The Story of the Glittering Plain - Illustrated: The Professor's Bookshelf #3

William Morris

Quillpen Pty, Limited, 2013 - Fiction - 240 pages

THE PROFESSOR'S BOOKSHELF #3: THE STORY OF THE GLITTERING PLAIN - ILLUSTRATED. A story that inspired Professor JRR Tolkien, author of 'The Lord of the Rings". On May 8, 1891, Kelmscott Press published its first book, The Story of the Glittering Plain. This fantasy novel by the famous 19th century English designer, artist and writer William Morris describes the journey of Hallblithe, a young man on an epic quest to rescue his love. J.R.R. Tolkien was two years old when the second edition was published in 1894, complete with decorated borders and capitals by Morris and richly detailed illustrations by Walter Crane. This is a close copy of that book. William Morris was an enormous influence on Tolkien's literary interests. Tolkien discovered Morris's translations in his teens, and his interest in Morris deepened at Exeter College, Oxford, where Morris had also been an undergraduate. When Tolkien was twenty-two he spoke of Morriss romances in a letter to his sweetheart Edith. In 1960 he was still acknowledging his debt of inspiration to Morris, noting that certain elements in The Lord of the Rings ...owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans... Like Morris, the illustrator Walter Crane was associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Crane is considered to be the most prolific and influential children's book creator of his generation. The Story of the Glittering Plain is one of several William Morris works known to have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien's creation of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

About the author

William Morris (24 March 1834 - 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and libertarian Marxist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and English Arts and Crafts Movement.He founded a design firm in partnership with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti which profoundly influenced the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. As an author, illustrator and medievalist, he helped to establish the modern fantasy genre, and was a direct influence on postwar authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien. He was also a major contributor to reviving traditional textile arts and methods of production, and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, now a statutory element in the preservation of historic buildings in the UK. Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children's book creator of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the latter 19th century. His work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come. He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles and other decorative arts. Cecilia Dart-Thornton is the author of numerous bestselling fantasy novels, notably the Bitterbynde Trilogy. The Washington Post reported that the first summer after Neilsen Booktrack launched in Australia, it showed Dart-Thornton's newly launched fantasy tome The Ill-Made Mute hitting the Herald's best-seller list, ranked next to mainstream authors and 'serious' fiction. Technology, in one swift blow, destroyed a decades-long publishers' bias against fantasy. It demonstrated that what people were really buying was simply not reflected in the old bestseller lists, based as they were on reports from a small panel of bookshops. The reality was, people were buying fantasy - in particular, they were buying The Ill-Made Mute. This debut novel and its two sequels in the 'Bitterbynde Trilogy' went on to win fans and accolades across the globe. Dart-Thornton's books have been listed on Amazon's Best, Locus Magazine's Best First Novels, the Sydney Morning Herald's Top Twenty and the Australian Publishers' Association 'Australia's Favourite Read'. They are published in five languages and distributed in more than fifty countries around the world.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Story of the Glittering Plain - Illustrated: The Professor's Bookshelf #3; Volume 3 of The Professor's Bookshelf Series; Volume 3 of Tolkien's bookshelf
• Author: William Morris
• Illustrated by: Walter Crane
• Contributor: Cecilia Dart-Thornton
• Edition: illustrated, revised
• Publisher: Quillpen Pty, Limited, 2013
• ISBN: 0987555413, 9780987555410
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Action & Adventure; Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Fiction / Fantasy / Epic; Fiction / Fantasy / General; Fiction / Fantasy / Historical