The Merman’s Children by Poul Anderson: A review

Anderson must have been pissed at the spelling of "Faery"

Did magic exist, once upon a time? Did the creatures of Faerie roam the deep woods, inhabit dark and lonely mountains, or swim beneath the ocean waves?

And if so, why did magic leave the world?

This is the premise of The Merman’s Children. I just wrapped up Poul Anderson’s 1979 novel last night, and my review is decidedly mixed.

To start: I’m a big Anderson fan. The Broken Sword resides somewhere in my favorite novels of all time. Not just fantasy novels, but novels period. Hrolf Kraki’s Saga is incredible as well, and don’t sleep on War of the Gods or his short stories from “The Tale of Hauk” to Cappen Varra. All highly recommended.

The Merman’s Children does not rise to these heights. It is far less savage than The Broken Sword though that’s no sleight; Vietnam in 1965 was less savage. But a meandering plot that lacks a propulsive narrative ultimately drags it down below his other fantasy efforts, to something of mediocre territory.

It’s mediocre Anderson … which still makes The Merman’s Children better than a lot of books you’ll read.

What’s to recommend? We get some pulse-heightening encounters with fearful and unique monsters, some well-done late medieval northern European atmosphere, and most of all an interesting examination of the question I posed to start this review:

Why do the myths of Faerie persist? Were mermen just a sailors’ fancy? Or might they have been real?

Anderson posits they were real, and Christianity ultimately drove them out. Anderson’s sympathies are clearly with faerie. Men are prejudiced, judgement, and inflexible, constantly double-crossing and betraying the mer-people who want only to live and enjoy all of the pleasures of this world. This becomes doubly interesting if you view the mer-folk as metaphor for pre-Christian pagans, the Tuatha Dé Danann and the children of Odin crushed beneath the merciless heel of the followers of the one god. Says the merman king Vanimen: "I who've hunted narwhals under the boreal ice and had lemans that were like northlights ... no, I'll not trade that for your thin eternity." 

This concept been done before, by other authors and even Anderson himself (the coming of the “White Christ” in The Broken Sword), but never so directly as he does here. There is a great tension in the book between men and faerie. As beings made in the image of God the former are ostensibly bound for the paradise of a heavenly afterlife, and so priortize modesty and sacrifice in this world in order to ensure their passage to the next (though they often fail—humans suck). In contrast the mermen have no souls, so this world is their paradise, and they drink it all in. Despite its considerable perils they roam the seas with abandon and indolence. They are quite lusty, sleeping with everyone including other races and even brother and sister. They are also extremely long-lived, near immortal though they can be slain by violence. This makes them feel sufficiently otherworldly, not just comely human-like beings with webbed hands and feet wielding tridents.

Though not as otherworldly as I’d like. Anderson’s mermen are in my opinion not strange enough; their undersea realm falls short of the enchanted lands of The King of Elfland’s Daughter or the perilous realms of Middle-Earth. To be fair their world lies within our world, and so it should feel more familiar. And it does. You can feel the old world giving way to new, and mourn the creatures of faerie fading into legend. Many submit to baptism and forget their past, and are bred out of existence. Anderson gives us a wonderful lament of the passing of the era in the song of the whales, whose mournful language the mermen understand: 

The seasons come and the seasons go,

From the depths above to the depths below,

And time will crumble our pride and grief

As the waves wear even the hardest reef.

The Broken Sword bears none of Tolkien's influence (it could not; both were published in 1954). Anderson was certainly deeply read of the wellspring myths and like JRRT drew on those, not secondary sources. But, by the time of The Merman’s Children he had certainly read The Lord of the Rings and the novel feels quite Tolkienian, even though it is based on the Danish ballad, “Agnete og Havmanden (Agnete and the Merman)." Like Anderson Tolkien greatly admired the pagan heroes of old, and wondered at their ultimate fate, unbaptized and unshriven and therefore presumably doomed to perish forever. But maybe not… there are some gleams of hope in the novel. I won’t spoil the ending but the story ends on a poignant note familiar to readers of LOTR.

Portions of The Mermen's Children appeared in Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords series and I feel like that is part of its problem. It is a series of interesting scenes and concepts patched together with a narrative too gauzy to support a 260 page novel. The plot is quite basic: A priest performs an exorcism on the mermen’s undersea kingdom causing them to flee for new lands in the New World. When the mermen splinter and the narrative splits, neither group is given sufficient attention and we lose urgency and interest. Or at least I did.

A couple other notes.

I sometimes get asked about borderline novels and whether they fit in my preferred subgenre. Is The Merman’s Children S&S? I don’t find a whole lot of use in that question, but I’d say, no. Its cast of characters, high fantasy feel, multi-year narrative, and relative lack of action pushes it in the category of general fantasy. But it does have some S&S DNA in it (the word “thews” is used at least twice, for those keeping score at home). A chapter like “The Tupilak,” in isolation, is S&S, which makes it a fit for Flashing Swords, but as a novel it probably isn’t.

The late Howard Andrew Jones thought S&S was all about pacing; The Merman’s Children takes its time building a world, and its emphasis is on theme, not action. This is not to say S&S can’t have theme; Howard’s Conan stories had an underlying theme of civilization vs. barbarism. But never at expense of action.

I have to mention the cool run-in with a Vodianoi, an underwater version of an umber hulk. I can’t be sure if this is the chief inspiration for the Dungeons and Dragons monster but it seems possible.  Gary Gygax was inspired to use teh green skinned regenerating trolls and plucked the paladin character class from the pages of Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions. There's also a great encounter with a kraken.

The sexual violence in the novel probably warrants a reader beware message.