William Morris, Tolkien and The House of the Wolfings

00:05 - Julia Golding (Host) Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today I am joined by my good friend and also a lecturer in English literature at University of Manchester, dr Ingrid Hanson, and we're going to be discussing William Morris and in particular, his fantasy novel, the House of the Wolfings, which I think will absolutely fascinate you Lord of the Rings fans out there. So first of all, Ingrid, hello, tell us a little bit about who William Morris is. Some people may have vague ideas that he's something to do with furniture and fabric, but there's much more to him than that. 00:56 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) That's a very good point. And yes, when I tell people that I work on William Morris's work, people know that I'm an English literature scholar and they sort of go you mean the wallpaper man, which seems a bit surprising to people. And I do mean the wallpaper man. But indeed Morris is much more than the wallpaper man. So in his own time he was most well known as a poet. Actually, the poet of the earthly paradise is how he became known in the sort of mid 19th century around about when he published that in the late 1860s. So he yeah, he first of all was a poet. He got to know the pre-Raphaelite artist, dante Gabriel Rossetti when he was a student and under his influence started painting as well, which he only did for a very short time, but went on to found what became known as the firm, with a number of different friends, which then produced wallpapers and stained glass windows and fabrics for furnishings with which people are really familiar. 01:49 But at the same time, morris was all the time writing poetry, and particularly writing poetry reaching back to the past. He was an avid reader of medieval and early English texts. He was an avid reader of early Icelandic and wrote Icelandic sagas. He did a translation of Beowulf towards the end of the 19th century, but he also in 1883, encountered socialism, having become disillusioned with the sort of liberal politics in which he'd started to get involved. He converted. 02:23 As he saw it, he crossed the river of fire and became a socialist and became a very active campaigner for what he called the cause which earlier in his life he used to refer to the idea of beauty of life. 02:38 And he saw beauty of life as something that was inherent in art by the people, for the people, a joy to the user and maker, as he described it in a lecture of 1883. That cause then became for him coterminous really with the cause of socialism, that is, you know, a kind of equality for people. As he said, there should be no brain sick brain workers, nor heart sick hand workers, but equality of condition. That's Morris's thinking. And meanwhile he continued all the time, as well as setting up a socialist newspaper and going up and down the country preaching to try to convert people to the cause of socialism, getting really involved in that, he also continued to write poems, and long poems, narrative poems, shorter poems, stories, and in the 1880s then he started to write kind of what I would call proto-socialist romances, including the House of the Wolfings in 1888. 03:36 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah. So when we think about where he fits in respect to the Inklings, cs Lewis and Tolkien, we're talking about someone who would be in their grandfather's generation or a very old father. His written work was what they were reading when they were growing up, so he fed into the 20th century fantasy writers. So the reason why we've talked about William Morris in the broader strokes before, if you want to dig back through the Mythmakers archive, but this particular story, the House of the Wolfings and it also has a follow on, doesn't it? It's just to give you a flavour of what it's about. It's reimagining the lives of the germanic gothic tribes resisting the romans. So it's not real. But it's set in a vague, vaguely real historical moment and we're in the middle of the europe continent, in the vast forest of guess what? Mirkwood. So do you want to tell us a little bit more about the characters who are the sort of central thread of this story? 04:57 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) Yes. So the story starts with. It's important from my perspective. It's important to say that I am going to tell you about the central characters. But characters is really important. 05:08 This is a text that is about community and that's really important in Morris's writing. Always he's not about we do have lone heroes. We have the central hero, theodulf, in this text and you'll see from that name the kind of way Morris is reaching back to earlier forms of Old English. But Morris is interested in the community of the wolfings. That's why it's called the House of the Wolfings. He tells us at the beginning about where they live, about the way that they fish the local rivers and they consider the rivers to be their friends. It's actually a book that's really interested for those of you who are interested in questions of ecology. It's a book that's really interested in the relationship between people and the land on which they live, people and the earth, and Morris sees that relationship as one that is kind of two-way. It's a reciprocal relationship in this text. So it begins with the call to war of the wolfings and it's a kind of war in which then there needs to be a sort of gathering of the tribes against the incursion of the Romans. No-transcript. 