Воды Дивных Островов

by William Morris, Уильям Моррис, Светлана Лихачева (Translator)

Уильям Моррис (1834-1896) – английский поэт, писатель, переводчик, художник, дизайнер, издатель, изобретатель и общественный деятель, поистине выдающийся ум и культовая личность Викторианской эпохи. Моррис одним из первых начал работать в жанре фэнтези – на стыке рыцарского романа и волшебной сказки, а знамя писателя позже подхватили Дж.Р.Р. Толкин,
К.С. Льюис и многие другие авторы. В заключительный том собрания сочинений Морриса вошли два поздних романа, воплотившие в себе все художественные достижения писателя, а также сборник рассказов "Золотые крылья" (1856).

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Classics, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, 19th Century, Medieval

752 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1897

About the author

William Morris was an English architect, furniture and textile designer, artist, writer, socialist and Marxist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), A Dream of John Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere. He was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with the movement over goals and methods by the end of that decade. He devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press, which he founded in 1891. The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design.

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

This late Morris novel chronicles the journeys of Birdalone, who is stolen from her weaver mother as a baby and raised by a witch in the forest. Under the guidance of the nature spirit Habundia, she eventually escapes in a little boat, beginning a series of strange encounters on various islands.

Like many of Morris' stories this was influenced by his interest in medieval sagas and manuscripts, but but compared to some others, such as The Well at the World's End it is deliberately written in a more natural (i.e. more contemporary) language and is not difficult to follow.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is without a doubt the best William Morris book I've read so far. It was the last Romance he wrote before he died and it is perfect. The biggest difference between this and the other romances I've read is the main character is a woman. While I have quite a few issues with the Bechdel test - this book passes it on page 3! And is only women characters for the first 100 pages!) It is such a wonderful story, an evil witch (whose not actually all that evil but powerful and beautiful and strange) kidnaps a young baby and brings it to live with her in the woods. Everything is fairy tale like but there's also an adult rather than a childlike feeling to the book. The main character isn't perfect and her inpatience at one points results in a tragic death of one of her friends. She's head strong and wise but at the same time sometimes she's quite scared and needs others to help her and othertimes she's capable of taking care of herself. It's a great mix. There are also so many wonderful little asides, that make it obviously written by William Morris. Like when the main character decides she needs to leave her friends behind as she fears a love triangle is developing she moves to the city and is able to support herself working and making incredibly gorgeous embroidery. I loved that she was able to be totally self sufficent, support herself through work and make beautiful things. After having been attacked for her virtue she decided to dress as a man, which didn't fool everyone, but made for one or two interesting bits. The other nice thing was that the women were just as passionate and inerested in physical love as the men. The relationships weren't all clean and fairy tale with one person meeting falling in love and getting married, but felt much more realistic. There was also a wonderful quote about prisons, and how they were places that rich people put poor people. The only problem I had was telling the difference between her three women friends. Either they needed a little more characterisation or I needed to be paying more attention, which I definitely will do next time I read this.

This is definitely the 2nd best book I've read this year (very close to Alan Moore's Voice of fire). It was a wonderful quest, written beautifuly with interesting characters. I read it througout Floyd's illness and I don't think any other book could have distracted me so well. I bought a copy of the first edition on Abebooks and that was definitely the right way to read it. Though now I really want to see pictures from the kelmscott edition!

This book was so wonderful and perfect. I'm really happy I read it.

[Joel J. Molder · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the back of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, C. S. Lewis refers to William Morris’s prose as a “watercolor”—a phrase that perfectly captures the dreamlike beauty and soft contours of this early fantasy novel, penned by one of literature’s great renaissance men.

The Water of the Wondrous Isles isn’t groundbreaking by modern standards, but it’s undeniably gorgeous: a meandering, almost impressionistic coming-of-age tale following Birdalone, a girl stolen by a witch who longs for love, friendship, and meaning in a world that rarely offers it freely.

As others have noted, there are two red flags to anyone interested in this novel:

1. The prose is intentionally archaic, styled like a medieval fairytale and brimming with thous, thees, fains, wots, and more. This book is the Victorian Era’s romanticized version of medieval fantasy, so Morris uses the language of that time to set the tone. Think the King James Version of the Bible. Note that I said only the King James, not the New.

