The genre of fantasy has a long history and one of the benefits of this is that there are now lots of great fantasy books available in the public domain. Here is a guide to some of these books both famous and not so famous.
William Morris is generally attributed with creating the modern genre of the epic fantasy quest and Tolkien himself gives a lot of credit to Morris as an inspiration for his own writing. The story idea of a Morris novel will be familiar to you. It is of a young man who is thrown into a grand adventure to save the world. In the adventure he must travel across strange and wonderful lands while battling strange and magical creatures. His two most famous works are The Well at the World’s End and The Wood Beyond the World. Both of these books are freely available at Gutenburg.org.
Edith Nesbit is the creator of the modern fantasy novel for children. The theme of her work usually is about several children in modern life who get inexplicably thrown into the mystery, intrigue and wonder of a magical other world. This is a theme that has been wonderfully expanded on my C.S. Lewis in his Narnia novels. She published about 40 novels in the genre of children’s fantasy and her best known works are The Story of the Treasure Seekers and Five Children and It (Which has been made into a motion picture).
Edgar Rice Burroughs is another author from the turn of the century who wrote an enormous amount of varying materials in the fantasy and science fiction genres. Some of his more popular works include the Tarzan series and The Gods of Mars series. The Gods of Mars series is eleven volumes long and the first volume is The Princess of Mars. Of particular note to the fan of fantasy are his Pellucidar novels. All of these works are freely available at Gutenburg.org.
There are many famous works of fantasy that are now in the public domain and if you are looking for a familiar work you may want to consider the works of Lewis Carroll or Hans Christian Andersen. Some other classic favorites would be Aesop’s fables or the Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton.
There are lots of great Fantasy books for children, teens and adults freely available in the public domain and all of the books and authors I have listed here in this article can be found at gutenburg.org. If you love fantasy and want to delve into it without digging into your wallet these are some great choices.
For more information and articles about Fantasy writers and books visit the authors website at: Castlefiction.com – Fantasy books and more
For a guide to lots of great information about fantasy on the web visit his site at:
The Fantasy Guide website – Your guide to Fantasy on the World Wide Web
tweet this!