06:16 - Julia Golding (Host) Hang on, hang on. Hall's son is the daughter. Yes, wood's son is the lover. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, his two female characters have similar names. So we've got in the hall Hall Sun, who acts like a sort of priestess guarding the Vestal Flame. That's a Roman term, I shouldn't use that. And then we've got out in the woods, the more nature demigod figure of Wood Sun. 06:50 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) Yeah, yeah, yes, wood, the more nature, demigod, figure of wood, sun, yeah, yeah, yes, so they so. So that's the, that's kind of the beginning of the story, and the story unfolds, telling the story of the battle in which theodolf in the end has to, kind of um, make a choice about sacrificing himself. So there's, there's a you know, it's so far a kind of classic war tale and a classic war hero story. It's worth just noting that other characters in this tale are, for instance, people's swords, which have names like War Babe. 07:11 So it's just worth noting that that Morris is interested too in what he sees as a kind of organic relationship between people and their weapons, people and their weapons, and I think part of that is because this is a text which is written at the height of Victorian industrialism. Morris is very disgusted with the kind of alienation of labour that he sees all around him and the way that people might be working in a factory just putting a glass bead, making one glass bead, with no sense of their belonging to the community or what the outcome is going to be. And so in a sense this is a text that imagines, versus the kind of rigid structures of the Romans which he borrows from Gibbon the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he had read as a young man. So he's very well versed in the kind of histories of the conflict of the Goths and the Romans. But he brings to it his own fantastical elements and elements which are about a kind of um organic relationship between people, dependence between people and dependence between men and women too yeah. 08:33 - Julia Golding (Host) So there's something interesting to note as well about the style of the novel, which is a mixture of narrative and then poetry. People often speak their thoughts in poetry. Was he the first person to try this in the Victorian period? Is he blazing a trail here? 08:55 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) he's doing something really quite unusual. Yeah, um, and it didn't go down very well. He received quite a lot of critique for this, uh, novel. Various people felt that it was a sort of pastiche. His style he has a kind of it's not written in sort of contemporary language. He's trying to reach back to an older kind of Anglo-Saxon idiom really. And, yes, and that combination of prose and verse allows people to sort of move in and out of kind of, yes, the story, the telling of the story in prose and people's expression of their feeling in verse, which, again, so it reaches back to that older idiom. 09:36 - Julia Golding (Host) Yes, he doesn't use the literative verse in the way that Tolkien does for his. This is similar to the bit in the Battle of the palenor fields, where you go from battle to poetry and back again. Some of the strongest parts, though, are the battle poems. I just wanted to read a little bit to give everyone a sense of what it's like to read this book. So hall's son, the daughter, who is one of the sort of powerful figures in the community, at an absolute key point, just before they have the showdown at the end with the Romans, she gets this wonderful moment to speak. So now she lifted up her voice and sang so that many heard her. For at this moment of time there was a lull in the clamour of battle, both within the garth and without, even, as it happens, when the thunderstorm is just about to break on the world, that the wind drops dead and the voice of the leaves is hushed before the first great and near flash of lightning glares over the fields. So she sang. Now the latest hour cometh and the ending of the strife, and tomorrow and tomorrow shall we take the hand of life and wender down the meadows and skirt the darkling wood and reap the waving acres and gather in the good. It's a longer poem but I just want to pop to the end of it because it's got a very tolkien end. And she says just as they're about to fight in, so is the tale now fashioned. That many a time and oft shall be told on the acres edges, when the summer eve is soft, shall be hearkened round the hall blaze when the midwinter night the kindred's kindred's mirth besetteth and quickeneth man's delight. And we that have lived in the story shall be born again and again as men feast on the bread of our earning and praise the grief-borne grain. So she's already imagining herself as part of a story in the future which anyone who is keen on a lot of the rings knows. This is often a sort of theme within the story that the characters are aware that they may also be themselves heroic figures of a kind later on. And but it's given here to hall's hall son. 12:00 So yeah, I think reading it coming to it um, for me it was. I've never read it