Piecing together Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword

My review/revisit/recap of/love letter to Anderson's magnificent 1954 novel is up on the blog of Tales from the Magician's Skull. Check it out here.

I wrote this without re-reading the book, but writing it prompted me to pick up The Broken Sword once more and go to war against Trollheim. It's as good as I remembered; I don't feel betrayed by my considerable nostalgia.

TftMS has a 1,000 word cap which I sometimes stray over a little but is nevertheless challenging to write within. I allude to some things in my review that are deserving of a standalone essay. Like Skafloc/Valgard being two halves of a broken sword. Tyrfing feels to me like a symbol of unleashed weaponry best left on the scientists' notebook. I can't help but wonder if Anderson felt the shadow the mushroom cloud, writing as he did in 1953-54. "Yet this is the curse on it: that every time it is drawn it must drink blood, and in the end, somehow, it will be the bane of him who wields it."

We have a potential end to unending conflict in the teachings of the new White Christ. "Was the White Christ of whom she had told a little not right in saying that wrongs only led to more wrongs and thus at last to Ragnarok; that the time was overpast when pride and vengefulness give way to love and forgiveness, which were not unmanly but in truth the hardest things a man could undertake?"

Alas we have forgotten the lesson. No one turns the other cheek, but strikes back with harder force. And so it escalates.

I love this line too; we can meet Ragnarok with bravery at least:

"None can escape his weird; but none other can take from him the heart wherewith he meets it."

Six Sought Adventure: A Half-Dozen Swords And Sorcery Short Stories Worth Your Summer Reading Time

I’ve always enjoyed fantasy fiction in the short form. In an age when a typical series stretches seven-plus doorstopper sized volumes without the guarantee of an actual ending, it’s refreshing to take a quick dip into the pool of the fantastic rather than committing to a read akin to a trans-Atlantic journey in the age of sail.

 If you are new to the heroic fantasy/swords and sorcery genres the following six stories are fine stepping stones for further exploration, at least in my opinion. I’ve deliberately chosen stories written by authors not named Howard or Leiber; REH and Fritz are the best these genres have ever produced but there’s already plenty of ink spilled about them. I obviously have nothing but praise for “Worms of the Earth” or “Bazaar of the Bizarre” but I’m sure most of Black Gate's readers have very likely already read these stories, so I present these six instead.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

The Demon of Scattery, a review

I’ve had the Poul Anderson/Mildred Downey Broxon collaboration The Demon of Scattery (1979) sitting on my bookshelf for ages, and this past weekend I was finally able to take it down, dust it off, and breeze through its lushly illustrated 207 pages in a few hours. It wasn’t really what I was expecting, both in a good and a not so good way.

I think I hesitated reading it all these years because of its cover. It features a sorceress summoning up a snake-demon, though not the kind of sorceress I prefer—there’s far too much Marion Zimmer Bradley and not enough Weird Tales in her attire (yeah, I’m kind of shallow like that. And I have been known to judge a book by its cover).

I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge the book, of course, as the tale does not contain the scene depicted at right. Instead, what you get is a historical fiction-infused fantasy tale set on Scattery Island, a real place off the coast of Ireland. Uninhabited today, it once was home to a monastery that was subject to a few Viking raids in the ninth and 10th century. According to historical notes at the back of the book, the Vikings raided the monastery in 816 and 835 AD but then did not return to it for more than 100 years, despite the fact that Scattery Island was a strategic location for launching raids on the mainland. Scattery was also said to be home to a monster named Cata that once prowled its coastline, which may have been the reason the Vikings later gave it a wide berth. In short, the historical record contains plenty of raw elements for the makings of a fine tale.

The Broken Sword, an (audio) review

Note: This post also appears on SFFaudio.com.

The Viking Age of England offers fertile ground for storytelling. It was a time of strong men, beautiful fair-haired women, and bloody raids for plunder. Christianity was the new religion on the block, striving to make inroads on the old pagan beliefs—and often at the point of a sword. Gods were said to mingle with men and the world lay poised on the edge of Ragnarok, a final battle and fiery conflagration that would end the world.

Poul Anderson drew on the best of this wild and poetic age, stirred it up with myth and fantasy, and the result was his 1954 novel The Broken Sword. Its like has rarely been matched in the annals of fantasy literature.

