"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other." --H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
White Noise by Don DeLillo, a review
Sunday, August 3, 2025
Sword of the Gael by Andrew J. Offutt, a review
Sword of the Gael is the first in a series of six books from Offutt (and later co-writer Keith Taylor) of Cormac Mac Art, a quasi-historical/mythic High King of Ireland out of medieval Irish legend. Robert E. Howard wrote a handful of stories about the character collected posthumously in Tigers of the Sea, two of which were completed by S&S author Richard Tierney. It is from REH’s interpretation of Mac Art that we get Offutt’s series.
Got all that? If you want to learn more about Taylor's participation in the series check out this Q&A I did with him over on DMR Books.
Sword of the Gael opens with a couple fantastic chapters that hooked me out of the gate. A dragon-prowed ship bearing Cormac and his crew capsizes in a storm; many men drown but about a dozen or so including the mighty Dane Wulfhere the Skull-splitter cling to the wreckage and survive after they wash ashore on a rocky isle. Combing the barren spit for any signs of life or life-giving water they happen across a temple of anachronistic construction. Something not of Roman construction, nor even ancient Celtic, but of Atlantis. And it’s occupied by a hostile Viking crew.
Had Offutt ended there it would have made for an excellent short story. But after this well-done piece of Howardian world-building and weirdness we never see nor hear of Atlantis nor the temple again. A classic unused Chekov’s gun. Maybe we will in the second book, The Undying Wizard (1976) however this is not pitched as a series nor a book one. And after the great opening sequence the story begins to flag.
But hold your judgement for a moment.
Though it fails to live up to its opening promise there are many interesting elements in the reminder of the book that carried me through to the end. Offutt says in the introduction he read millions of words and took thousands of words of notes researching ancient Ireland, aka., Eirrin, and in the process fell in love with its history and legends. This is evident. The story feels historical and interesting in a way a lot of generic fantasy does not, clothing and food and Irish culture faithfully depicted. We get so little of Ireland/Eirrin as the setting of fantasy novels (Taylor’s Bard is a notable exception) that this was welcome, and moreover well-rendered. Here’s a bit of that rendering, from a monologue delivered from Cormac’s love interest, the Irish princess Samaire:
There are no former sons of Eirrin, Cormac of Connacht! It’s a spell there is on the fens and the bogs, and the cairn-topped hills of green Eirrin called Inisfail, and it envelops us all at birth like a cloak about the mind. We are forever under it—even those who so long and long ago moved across Magh Rian to Dalriada in Alba. Eirrin-born is Eirrin-bound, as if by stout cords and golden chains.”
This stirs my Irish blood. What do you expect with a last name like Murphy? More than a bit of Eirrin is in me (as well as Danish blood from my mother’s side).
Speaking of stirred/spilled blood, we also get a desperate pitched battle against Picts, and a fun battle against a pool dwelling giant squid. We get a reasonably well done and familiar story of a hero’s homecoming, back to the land that once declared him an exile. Cormac is the son of a murdered high king but cannot return to Eirrin because of a killing he committed years before at a great assembly, a sort of great fair and friendly gathering of competitive clan rivals where no quarrels are permitted (not unlike a Danish Thing). But the young and hot-headed Cormac is goaded to violence and flees his homeland for a dozen years.
Offutt isn't Howard but he’s a good storyteller in his own right. Sword of the Gael is earnest (Offutt even includes bits of his own verse); you cannot fake its enthusiasm. As a standalone novel it’s not entirely successful. But it’s an interesting failure, entertaining enough, and moreover instructive for writers working in the field. I’d give it a tentative recommendation to S&S fans.
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
A sorely needed, swordly-and-sorcerous week off
It's 5 o'clock somewhere ... |
We still have the cabin. It’s passed through a couple generations and today I’m a 1/5 owner. My extended family splits the cost of utilities, taxes, maintenance, etc, and we all put in for vacation weeks in the summer.
I’m currently in the midst of our week away. I didn’t realize how much I needed it until I saw the lake, and felt an unseen load lift from my shoulders. It had been too long.
