Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: Ragnarök

2. Ragnarök, from various sources

We will give our lives and let our world be destroyed, but we will battle so that these evil powers will not live after us.

—Odin, from The Children of Odin by Padraic Column

The Twilight of the Gods. The Doom of the Gods. Not just the ending of the world, but the breaking of the world. A final battle of order vs. chaos. A creation myth that explains our dim remembrances of gods and monsters and the chants of old heroes singing in our ears. A conflict that ended in fire and darkness and ultimate defeat for the greatest gods and heroes of an age—but took evil down with it.

I’m referring of course to Ragnarök, the epic battle of giants, heroes, gods, and monsters from Norse mythology. Although I’m not aware of one definitive treatment of the battle (for this post I’m drawing upon Snorri Sturluson’s The Prose Edda and Padraic Colum’s The Children of Odin), and it lacks the detail and narrative voice of the others on my list, for sheer scope, stakes, and iconic elements, it’s almost impossible to top, and so checks in at no. 2 on my Top 10 Fantasy Fiction Battles of all time.

Ragnarök. Heck, I even love the pitiless, hard sound of its name.

Ragnarök pits Giants, a wicked race which seeks to destroy the race of men, versus a pantheon of Gods who beautify the world and elevate its inhabitants. The battle is leant an extra degree of poignancy by the fact that Odin knows the Gods are going to lose. But victory is not their goal—they’re fighting to smash the enemy and not let them rule the world. Ragnarök is the essence of the northern theory of courage that J.R.R. Tolkien so loved: bravery and unshakeable resolve in a hopeless situation.

Ragnarök is preceded by three consecutive hard winters without a summer. Great battles rock the world, brutal conflicts pitting brother against brother in wars of destruction. Humanity is at its lowest ebb and can only be cleansed by fire:

Brothers will fight
and kill each other,
sisters’ children
will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world,
whoredom rife
—an axe age, a sword age (and the sun rises)
—shields are riven—
a wind age, a wolf age—
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another.

Then comes the final battle. Heimdall, Watcher of the Gods and Warder of the Rainbow Bridge, sees the advancing host of foes and blows the Gjallarhorn. The Gods awaken and assemble. Valhalla opens its 540 doors with 800 champions ready to pass through each door. That’s 432,000 of the greatest champions, ever. The mind reels.

And that’s not counting the Gods themselves, the Aesir and the Vanir, the Asyniur and the Vana, the Einherjar and the Valkyries. I’ve always liked the thought of the Valkyries—fair maidens who collect the souls of the bravest warriors from the battlefield and take them to Valhalla on flying horses—engaging in the battle. They know the tremendous stakes involved in its outcome. The great host is resplendent in its war-gear and Odin rides in the vanguard. Writes Colum: “Odin rode at the head of his Champions. His helmet was of gold and in his hand was his spear Gugnir. Thor and Tyr were in his company.”

But the forces of evil are equally mighty—so mighty, in fact, that Ygdrassil, the World Tree whose roots are deeper than memory, is said to tremble. “And nothing, whether in heaven or on earth, is without fear,” writes Sturluson. The forces of evil include Surtur and his army of fire giants, Hrym and his host of frost giants, Jormungand, the midgard serpent, whose length encircles the globe, Fenrir, a wolf whose gaping mouth reaches from the ground to the sky, and Garm, the hound with the bloody jaws. The traitorous god Loki (whose father is a Giant and is thus allied with the forces of evil) leads into battle all of the dead from the realm of his daughter Hel. The rainbow bridge shatters and falls into pieces under their weight.

The combat is fierce and apocalyptic. Fenrir slays Odin. Vidar, the Silent God, places his leather sandaled foot in its lower jaw and seizes the wolf’s upper jaw, then tears its head apart. Thor crushes Jormungand with a hammerstroke from Miolnir, but the serpent in its death throes spews its choking and blinding venom. Thor perishes (too soon for me, I wanted to see the thunder god pulverize some Giants with his hammer). Loki and Heimdall slay each other in single combat. Garm slays Tyr but is himself slain by the one-handed God.

The fire giant Surtur sets the world on fire with his blazing sword, evoking thoughts of some great nuclear holocaust. Surtur and his host are consumed in the fire. Ygdrassil is said in some versions of the story to go up in flames as well, perhaps symbolic of the passing of the spring from the earth. Others claim it survives and gives root to a new world from the ashes of the old.

The wolf Hati devours the Sun (Sol) and the wolf Managarm devours the moon (Mani). Stars fell and darkness came down over the world. Writes Colum: “The seas flowed over the burnt and wasted earth and the skies were dark above the sea, for Sol and Mani were no more.”

Eventually the earth springs green again and a new sun and moon arise. The death of the world paves the way for what could be a Christian creation myth: Corum writes of a new heaven above even Asgard. “Will and Holiness ruled in it.” Deep in a wood two of human kind are left, parallels to Adam and Eve. “A woman and a man they were, Lif and Lifthrasir. They walked abroad in the world, and from them and from their children came the men and women who spread themselves over the earth.”

Of Cimmerian awards and REH-related writings

One of these years I need to make it out to Cross Plains, Texas for Howard Days. It's an annual gathering of Howard-heads at the old Howard homestead, which has since been designated a historical site. It features guided tours, panel discussions, special guests, fellowship, and awards given out by the Robert E. Howard Foundation. And some spirits appear to be imbibed as well, which is okay by me.

Here's one report of the event on the REHupa blog , and another over on REH: Two Gun Raconteur.

At this year's Howard Days The Cimmerian won a pair of Stygian awards, given for outstanding achievement by an REH-oriented website. I was glad to play a part in the award for contributions during calendar year 2009. Although I miss writing for The Cimmerian, as our penultimate post notes, it was nice going out on top. (Al, that's a sweet sports coat by the way).

I'll also blast my own horn and note that I had two essays nominated for a Hyrkanian (Outstanding Achievement, Essay): “An Honorable Retreat: Robert E. Howard as Escapist Writer” (from The Dark Man, V4N2); and “The Unnatural City” (from The Cimmerian, v5n2). I didn't win but it was an honor to be nominated. The winners were Leo Grin for 2009 and Steve Tompkins for 2010. Having read both essays I have no complaints there. These guys were and remain two of REH's greatest champions.

For the record I have a third essay just published in the latest issue of REH: Two-Gun Raconteur. It's called “Unmasking “The Shadow Kingdom:” Kull and Howard as Outsiders.” I'm not sure if, to paraphrase H.P. Lovecraft, Howard's Kull stories represented some weird peak in REH's writing career, but there's no doubt that they feature Howard at his most philosophic and meditative. They certainly demonstrate that the best pulp/fantastic fiction can and should be treated as literature. There's a lot more going on in "The Shadow Kingdom" than meets the eye. From my essay:

Regarded by most as the first swords-and-sorcery tale ever written, ["The Shadow Kingdom'] remains one of its finest examples, for it serves as a reminder that the genre can transcend empty action. Figuratively and literally, there is something both sinister and brilliant going on beneath the skin of this tale. Bound up in the reptilian hide of a pulse-pounding work of heroic fiction, “The Shadow Kingdom” is a vehicle that Howard used to probe for the truth of the human condition.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: The Battle of Thermopylae

3. Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield
Battle of Thermopylae

"Answer this, Alexandros. When our countrymen triumph in battle, what is it that defeats the foe?”

The boy responded in the terse Spartan style, “Our steel and our skill.”