before. Some of the narrative poetry, because it's in couplets, does fall a bit flat, but there are times when it really does rouse, like that particular speech. So I can imagine he had his detractors? Um for it anyway. So where does it fit in Morris's life and work? And was this his first fantasy novel or proto novel? Or did he? What did he do with it? Where did he go with fantasy as? 12:37 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) a genre. In his first venture, the Oxford and Cambridge magazine in 1856, he had written some kind of short romances really, which I suppose you might see as kind of forerunners to fantasy. But this is really his first venture into what we would kind of identify, I guess, as fantasy writing in a full scale novel. Um, and after this he goes on to, so I think just to pause and mention, um, you know we, it features an enchanted hallberg and uh, yeah, we'll get on to that. 13:11 We'll get on to that yeah all kinds of all kinds of sort of um, yes, uh, yeah, mythical moments in the text, which is which is, you know, obviously I guess, one of the ways in which that ties into um people like tolkien. But he goes on. Very shortly after this, 1889, he publishes the Roots of the Mountains, which is kind of a sequel, another kind of tale of the sort of battle of the folk, and then he doesn't really go on to publish another. He has a few years before he publishes the rest of his romances. And then he publishes five romances across the last few years. He dies in 1896. And the last one, the Sundering Flood, is in progress. He's almost finished it as he dies. So he has five late romances across 1890, then to 1896. 14:00 And there's some debate among people who are thinking about Morris about whether this was kind of a sort of moving away from that really active period of socialist agitation across the 1880s. There are others in his own time who were trying to find in these fantasies a kind of a sort of allegory, and all of them about socialism and Morris was fairly dismissive of that. But I think he is working out in these romances some of his own. He's always interested in alternative worlds. In 1890, just after the Roots of the Mountains, he publishes News from Nowhere, an enduringly wonderful utopian fiction of the future, which is one of the really few utopian texts in which people who disagree in the utopia don't have to be ejected. The usual process with a utopia is you can have this wonderful world in which all kinds of things are transformed into a good space, but if people disagree they must in some way be kept out in order that it retains its perfection. Morris manages to have a kind of imperfect but good utopia where people are allowed to disagree, which is really quite radical. So that idea of people being able to disagree, and that's very much a socialist vision of the future in which people are again, people are equal, there is equality of condition, people are able to produce art with their own hands and they produce imperfect cups and plates and saucers, you know, made in small quantities in banded workshops, rather than, you know, perfect things made in a factory. So he's always interested in those alternative worlds. 15:40 He also publishes in 1886, I forgot about this A Dream of John Ball, which is a kind of hearkening back, a tale, a sort of, as it were, a medieval dream narrative of a dreamer who goes back to the Peasants' Uprising of 1381 and watches what happens and gets into dialogue with John Ball, the sort of rabble-rousing priest of the 1381 Peasants' Uprising, and one of the key moments in that text is when John Ball tells him that men fight and they lose the battle, and then the thing that they fought for turns out not to be what they thought it was and other men have to fight for it under another name. So that sense of a kind of trans-historical battle for a life of communal wholeness is really important in Morris's thinking and a life of equality. And so even in this kind of ancient tribal society he sees that equality where women and men both have really active, powerful roles to play. And yeah, that's a really important part of his thinking. 16:44 - Julia Golding (Host) Yes. So just talking about, I think the role of women is one of the most fascinating parts of it. It's not just Wholesome with her battle song son, who is the demigoddess lover figure. Um, she is. She dresses as a man and and rides as a messenger. At one point she um provides one of the heroes with this enchanted dwarven you mentioned it, um holbrook which those of you who know your tol be thinking is that like the mithril coat that Frodo wears, sort of. But it's also cursed. So it's interesting that she gives it to Theodulf because she knows it will keep him safe. It's from a good desire to keep him safe, but it has this curse within it and she's lied about it. Curse within it and she's lied about it. So the the logic of the story is he has to put it aside and make the sacrifice. So her and she has to admit what she's done and reconcile herself to his sacrifice. So that's its sort of main psychological climax really is that is around this whole book. 17:59 You mentioned the importance of the tangible goods. That's one of them, um, but there are lots of little, little women. That's the wrong word. There are lots of minor characters who do good things as well. So um, horse son is very active in the defense of the realm and she sends off messengers who are largely women. So they're very much an equal society shown to be active all the way through the story. So I think for many people listening they'll be wanting to say, well, okay, that's all very interesting, but did it really feed through to the 20th century? Well, yeah, in a 1960 letter, tolkien wrote that though the dead marshes and the approaches to the moranon owe a lot to northern france after the battle of the somme, they owe more to william morris and his huns and romans in the house of the wolfings or the roots of the mountains. 