My company has an unlimited PTO policy, which means you can take as much time off as you want (with approval). What this ideal scenario means in practice is often less time off. Guilt and the protestant work ethic are powerful forces. I hadn’t’ taken anything beyond a few scattered days off this year. But right now I’m enjoying a whole lot of little. Pontoon boat rides, Old Fashioneds, the mournful wails of loons.
I’ve put blogging on hold too, but this morning as I was sitting out on our deck listening to the wind sighing through the maples and ripple across the water I was inspired to write something I could reasonably shoehorn onto the blog.
Here’s a few swordly and sorcerous updates.
I enjoyed a visit from Tom Barber. Tom and I get together at least once a year but typically at his house. This year I invited him to the camp and took him out on a leisurely pontoon boat cruise. We got caught up on everything in his life, including the loss of his beloved partner Terri. Tough times for Tom but he seemed to leave in good spirits.
After a span of more than a decade I watched The Whole Wide World with my wife and daughter. I loved it; they liked it although they found themselves annoyed by Bob’s erratic behavior and creeped out with his too close relationship with Hester. This is a very well-done movie and it left me choked up, but I can see the issues it can cause for an outsider with no context for Howard’s life. For example, there is no mention of the extremely late payments from Weird Tales, which we now know greatly impacted his mental health. But you can't expect too much from a 106 minute film and there is some fabulous acting by Zellweger and D'Onofrio. I enjoyed this revisit of Cross Plains.
I’m reading Andrew J. Offutt's Sword of the Gaels and finding it fun. The first two chapters are absolutely fantastic, setting up the reader for a late Roman Empire/Viking Age historical … that suddenly takes an unexpected left turn into the weird. Cormac and his crew are shipwrecked on a seemingly deserted rocky isle and discover a fortress that seems out of another era, evoking deep ancestral memories of Atlantis and snake-men:
Unfortunately some 70 pages later I can feel a bit of sag that plagues so much long-form S&S. It seems hard to sustain swordplay and fast pacing and lack of character interiority over a few hundred pages. We’ll see what else Offutt can do with the rest of the book.
I read a draft of David C. Smith’s Cold Thrones and Arcane Arts. This is a new title in the works from Pulp Hero Press that offers analysis of what makes sword-and-sorcery fiction tick—what it is, and what it does well when it’s at its best. Interestingly Smith spends most of the page count on new S&S, authors like John Fultz and Schuyler Hernstrom and John Hocking and Howard Andrew Jones and many, many others besides. I suspect this will be well-received in the community although I did offer up a few ideas for expansion and revision. Some inspired stuff here.
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Lakelife! |
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
I am Werewolf Boy
After a span of 40-odd years I obtained and re-read Monster Tales, and once again was Werewolf Boy.
This proved to be a fun collection, obviously written for adolescents though it certainly has sharp edges. Every protagonist is a kid and few have happy endings. The 70s “hit different” man.
I enjoyed some of the stories more than others. The standouts included “Torchbearer” and “The Call of the Grave.” “Wendigo’s Child” by horror veteran Thomas Monteleone was pretty good too, if a bit telegraphed.
I also remembered “The Vrkolak” though I remembered it being better. It reads like a PG version of Friday of 13th with Jason swapped out for a giant toad, and murder replaced by scaring a nasty camp counselor half to death.
But the story that most captured my imagination was Nic Andersson’s “Werewolf Boy”, both now and then. I am plagued with a lousy memory but somehow I recalled most of the beats. I think what makes it memorable was my identification with the protagonist, Stefan, a young boy who is treated with a cruelty that stays with you.
(spoiler alert coming)
The story is set long ago in medieval Europe. Stefan is caught out in the woods coming home at night with a puppy. A sadistic local baron is out hunting with his cruel hounds Arn and Bern and tree the young boy. As he reaches for a branch Stefan drops his helpfless pup to the ground. And watches in horror as the hounds tear it to shreds.
To add injury to insult, the baron calls Stefan down, strikes him cruelly across the face with his whip, and rides off laughing.
That’s some callous shit and a shock for anyone to read, but especially when you’re eight years old or so.
But vengeance is Stefans. He encounters a hideous old witch in the woods (she’s missing her nose, which we find out is also the baron’s doing), and asks if she’ll cast a spell to grant him revenge. She does, but not without great cost. The spell turns the boy into a werewolf—and also costs him his soul.
