William Morris, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with an element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature. The people of the small towns and villages at the foot of the mountains were losing their past when the Dusky Men and the children of the Sons of the Wolf migrated into the mountains . . . in its way, this story may be the one that inspired Tolkein to write of the Dunedain -- the Rangers descended from the Great Kings of the past. Certainly there is a certain correspondence, just as the semihuman enemies are strikingly similar to Tolkein's orcs . . .