The Wood Beyond the World was initially published in 1894. It was republished in 1969 as the third in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, and the first of several Morris titles that series editor Lin Carter revived. The lovely cover art is by Gervasio Gallardo, who illustrated many of the covers in the series.

Like the other Morris novels The Wood Beyond the World is written in an older style of English perhaps similar to that of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, written in the fifteenth century. Some people may find the language quaint, but I found it annoying. E. R. Eddison uses Elizabethan-style English, but his work is flowing and poetic, whereas Morris’s writing seems stilted and false.

The first Morris book I read was The Well at the World’s End, which took me several attempts to get into, again because of the language. The Well at the World’s End, however, Morris’s magnum opus, is redeemed by its length and complexity and the mystical significance of the well in the book’s title. The Wood Beyond the World doesn’t have these saving graces.

In his introduction, Carter speaks of The Wood Beyond the World in very positive terms as founding the modern genre of epic fantasy. However, there is more that is magical and fantastic in the work of Eddison, Dunsany, or Cabell, early fantasy writers who closely followed Morris. The Wood Beyond the World reads much like Morris’s medieval romances that preceded it. There is little that is genuinely fantastical in the book.

If Carter is right about the historical significance of The Wood Beyond the World, then it earns its place close to the start of the series. However, Morris, and this book particularly, is not my favourite fantasy.