Adventure classics – Fighting for peace, cursed with war

The Worm Ouroboros

by Eric Rücker Eddison

***

In last Friday’s post, one of the heroes of E.R. Eddison’s 1922 epic fantasy, The Worm Ouroboros, claimed a favor from the eerily beautiful lady of the dead lands of Ishnain Nemartra. Considering that the hero in question, Demonland Lord Brandoch Daha, was on a quest to find the lost warrior champion of his country, the sensible favor would seem to have been the successful completion of the quest. Unfortunately, Brandoch Daha is thinking with some part of his body other than his head. He opts for a night in heaven with the lady herself. When he wakes up enough to return to his quest, she curses him for leaving her. Instead of the peace he sought, she says, he will find only war.

Despite Brandoch Daha’s epic goof, the quest for the missing champion is fulfilled and Demonland eventual vanquishes its archenemy, Witchland. The victory was due as much to a massive goof on the part of Witchland’s sorcerer king, Gorice XII, as to the virtue of Demonland’s just cause. For the second time, Gorice attempts to call an unhallowed spirit to his aid. This time, without the aid of his once-trusted second, the ineffable traitor Lord Gro, the whole thing gets out of control. The spirit not only destroys Witchland’s fortress but drags Gorice’s soul, Faust-like, off in the process.

(Sorry about the spoiler, but you’ve probably been reading the complete text at Sacred Texts or other sites. If not, feel free to read the full account, if only for Eddison’s incredible language, praised by H.P. Lovecraft and others.)

In our world, with one World War already behind, the possibility of unleashing the energy stored in atoms was already being discussed when Eddison’s fantasy was published in 1922. Despite Eddison’s insistence in his dedication to the original edition that Ouroboros “is neither allegory nor fable,” it’s as difficult not to see a cautionary tale in the Witch King’s hubris as it is in the destructive power of the One Ring in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

In both epics, their respective worlds are devastated by war, as our world was after the first and second World Wars. Except that in Eddison’s case, the heroes long not for the peace to restore their world, but for the return of their brave enemies.

As Demonland’s ruler, Lord Juss, says, “We may well cast down our swords as a last offering on Witchland’s grave. For now must they rust: seamanship and all high arts of art must wither…thinking that we, what fought but for fighting’s sake, have in the end fought so well we never may fight again…”

What more can the gods of this strange land grant them, than a return of those beloved enemies? And they do. The Lady of Ishnain Nematra's prophecy is fulfilled: instead of peace, the heroes must wage war everlasting. And the Worm Ouroboros, a symbol for eternity, bites its own tail, and rolls endlessly onward.

Eddison, born in 1882, never served in a war, having instead a successful career as a civil servant and man of letters. In his last completed novel, 1940’s A Fish Dinner in Memison, a character says, “I can’t understand chaps like you. Hankering already for the next war, or a revolution.” To which the answer is: “Who’s going to stop it?”

This belief in the inevitability of war, as much as Eddison’s dualist philosophy, may have been at the root of Tolkien’s quarrel with him, despite his admiration for Eddison’s created world.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a December of spiritual adventures with Plato’s The Symposium.)

Adventure classics – Mr. Eddison’s never ending story

The Worm Ouroboros

by Eric Rücker Eddison

***

I could hardly believe my eyes when, searching for overlooked pre-Tolkienesque fantasies, I found Listverse’s “Top 10 Underrated Fantasy Stories Before 1937,” and its mention of E.R. Eddison’s  1922 magnum opus, The Worm Ouroboros. “My favorite novel,” gushed the Listverse writer. And I thought, wow, who knew anybody but me loved Eddison’s work?

Ouroboros is the tale of the warring kingdoms of Witchland and Demonland, set ostensibly on the planet Mercury, whose history endlessly repeats itself. The title refers, not to any of the characters, but to the dragon (“worm” in Old English) of Norse mythology that swallows its own tail, with no beginning or ending. And it’s told in a 16^th century idiom reminiscent of Shakespeare in an opium dream.