“These, yes,” Dienekes corrected him gently, “but something more. It is that.” His gesture led up the slope to the image of Phobos.

Fear.

Their own fear defeats our enemies.

“Now answer. What is the source of fear?”

When Alexandros’ reply faltered, Dienekes reached with his hand and touched his own chest and shoulder.

“Fear arises from this: the flesh. This,” he declared, “is the factory of fear.”

The above dialogue from Steven Pressfield’s incomparable Gates of Fire (in addition to reminding me a bit of the famous “what is best in life?” exchange from Conan the Barbarian) is one of those grab-you-by the throat moments in which you realize that there existed such a thing as a warrior culture. The ancient city-state of Sparta offers prima facie evidence of such a society. Its entire purpose was to produce unstoppable, peerless, fearless fighting men. As a result the Spartans boasted the best warriors of their own, and perhaps any, age.

The Spartans’ legendary prowess was put to the ultimate test when a two-million man Persian army under King Xerxes poured into Greece in 480 BC to enslave the western world. The ensuing events are now the stuff of legend: 300 Spartans were dispatched to slow the advance of the Persian forces at the Hot Gates, a narrow strip of land between the cliffs and sea. All were killed, but the Persian army was delayed for seven crucial days, which bought the rest of Greece enough time to mobilize, unify, and ultimately defeat the Persians at Salamis and Plataea. The west was saved.

How did the Spartans hold out so long at Thermopylae and eventually beat the Persians? The answer lay in a combination of superb training and an unbeatable martial mindset. The armies of Xerxes sewed fear in their opponents with their overwhelming numbers. Their hordes of archers, for instance, were said to fire enough arrows to blot out the sun. But Xerxes did not understand the nature of the opponent he faced in the Spartans, who were not only exquisitely trained and skilled with shield, spear, and sword, but quite simply knew no fear in battle. Theirs was not the mindless, slavering fearlessness of a barbarian horde bolstered with liquid courage, but the unbreakable fearlessness of superbly disciplined soldiery. The fear of death was stamped from the Spartans during a pitiless 13-year period of training that turned boys into iron-hard warriors who regarded dying on the battlefield as a gift. I would have wet my pants and defecated if I had to stand in a shield wall and fight belly-to-belly with an opponent who wanted to kill me; the Spartans relished the opportunity.

Gates of Fire offers its reader battle without compromise. Post-traumatic stress disorder wasn’t in the Spartans’ vocabulary. That’s actually not fair: The Spartans mourned and honored their dead. After battles they wept and shook, or fell on their knees and thanked the Gods they survived. They were in the end only men, after all. But this never occurred during battles, which the Spartans conducted with ruthless efficiency and impeccable discipline. In the midst of the unspeakable carnage of the shield wall they entered into a displaced state of mind which allowed them to avoid a condition called katalepsis, or “possession, meaning that derangement of the senses that comes when terror or anger usurps dominion of the mind.” Gates of Fire introduces its readers to a host of these Spartan descriptors—Arosis (harrowing, or a hardening the will), Phobos (fear), Aphobia (fearlessness), Andreia (true courage). Pressfield also acquaints his readers with the Spartans’ fearsome eight-foot war spears and their most prized possession, 20-pound shields of bronze and wood that served as both protection and offense, a battering ram whose rim could crush an opponent’s skull.

Pressfield simply writes awe-inspiringly well about the Spartans’ training and discipline and how it manifests itself during battles. From an early skirmish against the Syrakusans:

Now from the Lakedaemonian ranks rose the paean, the hymn to Castor ascending from four thousand throats. On the climactic beat of the second stanza,

Heaven-shining brother
Skyborne hero

the spears of the first three ranks snapped from the vertical into the attack.

Words cannot convey the impact of awe and terror produced upon the foe, any foe, by this seemingly uncomplex maneuver, called in Lakedaemon “spiking it” or “palming the pine,” so simple to perform on the parade ground and so formidable under conditions of life and death. To behold it executed with such precision and fearlessness, no man surging forward out of control nor hanging back in dread, none edging right into the shadow of his rankmate’s shield, but all holding solid and unbreakable, tight as the scales on a serpent’s flank, the heart stopped in awe, the hair stood straight up upon the neck and shivers coursed powerfully the length of the spine.

This scene (and many others like it) are to me what make Gates of Fire such a great book. Yes, the battles are awesome and Thermopylae is enough to earn a place in my Top 10 Fantasy Fiction Battles. But it’s the lead-up to the battle that’s the crowning achievement of the book.

Once the Battle of Thermopylae begins the action and the carnage are unrelenting. Thermopylae is like some great marathon without a finish line; the warriors fight on, day after day, beyond endurance, until they are ground down and destroyed. Each day the Spartans take the field thinned in number, horribly wounded, dog-tired, but committed to the purpose. They were going to die and they knew it. Their wives and children and peers expected no less and would not have accepted surrender or retreat.

The Spartans were not only better trained and more motivated but had topography on their side at Thermopylae. They built a wall of rough stone, the height of two men, from which they mounted their defense. The narrow defile of the Hot Gates allowed a maximum of 1,000 Persians to close with the defenders, of which there were 4,000 (the 300 were reinforced with other Greek soldiers). This created a pinch point of death, a meatgrinder into which the Persians marched. Xerxes’ watched over the battlefield from a throne perched on the cliffs; he expected his men to finish off the Greeks on the first morning and be treated to a warm noontime lunch.

The Persians, needless to say, didn’t know what was about to hit them. Their army was built for mobility and fighting on the open plains; they bore wicker shields, bows, javelins, and scimitars and were lightly armored. Fighting in close quarters against the Spartans and the massed heavy infantry of the Greeks resulted in their massacre. The Spartans’ phalanx hit the Persians like an armored rugby scrum and smashed and trampled them down, then speared them underfoot. They shoved them over cliffs en masse, tumbling them 200 feet to shatter on the rocks or drown in the churning sea below.

After the first day of fighting the Hot Gates looked like a scene out of hell. Writes Pressfield: “The ‘dance floor,’ now in full shadow, looked like a field ploughed by the oxen of hell. Not an inch remained unchurned and unriven. The rock-hard earth, sodden now with blood and piss and the unholy fluids which had spilled from the entrails of the slain and the butchered, lay churned in places to the depth of a man’s calf.”

On the sixth night the Spartans made one last desperate attempt to turn the tide, sending a handful of Peers on a forced march through the night to assassinate Xerxes in his tent. The attempt comes up just short. The next day most of the remaining Greek allies withdrew, leaving barely 100 of the original 300 Spartan Peers to guard their withdrawal. A few hundred Greeks remained behind as well. All die to the last man, save one, Xeones, who will go on to narrate the tale.

Before the final battle each of the leading Spartan Peers offers up some final words to their comrades in arms. Here’s a bit of King Leonidas’ speech, issued from this great king of 60 years, one tricep torn through in the fighting, shield lashed to his useless arm, recounting what men a hundred generations yet unborn will remember of this great last stand:

“They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn of us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples; their picks will prise forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this, what we do here today.”

