The Sundering Flood

In a country of William Morris's own invention runs a great river called the Sundering Flood — so deep and fierce that no one may cross it and live, and the folk of its east and west banks may shout to one another but never touch hands. On the east, at the stead of Wethermel, grows up the fearless boy Osberne Wulfgrimsson, watched over by the strange and mighty warrior Steelhead, who gives him the magic sword Boardcleaver. On the west, where the river narrows, he finds Elfhild, a girl of his own age; and across the racing water, year after year, the two children fall in love — telling stories, singing songs, able to speak but never to meet.

Then the marauding Red Skinners fall upon the western Dale, and Elfhild is swept away and lost. Osberne, grown to a young man with Boardcleaver at his side, leaves home to seek her — into war and wandering, into the service of the good knight Sir Godrick of Longshaw, into the overthrow of tyrants and the deeds of a hero's road. For long years the lovers are sundered not only by the Flood but by all the distance of the world; yet neither forgets, and neither gives up.

The Sundering Flood (1897) was the last book Morris ever made — dictated from his deathbed in the final weeks of his life, finished by his daughter May, and issued the next year from his own Kelmscott Press. Written in the ringing archaic English of his late invented-world romances, it is among the founding works of modern fantasy, and a direct ancestor of the tradition that runs to Tolkien.

Beneath its swordcraft and adventure it is a meditation on separation and faithfulness — the river standing for every barrier that keeps lovers apart — and it carries its two long-parted lovers at last toward the mountain source where the great Flood begins, and where what has divided them so long may finally be crossed. A tender, hopeful quest-romance of love divided and rejoined; the parting gift of the man who first taught fantasy how to build a world.