Reading recommendation

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I decided to make ’26 the year of classic Fantasy, not only will I be painting lots of 1970s, 80s and 90s minis, I will also try to read as many pre-Tolkien novels as I can manage, starting with William Morris, often called the father of modern Fantasy.

After The Wood Beyond the World – the very first modern fantasy novel, according to Lin Carter’s foreword – and The Water of the Wondrous Isles, I have just finished The Well at the World’s End, the longest Fantasy novel published prior to The Lord of the Rings, again, according to Lin Carter.

Mr. Morris was very fond of using an artfully archaic style, which makes his books a little hard to read, but, on the plus side, you’re going to learn some words you might not know – because no one has used them in several hundreds of years, or at least not in their original meaning. Another fascinating aspect is that the further back you go in the history of the English language, the more like German it becomes. Not just individual words, but also turns of phrase, sentence structure, the way things are expressed. Hengist and Horsa would approve….

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