Memory is not just a recall of facts, but also of feelings, emotions. It can be unlocked by a certain smell, a sound—or a story. It can even make you... transform.
As an adult, I found myself shape-shifting, into 10 year-old me. I remembered being shocked by the baron’s cruelty, then (and now). I remembered reveling in Stefan’s vengeance, and thinking how cool it would be if I could become a werewolf, and take care of a few childhood problems of my own.“Werewolf Boy” is an effective little tale and I was pleased to re-read it. And equally pleased to learn that it had the same effect on at least a couple other readers. While searching for details about the author I came across a couple threads where folks who had also read the story long ago were asking if anyone could recall it from its details.
Evidently this story holds a stranger power over more people than just myself.
Anyway, I'm glad I finally have a copy of Monster Tales, and equally pleased to become a werewolf boy once more.
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell; a review
“Ultimately, the last deed has to be done by yourself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down … Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing.”
“The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. And that is what T.S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land … the Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.”
Once we have found ourselves, we help others. That completes the circle. Perceval recovers the Grail only after he formulates the question to the wounded Fisher King: “What ails thee?”
Monday, June 23, 2025
A little piece of Howard Days wends its way home: God's Blade
One of those pieces made its way back home to Massachusetts where I call home. God's Blade: A Sketchbook by Michael Rollins. Editor Jason Hardy put together this modest but terrific little handmade book and asked me to write a short introductory essay. Which I was proud to do, for a gratis copy. See "Solomon Kane Against Injustice."
The book features some fine poetry by Hardy, Charles Gramlich, Michael Rollins, and Chris L. Adams. At first glance I'm struck by the outstanding artwork by Rollins. Very unique style, dark, lonely, Puritanical in feel. Kane's visage is cast into shadow, suitable for this somewhat complex figure. In the preface to the book Rollins says his art was inspired by the stark trees native to his hometown of Cumbria, England. He notes that when composing these pieces he "rarely began with Solomon, rather placing him in the landscape, which I think accentuated the feeling of his almost hopeless fight against the darkness around him."
Well done.
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
I've finally got it: Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves & Things
Pumped for this delivery. |
Until now.
You may recall my prior posts about it here on the blog. Here's the first, A scare from the deep mists of time: Monster Tales, from July 2009. At the time I could not even remember the name of the book, only a few vivid details. A happy Google search struck paydirt. I wrote at the time:
Were you ever seized by the intoxicating memory of reading a much-loved book as a child, only to despair that you'd never remember the title? This happened to me today. From some subterranean depths in my brain came the tale of a boy who exacts revenge on his family's killers by voluntarily taking on the form of a werewolf. I remembered it being a short story contained in a red hardcover book, filled with startling black-and-white illustrations. I remember reading it over and over again in my elementary school library in the 1970s. But that was the extent of my recollection.
I plugged in "werewolf stories for children" and "horror anthologies for children and 1970s" into Google to see what would come up... and eventually came across this marvelous link, courtesy of The Haunted Closet: http://the-haunted-closet.blogspot.com/2008/10/monster-tales-vampires-werewolves.html.
Twelve years later I revisited Monster Tales in a post for the blog of Goodman Games/Tales from the Magician's Skull, Brian Murphy's Gateways to Sword-and-Sorcery. Monster Tales was one of my gateway drugs to S&S, and a potent one. As I wrote in that 2021 blog post:
In hindsight I can see how I was being inevitably steered toward sword-and-sorcery by consuming its various components; historical elements, grit and danger, monsters, tough and resourceful heroes, horror, and the weird. I am grateful to have had access to books that moved me, exposed me to grim struggle, even disturbed me. Here’s a PSA for parents of young children: A few bad dreams are OK if the reward is making a lifelong reader.
Within a year or so of consuming the titles in this list I would discover Robert E. Howard in the pages of The Savage of Sword of Conan, and my path was fixed. But I have these gateway books to thank for getting me started down that savage trail.
Sixteen years later, I now have a copy of my own.