I’ve read The Broken Sword previously and knew what a wonderful book it was, but TV and film actor Bronson Pinchot’s narration in this new Blackstone Audio, Inc. production added a new dimension to the novel. I had first heard Pinchot in a reading of Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon. While he was wonderful there he ups his game in The Broken Sword, reading with a spite and fury in his voice that perfectly matches the book’s unrelenting grimness and battle fury. Pinchot breathes life into beautiful maidens and proud warriors, deep-throated trolls, and ancient elven warrior-kings whose voices are like winds sighing through treeless leaves.

Oddly enough there is exactly one sound effect in the entire recording—an echo effect used to convey the cold, cruel laughter of Odin—and it’s on the final disc. It was cool but rather jarring, considering it’s on the last disc and there’s no precursor. But on to the tale.

In The Broken Sword the land of Faerie exists alongside the lands of men, invisible save to those with the witch sight. Faerie is a land of bright castles and achingly lovely elves, of the gods of Odin and Tyr, the giants of Jotunheim, black-eyed trolls, and other, fouler monsters.

Pride and ambition touches off the events of The Broken Sword. Orm the Strong is the fifth son of Ketil Asmundsson and thus low in the totem pole of inheritance. Rather than accept a smaller share of wealth Orm seeks his own fortune by going a–viking. On one of his raids he kills a husband and his sons, burning their hall to the ground. The man’s mother, a witch, escapes and swears revenge: She bestows a curse that Orm’s eldest son will be fostered beyond the world of men, while he in turn will foster a wolf that will one day rend him.

The elf-earl Imric travels to the lands of men and sets the witch’s curse in motion. Imric takes Orm’s unbaptized infant son Skafloc and replaces him with Valgard, a changeling, whom Imric himself has fathered by raping a captive troll woman. Valgard’s dark ancestry is evident when he bites his unknowing mother’s breast and grows restless and violent in Orm’s care. Skafloc, raised among the elves, is fair haired and fair of spirit, though equally mighty and otherwise a mirror image of his dark changeling “brother.”

After he discovers his true half troll, half-elf heritage, Valgard embarks on a mission of revenge, killing several members of his foster family. Aided with an army of trolls he then launches a war of annihilation on the elven lands of Alfheim. Skafloc and the elves are beaten back by the initial assaults and all seems lost. Only by going on a quest to reforge a powerful ancient weapon—the eponymous broken sword, a weapon of terrible demonic power that demands blood each time it is drawn and ultimately turns on its wielder—can Skafloc save Alfheim and avenge his family.

Though The Broken Sword seems largely forgotten these days it remains influential. The elf Imric for example reveals the clear stylistic (and thematic) influence The Broken Sword had on subsequent authors like Michael Moorcock. Moorcock (a big fan of the book, who once wrote that The Broken Sword “knocked The Lord of the Rings into a cocked hat”) based his Melniboneans heavily on Anderson’s elves. Imric is (largely) Elric of Melnibone, not only in similarity of name, but in appearance and even character. Anderson’s Elves are darker than those in The Lord of the Rings (though I would point out that Tolkien’s elves closely resembled Anderson’s in his source material; see the prideful warrior Feanor from The Silmarillion). They are haughty, prideful, shun the sunlight, and if not malicious are certainly mischievous. These traits have their roots in Norse myth, which both Tolkien and Anderson drew upon.

Everything about the book is wonderfully northern. Characters mingle soaring verse with common speech in conversation. Anderson weaves old northern vocabulary into the tale, evocative words like “Fetch,” “Fey,” and “Weird” (the latter is a fate from which no man escapes), which lend The Broken Sword a hard northern ethos to match its flavor. In this pagan hierarchy the Norns are higher than the towering Jotuns or even the Aesir. Even the gods will die in the fires of Ragnarok at their appointed time. That grimness bleeds through into The Broken Sword as its protagonists are slowly crushed beneath the merciless wheel of fate.

"Throw not your life away for a lost love," pleaded Mananaan. "You are young yet."

"All men are born fey," said Skafloc, and there the matter stood.

This is hard stuff and an unforgiving outlook on life, though not incompatible with that other somewhat famous work that debuted in 1954—Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. No matter what Moorcock—he of the tin ear when it comes to Tolkien analysis—may tell you.

