If the jeweled diction and courtly anguish of pieces like “The Defence of Guenevere,” with Guenevere’s fraught defense of her love for Launcelot, spoke to you, Tennyson’s cycle will feel like coming home. In Idylls of the King you’ll find lush, musical verse circling Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot’s downfall, with scenes like the final meeting at Almesbury echoing the same romantic intensity and chivalric melancholy that Morris revels in.

If the mythic sweep of Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung—from Sigurd’s forging of Gram to the tragic knot with Brynhild—captivated you, the rune-sung adventures of Väinämöinen, Lemminkäinen, and Kullervo will hit the same vein. The Kalevala carries that ritual, incantatory momentum of heroic deeds and fatal vows, giving you the raw, archetypal power that Morris channels in his Norse-inspired narratives.

If you loved the broad, roving architecture of The Earthly Paradise—its procession of legends from “Cupid and Psyche” to “Atalanta’s Race,” linked by wandering mariners—Spenser’s epic will delight you with its panoramic scope. Knights like Redcrosse and Britomart traverse enchanted landscapes and moral trials, offering the same heady blend of adventure and pageantry that Morris unfolds across ages and geographies.

If the storytelling frame of The Earthly Paradise—seafarers and settlers exchanging tales through the year—enchanted you, Chaucer’s pilgrims will feel wonderfully familiar. From the Knight’s chivalric romance to the Clerk’s patient Griselda, the shifting voices and embedded tales mirror Morris’s layered approach to legend and give you that same pleasure of story-within-story discovery.

If you savored Morris’s lovingly wrought settings—mead-halls and greenwood clearings, the textured craftsman’s eye in poems like The Haystack in the Floods—Tolkien’s Middle-earth offers an even denser weave of history, language, and ballad. From the lays of Beleriand sung in Rivendell to the Shire’s humble customs, the world feels built by a maker’s hand, much like Morris’s imagined pasts.