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First appearance of this fantastic story?
Fantastic. |
It feels hyperbolic to describe any sword-and-sorcery story as divisive. So few read them. But within S&S limited circles Fritz Leiber’s “The Snow Women” qualifies. Its very mention seems to provoke ice-ball fights in internet forums, leaving bloodied lips and bruised egos (including mine).
I want to explain why, as well as why I consider “The Snow Women” a very good, perhaps great story.
But first let’s set the scene.
• The Snow Women was originally published in 1970 in Fantastic magazine.
• It’s a novella, clocking in at about 95 pages in my copy of Swords and Deviltry
• It was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1971 (although Leiber withdrew it in favor of “Ill Met in Lankhmar”)
• It’s one of Leiber’s “later” Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories but is the one many readers encounter first, as it is the first story in volume 1 of the popular “Swords” series.
• It’s Fafhrd’s origin story and centers around his attempt to break away from a matriarchal barbaric tribe. A wandering troupe of performers and the beautiful dancer Vlana offer him the opportunity to escape to warmer southern civilized lands. Conflict ensures.
Again, I think “The Snow Women” is terrific. Its nomination for the two highest awards in the land shows that others do too, or did, once upon a time. Nevertheless, its reputation among S&S fans is quite mixed.
Why?
I’ll start with this: When we read a story we do so through a lens—or own unique contexts and perspectives, but also, the lens of genre expectations.
Viewed through an S&S lens “The Snow Women” is blurry.
It is not a story of fast-paced swordplay. We get a little of that, but only at the end. The sorcery is relatively subdued, mostly limited to manipulation of weather and minds by domineering matriarchs. The protagonist appears to fit a familiar S&S trope, a tall and strong barbarian from the north. But this is not Conan of "The Tower of the Elephant." Fafhrd does not scale a towering spire guarded by lions and spiders, in search of treasure.
His enemy is hidebound tradition, and most of his struggles, internal.
"The Snow Women" reflects the changing interests of a maturing author who wanted to do something different. Leiber developed a fascination with the works of Carl Jung. For better or worse this significantly changed the direction of his later stories.
I will not offer a primer on Carl Jung, but as a clinical psychologist Jung viewed the true struggle as within the human breast, our universal need to embrace our shadow self and individuate—become a full-fledged, integrated, authentic human.
This is the matter of “The Snow Women.” I believe Leiber portrays these conflicts with subtlety, complexity, and beauty. The skeletal arms of his dead father trying to draw Fafhrd down (and later, lift him up). The cold grip of his mother freezing him in a barbaric stasis. The tribesmen who watch civilized freedom parade across the stage of Godshall passively from the audience, and then return to their one-dimensional lives, and bar Fafhrd’s path to freedom as he tries to win flee. Fafhrd wants more than tribal traditions. He wants to live a full color life, not a world of uniform white.
The tricky part with stories that engage with the human condition is the loss of narrative drive so crucial to S&S. These describe the latter Leiber stories which arguably become something else. In “The Snow Women” the pacing drops as Leiber zooms the lens in on Fafhrd and his internal struggles.
There also seems to be a general aversion in the S&S community to origin stories. We love Conan because he resists this traditional storytelling device (when we first meet him in “Phoenix on the Sword” he is a king at the height of his achievements; Howard gives us no background, none is needed). S&S heroes don’t need the bildungsroman character arcs of epic fantasy and we like it that way. Leiber likewise offered no origin for his heroes for more than 20 years, until the Gray Mouser received that treatment in “The Unholy Grail” in 1962, and Fafhrd eight years later with this sotry. Did we need to know that Fafhrd left behind a pregnant wife to be when he fled for civilized lands with Vlana? Maybe … or maybe not. But I understand why S&S fans don’t want or need this detail.
We also read stories through a political lens, what they have to say about power structures and social issues, including sex and relations between the sexes. Women in Leiber’s later stories don’t always hold up well. He had a noted obsession with (too) young women, though that is not the case here; Fafhrd and Mara are the same age and Vlana the dancer is nearly 10 years older. But the snow women are uniformly oppressors. Some find this off-putting. I don’t; I find them to be a credible menace and possessed of fierce agency. They dominate the men of the tribe, and this makes it credible for the freedom loving Fafhrd to want out.
I get all these complaints … but then again I’m reading the story through a different lens. The true power of “The Snow Women” is in its striking presentation of archetypes, the universal, recurring symbols and patterns rooted in the collective human psyche. And here, I argue it soars.
For example: The chasm. Trollstep Canyon is both a literal dark gulf Fafhrd must cross, but also an old part of himself that must die. Is he going to stay and become a frozen corpse like his father, a grasping half-man like the men of Godshall, staring at playlife on the stage? Or is he going to live authentically, choose the life he wants to live, and make the leap? This stark choice, the fear of death and being reborn, freezes Fafhrd … until he finds room for it. He becomes death, flying through the snow on a pair of rocket-propelled skis, his face a death-mask.
I love this image, so much.
We also get a nuanced look at civilization vs. barbarism. Fafhrd swings from rapture and infatuation with civilization to viewing it as a “tawdry thing, unworthy of his interest.” But he also despises barbarism, telling Vlana, “Barbarism can match civilization’s every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god’s laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape.” He’s trapped between two worlds. Leiber’s description of Fafhrd as a “lonely ghost, doomed to roam the Cold Waste” is an archetypal young man struggling to make sense of a complex world, his emotions a storm.
Aside from all its symbolic, archetypal matter, there’s also the matter of the writing. Leiber was a beautiful stylist and “The Snow Women” contains fantastic flourishes of his pen. Here’s one of my favorite passages; I cannot shake the image of Fafhrd’s father Nalgron and his sightless eyesockets reaching up through the dark soil with bony arms for his son like the image of a draugr:
“He thought of his last sight of his father, blue and shut-eyed, his broken limbs straightened, his best sword naked at his side with his slate-colored fingers fitted around the hilt. He thought of Nalgron now in the earth under the tent, worm-gnawed to a skeleton, the sword black rust, the eyes open now—sockets staring upward through solid dirt. He remembered his last sight of his father alive: a tall wolfskin cloak striding away with Mor’s warnings and threats spattering against it. Then the skeleton came back into his mind. It was a night for ghosts.”
The timing of this story adds another interesting wrinkle. We don’t know of Vlana’s ultimate grim fate as “Ill Met in Lankhmar was published shortly after The Snow Women, but we do know through Leiber’s earlier stories that she was right, civilization is no place for honest and noble men. But neither is the Cold Waste. Nalgron’s reward for “setting and unswervingly striding toward a high, romantic goal,” is a cold death. He tries to teach his son but Fafhrd only hears some of his wisdom in snatches. The rest must be acquired by painful experience.
The action intensifies as the story ends. We get a blur of well-written violence. An ecstatic and memorable escape, tempered with a deep foreboding that nothing has really been left behind.
You don’t have to love or even like the story. But I think you have to respect what Leiber was doing here. If you want fast-paced S&S you have Leiber’s entire early catalog to choose from. “The Snow Women” is not that; but as I hope to demonstrate it is different, not lesser.
