To Leave A Warrior Behind by Jon Tattrie, a review

“What blazed in Charles’s eyes? What was at his core? I think he planted it deep in his books, liberating himself. Readers purify their own emotions and memories in the refining fire of his words.”

--Jon Tattrie, To Leave a Warrior Behind

A talented author working in the second wave of sword-and-sorcery, Charles Saunders twice had his Imaro books under contract and in print by a publishing house … and twice had the series yanked from under his feet.

Partially as a result of these and other ill fortunes including shuttering of the newspaper on which he worked, Saunders died alone, near penniless. Worse, without family to claim his body he was buried in an unmarked grave.

That’s hard.

If that was your end, would you consider your life a success? Do you consider Saunders’ life a success?

You might not… unless you were to read To Leave a Warrior Behind (2026, McClelland & Stewart).

After which you’d answer that question quite differently. With a hell yeah. Saunders’ life might not look anything like the “success” you see on Instagram, but it was, nonetheless. Why?

He wrote some kick-ass S&S that we still read today.

He created a new (sub) sub-genre of fiction, sword-and-soul. 

He had hundreds of admirers with whom he corresponded. Many friends, and as all fans of “It’s a Wonderful Life” know, no man is a failure who has friends.

And he will continue to be remembered thanks to this new biography.

Biography is what’s on the cover but probably the wrong word to describe To Leave A Warrior Behind. Biography often brings to mind dry text, heavily footnoted and indexed, the plain recitation of the facts of a life. To Leave a Warrior Behind is part compelling story of a fatherless boy, just like his greatest creation, Imaro, “son-of-no-father.” It’s part literary analysis of Saunders’ works. Part detective novel, from the search for an unclaimed body to the search for a missing past in the pages of hand-written letters. Part funeral dirge for the dying newspaper industry. And above all it honors Saunders the man, his unique life and literary and human legacy.

I don’t want to spoil all of that story here, as the book’s revelations keep coming, building chapter by chapter to a satisfying finish. By the end you will meet a Saunders you probably did not know. 

But I do need to review it and so will reveal some of its contents here. You’ve been warned.

***

Tattrie knew Saunders, as the two worked together for years as newsmen at the Halifax Daily News. So the work includes a fair deal of self-biographical/emotional/personal reflections from the author, which I enjoyed.

Shuttering the newsroom at the Daily News hit close to home. I was fortunate in 2004 when I quit my full-time job at a newspaper whose best days were behind, but one I loved and for which I felt survivors’ guilt. Tattrie observes that leaving journalism for greener, safer, corporate pastures can feel like a sellout, and as an ex-journalist I agree. I admire people who stuck out the profession for the love of the game. People like Saunders.

Saunders never wanted to do anything with his life but tell stories, and that’s what he did, even when there was no money to be made.

This book is worth a small fortune.

Most of Saunders’ newsroom colleagues did not know he wrote the Imaro books. We get the full history here, starting with Saunders’ immense relief and pride after getting a $2,500 advance, to his crashing disappointment at finally seeing the cover of Imaro, which featured a tanned Tarzan-like, possibly white hero and the infamous blurb “epic novel of a black Tarzan.” This drew the ire of the ERB estate and led to it being yanked from shelves, a costly delay. We also get a bit of insight into the workings at DAW. In 1985 founder Donald A. Wollheim was hospitalized and his daughter Betsy took over the day-to-day management of the company. It was her call to ultimately cancel Imaro. 

Because DAW held the copyright to the first three Imaro books, Saunders was in a bind, unable to offer them elsewhere.

The book shines in its Imaro deep-dive, which all sword-and-sorcery fans and historians (ahem) will appreciate. Tattrie gives the series its due like few places did, save for perhaps The Cimmerian and Steve Tompkins (who by the way Saunders later extolled in an essay published in Rob E. Howard: Two-Gun Raconteur). We get the beginnings of Imaro, jointly influenced by Tarzan and a black character in Andre Norton’s postapocalyptic SF novel Star Man’s Son—2250 AD. But Saunders’ number one influence was Robert E. Howard, through the Lancers. We get his first appearances in the Gene Day edited magazine Dark Fantasy, and the big break when Lin Carter selected an Imaro story for his Year’s Best Fantasy Stories (DAW, 1975). It was Don Wolleheim himself who encouraged Saunders to submit Imaro for consideration, and ultimately acceptance.

After DAW cancelled the series Saunders did not publish a single piece of fiction between 1990-99. He did write the screenplays for a couple admittedly terrible S&S films, Amazons and Stormquest, which allowed him to pay the bills. He also wrote a few works of nonfiction about local black history and boxing.

