Who Was Kenneth Morris?

Kenneth Morris (1879-1937)

In her landmark essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” Ursula K. Le Guin singled out Kenneth Morris as one of the three “masters stylists” of fantasy, the other two being E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkien. Morris is definitely worthy of the company, and his writings, though less well-known than they should be, are among the very best of the genre.

Kenneth Vennor Morris was born near Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, in the southwestern part of Wales, on 31 July 1879, where he grew up relishing the Welsh countryside and its people. His family moved to London when he was around the age of six, and he was educated at traditional English school, Christ’s Hospital, from 1887 to 1895. During a visit to Dublin in 1896, while staying with the Irish mystical writer A.E. [George Russell], he encountered the theosophical movement, and he became a lifelong adherent to this philosophical society which is based on the teachings of H. P. Blavatsky and promotes the universal brotherhood of all mankind. Morris returned to London and over the next decade worked at times at various Theosophical Lodges throughout England. He also began to write prolifically for the theosophical magazines, contributing poems, plays, and essays as well as short stories. In 1908 Morris moved to southern California to live and work at the Theosophical community founded at Point Loma, near San Diego. Morris lived and worked there for twenty-two years, after which time he returned to his native Wales to organize theosophical lodges there. For some years he had suffered from the effects of goitre, and eventually an operation was necessary. Subsequent to the operation at a hospital near Cardiff, Morris slipped into a coma, dying in the early morning of 21 April 1937.

Morris’s output in the fantasy genre totals three novels and around forty short stories. The short stories are, perhaps, his supreme achievement. They range through the various mythologies of the world—Celtic to Norse, Greek to Roman, and Taoist to Buddhist; but Morris’s tales are not merely retellings of old mythological stories, but new stories that work from an intimate sympathy with the older mythology. Ten of his tales were collected in an illustrated volume (with gorgeous, symbolic decorations by K. Romney Towndrow), The Secret Mountain and Other Tales (1926). All of his stories were collected in The Dragon Path: Collected Tales of Kenneth Morris (1995). Several of the tales are high points in the genre, including “The Eyeless Dragons,” “The Regent of the North,” “Red-Peach-Blossom Inlet,” “The Saint and the Forest-Gods,” “The Divina Commedia of Evan Leyshon,” and “The Secret Mountain.”

Morris wrote two novels reworking the Welsh mythological tales in the Mabinogion, The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed (1914) and Book of the Three Dragons (1930). Both were written around 1910-11, together comprising the story of the Princes of Dyfed and the family of Pwyll. After the first volume was unsuccessful, Morris let the sequel sit for many years until he was persuaded by his friend Ella Young to send it to her publisher. In the intervening years, Morris’s style had matured considerably, so before publication he re-wrote the sequel in a less flowery manner. Unfortunately the publisher lopped off the final third of the book, which tied it up nicely with the first volume. The ending remained unpublished until 2005, when it was added to the Cold Spring Press edition. Morris’s duology is by no means a simple retelling of the Mabinogion, but a re-imagining of that work as well as a reinterpretation. With these works Morris in effect inaugurated modern Celtic fantasy, though his direct influence on the genre has been small.

At his death Morris left one unpublished novel, The Chalchiuhite Dragon, which was finally published in 1992. It concerns itself with the Quetzalcoatl legend, the story of the Prince of Peace, the Plumed Dragon, the god who is periodically reborn among men to teach Peace. As the legend goes, Quetzalcoatl was always born in a year Ce Acatl (Reed One, the fourteenth year in any year-bundle of fifty-two years). The chalchiuhite dragon, a living green jewel no larger than a woman's thumb and shaped like a dragon, would appear whenever Quetzalcoatl was about to reincarnate among men. More specifically, Morris's novel tells the story of a year leading up to an incarnation of Quetzalcoatl. (Morris's alternate title to this novel was The Coming of the God.) It is the time of the dominion of the Toltecs, who have gone conquering far and wide, adding kingdoms to the rule of their leader, the Toltec Topiltzin, whose god-name is Camaxtli, the Toltec God of War. Finally the Topiltzin hears of idealistic Huitznahuac, in the south beyond the south. He decides he must add this realm to the Toltec League, and he sets forth to subjugate Huitznahuac, where war and killing are unknown. To this writer it is the best of Morris's three novels.