The House of the Wolfings was the first of the remarkable prose romances William Morris wrote during the last eight years of his life. It was first published by Reeves & Turner in 1889, though the first thousand copies were released in December of 1888. The romance depicts a violent and ultimately victorious struggle of a tribe of Goths against the invading Romans. Not set in a purely imaginary world, it is strictly an historical novel rather than a fantasy story. It does, however, depict supernatural events; when Morris combined a medievalesque imaginary world with the marvelous, as he did with The Glittering Plain (1891), the third of his eight late prose romances, he bequeathed the essential form of the fantasy …
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