***

But beyond Saunders’ literary legacy we also get much on him the person. His college days during the rise of the Black Power movement. An attempted suicide in the 70s. The lifeline provided by his friends in letters, including the authors Charles De Lint and David C. Smith. With Smith Saunders mourned a joint loss of their early successes when their brand of “masculine fiction” fell from favor. We get the details of his marriage and its eventual failure. His work at the newspaper, Saunders’ raising his arms in triumph when CNNs’ Wolf Blitzer read on air his editorial about Canada sending ships to help the US during Hurricane Katrina. Lots of great details like this.

And we get Saunders’ fiction revival. His resurfacing after he was asked to submit a piece to the anthology Dark Matter. The republishing of his stories by Night Shade in the mid-2000s, which led Saunders to revisit the old Imaro stories and improve them. Tattrie walks us through Saunders’ work strengthening and deepening his characters, especially Imaro’s love interest Tanisha. “As he matured, Charles started treating fantasy not as a way out of our world, but as a deeper way into it,” Tattrie writes. Imaro begins to consider the feelings of others … “over time, core character traits reveal the man beneath the warrior.” Tattrie believes Saunders ultimately eclipsed Howard and his S&S roots by turning the focus of the stories from outer action to inner character revelation.

We get Night Shade’s disappointing cancellation of the series, but then the launch of Sword and Soul Media, and the first true visual depiction of Imaro on a cover that Saunders long imagined. In 2009, 25 years since his last new novel about Imaro, Saunders published his 4th and longest novel—Imaro: The Naama War, which brought with it a shift from the heroic fantasy of Imaro to a more epic storyline.

In short, To Leave a Warrior Behind is not just a biography, but important literary analysis. Analysis that along the way reveals striking parallels between creation and creator. Saunders, like Imaro, was deeply marked by the abandonment of his father and separation from his mother. Tatrie notes that he assembled the book by reading more than 250 letters over 50 years to a range of friends. Each letter was 3 pages, adding up to more than 700 pages of Charles writing about his life. In all that paper Saunders mentioned his father just once. When he fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War he largely left his mother behind, too.

Yet this is not a good guy/bad guy story… I’ll end my review here, I don’t want to spoil anything, as there are some big twists at the end. Read this book for yourself and you’ll walk away with brand-new insights into Saunders the man. I regret not meeting Saunders when I had the chance, but I feel like I did after reading To Leave a Warrior Behind. Which is about the highest praise I can give it.

Revelations, Judas Priest

I've got to give Nostradamus a proper go one of these days. Proper go as in, listening dozens of times to the album in full, locked in a room by myself with naught but beer, notepad and pen, and my thoughts.

Admittedly I was ... skeptical when Judas Priest announced it was putting out a concept album based on the life and works of the famous 16th century French astrologer and seer. It just didn't seem to align with the talents of a band that wrote "Living After Midnight" and "Painkiller." 

And "Johnny B Goode" but we don't talk about that around here.

Lately though I've been paying closer attention to some of the songs from the album, and am discovering they're quite good. Check that... more than a few are epic, powerful, awesome.

In fact I'm starting to think they just might have pulled the damned thing off.

See for example "Revelations." This song kicks my ass. Crank it up this Metal Friday and it will kick yours, too.

I have the power

I have the choice

They'll hear my voice

For centuries

Yes, we will Rob.

In his biography Confess (highly recommended BTW, my review is here) Halford expressed a deep belief that the band knocked it out of the park with Nostradamus, though he acknowledges it's also the most divisive album in the band's oeuvre. Here's what he had to say:

I absolutely loved making it. It ended up as a double album and I am proud of every fucking word and note.... I think it contains some of the most accomplished lyrics I have ever written. I also believe it's one of the greatest suites of music in metal history. So there! I stand behind it 100 percent.

Listen and decide for yourself. 

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Kane vs. the Werewolf by Jeff Easley.

I just pressed publish on issue #5 of Arcane Arts, my free weekly newsletter of arcane miscellany. This one includes:

• News of a couple of print S&S articles I recently completed
• A few early thoughts on a recently published Charles Saunders biography
• Some speculation on the King Conan film announcement

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Among the Living, Anthrax

Not nearly enough Anthrax on the blog. Let's change that this Metal Friday.

I don't listen to a whole lot of this band these days, but back in the late 80s/early 90s they were very heavy in my rotation. "Among the Living" hit a sweet spot. Right in the midst of the thrash era Stephen King released the uncut The Stand. Which we all read, and discussed. And wondered if we'd survive the apocalypse. Not likely with the Walking Dude to contend with.

