suffrage, and access to employment.

In The Defence of Guenevere, Morris portrays a free and autonomous woman, who for the first time raises her voice to justify her relationship with Lancelot. Through this bold depiction, he breaks away from the archetypal image of the queen trapped within the functional confines of courtly or political expectations. Instead, Guenevere emerges as a fully realized character, with emotional complexity and genuine agency, embodying a new, modern vision of femininity.

Lancelot and Guinevere - Herbert James Draper

In the 1890s, William Morris wrote several pioneering novels such as The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World's End (1896), and The Sundering Flood (published posthumously in 1897). Though largely unknown to the general public, these works laid the foundation for modern fantasy. They feature forgotten realms, heroes on initiatory quests, witch-like women, and an intentionally archaic style. The influence on Tolkien is unmistakable—he openly cited Morris among his key inspirations, alongside Norse sagas, the Kalevala, and Beowulf.

Beyond the structures of quests and imaginary geographies, Morris’s impact is also visible in the portrayal of powerful, sensual female characters—something that resurfaces in Tolkien's own work, albeit with a different sensibility. Like Morris’s heroines, Tolkien’s Galadriel or Lúthien are neither passive nor purely ornamental; they shape destinies, command respect, and often embody a mysterious, ethereal authority.

Yet Morris didn’t write merely to entertain. He wrote to build entire worlds, striving for an immersive, organic reality where storytelling served a deeper vision of human dignity and natural beauty. His deliberately old-fashioned language mirrored the noble, simple lives of his characters, far from the Victorian industrial world he criticized. His eye for detail, his preference for slow, patient narrative progression over spectacular action, resulted in a body of work that is both demanding and enchanting.

This ambition toward world-building found an even more concrete expression in The Sundering Flood. For the first time in fantasy literature, Morris constructed a fully mapped geography for his imaginary world, meticulously describing towns, mountains, and rivers that shaped the journey of his characters. Although no illustrated map survives from the original editions, the internal consistency of his geography served as an unseen foundation for the story. It is a method Tolkien would later adopt and perfect: beginning not with a plot, but with a map, and allowing the world itself to dictate the narrative.
In this sense, Morris taught Tolkien—and the generations after him—that fantasy is not escapism, but an act of ethical and aesthetic creation, a yearning for lost harmonies and a reclamation of meaning through invented worlds.

Arthurian Echoes in Tolkien's Women :

While William Morris and Tolkien both drew heavily from medieval sources, the influence of specific Arthurian figures varies across their works.
Galadriel, Tolkien’s luminous and ancient queen, owes more to mythological archetypes like the Norse Valkyries or the Elvish seers of Celtic lore than to characters like Elaine of Astolat.

Yet traces of Arthurian inspiration are undeniably present. Figures such as Éowyn and Arwen seem closer in spirit to Elaine—noble women defined by love, loss, and sacrifice. Éowyn’s longing for honor and her confrontation with death echo the melancholic heroism of the Lady of Shalott, while Arwen’s choice to forsake immortality for Aragorn recalls the tragic beauty of medieval romances.

Through these echoes, Tolkien reworked the medieval ideal of the "tragic lady," transforming it into complex portraits of agency, valor, and sorrow.

The death of Elaine of Astolat, Sophie Anderson.

The Lady of Shalott : 

Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott captures the haunting isolation of a woman cursed to observe the world only through reflections. Trapped in her tower, weaving shadows of life she can never touch, she embodies both the enchantment and tragedy of medieval-inspired romanticism. Her story, blending beauty, sorrow, and fatal longing, resonated deeply with Victorian artists and writers, including the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris. The Lady of Shalott became a symbol of the artist’s alienation from society — a figure both powerful in her creativity and doomed by her separation from lived experience.

Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott captures the deep melancholy of separation: a woman doomed to see life only through reflections, weaving the world she cannot touch. Her fate resonates with the 19th-century artists and writers who felt increasingly estranged from the industrial age. Yet, where Tennyson saw tragic isolation, William Morris began to imagine bridges across the divide.

Through his medieval dreamscapes and his utopian visions, Morris was not escaping the present — he was confronting it differently. In News from Nowhere, in his fantasy romances like The Well at the World's End, he crafted worlds where beauty, craftsmanship, and human dignity were not lost ideals, but the ground rules of existence.

His medievalism was never mere nostalgia. Like the Lady of Shalott’s cursed mirror, industrial modernity showed only a distortion of life’s true richness. Fantasy, for Morris, became a way to break the curse — to imagine societies where harmony, equality, and joy were possible.

In this light, Morris appears not just as a forerunner of Tolkien and modern fantasy, but as a visionary who believed that dreaming of other worlds was an act of resistance — and of hope.