William Morris, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair

Robert Boenig (Texas A&M University)
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As William Morris’s daughter May pointed out in her introduction to the seventeenth volume of her father’s

Collected Works

in 1913, Morris's late prose romance

Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair

is a loose adaptation of the thirteenth-century English poetical romance,

Havelok the Dane

. She recounts that her father once explained that the way to retell a story is to “read it through […] then shut the book and write it out again as a new story for yourself” (xxxix). Indeed,

Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair

is at a rather far remove from its original. Characters and countries have new names, important people disappear while others emerge, and there are vast regions of meaning not even implicit in the original. But the two—for all that—are the same story. …

2328 words

Citation: Boenig, Robert. "Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 November 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21571, accessed 19 March 2024.]

21571 Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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