18:57 So he was aware that when he read this it fed into his imagination and produced his version of, well, landscapes of Middle Earth. Here he's talking about the Gates of Mordor area, but you can also see the connection to particularly the Rohan culture. I just I think it's also interesting, though, to unpack what he does. That is different, because I was just talking about Morris's characters being the female characters in particular being very active. It's notable that in the rohan culture and in most of the female characters in tolkien is that they are isolated and they're not in community with other female characters, uh, which is you could see the the chain. You know how someone else does it differently. He was not a socialist. 19:57 In the william mor Morris vein, there's definitely an echo of um Hall's son in Erwin and Wood's son. For those of you who like to dig back into the Silmarillion, she is very like Melian, who is a Maya figure, who's a half sort of semi-divine, uh, mother of Luthien. So it's very interesting to sort of see what he does with these characters and threads them into similar characters in his own Middle Earth narrative. What about the evocation of landscape in it? So we've talked about the community aspect, but I think the landscape itself is a character too isn't it? 20:40 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) Yeah, absolutely so important. The strength of the Goths in this text comes from their knowledge of the landscape, their ability to use the woods and the trees, their sense of friendship with the river, their sense of the natural world being their ally. They're so closely associated with it, world being their ally, they're so closely associated with it, and all the time when they're fighting, when they're living at the beginning, when they're sending messages to one another, that sense of being in community with the landscape is really important and the senses are really important in this text. I would be interested to know how that feeds over into Tolkien. But certainly in this text Morris's characters are always willing to express themselves. They're willing to be emotional, both men and women. So we have the singing and you know Theodulf kind of swooning when he's got the whole book on in a way that's not helpful. He has to put that aside but a sense of kind of embracing life as something that is full of feeling, full of the senses as well, ties in both to human relationships and to relationships with the non-human world, so that people's you know. 21:51 At one point it talks early on in the text about how the people of the wolfings drew out of the river, driftwood and other matters. I love that. I love that use of other matters Matter we might use as a singular to go at other random matter that was in other matters. It's like they drew stories out of the river which has all these different names at different times. People give it different names, nicknames, almost as the people change. So the landscape as well is full of story and is part of the story. And you're right in that wonderful bit that you read about the sense of the characters themselves being aware of being part of a story. And that goes back to what I was saying about A Dream of John Ball. I think Morris's really strong sense of a kind of trans-historical story of people and land and community. 22:46 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, so I will come to your point about the emotion. But just on the location I mentioned, it's Mirkwood and the geography is very, very similar to Rohan, except flipped. So when you're reading it, if you just flip it in your head and turn the Middle Earth map around a bit, it ends up at the same. And the hall of the wolfings is very like Edoras, which is, of course, like you know. That's because it's like the real great halls that were built by the Anglo-Saxon and the early Goths and what have you. 23:23 So here's what they call the roof of the Worthings. It was a great hall, and goodly after the fashion of their folk and their day, not built of stone and lime but framed of the goodliest trees of the wild wood, squared with the adze and betwixt the framing filled with clay, wattled with reeds. So there's an interest here in the actual physical. How do you make a house? Long was that house, and at one end and I the gable was the man's door, not so high that a man might stand on the threshold and his helm crest, clear the lintel, for such was the custom that a tall man must bow himself as he came into the hall. Love that detail, architecture, forcing sort of subservience to the community. 