I wrote in a previous review that when you read Gates of Fire you feel as though you’re in the shieldwall, amid sweating, straining men awaiting the clash of spear and sword. I felt exhausted, terrified, and exhilarated while reading it. That’s the highest praise I can bestow on a battle-novel, of which, like the Spartans themselves, Pressfield's book is peerless.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: At last, the final, bloody three

After a lengthy and rather inexcusable hiatus, I’m finally bringing my Top 10 Fantasy Fiction Battles series to its savage, bloody conclusion. Spears shall be shaken, shields splintered, and Odin’s corpse hall shall overflow with fallen warriors, their souls borne away from corpse-strewn battlefields on the winged steeds of valkyries. Or something like that.

As a reminder this series focuses on the best mass battles of fantastic fiction, not small skirmishes or one-on-one duels. Note too that the term fantasy is a bit of a misnomer since a few these battles are historical fiction, but I chose to include them because they are either so ancient or so shrouded in legend that out of necessity they were heavily re-imagined by their respective authors. Plus, they kicked too much ass to leave them off the list--some of the best battle scenes I've read were penned by authors of historical fiction.

Look for the next installment a bit later this week. Here are links to the first seven parts:

4. The Battle of Unnumbered Tears, from The Silmarillion

5. The Demons Before Carce, from The Worm Ouroboros

6. Battle of Five Armies, from The Hobbit

7. A Hero Strives With Gods, from The Iliad

8. Battle of Cynuit, from The Last Kingdom

9. Battle of the Blackwater, from A Clash of Kings

10. Battle at Leidhra, from Hrolf Kraki’s Saga

The eternal appeal of the life and works of Robert E. Howard

Although The Cimmerian’s days are numbered, the legacy and works of Robert E. Howard will live on and on. The TC print journal and its accompanying blog did their part to deserve his legacy, and I was proud to be a part of it, but we were literally laboring in the shadow of a giant who will continue be read for as long as the word exists.

With my days as a TC blogger winding down I thought I’d get back to the reasons why I (and perhaps if I may be so bold, extend that to the plural we) love the life and works of REH—and why he continues to enthrall us.

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

Post-TC, the Road goes ever on, but to what end?

Sorry for the recent wall of silence around here, but I just returned from an incredibly busy, terribly stressful, but ultimately very successful business conference in Chicago. My blogging during the last week was non-existent and my weekly post over at The Cimmerian consisted of a re-print of an old Silver Key piece, a review of Mark Finn's fine Robert E. Howard biography Blood & Thunder. Weak, but under the circumstances it was the best I could manage.

But as Sam Gamgee famously said, "well, I'm back." A loaded, bittersweet phrase if there ever was one. Like Sam I've returned home, but changed from the experience, and finding that everything around me seems to have been altered irrevocably as well.

The big change of course is the impending demise of The Cimmerian, aka TC, which shuts its doors permanently as a blog on June 11. I was asked by the late, great Steve Tompkins to join the pirate crew as a weekly contributor to the TC in Feb. 2009. Very humbly, I accepted his erudite offer. Here's part of his first e-mail to me, which I continue to cherish for vain reasons and as a reminder of Steve's unique sense of humor:

Now that the doleful secret is out about the grand finale of THE CIMMERIAN as a print journal, I'm eager to get started on sustaining the blog as a clearinghouse for posts about Howard, Tolkien, Karl Edward Wagner, Poul Anderson, David Gemmell, Charles R. Saunders, horror (whether Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, or big screen releases), fantasy movies, Westerns, and anything else within a hard day's ride of our particular Border Kingdom.

I hope you'll be able to join in. I uneasily recall some interviews Keith Richards and Pete Townsend gave way back when before they embarked on solo recordings wherein they said they would never want to be placed in the position of having to choose whether the Stones or Who got their "A" songwriting material or they kept it for themselves. Here's hoping you don't feel like you're ever robbing THE SILVER KEY, of which Leo and I are major fans, to pay THE CIMMERIAN.

For the next year and four months I did join in, writing posts every week on everything from horror to heavy metal to REH to Tolkien, including a lengthy series of which I'm rather proud, Blogging The Silmarillion. I told the current crew of guys over at TC that writing for that publication was an honor and a privelege, which sounds rather phony and cliche' but is quite genuine. Writing for TC forced me to be regular (though looking back I think I produced a few bowel movements) and pushed me to excel. Stepping into a shieldwall of talented writers elevated my own game. I hope you enjoyed my many posts there. I'm sad to see that fine blog come to a end.

Now that the halcyon days of TC are drawing to a Camlann-like end, it's time to figure out what I want to do next. Fellow TC blogger Al Harron posed a similar question over at his wild, wooly, and compulsively readable bit of cyberspace, The Blog that Time Forgot, and I now find myself confronted with a similar set of questions.

Should I become my own Mayor of Michel Delving and focus my attention here on making The Silver Key a better and more regularly updated place, should I move on to other established heroic fantasy websites, or should I strike out on the Road on some grand new adventure? My problem is that my interests range too broadly and far afield: One week I'm obsessed with Conan, the next week I'm poring through books on The Third Reich, the next I'm delving back into old tomes of Tolkien criticism. The wide-ranging reach of The Silver Key reflects my eclectic tendencies. All the advice I've read on successful blogging says that you should keep your focus narrow, but although it may cost me readers I can't ever see myself writing about any single author or genre. There's too much cool shit in the world to put blinders on.

I'll be giving these questions some thought in the coming days, but for now I'm just glad to be home with my own Rosie and my two wonderful daughters.

Fantasy subgenres: Helpful or needlessly divisive?

Sword and sorcery? Epic fantasy? Sword and planet? Sword and sandal? Does anyone really care about these delineations? Do they serve any purpose?

A couple of the blogs I frequent, Charles Gramlich’s Razored Zen and James Raggi’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess, have in recent days argued both sides of the debate. LOFP sneered that no one really cares about the issue and that all such divisions are meaningless; RZ’s opinion is clearly apparent in the fact that he’s written the first two parts of a detailed three-part series on heroic fantasy and its subdivisions.

So who is right? Here’s my take, for whatever that’s worth.

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

Remembering Ronnie James Dio, grandfather of heavy metal

This is your life
This is your time
What if the flame won’t last forever
This is your here
This is your now
Let it be magical

Who cares what came before
We’re only starlight

Once upon the time
All the world was blind
Like we are

This is your life
This is your time
Look at your world
This is your life

–"This is Your Life,” Ronnie James Dio

In my opinion the late Ronnie James Dio was none other than the grandfather of heavy metal. Many if not most metal fans would probably cry blasphemy and choose to bestow that honor upon Ozzy Osbourne; not me. I like Ozzy, but Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler were the true creative forces behind the classic Black Sabbath albums (In fact, I’d be more willing to listen to a case for Iommi, whom Judas Priest frontman/Metal God Rob Halford credits as having invented the heavy metal riff).

Metal’s grandfather? It could be Ozzy. It could be Iommi. It may even be Halford. Judas Priest has been around nearly as long as Black Sabbath and arguably have enjoyed a more successful and consistent career. But I will make the case for Dio.

Dio’s death this past Sunday from stomach cancer was a huge loss for metal. It might be the genre’s biggest loss ever. The death of Randy Rhoads and AC/DC’s Bon Scott were tragic, but at 25 the former’s career was only beginning, and the latter was a singer in a band I consider rock, not metal. Your mileage may vary, of course, but off-hand, I can’t think of anything even close to the loss of Dio.

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

The Eyes of the Dragon--a review

After writing his magnum opus IT, Stephen King briefly stepped away from the genre that defined his career. The result was The Eyes of the Dragon (1987), a fantasy novel. King said that he wrote The Eyes of the Dragon for his daughter Naomi (for whom the book is dedicated, along with King’s friend Ben Straub) who reportedly never liked her father’s terrifying tales.

