The Folk of the Mountain Door
The Folk of the Mountain Door: A Victorian-Era Pagan Fantasy
By William Morris
The revolutionary English polymath William Morris's influence on the development of the genre of fantasy fiction is today widely recognized as profound, with his The House of the Wolfings (1888) and especially his The Roots of the Mountains (1889) directly and greatly influencing English fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Alongside Morris's two innovative fantasy novels is a third, stranger work: The Folk of the Mountain Door, an unfinished book he worked on until his death in 1896. Its contents display yet another Morris innovation: a pagan fantasy wherein the benevolent gods Odin and Frigg of Old Norse mythology relay prophesy and advice to an aging king about a dying world. Presenting one of Morris's most obscure and yet most interesting works, this unique and fascinating edition contains enigmatic material from the historic record that inspired him, alongside original commentary and Morris's horror retelling a Danish folktale, Lindenborg Pool.
The Folk of the Mountain Door: A Victorian-Era Pagan Fantasy
By William Morris
The revolutionary English polymath William Morris's influence on the development of the genre of fantasy fiction is today widely recognized as profound, with his The House of the Wolfings (1888) and especially his The Roots of the Mountains (1889) directly and greatly influencing English fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Alongside Morris's two innovative fantasy novels is a third, stranger work: The Folk of the Mountain Door, an unfinished book he worked on until his death in 1896. Its contents display yet another Morris innovation: a pagan fantasy wherein the benevolent gods Odin and Frigg of Old Norse mythology relay prophesy and advice to an aging king about a dying world. Presenting one of Morris's most obscure and yet most interesting works, this unique and fascinating edition contains enigmatic material from the historic record that inspired him, alongside original commentary and Morris's horror retelling a Danish folktale, Lindenborg Pool.
The Folk of the Mountain Door: A Victorian-Era Pagan Fantasy
By William Morris
The revolutionary English polymath William Morris's influence on the development of the genre of fantasy fiction is today widely recognized as profound, with his The House of the Wolfings (1888) and especially his The Roots of the Mountains (1889) directly and greatly influencing English fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Alongside Morris's two innovative fantasy novels is a third, stranger work: The Folk of the Mountain Door, an unfinished book he worked on until his death in 1896. Its contents display yet another Morris innovation: a pagan fantasy wherein the benevolent gods Odin and Frigg of Old Norse mythology relay prophesy and advice to an aging king about a dying world. Presenting one of Morris's most obscure and yet most interesting works, this unique and fascinating edition contains enigmatic material from the historic record that inspired him, alongside original commentary and Morris's horror retelling a Danish folktale, Lindenborg Pool.
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Hyldyr
140 pages. 5x7. Perfect binding. Printed in the USA and/or Canada.First edition limited to 333 hand-numbered copies
From the publisher:
"Hyldyr is an independent and experimental publishing house based in Olympia, Washington state, USA. We combine the efforts of academics and artists to produce unique, beautiful, and scholarship-grounded publications.
There’s nothing else like us—by design. Founded in late 2021 with our first publications arriving the summer of 2023, we designed Hyldyr to produce high-quality and extremely unique editions built to withstand scholastic scrutiny, to function as art objects, and to provide our readers with keys to hidden worlds.
We are heavily inspired by the works of English polymath William Morris, do-it-yourself movements, and our evergreen mountainous surroundings. We place a particular emphasis on historical linguistics and folklore studies and all of our publications in some way or another fall within the triangle of art, ecology, and folklore. We believe the world is a vast place full of wonders.
While we design our publications to be as approachable as possible, Hyldyr’s roots are academic: Hyldyr developed out of the web-based resource project Mimisbrunnr.info, itself an evolution of a student-led reading circle originally sponsored by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Georgia for several years in the 2010s.
Quality and humanity come first at Hyldyr: We never use print-on-demand services, we explicitly forbid the use of generative AI in our publications, we sell our books only to independent bookstores and educational institutions (like museums), and we always aim to go a step beyond traditional publishing houses in everything we do."