24:11 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) It's just wonderful um so just can I interject there for a minute just to say that's so important that question of architecture for Morris In the many, many things he did in his life. I didn't mention that when he first do that he decided to become an architect and he didn't stay very long with George Street but he was always interested in architecture, really observant about it, from his young age. He used to go into doing brass rubbing in churches. He was interested in the sort of tactility of buildings but also really interested in Gothic architecture and he read John Ruskin's work about Gothic architecture as a young man and became really interested in that and for him always that sense of environment is really really important and the way in which environment does shape what happens to people's lives in it. 25:10 So again in the lecture that he gives in 1883 called the Beauty of Life, he says for instance no one who cuts down a tree wantonly or carelessly, especially in a big town or its suburbs, need make any pretense of caring about art. I love that. It's a very Morris statement, it's a very large statement, but actually he's thinking and then he goes on to talk about the sort of terrible housing in the slums in London and what he sees as the kind of showy, ostentatious, unbeautiful houses of the wealthy. As the kind of showy, ostentatious, unbeautiful houses of the wealthy and these things are sort of partners to each other, whereas what he wants is for people to have houses that are kind of, you know, fit to live in. And in his sort of famous dictum in that same lecture, the beauty of life, you know, for people to have houses where they don't have anything that they don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. But there's a kind of that. It's to be beautiful, but there's a kind of that. 25:58 It's not just about everything looking pretty. That beauty is about what he calls the beauty of life, so a sense of coherence between people and their environment and the kind of justice in that that people should have the right to enjoy their environment. That's really important in Morris's thinking and I think that comes through in here. So his interest in architecture yes, he's interested in the technical details of how tall a doorway has to be and the way in which the roof is constructed and the materials from which it's constructed. So all of that, you know, he's interested in a kind of what we would see now as a sort of ecologically. Whole way of. That's important to him. The way in which different parts of an ecosystem are working together important to him the way in which different parts of an ecosystem are working together, and there's been. 26:40 - Julia Golding (Host) I've just even this week I saw an article about how william morris's designs have have ruled the world. They sell them in waitrose you know it is the. 26:50 The furniture fabric is so familiar now people have forgotten who was behind it once upon a time. It's, in fact, probably far too industrialized for his taste, I'd have thought. But anyway, going back to your question about the passion and the emotion expressed, I think when we're looking at Tolkien, there are two peoples that these goths are like, and that is the ones we've already mentioned the Rohan people, but also the hobbits already mentioned the Rohan people, but also the Hobbits. And both the Rohan people and the Hobbits sing spontaneously in the similar ways to this the wolfings do or the Huns, the Goths do, and I'm thinking in particular of well, the Hobbits just sing it a drop of a hat. They will make things up at key moments of passion as well as to entertain them while they're walking. But the closest resemblance is the songs of war and lament and battle cries that the Rohan people sing. And both the Hobbits and the Rohan are referred to as being young cultures compared to some of the older, slower cultures of like Ents and Elves and even Gondor, which is older the men of Gondor. They've got a longer lineage. The fierce, intense appetites is a good way of putting it are the Rohan people and the hobbits sort of make them the closest. And it's interesting, it's the Rohan people who knew of, or had stories about, hobbits in their culture and everyone else has forgotten them. Treebeard has no idea they exist, whereas Rohan did know. 28:39 And so, for example, just so you can get the the sense of where they converge, in the house of the wolfings um, at the end there's this final celebratory funeral feast where whole son, again um, gets to do the sort elegy. It's a longer elegy but I'm going to read you a bit, because it imagines the reward for the war leaders, theodulf and his fellow war duke Otter, who both sorry folks, it's not a happy ending for them. They have both died in battle and so they're getting their reward in the afterlife. And so she sings war father gleams where the white light streams round, kings of old all red with gold and the gods of the name with joy aflame, all the ancient of men grown glorious again. Till the slain's father crieth aloud at last here is one that belieeth no hope of the past, no weapon, no treasure of earth. Doth he bear no gift for the pleasure of god home to share, but life his hand bringeth, well cherished, most sweet and hark, the horse singeth the folk wolf to greet. So all that theodulf takes into the afterlife is his name. He can't take his dwarf, holberg, but he gets a greeting