While that may be true, I also think that King may have thought he had said all that he had to say about horror and was looking to explore other genres. He may also have simply exhausted himself with the tome-like IT and needed to try his hand at something short and simple. Compared with most King novels, The Eyes of the Dragon is a chapbook (it’s nine compact discs in the Penguin Audio version, 380 pages in paperback including illustrations).

In brief, The Eyes of the Dragon is a story about the inheritance of the kingship of the fictional realm of Delain. Roland, the old king, fathers two sons late in life, Peter and Thomas. Peter, the eldest, is slated to inherit the throne. Peter possesses all the qualities you would want in a monarch—he’s smart, just, honest, and brave. Thomas on the other hand is a near clone of his father—an average thinker, prone to vacillations, reluctant to make important decisions. Roland’s adviser is Flagg, a shadowy wizard who has served the kings of Delain for centuries, perhaps longer. Flagg is actually a demonic figure who wants to see Delain in ruins and the world thrown into a dark age of bloody anarchy. He devises a plot to poison Roland, framing the murder so that the blame falls on Peter. When the dust settles, Thomas, only 12 years old, unfit to rule and terrified with his new responsibility, is put on the throne. Flagg knows that Thomas will be a puppet in his hands and the instrument through which he can finally see his centuries-long evil plans come to fruition. Peter is sentenced to life in a prison in the tower of the Needle, a small cell high above the city.

King has professed a love for the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (The Stand is a semi-homage to The Lord of the Rings, and The Dark Tower series draws its inspiration from that book as well). The Eyes of the Dragon shares a lot in common with The Hobbit. Roland’s ancient heirloom is the arrow Foe-Hammer, one of the names given to Gandalf’s sword Glamdring. It’s also an allusion to the black arrow Bard uses to bring down the dragon Smaug. King tells the tale using an omniscient narrator who speaks with a pleasant, conversational voice, and seems to be relaying the tale years later and from some other time and place. This authorial voice is another hallmark of The Hobbit, written initially for Tolkien’s children and meant to be read aloud.

In general I liked The Eyes of the Dragon very much. As with all of King’s stories it’s wonderfully told with a compelling narrative. It feels like a fairy tale with an edge, in which the events will likely work out for the good in the end but with blood spilled and hearts broken along the way.

Peter is a great character and is easy to root for. Despite his unjust sentence and the fact that he knows he will likely never leave the Needle alive, he refuses to succumb to despair. Peter is a born leader with a carriage of command. Guards who initially spit in his soup or try to bully him, believing that as a convicted murderer he will be humbled and easy prey, are cowed by his regal bearing. His captors begin to question whether he indeed murdered his father. Peter has truth on his side and maintains his innocence with a quiet certitude that inspires awe. After his first week in the Needle he makes up his mind to live, and to not relinquish his kingship. Though he’s been convicted and stripped of his regalia and title he is in all respects still the uncrowned King of Delain.

If you’re a fan of King’s world and works you’ll recognize the name of Flagg, who is also the main villain of The Stand and The Dark Tower. While menacing in The Eyes of the Dragon, I found Flagg not as terrifying as he is portrayed in The Stand. Perhaps it’s because he’s less mysterious here and more of a prototypical evil dark wizard. He only reaches the truly insane level of depravity and malice I came to associate with Flagg of The Stand at the very end of the novel.

The Eyes of the Dragon is a moral tale and uses the fantasy trope of pitting opposing sides of good and evil against each other (Peter is almost stainlessly pure, while Flagg is an unredeemable monster who wants to see Delain thrown into a 1,000-year reign of anarchy and blood-soaked chaos). In between are characters with shades of gray, and just like The Lord of the Rings the outcome is decided by a few average folk who have to make difficult choices that run at odds with their own best interests.

But The Eyes of the Dragon is not without a few flaws. In my opinion King is far more comfortable and convincing when he’s writing about our world and in particular his Maine birthplace. Fictional small towns like Derry and Castle Rock feel real because King knows their environs and peoples. In contrast, the kingdom of Delain is unremarkable and without character (it’s a typical monarchy with kings and a servant class, whose technology is roughly high medieval). Any truly fantastic elements are at a minimum: Flagg is the only person who has access to magic and his spells are more alchemy than spellcraft. The only monster we see is a single smallish dragon in a flashback sequence whose head is mounted on the wall of Roland’s sitting room (from this trophy we get the title of the novel).

There are some holes in the plot, too. For someone who is incredibly ancient, powerful, and brilliantly evil, how does Flagg let Peter live for more than five years, letting him patiently spin his escape plot from the top of the Needle? Flagg recognizes Peter almost from birth as a formidable threat: Why wouldn’t he poison him, or pay the guards to murder him, or simply do it himself? When Flagg finally does catch on to Peter’s escape plan and comes racing up the stairs of the Needle swinging his monstrous double-bladed axe like a medieval version of Jack Torrance, I wondered why he had chosen to wait so long.

The second plot hole is Peter’s method of escape. I won’t spoil it here, but it seemed unrealistic that one of the omnipresent guards (who frequently pop their heads into the window on Peter’s cell door) wouldn’t have caught him in the act at some point during his five-plus years of imprisonment.

Still, a few problems aside, The Eyes of the Dragon is, like most of King’s material, a great read and highly recommended. Bronson Pinchot does a wonderful job as narrator and in particular delivers a wonderfully-voiced Flagg, delivering his lines with a whispering malice.

This review also appears on SFFaudio.com.

Ronnie James Dio passes

I've just learned that heavy metal legend Ronnie James Dio passed away today at age 67. Terrible news. Back in March I had written a post about Dio's battle with stomach cancer, one which he appeared to be winning.

First Frank Frazetta, now this. What a terrible week. Another light has gone out of the world.

I will post something later this week.

A final Frazetta tribute

This week over at The Cimmerian I join my fellow bloggers in praising the life and art of the late, great Frank Frazetta. It's my second post commemorating Frazetta's passing but my first for The Cimmerian audience, and in it I praise his ability to capture strength and muscular power in his drawings.

If you're interested, you can read the post here.

Remembering Frank Frazetta

Today I join a host of fantasy fans pausing for a moment to mourn and remember the life and works of brilliant fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, who passed away from a reported stroke at the age of 82.

A few months back I watched a highly recommended biography on Frazetta's life and work, Frazetta: Painting with Fire, in which a claim was made that Frazetta should be considered one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. Not fantasy painters, mind you, but among all painters, across all genres.

I'll admit that I reacted with a healthy dose of skepticism upon hearing that claim. But as the images in the film unfolded my resistance faded, and by film's end I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I love Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer, but--and I'm not sentimentalizing or expressing undue affectation here--I think Frazetta was every bit as talented as those guys. Heretical as it may seem, I believe that Frazetta could have painted works like Nighthawks or Eight Bells had he chosen to do so. He simply elected to work in a fantasy medium.

Frazetta was an artist who could sell books by his covers alone. On my bookshelf are the complete line of Lancer/Ace Conan books, as well as Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain and several Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books. I bought them long ago simply for their evocative Frazetta-illustrated covers. Only later did I discover that they were pretty good books by pretty good authors, too.

I have Frank to thank for that. He showed us glimpses of other worlds and larger-than-life heroes with an inimitable savage style, blending darkness and light and brilliant splashes of color to create muscular warriors and wondrous vistas. May he rest in peace.

