The Roots of the Mountains

Immediately after the publication of The House of the Wolfings in 1889, William Morris set to work on its successor. This story would move on in time from its predecessor, and adopt a slightly different style: less poetic and less overtly Germanic, but retaining the vaguely medieval setting, and the heroic, saga-like tone. The result was The Roots of the Mountains.

The Roots of the Mountains tells the story of the men of Burgdale, now separated from other tribes of men dwelling in the woods and dispersed throughout the dales at the foot of great mountains. One of the leading sons of Burgdale wanders into the mountains to discover that the “Dusky Men”—forerunners of Tolkien’s Orcs—threaten the freedom of the Dalesmen. At the same time, he is awestruck as well as lovestruck by one of the daughters of the House of the Wolf. Together, these encounters lead to the heroic romance of the uniting of the Dalesmen and the defeat of their foes.

Morris’s biographer, J. W. Mackail, recorded that The Roots of the Mountains was, of all Morris’s books, the one “which had given him the greatest pleasure in writing.” Mackail’s own judgment was that although it lacks “strength of its predecessor, The House of the Wolfings, [and] the fairy charm of its successor, The Wood Beyond the World, [still] in its union of the gravity of the Saga with the delicate and profuse ornament of the romance it may perhaps take the first place among the three as a work of art.”