Although J.R.R. Tolkien had some praise for Ouroboros, which got a 1950’s reprint following the success of at his Lord of the Rings, at this point you may understand why Eddison’s works haven’t exactly become cultural icons.

Still, I think his books may yet get their due in 21^st century fantasy realms. His “Demons” and “Witches,” along with his other nations of Pixies, Imps, Goblins and Ghouls don’t sound as bizarre to readers steeped in paranormal fantasy today as they must have in the early decades of the previous century; his byzantine, sexually-charged plot twists familiar ground to Game of Thrones enthusiasts.

And computer-generated animation seems made to delve into Eddison’s sometimes descriptions of setting, such as this one for the audience chamber in the palace of Lord Juss, ruler of Demonland, whose support pillars are each topped with a precious stone “carved by the hand of some sculptor of long ago into the living form of a monster: here was a harpy with screaming mouth, so wondrously cut in ochre-tinted jade it was a marvel to hear no scream from her: here in wine-yellow topaz a flying fire-drake:…there a star sapphire the colour of moonlight, cut for a cyclops, so that the rays of the star trembled from his single eye….”

Eddison lavished similar detail on everything from the dresses of the highly decorative princesses and damsels accompanying his heroes to Himalayan-rivaling mountain ranges. His characters are equally baroque: heroes inimitably brave, strong and good; villains equally brave, strong and evil. The action is tremendous, beginning with an epic single combat, a wrestling match between the evil king of Witchland and Lord Juss’s brother, the Demonland champion, for domination of their world.

But Witches are witches. No, actually, they’re not. Their kings are powerfully evil sorcerers more like Tolkien’s Saruman than Halloween (or even Shakespearean) crones stirring cauldrons. So they’re not about to let the Demons’ win in the wrestling match keep them from plotting more villainy. In Eddison’s viewpoint, there are no shadows, no in-betweens. And neither side ever, ever gives up.

As the introduction to the 1952 edition states, perhaps with a hint of wistfulness, “There are no complications, no reservations and no excuses here. Pagan these warriors may be (actually, Eddison is notably short on religious overtones) and semi-barbarous, but they are not oppressed by weasel-faced doubts or whining uncertainties…and life itself is joyful and wonderful.”

But there, I haven’t even gotten to the melancholy traitor Gro (the only character with any approach to complexity, little good though it does him). Or to the Scarlet Pimpernellish Demon Lord Brandoch Daha or the May-December romance between lovely Prezmyra and Witchland’s cunning old warrior Corund. I’ll continue this discussion next Friday, although readers who want to read (or reread) will be able to see the entire story here.

Adventure classics -- Far from the fields we know

 

The King of Elfland’s Daughter

by Lord Dunsany

#

If I hadn’t been taking my usual indecipherable notes during last month’s FenCon writing workshop, I would hardly have believed I heard editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden (who forms, with wife Teresa, the Tor Books editing team Nielsen Hayden) say the name “Lord Dunsany.” Really? I’d come across Lord Dunsany’s influential 1924 fantasy novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, more than thirty years ago but that was the only mention of the prolific Anglo-Irish writer I had ever seen or heard of until Nielsen Hayden dropped his name.

In a lucky moment, I’d already listed The King of Elfland’s Daughter on this month‘s fantasy classics for its obvious influences on J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery adventures, E.R.R. Eddison’s Ouroboros series, and even C.S. Lewis’s alternate universe of Narnia stories. With Nielsen Hayden’s recommendation, I had another excuse to read Lord Dunsany again.

(By the way, his full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18^th Baron of Dunsany. No wonder he wrote his dozens and dozens of plays, poems, novels and short stories in a wide variety of genres under a pen name.)