Rediscovering the real Robert E. Howard in Collected Letters

We know a lot more about Robert E. Howard these days, and in particular we know a lot more truths about the man from Cross Plains than ever before. For this, we have many sources to thank, including the recent excellent work done by Rusty Burke in his A Short Biography and Mark Finn’s biographical work Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. There’s also plenty of places to find important critical analysis of Howard’s works, including collections of essays like The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph.

But if you want to get a look inside Howard’s mind—how he thought, what he believed in passionately, and what he raged about—I can’t recommend The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard highly enough. Editor Rob Roehm deserves our utmost praise for putting together this three volume collection, available for purchase from The Robert E. Howard Foundation.

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

A King-sized project begins

Writer Adam Christopher has embarked on a very ambitious project—reading and reviewing all of Stephen King’s books in the order in which they were published. He started a Web site dedicated to the task a couple weeks ago entitled Stephen’s Lot.

Christopher certainly has a massive task ahead of him. According to his Web site, King has written 56 books, including 46 novels, seven short story collections, and three works of non-fiction. Christopher also plans to intersperse his entries with reviews of film and television adaptations of King’s works and other King esoterica. To date he’s completed reviews of Under the Dome (which he’s calling Book #0—it’s King’s latest and out of order, hence the “zero” appellation), and has since reviewed Book #1, Carrie. Next up is ‘Salem’s Lot.

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

Thirty-five years of despair: The continuing relevance of Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories

I still remember many years ago reading the admonition that serves as the preface to Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories (1975). I had never encountered a “buyer beware” message in a book and its three simple lines chilled me almost as much as the short stories that followed (what was I getting into? I remember thinking):

Caveat Lector
It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole.

I will vouch for the fact that Ellison’s warning is no cheap ploy, like a horror film declaring itself the most terrifying or gruesome ever to hook in a big gate. Rather, it lets the reader know that he or she is about to embark into a group of short stories whose combined effect is to deaden the spirit. This is the net effect of Deathbird Stories.

Written over a span of 10 years, the tales of Deathbird Stories are tied together by the concept that gods are real only as long as they have followers. “When belief in a god dies, the god dies,” writes Ellison. Old gods like Thor and Odin dissipated when Vikings took up the cross; Apollo was reduced to rubble when his temple fell, Ellison says in the book’s introduction. I’m not sure whether this idea of religious belief preceding divine essence was Ellison’s creation, but it may be (Neil Gaiman’s much-hailed American Gods also employs this concept, but Deathbird Stories, published more than 25 years prior, did it first and better). All I know is that 35 years later, its stories still resonate, and disturb.

Deathbird Stories is hard to pigeonhole (no pun intended): It’s probably closest to horror with a good deal of science fiction and fantasy elements thrown in. Story after story drives home the point that mankind has drifted away from belief in a benevolent, all-knowing and all-loving God and transferred its faith to soulless pursuits and material possessions. Deathbird Stories is Ellison’s negation (or perhaps more accurately, execution) of the Christian God, who is replaced by numerous, squalid, selfish (small g) gods upon whose sordid altars we now worship: The gods of cars, of gambling, of the modern metropolis, of pollution, and many more debased pursuits. The monstrous, twisted forms (both literal and symbolic) of these new gods are a marvelous work of Ellison’s creation. Old creatures of myth—basilisks, gargoyles, dragons, minotaurs—all make appearances, too.

Some of my favorite stories include “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” about the god of the slot machine and the mind-numbing dead-end that is Las Vegas; “Along the Scenic Route,” a short but memorable tale about a freeway autoduel of the future with equal relevance to our current road-rage fueled obsession with the automobile; “Basilisk,” which artfully combines the Greek myth of a serpent-like creature with a lethal gaze with Mars, the hungry and (well-fed) God of War; and “The Deathbird,” a disturbing inversion of the Genesis story which features serpent as hero and Adam’s search for the truth on a dying, ash-choked earth of the future.

One story is quite different in tone than the rest of the collection, “On the Downhill Side.” Here the ghosts of a deceased man and woman meet on a midnight street in New Orleans; the god of love has given them one last chance to find love in each other’s arms (the man, Paul, loved too much in life, while Lizette is a virgin who was unable to commit herself to a relationship). A great sacrifice is needed to consummate their love, which does not culminate in a playing of harps or choir of angels singing, merely a compromise “forming one spirit that would neither love too much, nor too little.” Along with “The Deathbird,” “On the Downhill Side” is Ellison at his rawest and most exposed—one gets the feeling that this how he truly believes that love and religion operate.

Ellison has always been a polarizing figure, a man of very strong opinions that he’s not afraid to share (his rants are everywhere on Youtube). You may or may not buy his cynical views, but they’re impossible to ignore. Likewise no reader will ever cuddle up with Deathbird Stories. It’s a difficult, often painful read. But it makes us think, and it immerses its reader in the beauty of the written word and the limitless potential of the short story. Love him or hate him, Ellison is an immense talent, and 35 years on Deathbird Stories still deserves to be read and discussed.

Howard’s Muse: Some ruminations by historical fiction author Steven Pressfield

Historical fiction author Steven Pressfield, perhaps best known for Gates of Fire, a magnificent re-telling of the Battle of Thermopylae, writes about the art (or more accurately, the hard labor) of writing every Wednesday on his Web site, stevenpressfield.com. This week’s installment references our favorite author ‘round these parts, Robert E. Howard.

In The War of Art, his non-fiction treatise about the writing profession (and upon which Writing Wednesdays are based), Pressfield describes writing as the product of grit and effort, accomplished by overcoming the demon of resistance. In other words, writing is largely an unromantic slog and the result of hard work. But Pressfield also believes that ideas are an entirely different animal: Inspiration like Howard’s arrives from the wings of angels, a kind of divine insight that alights on our shoulders as we set pen to paper. Pressfield calls this the spirit of the Muse.

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

“Unshaken on his rocky throne above the bleak fjords”: A review of H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes

The default setting for most fantasy is a faux late-Middle Ages, generally ascribed to the period from the Norman conquest of 1066 to roughly the end of the 15th century. Hence we get novels whose characters live in sprawling, lavishly decorative castles, answer to a high king in a monarchical society, embrace chivalric ideals, and speak in an ornate language of high culture. In comparison, the coarse, rough mine of the early Middle Ages and in particular the Viking Age is relatively untapped. I enjoy the Crusades and the Hundred Years’ War as much as the next guy, but I prefer the song of spear and axe, the smoke of the burning hall, and the sight of the dragon-headed longship against the backdrop of the ruins of ancient civilization.

This disparity is unfortunate, because although the number of novels set during the Viking Age is relatively low, I have generally found them to be of exceeding high quality. Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga and The Broken Sword are among the best of this smallish genre (though I’m not sure if the latter can be properly classified as set during the Viking Age, heavily Nordic-influenced though it may be). Bernard Cornwell’s ongoing historic fiction series The Saxon Stories is similarly great, devoid of ant overt references to magic but with all of the poetry of the age. I would add to that mix Harry Harrison’s The Hammer and the Cross, a fun, if savage and bloodthirsty read, while Nancy Farmer’s young adult work The Sea of Trolls is quite good and entertained me as a full-grown man. I have also heard praise from many quarters for E.R. Eddison’s Styrbiorn the Strong, which I have not read (it’s out of print and not easy to acquire).

