William Morris 51 min read

'Do you know where it is, the Hollow Land? I have been looking for it so long, for there I saw my love first,' an old man recalls, amid a confused noise of trumpets and clashing steel.

William Morris's 1856 story is a dreamlike, pioneering prose fantasy by the great artist and craftsman. Lyrical, strange, foundational. Read it for an early masterwork of the imaginary-world tradition, a haunting, half-remembered quest for a lost land of love and enchantment, from a founder of modern fantasy.

In its time

Published in 1856, during the 1850s, fairy tale and moral fantasy for a mass reading public; the sensation novel stirs.

Reading it

51 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).