The writing in The Broken Sword is top-notch, really and truly great stuff. A small sample of dialogue uttered by the troll-woman Gora:

“The world is flesh dissolving off a dead skull,” mumbled the troll-woman. She clanked her chain and lay back, shuddering. “Birth is but the breeding of maggots in the crumbling flesh. Already the skull’s teeth leer forth and black crows have left its eye sockets empty. Soon a barren wind will blow through its bare white bones.”



One final, important note about the Blackstone recording: The text is Anderson’s original from the 1954 version of the book, which Anderson updated in 1971 for republication in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. This is not immediately apparent from the description on the Blackstone website. I’ve only read the 1971 version, so for those who haven’t had the chance to experience The Broken Sword in its earliest and rawest incarnation you now have another chance.

In the grip of “The Northern Thing:” My top 10 northern inspired stories

Let us die in the doing of deeds for his sake;
let fright itself run afraid from our shouts;
let weapons measure the warrior’s worth.
Though life is lost, one thing will outlive us:memory sinks not beneath the mould.
Till the Weird of the World stands unforgotten,high under heaven, the hero’s name.

–from Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, Poul Anderson


If I had to choose a favorite sub-genre of fantasy literature it would be those writings showing the clear influence of ancient Northern mythology. Fantasy critic Lin Carter once described a group of writers including the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien, Poul Anderson, and William Morris as being possessed by “The Northern Thing”; I too am firmly in that Icelandic grip of iron. There’s just something about tales of pagan heroes possessed of grim northern courage, set against a backdrop of bleak fjords and smoldering mountain peaks and gray lowering skies, that make me want to hop on the nearest dragon-headed longship and go a-viking.

Following in no particular order are my top 10 favorite northern stories. These are stories inspired by northern myth (the Prose and Poetic Eddas), legend (the Icelandic Sagas), or history (the Danish invasions of England), and sometimes all three at once.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Black Gate website.

Cimmerian sighting: "Fantasy” a worthy entry in Anderson’s canon

While others seek the passageway to elven realms in vain, Poul Anderson throws wide the gate to let his readers enter into wonder … Anderson is a “literalist of the imagination.” He makes what is magical real and what is real magical. Of such power is poetry born.

—“An Invitation to Elfland,” Sandra Misesel, from Poul Anderson’s Fantasy

Poul Anderson gets a lot of love around these parts, and with good reason. While I can’t speak to his metric ton of science fiction, he’s written a lot of great fantasy novels, including Three Hearts and Three Lions, and the Nordic-flavored War of the Gods, The Broken Sword, and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. All of these are worth finding and reading.

But Anderson also wrote some excellent short stories. I have a couple of his collections and will vouch for the excellence of Fantasy (1981, Pinnacle Books, Inc).

Belying its vanilla title (Fantasy? Was Pinnacle Books considering Men with Swords as an alternative?), Fantasy is actually a wide-ranging, eclectic group of short stories that includes “soft” sci-fi (debatably fantasy) stories, a handful of essays, including a satirical non-fiction look at the sword-and-sandal brand of fantastic fiction (“On Thud and Blunder”), and a few excellent traditional fantasy tales.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Hrolf Kraki in the Guardian

As a longtime proponent of Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga, I was pleased today to see a review of this fine but mostly forgotten novel over at the online version of the British newspaper The Guardian, Cracking Poul Anderson's Kraki. The Guardian's Alison Flood is working her way through some of the fantasy genre's classics, including former British Fantasy award winners, which Anderson claimed in 1974 with Hrolf Kraki.

I don't agree with some of Flood's criticisms of the novel, including her disdain for Anderson's mythic language and poetry (which I think is part of the novel's unique charm and appeal, as well as a reflection of Anderson's faithfulness to the source material, the fragmentary Hrolf Kraki Saga and other ancient Icelandic sagas). But it's nice to see this mythic tale of a brief, shining period of peace in dark ages Denmark get some public recognition.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: Battle at Leidhra

The ‘battle piece’, as a historical construction, is as old as Herodotus; as a subject of myth and saga it is even more antique. It is an everyday theme of modern journalistic reportage and it presents a literary challenge which some of the world’s masters have taken up.