It’s hard to say which of these Viking Age-inspired works would win a theoretical Holmgang amidst hazel rods, but having just now read H. Rider Haggard’s 1889 novel Eric Brighteyes, I can now state that any previous order I had established is deeply in doubt, so mighty is this book. In fact, I would unhesitatingly declare it among the finest works in the genre, better than Cornwell and at least as good as Anderson’s best. It may not be as much a household name as Haggard’s more famous works King Solomon’s Mines and She, but it’s nevertheless rightly considered a classic in some quarters and one of Haggard’s best.

What do Eric Brighteyes and the aforementioned Viking Age-inspired novels have in common, and what is their appeal? They are based on old sources of rich literature, the Icelandic Sagas, which instead of dark lords, ferocious monsters or wicked races of beings as protagonists, typically concern themselves with problems arising from human nature—a jealous lover’s scorned heart, a generation-spanning blood feud incited by murder over wealth, or a dispute over ancestral land, for example.

The Sagas also at their heart share a bleakness of vision—a belief that fate is unchangeable, and that all roads end in darkness. In Eric Brighteyes fate is depicted as a tapestry woven by the Three Fates, the Norns. Our lives are as threads in this grand but finite pattern, shorn off by the weaver at the Norns’ appointed time. Haggard sums up this unique quality of the Sagas in an introduction to Eric Brighteyes:

The Norns, as they name Fate, have mapped out their path long and long ago; their feet are set therein, and they must tread it to the end. Such was the conclusion of our Scandinavian ancestors—a belief forced upon them by their intense realization of the futility of human hopes and schemings, of the terror and tragedy of life, the vanity of its desires, and the untraveled gloom or sleep, dreamless or dreamful, which lies beyond its end.

Finally, the Viking Age novels have the luxury of drawing upon an established old Northern culture as set down in the Sagas, one that feels simultaneously alien and familiar. Men in these books don’t drown, they “go down to Ran.” Thieves and outlaws are “wolfs heads.” Warriors go “Viking” in season—bloody raids that involved the taking of gold and silver and slaves as plunder—with the same joy and tradition that we tune in to the opening day of the Red Sox each April. Valhalla waits as reward for the brave, not heaven. This was a culture that existed arm-in-arm with violence: Holmgangs, hall-burnings, and blood eagles were parlance of the Age. It’s little wonder that the aforementioned fantasy novels have burst from this fertile ground like sweet fruit.

This northern spirit and Icelandic Saga influence infuses every page of Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes. The action takes place in Iceland, a hard, stony country of hard snows and unforgiving seas. Men either make their fortunes off the land, by trading on the open seas, or by the taking of plunder in coastal raids (often all three). From the bones of this hardy soil is sprung Eric Brighteyes. Eric is the archetype of the Nordic hero: Blond, handsome, fearless, and mighty in arms and feats of strength. Yet for all his strength he too is subject to the same forces of fate that rule all men.

Artwork by Donato Giancola.

As the novel opens a young Eric falls for the beautiful Gudruda the Fair, and their marriage seems imminent. But Gudruda’s half-sister, the evil, scheming Swanhild, has other plans. Gudruda and Swanhild are both daughters of Asmund Asmundson, but while the former is his daughter from marriage, Swanhild is the offspring of Asmund’s brief extramarital fling with Groa, a fey, Finnish witch-woman. Dubbed Swanhild the Fatherless due to Asmund’s refusal to recognize her as his flesh and blood (every character in the Sagas seems to have an appellation tied to their name), Swanhild grows up spiteful and cruel. Her sole desire is to claim Eric for her own, and she will stop at nothing to get him.

Swanhild’s vow to win Eric sets up an ending string of trials and woe for Eric and Gudruda, as well as Asmund and a number of hapless men whom Swanhild uses to drive a wedge between the two lovers. Swanhild whispers in Asmund’s ear that Eric is not worthy to wed his daughter; he sets before Eric a seemingly impossible task of coming to his Yule-Feast via the route of the Golden Falls, which requires that he Eric come descend down a great waterfall some thirty fathoms high. In a scene of man against cliff rivaling James Dickey’s Deliverance, Eric succeeds in reaching the bottom.

The tests go on: Swanhild convinces Asmund to marry off Gudruda to Oskapar Blacktooth, a prosperous but heartless troll-faced warrior from the northern lands. He and Eric run afoul throughout the book, and their feud finally reaches a bloody conclusion in a scene reminiscent of The Red Wedding from George R.R. Martin’s AStorm of Swords.

Fortunately for Eric he meets a staunch ally in Skallagrim, a great bear of a man and a Baresark/Berserk, a breed of warrior which flew into such a rage in combat that they seemed impervious to weapons. Eric defeats Skallagrim in single combat and the latter swears thralldom to him and refuses to leave his side thereafter.

With Skallagrim at his side and infused with a Northern courage which allows him to endure in the face of bitter adversity, Eric overcomes all obstacles to win his way back to Gudruda—but only briefly. Eric knows that fate is on their tail and that their love cannot outlast the reckless hate of their enemies. In a speech that may have been spoken by a more pessimistic Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings (incidentally, J.R.R. Tolkien was a big fan of Eric Brighteyes), Eric tells Gudruda that although toil and struggle is our lot and we end in darkness, and that life’s rewards are short, they must be preserved, with arms if need be, and despair fought against:

Here, it would seem, is nothing but hate and strife, weariness, and bitter envy to fret away our strength, and at last, if we come so far, sickness, sorrowful age and death, and thereafter we know not what. Little of good do we find to our hands, and much of evil; nor now I for what ill-doing these burdens are laid upon us. Yet must we needs breathe such an air as is blown about us, Gudruda, clasping at that happiness which is given, though we may not hold it.

Presented at numerous times with the choice to flee Iceland and live a happy full life in England, Eric rejects this option at every turn, reeled in by pride, or his love for Gudruda, or his strong ties to Iceland itself. In one poignant scene (there are a half-dozen or more magnificent such scenes in the book), a glimmer of hope appears for the star-crossed lovers. Gudruda asks Eric whither they will go after death; Eric answers:

“Death is but the gate of life and love and rest. Harken Gudruda, my May! Odin does not reign over all the world, for when I sat out yonder in England, a certain holy man taught me of another God—a God who loves not slaughter, a God who died that men might live forever in peace with those they love.”

“How is this God named, Eric?”

“They name him the White Christ, and there are many who cling to him.”

“Would that I knew this Christ, Eric.”

I won’t spoil the ending for readers who wish to see for themselves whether Eric and Gudruda ever find peace, in this world or the next, but this a story about life, and all lives ultimately end in tragedy.

Eric’s passage here on earth wins him fame and honor in the great rolls of heroes; so too does Haggard’s novel deserve to be remembered, and re-read, down through the ages. Eric Brighteyes is the kind of fantasy novel we need more of today: Powerful, well-written, standalone, the stuff of adventure and dark magic that, at its core, grapples with the human condition, featuring heroes and heroines that match their love and loyalty and bravery against the implacable dark.

Note: I can’t review Eric Brighteyes without mentioning the wonderful introduction to my particular edition (1978, Zebra Books), by Lin Carter. Carter was a shrewd editor and a passionate, informed spokesman for fantasy literature of all stripes. It is from his introduction that the title of this post is taken.