2. The plot leans heavily on repetition and circularity. It’s deliberate and thematically intentionally. But that doesn’t mean it can’t wear on you.

If those don’t scare you off, you’re likely the right reader for this.

It’s actually pretty impressive that the main character isn’t one of our three knights, but a capable young woman who (at times) borders on Mary Sue territory (not that I am complaining). Still, the nine-person cast does feel a bit trope-heavy, though that might be a reflection of modern expectations than any fault of Morris’s. Written in the 1890s, this book precedes just about every major fantasy author you can think of. His fingerprints are everywhere, and it’s hard to separate what he invented from what later writers—such as H. P. Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, J. J. R. Tolkien—borrowed and built upon.

Once you settle into its rhythm, The Water of the Wondrous Isles is, well, wondrous! The story flows, and I didn’t get bored . . . just occasionally fatigued by how much ground it insisted on circling. Then again, I often feel that way about fantasy books so it may be a “me” problem.

So if you’re looking for the grand-daddy of all fantasy, this may just be the great grand-daddy of them all.

[Octarine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une lecture mitigée.

La forme du conte m’a beaucoup plus, mais je ne me suis pas du tout attachée à l’héroïne Petite Grive, et je n’ai pas franchement ressenti de compassion pour elle. Elle a souvent tendu le bâton pour se faire battre, en prenant des décisions stupides malgré un bon entourage, plus au fait des choses qu’elle, et qui la met en garde moult fois.

C’est peut-être un roman « initiatique », mais il n’empêche que les fautes commises étaient graves et parfois vraiment stupides. Je veux bien qu’un personnage fasse des erreurs, mais dans ce cas il ne faut pas le décrire sans arrêt comme intelligent, juste et sage.

La mise en avant de la beauté, aussi, sans arrêt, ne m’a pas plus. Les gentils sont tous magnifiques, les méchants sont tous moches. D’accord c’est un conte… d’accord… mais au bout d’un moment, non.

Pour l’époque, c’était sans doute avant-gardiste. Les femmes sont les protagonistes principaux de ce roman et supassent les hommes en nombre. On notera aussi que l’héroïne, à un moment donné, s’habille comme un homme. Elles sont maîtresses de leur destin, on va dire. Et comme quasiment tous les hommes de ce roman sont beaux et gentils, et béats d’amour pour l’héroïne qui est comparée à une déesse descendue sur terre à chaque nouvelle rencontre, aucun (sauf le vilain méchant) ne la brusque ou ne va contre son avis.

Malheureusement aujourd’hui ça me semble dépassé. Il faut évidemment replacer le livre dans son contexte historique, et pour l’époque ça n’était pas commun, mais j’ai quand même eu l’impression, plusieurs fois, que certaines choses avaient mal vieilli.

Le gros point fort, pour moi, ce fut la plume de William Morris qui est très belle, et qui nous plonge tout de suite dans l’ambiance du Conte.

Même si la lecture fut un peu longue, je suis contente d’avoir découvert William Morris. On m’a dit que ce roman était son petit dernier et le plus moderne. Pourquoi ne pas en tenter un autre un jour pour évaluer cela.

[Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

my mom recommended this book to me. I was unprepared for the olde school language, but it was neat how quickly I habituated to reading about kine and wot what they said thereof. (one of my favorite little details was a description of cows that "bundled" through the fields at night.) it was a bit silly that everyone kept losing their absolute mind about Birdalone (chapter title: Birdalone friendzones another guy) and also how much time Birdalone spent naked, but the whole story was kind of dreamlike and gentle and the language even removed me from the nightmare that is the modern world during a pandemic, however briefly. there is death and plenty of threats to enslave Birdalone and her friends... there are moments of tension and sadness, and everyone suffers in some way, except for Habundia. and interesting comparison between the witch and the faery, both of them hoping to keep Birdalone forever. I love the way the story ended.

[Zéro Janvier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Encore une fois, ce roman de William Morris m'a laissé un goût amer. J'ai bien aimé les premiers chapitres, mais j'ai fini par me lasser par la lenteur du récit, son caractère répétitif, et ses personnages unidimensionnels. On est parfois plus proche d'un (très long) conte que d'un précurseur de la fantasy contemporaine. J'ai fini par survoler plusieurs chapitres avant d'abandonner ma lecture avant d'atteindre le deuxième tiers du texte.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colorfully worded, and artfully crafted in the spirit of medieval legend. This is a must read for anyone with a taste for "Thees and Thous".