Pair The Stand with "Among the Living" and you've got a great time on your hands. This song gave Randall Flagg his due.

Anthrax had a knack for writing choruses with riffs that begged for a mosh pit to erupt. You get that here.

I'm the walking dude

I can see all the world

Twist your minds with fear

I'm the man with the power

Among the living

Follow me or die 

The Tower and the Ruin by Michael D.C. Drout, a review

“Tolkien’s vision is deeply and essentially true, and it gives shape and meaning to the grief and loss that is our common and inescapable inheritance as humans incarnate in time.”

--Michael D.C. Drout, The Tower and the Ruin

As a 52-year-old with more of my life in the rear-view mirror than the road ahead, I find myself looking back on fond memories as much as forward. I think of growing up in the 1980s, which for me meant marathon sessions of Dungeons and Dragons at the kitchen table with friends, afternoon-consuming sessions of Atari 2600 with my brother and cousin, and of course, getting lost in the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Those days are gone, irretrievably, save only in the wells of memory. When I recall them now they are accompanied with intense pangs of nostalgia. They are broken remnants of past glories, even if the artifacts remain.

Towers, and ruins.

A tower and a ruin makes for a powerful symbolic contrast and one author Michael D.C. Drout puts to full effect in this new work of Tolkien scholarship. The Tower and the Ruin (2025, Norton) is a striking blend of deeply personal memory and reflection, sharp intellectual rigor, and voluminous engagement with what is now a great breadth of published Tolkien scholarship. 

Drout tells us how Tolkien forever changed the course of his life, then sets out to show us how Tolkien’s works (principally The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and LOTR) achieve their potent spell through literary effect. In somewhat of a surprise Drout dispels the myth that Tolkien set out to create a mythology for England, arguing this common refrain is a misread by Tolkien’s principal biographer Humphrey Carpenter. Instead, Drout writes that Tolkien sought to create works of literary art … “that would produce in their readers some of the same effects that the works of medieval literature produced in him.”

The Lord of the Rings is great for many reasons, but among them for evoking the feeling that you are in a world of tremendous depth and history. It feels real, and lived in, like inhabiting a “coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world … glimpses of a large history in the background.” We can feel this when we read him. Tolkien achieves this effect by layering in references to older ages of Middle-earth, evocative names, and even inconsistencies, all of which combine to produce the effect of displacement and historicity that we get from reading something like Beowulf. Drout explains how this is done with Tolkien’s use of intertextuality; for example writing the chapter “The Council of Elrond” through the telling of a number of implied histories shared by the tellers, all of whom have their own unique voice and viewpoints informed by their unique cultures and races. Tolkien drew on old medieval sources but also sophisticated literary techniques like patterning, interlace, and “heterotextuality,” or the illusion of a story told by multiple authors (Bilbo and Frodo and the fictitious “Red Book of Westmarch”). These create the effects of “textual ruins.” Literal ruins like the tumbled Tower of Amon-Sul, but also the feeling that this is a Third Age which of course means two prior Ages, greater Ages, preserved in song and tales of Beren and Luthien and Turin. It all creates per Drout “the convincing illusion that the work has a long and complex composition and transmission history rather than merely being the creation of a single Oxford professor in the twentieth century.”

Some of this I knew through the likes of the scholarship of Tom Shippey, but some was new to me including Drout’s examination of Tolkien’s deliberate use of racism among the Elves as a motivating force in the narrative of The Silmarillion and to a lesser degree, LOTR and The Hobbit. Drout makes a convincing case that the Elves’ rigid racial hierarchies led to internecine conflicts and great tragedies and helped speed their downfall. See the Kinslaying at Alqualondë and its conflict of Noldorin Elves, led by the prideful Fëanor, vs. the Telerin Elves. This also serves as an interesting counterpoint to modern critiques of Tolkien’s perceived racism; per Drout Tolkien was not only very aware of the pernicious effects of racism but actively grappled with it in his works. 

I found myself nodding along to Drout’s summary that the problems of death and immortality, and the critical importance of individual freedom, are all front and center themes of Tolkien’s works. Even as I learned and/or reinforced what I knew, I found myself not always seeing eye-to-eye with Drout  … but I can’t stress enough how much I enjoyed the act of mental dialogue and sparring.