—John Keegan, The Face of Battle

I read fantasy for the story, for the escape, for the adventure, for the monsters and magic, and for the memorable characters. The best fantasy has the added bonus of examining the important matters in life (God or his lack thereof, mankind’s purpose on earth, society and civilization) and exercises the mind in higher thinking.

But heck, I’ll admit it: I also read fantasy for the fights.

There’s nothing I enjoy more in a book than a well-portrayed battle scene. In the next few posts I’ll be exploring my top 10 favorite fantasy battles. These are epic combats that inspire with their courage, frighten with their ferocity, sadden with their pathos, and occasionally sicken with their terrible carnage and destruction. But above all else they are a joy to read.

These posts will celebrate the mass battles; fantasy has its share of great single combats too (Eowyn vs. the Witch King in The Lord of the Rings, and Gregor Clegane vs. the Red Viper in A Song of Ice and Fire are two that immediately spring to mind), but solo duels or minor skirmishes are for another day. Several of these large-scale battles, however, do feature terrific single combats within them.

Some of this list is borderline “fantasy,” since I’ve included entries from the historical fiction genre and events that really happened. But since the details of these ancient battles are largely lost to the passage of time, and out of necessity must be heavily re-imagined by the author, I have included them here.

So without further ado, and in no particular order, sound the horn, shields at the ready … Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

(Warning: If you haven’t read these books, be prepared to experience some spoilers).

10. Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, Poul Anderson
Battle at Leidhra

I’ll tell you right off the bat that the final, climactic battle from Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga will be hard to top. It features boar-trolls, attack dogs, shield walls, men in bear form, heroism, slaughter, and ultimate ruin. In brief, the build-up to the battle is as follows:

A great host of evil led by the false King Hjorvardh and the wicked Queen Skuld march through the night to murder Hrolf Kraki and his men, sleeping unawares at the stockade fortress of Leidhra. Fortunately Hrolf’s man Hjalti sees the traitorous host coming and rides his horse at a breakneck pace to rouse his lord. Hjalti’s horse dies from exhaustion as he reaches Leidhra, and, leaping from his falling mount, awakens Hrolf and his men to the danger with a fragment from the ancient Bjarkamal:

Athelings, rise up and honor your oaths,
all that you swore when the ale made you eager!
In foul winds as fair, keep faith with your lord,
he who withheld no hoard for himself
but gave us freely both gold and silver.

Hjorvardh and Skuld’s massive army encircles the fort. They dispatch messengers to tell Hrolf that he can save his life if he kneels to Hjorvardh, but Hrolf answers like every good Viking king should: He extends his middle finger and tells his men to drink up.

“Let us take the best drink we have,” he called, “and be merry and see what kind of men are here. Let us strive for only one thing, that our fearlessness live on in memory—for hither indeed have the strongest and bravest warriors sought from everywhere about.” To the messengers: “Say to Hjorvardh and Skuld that we will drink ourselves glad before we take their scot.”

The next morning Hrolf and his 11 champions and the rest of his men issue from behind the walls to fight the enemy on open ground. The description of their charge is a sumptuous visual simile: “Along their ranks went that ripple as of wind across rye, which bespeaks a peak of training.”

Formed in a great wedge Hrolf’s men smash the enemy’s center, killing countless of the foe. Fighting in front of the press is a great red bear, which none recognize but is one of Hrolf’s men, Bjarki, fighting in bear form. Later Bjarki fights as a man, hewing shields, helmets, arms, and heads, his own arms bloody to the shoulder from killing.

Hrolf and his men have the early advantage, but their charge and crushing advance leaves them overextended and surrounded by the great mass of the enemy. Skuld summons a wolf-gray troll-boar the size of a bull, and later uses undead and a handful of shadowy monsters to attack the Danes.

The battle rages the entire day, and as night falls hope begins to fade. Great are the deeds of Hrolf’s champions, but the enemy are too many. Hrolf’s most trusted friend, Svipag the one-eyed, is thrown and slain by the boar, and Bjarki is gored and slain as he finally kills the beast. The circle of defenders around Hrolf inexorably closes. Grief-stricken by the impending death of his king and the end of the glorious reign he brought to Denmark, Hjalti speaks a lengthy set of staves, including the following memorable lines:

Let us die in the doing of deeds for his sake;
let fright itself run afraid from our shouts;
let weapons measure the warrior’s worth.
Though life is lost, one thing will outlive us:
memory sinks not beneath the mould.
Till the Weird of the World stands unforgotten,
high under heaven, the hero’s name.