It should be said that "Water of the Wondrous Isles" is not wholely authentic, but it's flowery prose serves well for the story and it's tone. The characters act and think as people in Arthurian legend would, and Birdalone is (for the most part) a good example of a woman with initiative.

There were times where the book's formulaic nature was overly repetitive, but it is a byproduct of the style that it imitates. You'll know, after the first couple of chapters, whether you'll be interested.

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like the other Morris stories I've read, it builds outward from the start, to new lands and people in a travel or wandering. Toward some midpoint-ending it unwinds, reversing through to roughly the same location. The characters have been seasoned by the experience, even to the point of having some inner quality that shines forth to the amazement of the stay-at-homes. It's all a great circle. And sometimes the flow goes backwards as characters explain in flashback what has happened in their absence.

The medieval story thing is where something can be wondrous and without explanation--The Isle of Increase Unsought, for instance--and we don't look for explanation. It is wondrous and changing and its purpose is to be amazed at.

A worthy, tiring experience but not a story that I'd call compelling, sometimes little more than expressions of pure style or emulation of (much) older literature. It proceeds with pageantry from event to event and when it comes to it, the actual list of plot points is quite small. So darned earnest and unironic.

[Tug Mor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lire ce livre n'a pas vraiment été une pure partie de plaisir, certaine chose sont bien, beaucoup d'autres sont mauvaise, un style vieillot, une histoire assez simple. Mais surtout, des gros problème d'édition (inversion de page, espaces manquants dans certaines phrases)

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A vast improvement over the last Morris I read (Well at the World's End). A little girl, Birdalone, is kidnapped by a witch as a child, raised in isolation on the edge of an evil wood, and finally escapes by sea to a series of strange islands (given C.S. Lewis was a big Morris fan, it's hard not to see an influence on Voyage of the Dawn Treader) before helping some knights find their lost love. This starts well but loses a lot of steam when we get into the more conventional medieval stuff. That said, I'm pretty sure I'd like it better if I were in the mood for a long, slow read--but not that much better.

[Rickey McKown · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" fifty years ago (1970) while an undergraduate (having serendipitously encountered a set of Morris' Collected Works in the university library) - from the first I was thoroughly enchanted by the story-telling, the language, and the character of Birdalone, and I remain so to this day, having re-read the book a number of times in the decades since (most recently last year). To fully savour Morris' prose, I believe this book deserves to be read aloud, or at least sub-vocally, so that the rhythm and language flows. It remains one of my favourite books, along with Morris' other great romance, "The Well at the World's End" .

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did like it, though it was heavy going. Perhaps one of the earliest fantasy novels, and so progressive as it's main questor is a woman. I read this as part of my Literature degree in my Honours year, and although it is a hard slog, (very prosaic), i really enjoyed it. I would like to find my own copy of the book, perhaps with pictures of William Morris' art to illustrate. Morris is one of my favourite artists.

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

C. S. Lewis is quoted on the back cover, which is utterly unsurprising. Morris's influence on Lewis (and for that matter Tolkien) ought to be immediately apparent to anyone who has read both. Morris is arguably the originator of what evolved into twentieth-century high fantasy literature, with books like this one. Morris here combines elements of fairy tale (witches, literal fairies) with the conceits of medieval romance (complete with a sort of cod medieval diction and language, that mostly works well) and hints of allegory, or at least allusiveness. What, if anything, sequences such as the visits to the various islands--the Isle of Increase Unsought (as close as Morris gets in this book to anything like a socialist commentary), the Isle of the Young and the Old, the Isle of the Queens, and the Isle of the Kings--represent is anyone's guess. Morris clearly conceives of them as important--each is visited three times, and is radically transformed between each visit--but readers are left to puzzle about it. The air of mystery provided thereby (and elsewhere, as well, but mostly in these bits) gives the book a perhaps unearned sense of depth, but it's a canny strategy regardless. Plotwise, there's not a lot that happens, and what does happen plays on fairly conventional tropes--lost child reunited with parent, knights fighting for their lovers, etc.--but it does so in often surprising ways. For instance, what seems to be set up as a schematic loss and recovery narrative gets thrown akilter when one of the three knights lamenting his lost beloved ends up falling in love with our protagonist, the interestingly-named Birdalone. Another lover is killed off unceremoniously. There's a lot more complex psychology--and sex--that one would expect either in a nineteenth-century novel or in high fantasy, at least as it evolved in writers such as Lewis and Tolkien, who may have owed huge debts to Morris but consistently eschew this one aspect of his work. The number of men who fall in love with Birdalone does get a tad tiresome after a while. On the one hand, it speaks thematically to her function as the idealized woman, but on the other, is feels a lot like a cliche, and an overused one at that. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating book that I think anyone seriously interested in heroic fantasy would find worth a look.