For example, I really wish Drout—a professor of English at Wheaton College, who not only specializes in Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature but also science fiction and modern fantasy--would read more sword-and-sorcery. He lists early examples of fantasy that add reality and verisimilitude to their works through replicating the feel of old medieval texts, and to his credit gives props to the likes of H. Rider Haggard, William Morris and Walter Scott … but somehow ignores Robert E. Howard, who employed the same “pseudo references” for which he gives so much to credit to Tolkien. Howard not only incorporated his own pseudo references like the Books of Skelos but also incorporated Lovecraft’s pseudo references … which I suppose makes him a pseudo-pseudo referencee/referencer. Like Tolkien Howard also used our real world to frame his fictitious Hyborian Age. Steve Tompkins considers Howard and Tolkien the Two Towers of fantasy with only a short distance between. I agree; the towers and ruins they’ve left behind leave us in awe.

Speaking of Tompkins, one of the things that drew me to Drout was his essay in The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On. Steve’s mention of that essay on The Cimmerian website led me to track it down. You can read my review/experience of that here. Drout’s essay is intensely personal, a recollection of his first encounter with The Silmarillion which he received as a Christmas present in December of 1977. He had just moved from New York to a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts (my neck of the woods, incidentally). That winter the region was hit with the Blizzard of 1978. In addition to the suffocating snows the nine year-old Drout was coping with his parents’ impending divorce and separation from his friends, family, and childhood home. 

Yet paradoxically the bleakness of The Silmarillion and its terrible scenes of carnage and defeat (The Battle of Unnumbered Tears, the Fall of Gondolin) served as a salve for Drout, who learned in its pages the value of courage and resilience and of exhibiting tenacity in defeat. Drout also learned that nostalgia is a genuine emotion worthy of exploration, not of shame, as it is a part of the spectrum of the human condition. 

As Steve wrote, with his typical poetic sensibility:

We humans aren’t as lucky (or is it unlucky?) as Tolkien’s Elves, but Valinors of sorts are available to us, be they the green-gold stun grenade of a spring day, the Polaroid poignance of that one page it might be easier to skip in the photo album, or a chance hearing of a long-ago hit single that ruled the airwaves all during one of those cusp-between-adolescence-and-adulthood summers when possibility and probability were still in equipoise.

In The Tower and the Ruin Drout expands on that essay, but abandons “nostalgia” for the term Heimweh, a German word meaning “home pain” and originally a medical diagnosis. I won’t quibble overmuch with Heimweh… except to say I think nostalgia is a fine word, it signifies something you long for but can never reach. I believe it still fits for how I feel when reading Tolkien, even if it’s been corrupted. We can’t let word corrupters take our language and adapt with constant new (or old) terminology. That’s like playing whack-a-mole.

Anyone who has followed me for any length of time knows how much I detest “Epic Pooh,” which is more or less uniformed teen angst (in fact, Moorcock only read LOTR once, as a teenager, by his own admission). Why anyone gives it any weight beyond the author’s name and some misguided appeal to “authority” eludes me. Drout doesn’t address that essay precisely but he does craft a perfect takedown of its overwrought claims. Here I slightly paraphrase:

“It must be, instead, that there is something about Tolkien’s work that triggers a critical blindness or a perverse reflex to claim the opposite of the truth. I think I can identify one of the major factors. The standard, cliched twentieth-century rejection of any works of literature that depict humanity and its works as being substantially good and beautiful and thus worthy of preservation is to call them “fairy-tales,” with the implication that such are just simple, happy stories that only children would believe.”

There is also a particularly choice and delicious shot at postmodernism and the misguided belief that there is no such thing as good and evil, only power, among some of the intellectual elite… but I won’t spoil it ere.

The Tower and the Ruin is Drout’s first book on Tolkien and ultimately it is mostly for the Tolkien nerd, perhaps more than I was anticipating, mainly because it is in conversation with and builds upon the work of other Tolkien scholars and in particular Tom Shippey. Drout owes a sizable debt to Shippey; you could say this book is built on the textual ruins of Shippey’s groundbreaking scholarship. There is some direct recapitulation of Shippey’s work including his theory of how bourgeois Bilbo vs. the older epic world he encounters gives The Hobbit its unique power. But this is not a critique of Drout; every Tolkien scholar since The Road to Middle-earth is in Shippey’s debt. Drout also references and interprets the likes of Verlyn Fleiger, John Garth, Gergely Nagy, and Thomas Hillman. He’s responding to critics, not just the source texts, which is what any good critic should do. In fact, if you’re looking to get into Tolkien scholarship The Tower and the Ruin is a good place to begin that epic quest; Drout references a number of essays and critical works to take you ever deeper into the whys and hows of JRRT. 