At the end, his death at hand, Hrolf leaves the dwindling shield-circle and wades alone into the sea of foes until he too is slain. “Man after man he felled. No one of them slew him; it took them all.”

Hrolf Kraki's Saga: A viking warlord in King Arthur's court

Though life is lost, one thing will outlive us: memory sinks not beneath the mould.

Till the Weird of the World stands, unforgotten, high under heaven, the hero's name.

--The Bjarkamaal

It is a glaring weakness of mine as a lover of fantasy literature that I haven't read deeply of the Norse sagas. For example, sitting on my shelf right now and staring at me like a thick challenge is The Sagas of Icelanders, a massive tome in the Penguin Classics line which has remained on my "to read" list for far too long. It's a shame because, in the few instances in which I've encountered the Sagas, either in translation or adaptation, I've enjoyed the heck out of them.

Hrolf Kraki's Saga by Poul Anderson falls into the latter camp. It's a terrific little novel (260 pages in paperback) that moves with the speed of lightning and hits with the impact of Thor's hammer. As I said in a past post about Anderson (see my review of The Broken Sword), he's an author that seems to be largely forgotten these days, and when his name is mentioned it's usually for his prolific career as a science fiction writer, or for Three Hearts and Three Lions. But Anderson loved the Viking Sagas too. While arguably a better book, The Broken Sword is Anderson's creation; Hrolf Kraki's Saga is a retelling of the life and times of an actual Danish king. From the foreward by Lin Carter:

He was a real man, he really lived; he was the greatest of the Kings of the Danes and his court was glittering and fabulous, like that of Arthur at Camelot; there gathered the foremost heroes and warriors, the champions of their age--Bjarki, who held the charmed longsword Lovi; Svipdag, the slayer of berserkers; young Hjalti, who owned the magic sword Goldhilt.

But the old myths and tales of Hrolf Kraki are scattered and piecemeal. Anderson brings them all together in Hrolf Kraki's Saga (he calls it a 'reconstruction'), spinning a wonderful, epic tale in the process. It's a tale that's not for the faint of heart, as Anderson admits in his own foreward:

Here is no Lord of the Rings, work of a civilized, Christian author--though probably it was one of Tolkien's many wellsprings. Hrolf Kraki lived in the midnight of the Dark Ages. Slaughter, slavery, robbery, rape, torture, heathen rites bloody or obscene, were parts of daily life ... Love, loyalty, honesty beyond the most niggling technicalities, were only for one's kindred, chieftain, and closest friends. The rest of mankind were foemen or prey. And often anger or treachery broke what bonds there had been.

Yet Hrolf Kraki transcends this time by carving out a shining kingdom reminiscent of Camelot, "a moment of sunshine during a storm which raged for centuries," according to Anderson, driving back the darkness and bringing a rough order to a savage, dark world. The basic story is as follows:

Kraki is the son of King Helgi and Yrsa. His father is slain by the treachery of King Adhils of the Swedes, whose lust for Yrsa leads to foul murder and Yrsa's capture. Kraki inherits the throne and gathers great heroes to his side, including Svipdag, the one-eyed slayer of berserkers, and Bjarki, the son of a shape-changer, who retains some of his father Bjorn's bear-like size and strength (hmm... name sounds familiar).

Together, the group reunite the Danish kingdom a-la the Knights of the Round Table, avenge themselves on Adhils, and begin a seven-year reign of peace and prosperity of such greatness that its legend survives the ages.

Of course, this is Icelandic Saga and no gold can stay. Ultimately all is undone by Skuld, Hrolf Kraki's jealous sister, who convinces her husband Hjorvardh to rise up against Hrolf Kraki. He brings with him an army of cutthroats and mercenaries, strengthened by trolls and demons summoned by Skuld, a practitioner of the black arts, and starts a final battle against Hrolf Kraki and his men Ragnarok-esque in proportion.

If this doesn't sound awesome, your blood must run cold.

I won't spoil any more, but will end by offering a simple encouragement to find a copy of Hrolf Kraki's Saga and read it. You can blow through it in two nights and it will leave you thirsting for more of the Northern myths. As for me, The Sagas of Icelanders is calling...