Dunsany paid the publication costs for his first book--and first experiment in writing alternate universes--1905’s The Gods of Pegana, a short story collection containing its own mythology, history and geography. It must have seemed like a strange, chancy experiment to commercial publishers at the time. But reviewers and readers such as young H.P. Lovecraft couldn’t get enough. Dunsany would become “the single greatest influence on fantasy writers during the first half of the twentieth century,” editor Lin Carter wrote in his introduction to the 1969 reprint of The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

The book recounts the story set in both a timeless, otherworldly Elfland, and, in Dunsany’s own brief preface, “the fields we know, and ordinary English woods and a common village and valley.” Except that the woods are not ordinary, and I hope, not English, haunted as they are by creatures whose habitats span both worlds, or who, like unicorns, travel habitually between the two.

One day, the twelve members of the parliament of Erl take a break from their usual duties of blacksmithing and leather tanning and garden to make a strange request of their hereditary lord.

“We want to be ruled by a magic lord,” they said. And their lord replied, “It is five hundred years since my people have spoken thus in parliament, and it shall always be as your parliament saith.” So the lord of Erl summons his son Alveric to cross over the border into Elfland and marry the King of Elfland’s daughter, Lirazel. And Alveric sets out, finds the elvish princess and returns within a single elvish day, only to learn that his father has died and the parliament members have grown old in the decade or more that has passed on Earth during that one magical day in Elfland.

That is only the beginning of Alveric’s troubles. Because how can a princess who dances in the road, talks to goats and laughs at funerals ever find contentment in “the fields we know”?

“Dunsany combines the style and settings of the classical fairy tale with an adult and sophisticated viewpoint, welding the two diverse elements into one match whole through his lyric, singing prose,” Carter wrote. “Most fairy tales end with ‘and they were married and lived happily ever after. But Dunsany knows this could not be so: for Alveric was of mortal blood and hearkened after earthly things--but Lirazel was neither mortal nor earthly. . . And to Dunsany’s lasting credit goes the honor of having written a fairy tale that dares to tell you ‘what happened afterward.’”

Dunsany’s works are readily available, often in free e-book versions, as well as an armload from the Dallas Public Library.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a November of fantasy with J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.)

Adventure classics -- Light in every way

The Light Princess

by George MacDonald

#

I’ll admit not catching most of George MacDonald’s sly satirical touches when I first read his mid-nineteenth century fairy tale, “The Light Princess,” in my family’s 1956 edition of The Junior Classics. But I knew that this story about a princess with a mind of her own -- light as it was -- was like nothing else I’d ever seen.

This wasn’t a princess who stayed obediently cloistered in a tower. Or whose idea of a rowdy night out was going to sleep for a hundred years. Not on your life. This was a princess who, when confined to her room, climbed out for a midnight swim.

And if a handsome prince happened to come along -- she wasn’t about to put herself out looking for one -- she didn’t worry about whether their friendship conformed to conventional Victorian standards of deportment. As long, of course, as he was a good swimmer. Swimming was her passion and water, indeed, was the only medium in which she could enjoy the freedom of not floating off into the atmosphere.

Because much as some of us may wish to register more lightly on our scales, this princess really was light -- a defect wished on her by a spiteful aunt, whose witchcraft had deprived the princess of her gravity in both the scientific and psychological senses.

Of course, she was able to regain her gravity by falling (one of MacDonald’s many puns -- and they are hilarious, not horrible) in love. And when her boyfriend the prince (he’s the obedient one in the story) offered to die by drowning to save her life, threatened by the actions of the same wicked aunt, the princess saved his life instead.

Given that the story is from the hand of the Scottish preacher turned professor turned author who C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien acknowledged as an influence, both the
obedient and disobedient have their proper place in the scheme of things.

Lewis Carroll, who would complete Alice in Wonderland with MacDonald’s encouragement, wrote in his diary in July 1862 about a walk with MacDonald. They took MacDonald’s publisher the manuscript of “The Light Princess,” which included, in Carroll’s words, “some exquisite drawings by Hughes.”

