The World's Desire - Concept and Creation

Concept and Creation

In 1890, Andrew Lang was an influential man of letters; Rider Haggard was the author of sensational adventure novels. When the friends wrote a novel together, they chose a subject near to Lang’s Hellenist heart. The World’s Desire picks up the Odyssey where Homer left off and shows a widowed Odysseus voyaging to find his heart’s desire, Helen of Troy. Two years before its serial publication, anthropologist Andrew Lang posed the question: “How delicious a novel all Zulu, without the white faces in it, would be!” (Monsan 106). Andrew Lang is perhaps known more for his translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad than for anything else, except maybe his input in Grimm fairytales. His translations have been called the “most influential English translations of Homer in the nineteenth century”. So, by combining Haggard’s experience in South Africa and resulting influence and love of Zulu, with Lang’s propensity for modernizing Homer, The World’s Desire was created. It is Lang’s extensive background in the translations of Homer’s work that enabled the tone and wording of the novel to so effortlessly capture the essence of the previous works on which it was based. To compose The World’s Desire, first they returned to the Helen theme Lang had used in his long poem Helen of Troy, published five years earlier. From there, they decided that The World’s Desire was to be about Helen and Odysseus in Egypt, where Haggard had previously set two romances- She and Cleopatra. It was Lang’s noncollaborative contribution in the first four chapters, as well as his input throughout the rest of the novel, that gives the novel an allegorical level that makes it nearly as strong as any folklore in the Grimm’s tales.