Adventure classics -- A perfect creature in an imperfect world

Black Unicorn

by Tanith Lee

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Without intending to, I see that I’ve written a whole month’s worth of Adventure classics posts about British fantasy (making allowances for Lord Dunsany, whose title came from a British, rather than Irish ruler). Blame it on the unicorns, who began the posts and end them.

image: wikimedia commons

But the unicorns Lord Dunsany’s hero hunted in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, the ones whose straying over the pastures between Elfland and the fields we know opened the borders to a host of strange creatures, were traditional white unicorns.  Tanith Lee’s unicorn of today’s post is that incredibly rarer creature, a black unicorn. A creature so rare, musicians as different as 2 Chainz and Alexander James Adams (formerly known as Heather Alexander) write songs equating its uniqueness with their own.

There are precedents for the blackness of the unicorn, including the rhinoceros, whose horn was credited from antiquity with the same magical, medicinal, and poison defeating properties later ascribed to the more graceful unicorn. Even once human imaginations made the leap from a real, often black animal to a white one, the horn retained its blackness for ages longer.

Lee’s meeting with the rare creatures in Black Unicorn, opens with a bone brought to young sorcerer in training Tanaquil by her pet peeve (creatures we all possess, although they never do anything as useful as Tanaquil’s did).

“What (Tanaquil) had taken for a bar of moonlight was not. It was a bone. Long and slender, unhuman, not at once identifiable, the material from which it was made glowed like polished milk-crystal. And in the crystal were tiny blazing specks and glints, like diamond--no, like the stars out of the sky,” Lee writes. And because Tanaquil’s practice of magic so far had been limited to putting broken mechanical things back together, she gathered all the bones she can find of the long-dead unicorn and strung them back in order, adding a few bits in place of bones she and the peeve couldn't locate.

And with the aid of Tanaquil's unacknowledged magic, the unicorn returned to life, “black as every night of the world together, and it shone as the night shines with a comet.”

Normally, we might thind a world in which a living unicorn can be raised from a dead skeleton would be a world magical enough. But Tanaquil’s world, her sorcerer mother has told her, is badly made. “But we sorcerers believe there are other worlds, some worse, and one the improved model of this.” And it is from that “improved model” of the world that the unicorn longs to return. A return in which only Tanaquil, young, spoiled, and ignorant though she is, can aid.

Following the trail of the black unicorn, she will unravel mysteries about herself, meet her absent father, her long-lost sister, and find the courage to become the equal of her mother. She helps the unicorn return to its true home, the perfect world. And she returns to her own world, finding no place for herself and the peeve amid perfection.

“Do you believe,” Tanaquil writes to her mother, as one sorcerer to another, “the unicorn will have any trouble there form the additions I had to make to its bones, the copper and other metal I added? Will it always now, because of them, keep some link to this earth?” Perhaps it did, because Lee wrote sequels, Gold Unicorn and Red Unicorn.  Read about them, Lee, and her books at 
www.tanith-lee-com/.

Unfortunately, black unicorns are so rare, I had trouble finding a copyright free image of them, which is why this post is illustrated with white unicorns. For other unicorn lore, I liked the compilation at www.unicorn-dream.co.uk/.

And for a look at the real-life antecedents of unicorns, see www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/rhinoceros/rhino-horn-use-fact-vs-fiction/1178/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a December of adventures of the spirit with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.)

Adventure classics -- Far from the fields we know

 

The King of Elfland’s Daughter

by Lord Dunsany

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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.)