I was unable to find any of the drawings by Pre-Raphaelite painter and illustrator Arthur Hughes, but I’ve snitched one of his more famous paintings, “Ophelia,” to go with this post. If that sounds too serious, consider the description of the fairy tale’s light-minded princess: “. . .she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. . .I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow -- morbidezza, perhaps.”

“The Light Princess” is included in numerous other editions of MacDonald’s works, with illustrations by artists as famous as Maurice Sendak and actor Humphrey Bogart’s mother Maude Humphrey. But it’s also available online at
http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/George_MacDonald/The_Light_Princess/
Want to know more about George MacDonald? See
http://www.george-macdonald.com/
(Next Friday, a December of spirited adventures continues with Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Bridge of San Luis Rey.)

Adventure classics -- Return to Middle Earth

The Hobbit

by J.R.R. Tolkien

#

Never underestimate the importance of bedtime stories. Fantasy writer Rick Riordan said he started his bestselling “Lost Hero” series because his son demanded more stories. Even more famously, an obscure professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University scribbled a line on the blank page of an examination paper he was grading. The line, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” grew into a tale he told his children.

And after the head of a publishing firm got a positive report on the completed story from his own ten-year-old son, Rayner Unwin, the tale became The Hobbit, published in 1937. The professor, of course, was J.R.R. Tolkien.

Although in Tolkien’s remembrance, that first sentence of The Hobbit seemed random, it drew on a fascination with languages dating back to his own childhood and on a personal mythology he had begun to write as an escape from the horror of service during the First World War and recurrences of the dreaded trench fever that flourished in the unsanitary conditions.

As he recalled in a letter, he was already writing the stories that would be the basis of the underlying history of Middle Earth “. . .in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”

They did not, however, include any beings remotely like hobbits. And when Tolkien offered his publisher the stories that would form the Silmarillion, the verdict came back, “not commercially publishable.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

The work that would seal Tolkien’s fame, The Lord of the Rings, did include plenty of hobbits. The by-then adult Rayner Unwin guided it through its later stages despite the reluctance of his father’s firm to incur an expected loss on its publication.

As the Tolkien Society’s website, www.tolkiensociety.org/, reports in its understated way, “It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work’s public appeal.”

A reminder of that continuing appeal came recently from British blogger Mark Lord (www.marklord.info/) spreading news of a new Hobbit movie directed by Peter Jackson. I also found a regular chronology of the film’s making by tracking the dates of www.youtube.com/ uploads (just search “hobbit film”).

Peter Jackson, also known as the man who brought the complete Lord of the Rings to the screen, will release the first of the two-part production December 14 in his hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. Hope it’s in my town by Christmas!

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a November of fantasy with Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Bonus for Texas readers -- Beagle will be at the Texas Renaissance Festival near Plantersville this coming weekend, November 5-6, and at Wizard World in the Austin Convention Center November 12-13. He’s also very accessible on Facebook.)

Adventure classics -- A fine kettle of April fish

A Fish Dinner in Memison

by E.R. Eddison

#

Usually when I’m faced with writing about a series by the same author, I pick the first book.  But when the subject of the series is Time – possibly Eternity, as Irish poet James Stephens declared in his introduction to E.R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison, the problem becomes how to define “first.”  I’ll just say Memison is probably the easiest to read and my personal favorite work of Eddison’s weird genius.  It’s less well-known than his first fantasy, The Worm Ouroboros, with which it shares characters and some degree of setting.  It was his second-written work in what he ended up calling the Zimiamvian Trilogy, although preceding the first in the chronology of its story.  But “follows” and “precedes” are imprecise terms to describe the ways in which Eddison uses time.  As Stephens points out, “The personages of this book are living, at the one moment, in several dimensions of time. . . .  They are in love and in hate simultaneously in these several dimensions, and will continue to be so for ever. . . .”