But, this makes The Tower and the Ruin predominately a work for hardcore Tolkien-heads/scholar-types, and less so a broadly popular/mainstream accessible work. I thought it would be more of the latter; I’m not disappointed because I am a Tolkien nerd but I wanted even more of Drout’s experiences as a child escaping from the arguments of his near-divorced parents to his snow and ice castle of Nargothrond. And a pair of terribly sad personal losses, which I won’t spoil here but Drout describes with some haunting, beautiful writing. 

That we do get these personal experiences in The Tower and the Ruin is quite unique. Scholars don’t do this; academic writing is a unique beast, with its own norms and codes. Drout bravely puts his own ruins on display alongside the tower of Tolkien’s art, which makes me grateful we have The Tower and the Ruin. 

Read it.

Here’s an interview with Drout focused on The Tower and the Ruin you might want to check out.

Weird Studies podcast tackles The Fellowship of the Ring

Ever have a podcast hit your feed that you can’t click on fast enough?

A handful of podcasts have stayed in my rotation from the moment I first heard them. One of those is Weird Studies with hosts Phil Martel and J.F. Ford.

I don’t listen to every show; in fact I estimate I might skip half or more. I’m not interested in the Tarot, or the X-Files, or analyses of films I haven’t seen. But when it’s a topic that interests me, even obliquely, I’m in. Martel and Ford are college professors and possess not only a very high level of erudition and insight, but also a fine dialogue with one another. They have a level of glib I admire and a playfulness and earnestness I enjoy. I’ve listened to some dynamite shows on George Miller’s Mad Max movies, Algernon Blackwood, Blade Runner, and more.

So you can imagine my level of excitement when they dropped an episode on The Fellowship of the Ring.

This did not disappoint. Tolkien does not leap to mind when you hear the term “weird” … until you think of things like Old Man Willow, and trees full of anger, which is very much out of Blackwood’s “The Willows.” Or the Elves themselves, whose lives as immortals unbounded by time as we know it are utterly alien to men, or hobbits.

Here’s three cool things the hosts discussed I wanted to point out.

The Lord of the Rings is a postapocalyptic story. Of course it is! It’s so obvious I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. Probably because I tend to associate postapocalyptic with Thundarr the Barbarian, Mad Max or World War Z. But how else would you describe a fallen world that is Arda marred, damaged irrevocably by Morgoth, and suffered the drowning of Numenor by a vengeful Iluvatar? And whose characters stride through ruins of greater civilizations, and great Elven kingdoms that have been destroyed in war and whose remnants are steadily leaving for Valinor via the Gray Havens? One word might be, postapocalyptic.

It is deeply anti-modern and modern at the same time. By modern I mean of the literary movement. LOTR is a post WWI novel and of a time when old certitudes were stripped away by the devastation of the Great War. Its author was aware of everything that had come before him, and his choice to write with deliberate archaisms is a form of irony, a modernist technique. Tolkien was not some atavistic throwback but in tune with the times and a reader of the news and of “modern” fantasy of his era. Yet it’s also deeply unironic, intensely engaged with the world, and moral to its core. And anti-postmodern. 

The Lord of the Rings is applicable to every reader, and challenges you. Reading it is perilous, because it offers moral clarity and forces you to consider tough choices. Can you exhibit pity, and mercy, on your enemies, because you cannot see all ends? Would you have the will to cast a (metaphorical) One Ring into the fire? For example on the use of AI, which grants greater power but requires environmental degradation, and has well documented deleterious impacts on learning and human flourishing?

What is your ring?

***

I disagreed with a couple of the hosts’ points. I’ve read enough Tolkien, and enough about Tolkien, to have my own views. Which is what anyone should strive for who truly loves a subject enough to return to it again and again. They assert for example that the work is not nostalgic, I argue that it very much is, though I think we are operating off two different definitions of nostalgia. They also assert that Aragorn is not rooted, unlike Bilbo or Boromir, but I note he is descended from Elendil and the Kings of Numenor and of the Faithful, and therefore rooted (at least in bloodline) very deeply.

Regardless this is the type of dialogue I yearn from when I’m reading something like LOTR. There is a dynamite soliloquy with about seven minutes to go prompted by a reading of Galadriel’s gift to Gimli that left one of the hosts choked up; the book does the same to me.

Listen to the episode here. I can’t wait for forthcoming parts on The Two Towers and The Return of the King.

I’m also in the midst of reading The Tower and the Ruin by Michael D.C. Drout which has also been great. More on that later.

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