The Broken Sword: A masterpiece from the fantasy forge

Poul Anderson is an author who seems to be largely ignored and unappreciated these days, save for those who are true fans of the fantasy and science fiction genres. Even in those circles he's known primarily as a science fiction author, and for good reason--Anderson was a voluminous SF writer (I say voluminous because he wrote a metric ton of it, and I don't have an accurate number) with much fewer fantasy/historic fantasy titles to his credit.

But Anderson was also an avid fantasy fan. He helped found the Society for Creative Anachronism, and according to Wikipedia was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (can I get a membership, please?). He was also a truly great fantasy writer, perhaps best known for Three Hearts and Three Lions, a book which serves as the inspiration for a pair of classic Dungeons and Dragons icons: The paladin character class, and the green-skinned regenerating troll, D&D founder/author Gary Gygax admits. Anderson also wrote some awesome Nordic-flavored fantasy, including Hrolf Kraki's Saga and War of the Gods, books to which I'll devote some blogspace at a later time.

But for my money, Anderson's best work of fantasy was The Broken Sword, published in 1954. If you haven't read this slim, 200-page classic of epic fantasy, rush out to your local used book store or purchase a copy on Ebay and do so now. It's a kick in the pants of "fat fantasy," a welcome relief from the bloated tomes choking the fantasy section of book stores these days.

The Broken Sword combines Norse mythology, inexorable tragic fate, faerie races vs. encroaching humanity, and Christianity vs. Paganism in a quick-moving, bloodthirsty saga. The basic plot is as follows: Imric, an elf chiefain, steals away the child Skafloc from his parents, Orm and Aelfrida. Imric replaces Skafloc with a changeling, Valgard, identical in appearnce to Skafloc but born from Imric and a she-troll. Skafloc grows up among the elves as a child of the light, while Valgard, feeling like he's an outcast, turns to the dark.

Meanwhile, an old witch with a grudge (Orm burned her home and slew her sons in a raid during his younger days) swears to continue the feud against Orm and his family. She enlists Valgard as a tool for her revenge, and Valgard slays Orm and his siblings. The witch also tells Valgard about his true troll heritage, and Valgard leaves to join the trolls' ranks, taking Orm's daughters/Skafloc's sisters, Freda and Asgerd, as tokens for the troll king.

Still unaware that Orm is his father or Freda and Asgerd are his sisters, Skafloc leads a raid against the trolls to test their strength, and winds up rescuing Freda and Asgerd. In a familiar tragic device, Skafloc and his sister, Freda, fall in love, which guarantees that their unnatural relationship will end in disaster.

Later the pair escape near death from the invading troll armies, and Skafloc learns that he is fated to free the land from their scourge, and recover and reforge the broken sword--a weapon of great power, but also cursed with an evil sentience that will ultimately spell doom for its wielder.

You can imagine the havoc that ensues when Skafloc learns his true identity, that his father and siblings were slain by his traitorous twin "brother," and that he's been sleeping with his sister. Skafloc's quest to reforge the sword, his internal turmoil and agonies, and the final epic battle are amazing and a joy to read.

There's also a lot more going on under the surface of The Broken Sword than mere plot. The reforged evil sword is a terrible weapon that represents military technology, like atomic power or gunpowder, that are as much a blessing as a curse. And once reforged (or conceived by scientists) the cat is forever out of the bag. At one point Imric decides to take it and cast it into the sea, but realizes that even this drastic measure cannot undo fate: "I do not think that will do much good though. The will of the Norns stands not to be altered, and the sword has not wreaked its last harm." There's shades of the Excalibur myth here, albeit much darker and more sinister.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the sword's properties--smelted iron--are anathema to the trolls, elves, and other races of Faerie. The broken sword can thus be viewed as the power of the one god--referred to by Anderson as "The White Christ"--driving out the many gods of the old pagan religions. This theme runs throughout the book.

Interestingly, Anderson paints a bleak picture of mankind in general. Men, while physically weaker than trolls and elves, will rule in the end, not because they are inherently superior, but because of their lust for science and the power it brings. And they care not for the consequences: "'All men are born fey,' said Skafloc, and there the matter stood."