because he's gone there, having lived up to his name and his forefathers, which is very, very similar to the sort of laments and elegies that you get, and Théoden, as he dies on the battlefield, says he won't be ashamed to be in the house of his fathers. So there's a connection there for this. 30:27 Um, yeah, they are both very. You can see that they are related to each other in that sort of young tribal, passionate, quite close to the land, full, full of horses, by the way, I haven't mentioned the horses yet, but they've got a very similar cultural background. So that's. But I don't really mean this to be. 30:55 We should only be interested in it because it leads to Tolkien, because I think it's much more interesting than that. It's looking at what Morris is doing about reimagining a prehistory for this part of Europe, because if you think of the real Roman Empire, this is where it stops in the woods of Germany, never goes any further. It's met its frontier. So it's like the frontier wasn't Asterix, it was over here, uh, and so this is where the old tribes meet the new people arriving, and I'm interested looking at what Morris does with real enemies like Romans when they meet at these frontiers, versus Tolkien, who also thought about his story as a kind of prehistory, but his frontier people are orcs and people that you can immediately sort of feel oh there must be bad. 31:57 So what did you get? There is one roman. Romans are mainly described as a group, aren't they? And they're very dastardly. They burn people alive and do all sorts of terrible things. But there is one roman leader at the end who gets his moment. Um, what did you think of the? You were talking about the rom Romans being mechanized and part of the sort of incoming. Can you unpack that a bit more for us so we can understand what's going on there? 32:23 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) Yeah, I think that's really important for Morris. He writes elsewhere. He has an essay that he writes with a fellow socialist called Ernest Belfort Bax, called the Development of Modern Society, and they look back at the kind of Goths and the Romans and their encounter and what happens and they see Morris sees the Romans very much as he's kind of imagining them, at least as kind of proto-Victorian capitalists. So this is not it's quite important to say this is not a text that is a kind of patriotic, nationalist text. Morris is not interested in patriotism or nationalism. He's really against a kind of sort of gung-ho nationalism. He's very against colonialism, which he describes as gin and Bible and gun and Bible. He's not interested in that. In his newspaper that he edits that's the kind of language that's used about colonialism and Morris isn't interested in that. He's not interested in a kind of yeah, so he's not interested in a kind of patriotic battle for the land, but he is interested in thinking about a kind of wide trans-historical community. In some ways I think Morris is kind of thinking we might see it as more akin to what present-day anarchists would see as bioregionalism, ie a kind of association of different groups of people with the kind of environment in which they live. So he's very interested in that and his sense of battle is battle against. 33:47 Yes, so the Romans, their sort of formations, their battle formations, are described very clearly. Most of them, you know, they're absolutely sort of unbreakable. They are so they're seen as against the organic lives of the Goths. They are seen as the kind of the kind of incursion of industrialisation, mechanisation, a kind of forced loyalty, which is the kind of text makes clear to us. Their loyalty is not about love and passion but it's about obedience, and Morris is very much against that. So I think that's an important part of the text. 34:26 I think the text is not uncomplicated in some ways and for myself, as a reader of Morris who is also very much against war, I think it's interesting to see the way in which he uses it and he changes over his life his sort of sense of the extent to which he is against war. But his imagination of battle is almost always an imagination of kind of struggle, the continuing struggle against what is wrong. And so he constructs this enemy, that is an enemy who, yes, certainly is powerful, and, yeah, he doesn't other them. In a sense they're sort of accessible, you see and know who they are, and he does allow, yes, for the odd exception. That's always the case. That's always the case for Morris. Whatever the situation, there's room for the exception, there's room for the person who makes a different decision. 35:13 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, and he makes in terms of the battle plan. The Wolfings and their allies come unstuck when they try and fight like the Romans, but they win when they come out of the forest and so that sort of has the. They go around the edges of these geometric shapes that have to sort of turn to face them, but they can creep around and get at them at different areas. And in the battle I mentioned, um, where wholesome sings her song to encourage everybody, um, it's very clear that it's everybody in the community is fighting. It's a defensive battle for their homes, not a battle of expansion. Um, so the great company is made up of the men, of the stay-at-homes and the homeless and the women, so it's not just the warriors. Everybody fights in this community and that's how they eventually win, because the conventional armies have failed or been outnumbered. It's not fair to say they were failed, but they were overwhelmed Fascinating stuff. So I hope that this will encourage people to go away and look at the House of the Wolfings and have a think about its connections to politics and the way war is presented in fantasy and also get to delve deeper into the fascinating figure that is William Morris. 