This post originally appeared on The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: Adrift in The Pacific

I’ve always had a fascination with World War II. When I was a kid I played with army soldiers and guns, pretend battles with friends that always pitted the U.S. vs. Germany. When I got older I started to read about the war, broadening my interest from its tanks and planes and guns to its root causes, its personalities, its tactics and triumphs, and its tragedies.

But it wasn’t really until 1998’s Saving Private Ryan that I grasped the true hell of combat. Even now, some 12 years later, when I think about those landing craft approaching the beaches at Normandy, my palms break out in sweat, my heart begins to race, and my damn testicles crawl up inside my body.

I had the same reaction watching 2001’s Band of Brothers. When Easy Company’s paratroopers bail out over France into heavy flak and tracer bullets, landing spread across hostile fields in which enemy soldiers wait below, wanting only to kill them, my first thought was an incredulous, Men actually did this?

The memories of these scenes left me eagerly anticipating the 10-part HBO miniseries The Pacific, which switches the action from the European theatre of war to the savage battles waged against the Japanese. Having recently read With the Old Breed—an outstanding combat memoir by Marine infantryman Eugene Sledge, and one of the books upon which the mini-series is based—I knew The Pacific had the underpinnings to be very, very good. And with the same superstar producer duo that brought us both Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers—Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks—I was hoping that lightning would strike thrice with The Pacific.

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

Ronnie James Dio: Putting the sword to the dragon of cancer, still defying the ravages of time

—The best steel goes through the fire

Ronnie James Dio, Hide in the Rainbow

If you’re a fan of heavy metal music, you’re probably aware that legendary frontman Ronnie James Dio, 67, is in the midst of a grim battle against stomach cancer. On November 25, 2009, Dio’s wife broke the news and announced that he was starting immediate treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Her message: Dio was ready to fight back, tooth and nail, to achieve victory against this dreaded disease:

After he kills this dragon, Ronnie will be back on stage, where he belongs, doing what he loves best, performing for his fans. Long live rock and roll, long live Ronnie James Dio. Thanks to all the friends and fans from all over the world that have sent well wishes. This has really helped to keep his spirit up.

Fortunately for metal fans, it’s a battle Dio appears to be winning. The latest news according to Dio’s web site is that the man who made the sign of the horns a household symbol recently had his seventh chemotherapy treatment, and that the main tumor in his stomach has shrunk considerably. I hope it’s a fight he ultimately wins and that one day we’ll see him back on stage, belting out Holy Diver while wielding a two-handed sword.

At this point you may be thinking, that’s cool and all, but why write about Dio on a web site devoted to the works of Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other authors?

To which I would answer: Have you ever listened to Dio’s lyrics? They’re fantasy fiction set to music, man.

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

Closing the book on The Silmarillion

Re-reading The Silmarillion was a lot of fun—as I knew it would be. From the Dagor Brallogach to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, from The Fall of Gondolin to the Voyage of Eärendil, how could it be otherwise? The Silmarillion might not be for everyone, but it never fails to awe, inspire, and move me. Telephone directory in Elvish my ass (okay, that particular description makes me smile, inaccurate though it may be).

I found my most recent trip through Tolkien’s legendarium particularly rewarding because blogging as I read forced me to organize my thoughts and get them down on paper. Committing to a series of posts had the byproduct of making me think more deeply and rigorously about the subject at hand. I hope you enjoyed Blogging The Silmarillion and I want to thank you all for the great comments.

I do feel obligated to mention the edition of The Silmarillion I used to write this series, in part because I borrowed so much of its artwork. It’s a hardcover published in 2004 by the Houghton Mifflin Company containing 45 gorgeous, full-page color illustrations by artist Ted Nasmith. This isn’t just a book, it’s a work of art, one of the gems of my bookshelf. I’m a reader, not a collector, but I am proud to own this particular volume (you can find it pictured above).

While he may not be as well-known a Tolkien illustrator as John Howe or Alan Lee, Nasmith is perhaps my favorite artist of the trio. He’s particularly good at painting detailed landscapes and broad vistas, which makes him a natural fit for the epic, scenic sweep of the stories contained in The Silmarillion.

One of the most affecting images that I’ve ever experienced in my mind’s eye is a young Tolkien on the battlefields of the Somme, wreathed in the reek of cordite and blood and fear, hope for survival minimal, writing down the tale of The Fall of Gondolin. Some combination of chance or fate allowed him to survive those horrors and deliver his wonderful tales of Middle-earth to us, posthumously, with the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion. I’m glad we have it.

Critical works referenced

Carpenter, Humphrey, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

Flieger, Verlyn, Splintered Light

Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War

Shippey, Tom, Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-earth

Zimbardo, Rose; Isaacs, Neil: Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism

REH and other omissions aside, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature a worthy listen

Note: This post originally appeared on The Cimmerian website.

Slowly—too slowly and decades overdue, in my opinion—fantasy literature is gaining a foothold in colleges and universities. Long ignored and/or the subject of sneering intellectuals and defenders of the literary “canon,” works like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings are finally starting to appear on a handful of college syllabi. (To geek out a moment and quote Gandalf the Grey, “that is an encouraging thought.”)

For this slowly building acceptance of fantasy literature in academic circles, one has to acknowledge the work of the college professors who have cajoled, pled, or insisted that it be allowed into the hallowed halls of academia. These include men like Tom Shippey (former Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University and author of J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-earth), Corey Olsen, aka., The Tolkien Professor, an English Professor at Washington College, and Michael Drout, Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

Drout is editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics and a co-editor of Tolkien Studies. At Wheaton he teaches Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, medieval literature, fantasy, science fiction, and writing. He also writes a blog, Wormtalk and Slugspeak, which is definitely worth adding to your list of links.

Drout also wrote and narrated a fine entry in The Modern Scholar audio book series, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which is the subject of this post. I recently had the pleasure of listening to it during my commute to work and found it immensely enjoyable, lucid, thought-provoking, and ambitious. It offers prima facie evidence for why fantasy literature deserves to be the subject of academic study.

Drout begins by outlining  the origins of modern fantasy literature, including Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes, and then continues the fantastic journey all the way up through J.K. Rowling’ Harry Potter series.

Rings, Swords, and Monsters spends most of its time offering an excellent appraisal of J.R.R. Tolkien and his works. Tolkien has cast a long shadow over all fantasy literature since the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the mid-1950s, and Drout explains why in detail here, illuminating the timeless themes that place works like The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings among the best novels of the 20th century. He also delves into Tolkien’s seminal works of scholarship, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and “On Fairy-Stories.”

Drout places Tolkien in a semi-holy trinity of fantasy authors alongside Ursula LeGuin and Robert Holdstock. I agree with the choice of LeGuin, whose Earthsea books are a marvel, but Holdstock gets a firm “?” from me, as I have not read any his works. But Rings, Swords, and Monsters has convinced me to give Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985) a try. So I won’t be too quick to deal out judgment on this claim.

But the reach of Rings, Swords, and Monsters extends beyond just the heavy hitters of fantasy. For example, it offers the first serious, critical treatment I’ve ever seen (or more accurately, have heard) of authors Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks. Both fell under the spell of an “anxiety of influence” while laboring in Tolkien’s long shadow: Donaldson (of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever fame) was one of the first post-Tolkien writers to write in reaction to The Lord of the Rings, while Brooks’ Sword of Shannara was the poster-child of Tolkien clones.

Drout also spends considerable time detailing the golden age of young adult fantasy fiction, a period that ran from roughly the late 1960’s/1970s and included Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. No arguments here: I enjoy and continue to enjoy all three series, which still hold up as fine reading for both children and adults. He also spends time analyzing C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series.