I haven't been looking with any regularity. No ebay or Google alerts. Just the occasional search... and blanching at the typical $80-100 asking price (I've seen it listed for as much as $120. WTF). But a couple weeks ago I popped it into ebay and saw a copy listed by Thrift Books for $33. Immediately bought it. Today it arrived in the mail, in surprisingly excellent shape.
With patience, you can still get a decent deal. BTW I also tracked down a copy of Fire-Hunter.
Looking forward to a re-read for the first time in a VERY long time.
Tell me these aren't some creepy images for a kid... |
Sunday, June 15, 2025
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, a review
Lady Gaga would appreciate this romance.... |
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Three things
Walk with me... |
I just finished re-reading The Long Walk after a long walk of my own, years and years of life since my last reading decades ago. Some thoughts.
We get no details on why the Walk came to be, just a couple scant suggestions. Like this: “In the old days, before the Change and the Squads, when there were still millionaires, they used to set up foundations and build libraries and all that good shit.” There is a reference to a war fought against a nuclear-armed Germany in 1953. So it’s not set in an apocalyptic future but some alternate history, perhaps one in which Germany develops an atomic weapon before 1945 and greatly extended the second world war. The result is a terrible totalitarian 20th century where the country is so lost and the future so bereft of hope that it turns to horrible death-fueled game shows to forget.
We don’t know, and I like it this way. Given the many chapter epigraph references to the Price is Right, prize fighting, and the Ten-Thousand Dollar Pyramid, I’m sure King was inspired by the game show craze sweeping the nation in the 1970s.
Things haven’t changed all that much. We all seem to be walking around in a fog, distracted just enough by digital spectacle to ignore the real horrors going on around us, as well as our own impending deaths. Just scroll an Instagram feed.
The Long Walk is an extended metaphor on dying. We’re all on the same Walk, two minutes from a ticket out (Walkers who slow their pace get three warnings before they are shot dead). That brief space tracks somewhat closely to what happens when you stop breathing. We’re separated from the other side by a thin margin. So we walk, and everyone around us drops off, one by one, until its our turn.
I know the literal, physical territory of this Walk, I was just on it, yesterday, when my wife and I had a nice dinner in Portsmouth, NH. The Walk starts in Maine, crosses into New Hampshire, and a skeletal handful make it all the way to my home state of Massachusetts. Weird, wild. Between King and H.P. Lovecraft New England takes a back seat to no other region of the United States when it comes to horror.
I really do enjoy King, in particular his old stuff. Say what you want about his long-windedness, his occasional closure whiffs and bad endings, and his lack of philosophical depth (King himself describes his work as the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger). I’d be hard-pressed to think of another writer who can so sweep you up into a story and hold you spellbound until the end. That’s true talent.
Thing 2
I’ve seen a few places—messageboards, articles, reddit threads—refer to the sword-and-sorcery definition I offered in Flame and Crimson as “seven points,” which makes it seem like a cumbersome checklist that must be met.
This is not correct, because it’s not what I wrote.
What I wrote was, sword-and-sorcery often contains these handful of elements; it does not need all of them nor any precise proportion. But shorn of any it’s hard to picture anyone calling said story S&S.
I kind of like this, it seems to me flexible and elegant, forgiving but not without boundaries. A precise definition of S&S is not really possible, IMO. When you look at how the subgenre evolved it coalesced over three decades and in conversations with authors and a fan community. It has changed and will continue to evolve. So instead of a precise definition I offered up a constellation of tropes. With the caveat that I am just a guy and YMMV.
See some of my other musings here.
But for some reason this seems to be a continued source of confusion and occasionally complaint. Some feel the need to simplify the definition, boil and boil down like maple syrup in some type of purity contest, until the definition of S&S might fit on the head of a pin.
If you must insist…I can’t boil it down to one word but I’ll give you two: Pulp Fantasy.
I am this target audience. |
Thing 3
I mentioned Instagram further up; yesterday that platform triangulated me with precision, locked in with unerring heat detecting radar, launched its missile, and hit me with a dead-on bullseye.
The missile: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap. Signed by director Rob Reiner.
How did I not know this existed? The ad hit my feed. I preordered.
