The House of the Wolfings

A Gothic tribe on the edge of the forest learns that Rome is coming, and the war-chief's choice is set out in prose and verse in the old manner. Morris — wallpaper designer, socialist, translator of sagas — invented the modern fantasy novel here: Tolkien read him closely, and the debt is plain. This is the book where an imagined people is given its own laws, songs and dead. Sixty plates of castles, hunts and forest landscapes, from Cranach to Kosárek, give the Mark its own weather and walls.