[5greenway · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was surprisingly enjoyable. Worth sticking with, and tuning your ear to the mock-medievalism, because when it goes first weird(er) and then dark, it's a top read. Shouldn't have languished unread on my shelves for something like 20 years...

[Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly favorite book ever

[Margaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Très très sympa, agréable à lire, du merveilleux de gauche comme j'aime.

[Zantaeus Glom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A flawless, lyrical masterpiece by one of the most gifted prose writers of any epoch!

[Kaze · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm honestly not sure what to think. I get that it's a classic and a breakthrough, but I found it a bit fad and one-sided at times.

[Lena · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book contains two longer novels and several shorter ones. The long ones seem overdone at first sight. If there is a lady, she is as beautiful as sunshine and as kind as an angel. Every knight is brave and noble, except for the enemies, who represent absolute evil. But this is only a first impression. Keeping in mind the time when the novels were written (the 19th century), it becomes easier to understand why Morris is known as the "father" of fantasy.

The short novels, on the other hand, are absolutely brilliant: gloomy, dark, with deeply metaphorical language—absolutely timeless.

[Aaron Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Birdalone :)

Atra :(

Wood-mother.

[Simon Workman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fantasy novel I always knew Morris had in him.

[Nente · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one really reads as a medieval romance. Not so much because of the (moderately) archaic language but because the characters think, feel and behave very differently from us moderns.
Unquestioning belief in magic (anything supernatural really) combines with absolutely no curiosity as to how and why it works, to the point that when the heroine comes to eponymous Wondrous Isles and finds each one differently strange, she does not try or even want to find out anything about their nature, just wanders around hoping for something that may help in her quest.
And yes, the Quest theme is of course much in use to this day, but here it is also worked in medieval fashion, trusting to fate and not thinking it over from all sides.
Little reflection is another trait common to the characters, and I don't mean it in the negative. When a decision is taken, they don't waste time reflecting, just go ahead and do it, however dangerous the path or uncertain the result.
All in all, this is a fairy tale, but it's not sugary and pink, and the characters are not one-sided. Oh, and most important of them are women, including the protagonist, which does not hurt the romance one bit.

[Sverre · Rating 1 out of 5]

I completed 2/3s of this book and wished I had quit earlier. As much as I wanted to admire William Morris, a true pioneer of fantasy, I just could not abide his quaint (at times incomprehensible) language, cryptic plotting and slow progress in the telling of the tale. There are good reasons why this work remains out of print: most modern readers would find it a laborious read garnering little pleasure for the hard work. The novel could succeed if rewritten in a language/vocabulary most can understand and edited to eliminate some of the extraneous narrative.

[Zelda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claimed by some to be the first modern fantasy novel, The Water of the Wondrous Isles shows William Morris in full prose without a heavy coating of socialism. His neo-medieval quest novel has a woman as the adventurer and a whole-heartedly villianous witch-wife.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's maybe not for everyone, admittedly, but, boy, this is good stuff:)...

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this in The Collected Works of William Morris and had to read it. Hauntingly beautiful.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent tale of a "damsel most adventurous."

[Laurel Kane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read early 90s? I remember it as tough going but enjoyable

[Steve R]

This fantasy novel tells the story of Birdalone, a girl stolen as a child to be a servant to a witch in the wood of Evilshaw. She escapes and travels to a series of strange islands, supposedly designed as a parable for various locations in England at the time. Se also spends a large portion early on in the novel naked. Supposedly, Morris intended to present his socialist views through this fantastical setting. Habundia acts as her fairy godmother, and Birdalone also helps out three maidens whom she discovers as prisoners of another witch. Not remembered; scheduled for rereading.