The takeaway: Algorithms work, and I too can be reeled in like a fish on a line.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck, a review
“Then Arthur learned, as all leaders are astonished to learn, that peace, not war, is the destroyer of men; tranquility rather than danger the mother of cowardice, and not need but plenty brings apprehension and unease. Finally he found that the longed-for peace, so bitterly achieved, created more bitterness than ever did the anguish of achieving it.”
“In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins. I have told you your certain future, my lord, but knowing will not change it by a hair. When the time comes, your feeling will conduct you to your fate.”
A black rage shook Sir Launcelot, drew his lips snarling from his teeth. His right hand struck like a snake at his sword hilt and half the silver blade slipped from the scabbard. Lyonel felt the wind of his death blow on his cheek.Then, in one man he saw a combat more savage than ever he had seen between two, saw wounds given and received and a heart riven to bursting. And he saw victory, too, the death of rage and the sick triumph of Sir Launcelot, the sweat-ringed, fevered eyes hooked like a hawk’s, the right arm leashed and muzzled while the blade crept back to its kennel.
Lancelot and Guinevere. |
Sir Lyonel knew that this sleeping knight would charge to his known defeat with neither hesitation nor despair and finally would accept his death with courtesy and grace as though it were a prize. And suddenly Sir Lyonel knew why Lancelot would gallop down the centuries, spear in rest, gathering men’s hearts on his lance head like tilting rings. He chose his side and it was Lancelot’s.
“Granite so hard that it will smash a hammer can be worn away by little grains of moving sand. And a heart that will not break under the great blows of fate can be eroded by the nibbling of numbers, the creeping of days, the numbing treachery of littleness, of important littleness. I could fight men but I was defeated by marching numbers on a page.”
A perilous quest... |
And it can be shown and it will be shown that the myth of Arthur continues even into the present day and is an inherent part of the so-called “Western” with which television is filled at the present time—same characters, same methods, same stories, only slightly different weapons and certainly a different topography. But if you change Indians or outlaws for Saxons and Picts and Danes, you have exactly the same story. You have the cult of the horse, the cult of the knight.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Robert E. Howard, The Life and Times of a Texas Author: A review
- Oliver does a fine job setting up Howard’s time and place—the actual town of Cross Plains. It offers rich detail of his family history/parents and settlings in the United States.
- There is some great material here on Howard the poet—his love of verse, his early sales, and being one of the most prolific poets in WT history. Howard’s poetry even received rare praise from mercurial Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Fans often forget this or overlook his wonderful poems.
- New to me; Howard’s deliberate construction and cultivation of an Irish identify (pp. 197-198); I knew about his strong Gaelic interests but not how far he adopted them into his own life—singing old Irish songs, Gaelicizing his middle name, etc.
- His youthful, beer-swilling trips with Smith and Vinson as detailed in the Junto (p. 215), told here evocatively and dude-bro awesome by Oliver.
- Oliver does a nice job introducing “The Shadow Kingdom” and its important place as the origin of sword-and-sorcery but also one of Howard’s most poetic and vivid stories, as well as how popular it was with WT readers and editors (my ego is pleased to find myself cited here, and elsewhere, in the work—pp. 245-246).
- Howard’s fatiguing medical condition is covered here with more research, care and nuance than DVD.
- There are several new pics of REH I had not seen before. This was a very pleasant surprise.
- We get some well-placed details on the Great Depression, focused on Cross Plains and the closure of its two banks in 1931 (p. 308).
- Howard’s love of westerns and the role of the frontier in his books. Although he wrote straight two-fisted westerns he also wrote some weird westerns, a genre for which he is considered the founder (p. 315)
- I enjoyed the detail on Margaret Brundage’s artistic process. A prolific cover artist for Weird Tales, she would actually read the stories, pick the scenes that seemed most salacious/sexy, draw them using pastel chalk on canvas, and tack the image to a wooden frame before dropping them off at the WT office (p. 338).
- Black Mask, Dashiell Hammett and the birth of hard-boiled detective, meting out tough personal justice outside the law. Howard wrote his own hard-boiled detective stories but never loved the form and it was his least successful literary foray (p. 350).
- Howard getting half-checks from a struggling Weird Tales before these too ceased due to the magazine’s financial woes (p. 412). If I had read before that WT was cutting Howard half-checks with the promise to pay the rest later if so I had forgotten this detail.