I hope that doesn’t scare you away from reading Memison.  Eddison’s characters, including his women, are stupendous.  Stephens’s description of the women could apply as well to the men – “greedy, and treacherous, and imperturbable, . . and all that is high or low or even obscene.”  (I’ll note here that the “obscene” part refers to the characters’ enjoyment of their sexuality, not to anything modern readers would find pornographic.)

Like J.R.R. Tolkien, who admired his writing but not his strange philosophy, Eddison invented his own version of English to describe the alternative world these characters inhabit.  He has been criticized for wasting his descriptive powers, especially in the earlier books, on over-decorated palaces.  He still loves palaces in Memison, but also secret assignations, dinner party conversation, and beauty whether in art, landscapes or human beings.

If I tried to reduce this richness to a simple plot summary, I’d say that Memison is the story of parallel loves.  The first is that of Edward Lessingham for his wife Mary, both of whom exist in a recognizably real twentieth century.  The second is the love of Barganax, Duke of Zayana, who exists in the alternate world of Zimiamvia, for Fiorinda.  Fiorinda herself moves happily between both worlds.  In Eddison’s words “in a dozen paces after Lessingham’s far-drawn gaze had lost her, (she) stepped from natural present April into natural present June – from that night-life of Verona out by a colonnade of cool purple sandstone onto a daisied lawn, under the reverberant white splendour of midsummer noonday.”  Long live Zimiamvia.

After I lost my college-era copy of Memison, I searched many a used bookstore in pre-Internet days to find another.  However, now it and the rest of Eddison’s works are readily available through www.amazon.com and www.alibris.com/  Probably other sources as well.

(I plan to showcase adventure stories in a variety of genres, but even I may flounder without reader suggestions.  Share your favorites!  After today’s April Fool offering, the month will turn mysterious.  Next week:  Australian writer Arthur Upfield’s The Sands of Windee and the copycat murder case it inspired.)

The last barbarian

This coming Saturday, January 22, marks the one-hundred and fifth anniversary of the birth of my fellow Texan Robert E. Howard.  Howard, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age thirty, invented sword and sorcery fantasy almost single-handedly with characters such as Conan the Barbarian (more properly, the Cimmerian).  Even J.R.R. Tolkien, who had little sympathy for most of his contemporary writers, is rumored to have admitted that he “rather liked the Conan stories.”

During Howard’s lifetime, his neighbors in the West Texas town of Cross Plains considered him more of an eccentric than an innovator, looking askance at him for acting and when possible, dressing, in the style of his protagonists.  My favorite anecdote is of Howard and a friend who, eager to experience sword-fighting but finding fencing masters in short supply in small Texas towns during the Depression, bought a couple of U.S. Army surplus cavalry sabers.  The two young men started bashing away at each other, and in the encounter, the taller and heavier Howard slightly wounded his friend.  Also notable for his sensitivity to the pain and injuries of others, Howard threw down his saber and never touched one again.

Perhaps you don’t want to channel your inner barbarian by attacking your friends with edged weapons.  But have you considered using Howard’s other methods to get inside your characters’ heads?  I find the book Inner Drives by Pamela Jaye Smith (yet another Texan) useful for providing styles of speech, physical actions, clothing, foibles and even appropriate foods for many character archetypes.  Smith’s clients are often filmmakers, but anyone striving to portray character and motivation will find it helpful.  Robert E. Howard, I’m sure, would have loved it.

If this gives you any ideas for characters and stories to display them in, join my writing prompt contest.  Just list items in the comments section that you would like to include in a short story of any genre.  I’ll pick three – adding some of my own if needed – and post them on the January 26 blog, adding rules for a story contest using the prompts.  Winning prompts will be credited to their creators.  They’re your choice, but keep the sex and violence to about what you’d see in a PG-13 movie.

(For more information about Smith and her character theories, see her website, www.mythworks.net/ )