Grey cloth binding with white title plate and black lettering on the spine.

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This is a nice clean ninth edition of this most famous work. The book is intact as far as ‘part works’ can go.

The Earthly Paradise by William Morris is an epic poem. It is a lengthy collection of retellings of various myths and legends from Greece and Scandinavia. Publication began in 1868 and several later volumes followed until 1870. The volumes were published by F.S. Ellis.

Morris uses a frame story concerning a group of medieval wanderers searching for a land of everlasting life. After much disillusionment they discover a surviving colony of Greeks with whom they exchange stories. The poem is divided into twelve sections, each section representing a month of the year and containing two tales told in verse, drawn largely from classical mythology or medieval legends, including the Icelandic sagas. All Morris’s subsequent books were published as “by the author of The Earthly Paradise”.

Tolkien’s use of frame stories was directly influenced by Morris’s poem. In particular, the frame story of Tolkien’s legendarium, starting from the travels of Ælfwine the mariner, was modelled on the poem’s frame story, that “mariners of Norway, having … heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it”. Morris’s “wanderers” reach “A nameless city in a distant sea / White as the changing walls of faërie”, where they hear and narrate legends including “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon”; Tolkien’s Book of Lost Tales II contains one of the legendarium’s foundation-poems that similarly describes the “Wanderer” Earendel, who sails “West of the Moon, east of the Sun”.

William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production. His literary contributions helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, while he helped win acceptance of socialism in fin de siècle Great Britain.