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Three weeks for Dreamwidth: Which book was the toughest for you to get through?
This would be "The Well at the World's End” by William Morris published in 1896. The story itself isn’t complicated, but it’s written in an archaic style. Since I read it in English, which isn’t my native language, this was quite hard to get through. Thankfully, I read it on an e-reader (Project Gutenberg has the ebook for free, since it’s in the public domain), and so my e-reader could instantly translate a lot of words. A notable observation was that many older English words I encountered seemed to be linked to older Dutch words, which was interesting.
I knew of the book because we discussed it in a design course in school. Not the story itself, but the beautiful design of the pages with the Illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. I sometimes wonder if they made reprints of the book as it was with the original illustrations, or if the only way to see this is at a museum. This is what a page looks like:
I decided to read it when, at a certain moment, I heard that this book might have influenced Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings series, and that intrigued me and made me decide to give it a go. I wasn’t aware of the archaic style. When I started reading it, I was puzzled. I assumed I must have been mistaken about the publication date, thinking that the book was way older than I believed it to be. I looked it up and discovered it was just written in an older style. Nevertheless, I decided to continue reading it and I finished the book. Apart from being hard for me to read, I enjoyed it, it’s a nice fantasy story.
This would be "The Well at the World's End” by William Morris published in 1896. The story itself isn’t complicated, but it’s written in an archaic style. Since I read it in English, which isn’t my native language, this was quite hard to get through. Thankfully, I read it on an e-reader (Project Gutenberg has the ebook for free, since it’s in the public domain), and so my e-reader could instantly translate a lot of words. A notable observation was that many older English words I encountered seemed to be linked to older Dutch words, which was interesting.
I knew of the book because we discussed it in a design course in school. Not the story itself, but the beautiful design of the pages with the Illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. I sometimes wonder if they made reprints of the book as it was with the original illustrations, or if the only way to see this is at a museum. This is what a page looks like:
I decided to read it when, at a certain moment, I heard that this book might have influenced Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings series, and that intrigued me and made me decide to give it a go. I wasn’t aware of the archaic style. When I started reading it, I was puzzled. I assumed I must have been mistaken about the publication date, thinking that the book was way older than I believed it to be. I looked it up and discovered it was just written in an older style. Nevertheless, I decided to continue reading it and I finished the book. Apart from being hard for me to read, I enjoyed it, it’s a nice fantasy story.
