As William Morris’s daughter May pointed out in her introduction to the seventeenth volume of her father’s

in 1913, Morris's late prose romance

is a loose adaptation of the thirteenth-century English poetical romance,

. She recounts that her father once explained that the way to retell a story is to “read it through […] then shut the book and write it out again as a new story for yourself” (xxxix). Indeed,

is at a rather far remove from its original. Characters and countries have new names, important people disappear while others emerge, and there are vast regions of meaning not even implicit in the original. But the two—for all that—are the same story. …

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Citation: Boenig, Robert. "Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 November 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21571, accessed 22 November 2024.]