36:34 Just to pick up on something you said delve deeper into the fascinating figure that is William Morris. Just to pick up on something you said, lord the Ring sometimes gets misused to be applied to present day conflicts, but actually Tolkien himself said that he was an anarchist and his ideal community is something like the Shire, which has no kings. The kings stay on the edge. They're not allowed inside the Shire without their permission. So I think he and Morris would have had a lot in common when it comes to the future of politics. So we've described a world, Ingrid, where we've had lots of very powerful female leaders, particularly my fave, which is Hall's son. So we're going to end with our question about all the fantasy worlds that you have access to, be it on film or in a book or in poetry. Where do you think is a good place to be a Hall Sun type, a female leader who steps forward, particularly in times of conflict? Where would you go and it can be anything from Beatrix Potter, if you can imagine that to Dune? The choice is yours. 37:44 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) Where would you think it'd be good to be a female leader? Great, I do have a great place to be a female leader. Just before I go there, I'm going to urge people who get interested in Morris, who read the House of the Wolfings, also to read his final romance, the Sundering Flood. I think people who are interested in Morris, who read the House of the Wolfings, also to read his final romance, the Sundering Flood. I think people who are interested in this text will love that. Really great about landscape and all kinds of other things. 38:04 However, in terms of a good place to be a female leader, oh my goodness. Where I would go is into a world called Ladyland, which is dream world of a writer called Rukaiya Sakkot-Hussain, writing in the Indian Ladies magazine in 1905. She publishes this world. It's a kind of utopian fantasy in which the author wakes up and finds herself in Ladyland, so in a society in which women are often imperder and kept away from society. Now a war arose, now women. So let's go back Now in this society. 38:42 Women are out on the streets and men are kept away, and the history of this is that a war arises and men do all the usual things and want to fight and want to battle, and want to assert their warrior skills, and they're failing. And want to assert their warrior skills and they're failing. And so the women say, look, you're exhausted, the thing isn't working. Why don't we come up with an idea? So they use all their fantastic scientific skill and they conjure up a kind of a solution, which I won't spoil. It's a very short story. Please do go and find it. You should be able to find it online. No-transcript, which we might fix it. So I don't think that it would be a good idea for men to be shut up behind doors, but I think, for the moment of this world, just thinking for a minute about the liberation of women in this moment, it's a wonderful way of constructing an idea of what the world might look like if women were allowed equal opportunities with men yeah. 39:59 - Julia Golding (Host) So I suppose it's very easy to think of the places where it would be bad, um, the dystopian places, like in handmaiden's tale, where there isn't such a really a thing as a female leader, um, but, and I also then thought of places where, if you wanted to be a really autocratic female leader, an unreasonable one, of which there are some in the world at the moment, something like alice in wonderland, uh, you know, you can be completely off with their heads there, so that, and and with no consequences. So if that's your, your preference, that would be a good place to go, but where I was thinking of a place where gender no longer matters, which I suppose is the ideal, where we're just people, um, we can be fully female, fully male, whatever we want to be, and and also be leaders. I was thinking, well, basically the star Trek universe. They were for many years ahead of the game, putting on television and on film sort of versions of female leadership which wasn't about the fact they were female. It's like post-gender in many ways, and so maybe that is the best place to be a female leader, because it doesn't matter that you're female, you're just a leader. 41:19 Thank you so much, Ingrid, for um taking us through the house of the wolfings. And, uh, I will put a link to ladyland for those of you who wish to find what was the name of the writer again, rakeya sakalat, the same. Okay, so I'll find that and put a link so you can follow that up if you wish to find out more about that fascinating story from India. Thank you very much. 41:43 - Ingrid Hanson (Guest) Brilliant thanks, Julia. 41:49 - Speaker 3 (None) Thanks for listening to Mythmakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.