The Defence of Guenevere Resources

The University of Iowa's library has a great annotated version of "The Defence of Guenevere" online, with a preface and notes by Margaret Lourie.

The Victorian Web is a handy website for anyone interested in the Victorian period.  It has biographical information about writers and other public figures, summaries of important social movements and historical events, and even a few critical essays you can check out about the different texts. (Be careful, though – some of those essays are better than others.)

The William Morris Society has a lot of good resources linked on its website. 

Morris was a designer of textiles and wallpapers as well as a printer, politician, essayist, novelist, and poet.  Busy guy!  This is a video of some of his designs.  Take a look at it and you'll start to get a sense of the breadth of his interests and talents.

This video shows Morris's home and printing press at Kelmscott and explores the real-life scenes from his utopian novel News from Nowhere.

A Librivox recording of "The Defence of Guenevere."

William Morris was a printer and designer as well as a poet – he owned and operated the Kelmscott Press. This is the first page of "The Defence of Guenevere," which he printed himself.  We think it looks almost like a medieval illuminated manuscript.

William Morris was fairly young when this portrait was made – about the same age, in fact, as when he wrote "The Defence of Guenevere."

He's got a much cooler beard when he's older.  Those Victorian guys sure knew how to do facial hair right.  They were the original hipsters.

William Morris was a painter as well as a poet, novelist, socialist, printer, designer, and architect.  And he was actually good at all those things.  Check out this painting from 1858.  The model was Jane Burden, who would later become Jane Morris, William Morris's wife. Still later, she would model for Morris's friend and fellow poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Eventually the two had a love affair.  Even without all that juicy gossip, it's a cool painting.

Here's a photo of a wood thrush – the kind of bird Guenevere describes as a "yellow spotted singer" (line 126).

This is the medieval poem William Morris used as his primary source for Arthurian legend in all of his poems about King Arthur, Guenevere, Launcelot, etc.

This is a good article to look at if you're interested in the way Morris used historical and literary sources when he wrote "The Defence of Guenevere."  It's accessible online through JSTOR, so you'll either need to access it from a library with a JSTOR subscription or ask a librarian to help you find a copy.

This article discusses Morris's poetic technique in "The Defence of Guenevere."  It's accessible through JSTOR online, so you'll either need to access it through a school or library subscription, or ask a librarian to help you find a copy.