- Howard’s love for the Texas landscape and its barbarian ethos, which likely would have been his next literary venture (p. 436).
- Oliver’s speculation that Hester’s death provided the occasion for Howard’s suicide and was not necessarily the inciting incident; I agree, though would add it was the result of an irreconcilable clash of values (p. 455).
- Details about a will Howard wrote near the end of his life which reportedly bequeathed all his worldly possessions to friend Lindsey Tyson. And destruction of said will. Oliver says this may have been gossip, not fact.
- A nice summation of Howard’s character by Price and his circle of friends and WT collaborators, post-suicide. This was sad, especially the letters of remembrances and posthumous praise to the Eyrie from heartbroken WT readers (p. 466).
Friday, April 11, 2025
The Knight stands against nihilism
Excellent book... unfortunate cover blurb. |
“It is honor, Able. A knight is a man who lives honorably and dies honorably, because he cares more for his honor than for his life. If his honor requires him to fight, he fights. He doesn’t count his foes or measure their strength, because those things don’t matter. They don’t affect his decision.”
The trees and the wind were so still then that I felt like the whole world was listening to him.
“In the same way, he acts honorably toward others, even when they do not act honorably toward him. His word is good, no matter to whom he gives it.”
--Gene Wolfe, The Knight
Character matters. There is truth in the world of ideas.
I was listening to a podcast the other day. One of the guests--an author, self-described philosopher, and entrepreneur—concluded a view of the world I find abhorrent: Objective truth does not exist, values are manufactured and none better than others, and the purpose of life is maximizing personal happiness.
I’m leaving this dude’s name out because I don’t know him, and I’m attacking the idea, not the individual. But I do wonder: How do you end up in your mid-50s endorsing nihilism? Cheerily admitting there are no such things as absolute moral values … which means that everything is in theory permitted? It’s a train of thought that leaves dragons hoarding wealth they’ve ruthlessly abstracted from others, swelled with hubris, unable to see that their gold is derived from the thankless labor of uncountable generations who built civilization, created the human project from squalor, and allow for the existence of privileged coastal millionaire elites.
Few openly admit to nihilism, but many act that way. “I’ll extract wealth from the less fortunate, because no one is watching. And after all, it’s technically legal and I can get away with it.”
We each have the freedom to construct our own meaning and live our own lives as we see fit … except when that freedom infringes on or destroys other’s lives. The strong are obligated to lift up the sick, weak, and needy. Because it’s honorable to do so. And I would argue, an obligation that is an objective truth of the human condition. How long does this last if everyone behaves like a selfish douche canoe?
Imagine if Able of the High Heart was a nihilist? It would make a much different book than Gene Wolfe’s The Knight.
The story centers around a small boy who enters through a portal from our world to Mythgarthr, a world of high fantasy, gods, magic, monsters… and stouthearted knights. After an encounter with an elflike being, Disiri the Mossmaiden, Able rapidly grows into a powerful man and embarks on a journey into knighthood.
This sudden transformation means we get a uniquely compressed character arc. Able goes from an adolescent experiencing the vicissitudes of life, to young man called to perform duties to others, to grown man called to service to his own heart and conscience. From learning from others to teaching others the way. As we all should, objectively. Because if we don’t do this, we’ll leave the next generation in shambles. Which should concern you unless you’re a nihilist and think that death and life are one and the same.
Of course, we’re never going to be perfect. We throw away much for pleasure. Reject responsibility to others because it doesn’t maximize our momentary well-being. As Able does with the vixen of the woods. This is part of growing up. I think we all have to indulge in pleasures of the flesh.
But at some point adults realize it’s time to fight the dragon.
As noted recently I struggle with Wolfe. I find him needlessly opaque and allusive, at times impenetrable. Not so much with The Knight, which I enjoyed, if not unreservedly. Even here Wolfe does not make the journey easy for the reader. The story is told in an epistolary/letters from Mythgarthr to modern earth style which I don’t love, which leaves important sequences glossed over or relegated to the background. Able often for example will completely gloss over a battle, and only later do we realize the extent of his heroism through offhand remarks from observers after the fact.
… but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Knights with a code of honor don’t crow about their accomplishments. They don’t virtue signal on Instagram and sell self-help books as they lead deeply insulated, selfish lives. That would be … dishonorable.
There’s much other great stuff in here that make the The Knight a memorable journey. Wolfe-ian symbols I’m quite certain I failed to grasp. When Able plunges three times into a deep pool, beyond air and endurance, to retrieve his armor and sword, and hears the horns of Aelfrice/elfland, we feel a mythic power we cannot articulate, literally and metaphorically deep. But one lesson we can be sure of: Unless you confront the metaphorical dragon it becomes terribly real.
I’m sure I will tackle The Wizard after a palate cleanser. For now something a bit lighter is in order.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
The Ring of the Nibelung/Roy Thomas and Gil Kane
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The Ring is mine! |
But I haven’t ever seen the opera nor read a full literary treatment of the work. And was overdue to scratch this niggling itch … but wanted to have some fun, with a low bar to entry. And so, I scooped up a treatment I did not know existed until quite recently: Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, the complete graphic novel as adapted by the great Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, with Jim Woodring.
This was enjoyable. I plowed through it in just a few hours over a few nights. It’s a product of DC Comics, released in 1991, and checks in at a relatively hefty 191 pages. It includes some welcome introductory material, including a foreword introducing the biography and talents of the authors, and an introduction to Wagner’s opera cycle by Brian Kellow of Opera News.
The Ring of the Nibelung is a somewhat complex story, with four acts/operas (Wagner prefers music dramas) spanning long periods of time, told through different sets of characters ranging from gods, giants, and dwarves to the heroic albeit mortal race of humans known as Nibelungs. It starts with the creation of the world, and ends with its downfall at Ragnarok. The centerpiece is the story of Siegfried, a mortal hero sent to slay a dragon, reclaim the gods' stolen gold and rescue the Valkyrie Brunnhilde. These stories are bound together by a golden ring that grants its wearer dominion over the world. Yes, there are some Tolkien parallels here, which JRRT denies and to be fair he likely drew on Wagner’s common influences, not the operas. But we’ve got a greedy dragon hoarding wealth, a precious ring fought over by two brothers (one of whom kills the other to take it for himself), a broken sword reforged, and many other familiar elements.
Overall it's a gorgeous, epic, deeply thematic story well told by Thomas—and as you’d expect from his pen, it moves. Kane’s artwork is marvelous, beautiful, comic booky and muscular but not garish. The men are jacked and the women beautiful. Rather than me attempt to word-paint here are some of the panels:
What does it all mean? There’s a lot to dig into, too much for me after one rapid reading of an adaptation in graphic novel form. But The Ring is undoubtedly a Great Story, and like all great stories contains truth. I’m quite fond of Sir Roger Scruton’s “Reflections on The Ring of the Nibelung,” which he describes as a story for “modern people, for whom the path to heroism is overgrown.”
From that essay:
Wagner’s story of gods and heroes, of giants and dwarfs, is not a fairy tale. It is addressed to modern people, who have lost the ways of enchantment, and for whom the path to heroism is overgrown. It is a story in which law and love, power and property are all caught up in a life and death struggle between the forces that govern the human soul.
Love without power will not endure, and power without law will always erode the claims of love. We live this paradox, and without the gods to maintain the moral order the burden of it falls entirely on our shoulders.
Gods come and go; but they last as long as we make room for them, and we make room for them through sacrifice. The gods come about because we idealize our passions, and it is by accepting the need for sacrifice on behalf of another that our lives acquire a meaning. Seeing things that way we recognize that we are not condemned to mortality but consecrated to it. Such, in the end, was Wagner’s message. Yes, the gods must die, and we ourselves must assume their burdens. But we inherit their aspirations too: freedom, personality, love, and law. There is no way in which we can achieve those great goods through politics, which, if we put too much faith in it, will inevitably degenerate into the kind of totalitarian power enjoyed by the dwarf Alberich. But we can create these things in ourselves, and we do this when we recognize the sacred character of our joys and sufferings, and resolve to be true to them.
For more reading and listening, check these out:
Reflections on “The Ring of the Nibelung”
Wagner Götterdämmerung - Siegfried's death and Funeral march Klaus Tennstedt London Philharmonic