Drout classifies Arthurian literature as a subcategory of fantasy. Arthurian literature is considered more “serious” because in it magic and world-building are subordinate to male-female relationships and ethical dilemmas, which share more in common with romance. Drout calls T.H. White’s masterful The Once and Future King the most substantial and important work of Arthurian fiction since Malory, an assessment with which I wholeheartedly agree. He also touches on Malory, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Mary Stewart in this lecture.

Refereshingly, Drout is not only a medieval scholar but an obvious fan of the fantasy genre. Frankly, this is nice to see. He not only analyzes the books, but interjects personal opinion about them and reads passages aloud for their lyricism and beauty. Listening to Drout’s meticulous pronunciation of the Sindarian and Quenya tongues, or the first several lines of Beowulf in Old English, was an aural pleasure.

Drout concludes Rings, Swords, and Monsters with some brilliant commentary on what makes fantasy fiction “fantastic,” including how and why fantasy differs from realism. Broadly, Drout says that fantasy is about stories that physically cannot happen, while realistic fiction/historic fiction is about things that could have happened, but did not. He rejects the idea that fantasy is inherently conservative or religious, noting that Tolkien’s ideology differs from LeGuin who differs from Donaldson, for example, and that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is anti-Christian.

Rings, Swords, and Monsters makes a strong case that fantasy should be considered serious literature, and not just escapism, though I have long argued that escapism is a worthy function of fantasy literature, as it enables us to see our own world in a clearer light. Drout says as much, too: “Fantasy literature takes us further, deeper, and higher, so that when we return, we see the old world in a new way,” he says. He also says fantasy typically focuses on larger and more existential “needs” of characters (survival, defeating forces of evil that threaten to overwhelm worlds, grappling with the reality of death) while realistic fiction focuses on the “wants” of characters (i.e., compromised freedom, broken relationships, lack of respect, etc). Fantasy literature actually wrestles with the bigger issues (death, belief in God, etc.) better than modern, realistic novels by engaging them directly, Drout argues.

Drout also has some illuminating things to say about nostalgia and its connection to fantasy lit. While nostalgia for a lost, idyllic past informs the works of Tolkien and subsequent fantasy authors, this feeling should not be conflated with infantilism. Rather, nostalgia represents an honest desire of authors to offer their readers better models of reality than our own unsatisfactory present. They’re not trying to pull us back to an “authentic” time in our own history that never existed, but to create from whole cloth a better past that never was, providing us with shining examples that can use to make our own world a better place.

“Tolkien, LeGuin, Holdstock, Donaldson, Brooks, at their best, want to examine what it means to be human, just as any mainstream writer does, but they want to do it by removing the social structures of the present world and seeing how humans in all their variety might behave in a different world,” Drout says.

Howard who? And other absences

Rings, Swords, and Monsters does contain a few glaring omissions, one of which is almost unforgivable. I almost hate to mention it around these parts for fear of turning off readers of The Cimmerian to an otherwise fine course.

Of course I’m talking about Robert E. Howard, who Drout completely overlooks, save for one wince-inducing comparison in which he calls the psychological journey of Bilbo Baggins “far more interesting than a hero like Conan the Barbarian who just smashes everything in his path.” Now, I’m almost—almost—willing to overlook this, on the grounds that Drout may not consider REH’s stories fantasy, but rather in the pulp-action/swords-and-sorcery genre (Drout’s failure to mention authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber lends further weight to this argument). He never makes this claim, but it’s a possibility.

I’m also willing to defend Drout for the simple fact that he attempts to offer a review of the entire corpus of fantasy literature on just seven CDs, each an hour or so in length. He obviously can’t cover everything.

However, I was disappointed not to hear anything about Howard, nor a few other authors whom I would place firmly among the greats in the fantasy genre, including Poul Anderson (The Broken Sword, Three Hearts and Three Lions) and E.R. Eddison, whose The Worm Ouroboros must surely be considered among the greatest fantasy novels ever written. Michael Moorcock, though not one of my favorite authors, also is overlooked here. The absence of Lord Dunsany and Gene Wolfe are also head-scratchers.

Drout’s world view of fantasy fiction is dominated by Tolkien, who he calls the “father figure” of fantasy literature. I would call Tolkien the dominant figure epic fantasy, while placing Howard as the pinnacle of a second tower of realistic, grim and gritty, action-oriented fantasy (aka, swords and sorcery). Howard’s tales are not just adventure stories but also have thematic and literary depth, which make them worthy of closer analysis and study. He is certainly a critical, weight-bearing pillar of the genre.

Nor is Drout’s evaluation of epic fantasy complete. For example, regarding the Tolkien clones, how did he overlook Dennis McKiernan, whose Iron Tower trilogy is LOTR in miniature with the serial numbers filed off? You can practically see the whiteout on the pages. In comparison, The Sword of Shannara is highly original. Though Rings, Swords, and Monsters was released in 2006, Drout also fails to mention George R.R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire series seems to offer a bridge of that realism/fantasy literature gap that he spends much time explaining. Not quite epic fantasy or swords and sorcery, A Song of Ice and Fire arguably shares more in common with the grim historic fiction of Bernard Cornwell than Tolkien. It would be interesting to see where and how Drout would classify these books. For that matter, I would have liked to have seen Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles covered in the Arthurian lecture, but although its fiction, Cornwell’s trilogy contains no overt magic or monsters and is faithful to 5th century Britain and perhaps is more accurately classified as historical fiction.

In summary, Rings, Swords, and Monsters offers a highly literate, engaging and detailed look at the sub-genre of epic or high fantasy, even as it falls short of offering a review of the entire depth and breadth of the genre. Perhaps we may one day see the Modern Scholar tackle pulp-inspired, heroic/swords and sorcery fantasy as well. Like Boromir hurling a stone into the waters of the dammed Sirannon, the ripples of Rings, Swords, and Monsters may awaken further academic analysis of rougher, more savage beasts that lurk beneath the waters of fantasy fiction.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Closing the book on the Third Age

Part nine of Blogging The Silmarillion concludes with Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

“Many are the strange chances of the world,” said Mithrandir, “and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

A recurring theme in The Silmarillion is Elves and/or Men meeting force with force, the result of which is endless cycles of war and ruin. In the Quenta Silmarillon Melkor steals the three Silmarils, and their maker, the Noldorin Elf Fëanor, vows to recover them at all costs. Fëanor’s destructive oath sets in motion a millennia-spanning series of conflicts that continue until the Valar intercede in the War of Wrath, another horribly destructive affair which mars Arda forever and ends the First Age of Middle-earth.

But even after Morgoth’s defeat in the War of Wrath, evil is not destroyed, nor are possessiveness and pride stamped out of the hearts of Men. In the Akallabêth the Númenóreans fall victim to the same Fëanor-like sins of pride and overreaching when they try to wrest immortality from the Valar. The result is the destruction of their civilization.

Thus far it’s been pretty bleak stuff from Tolkien, and with only one section of The Silmarillion left it’s still very much an open question whether Men and Elves will ever learn from their mistakes, or whether Middle-earth is doomed to ever more destructive wars of possession. And so we arrive at Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.

After the drowning of Númenor, the surviving ships of the Faithful led by Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anárion alight on the shores of Middle-earth. They build great works whose gorgeous, evocative names I can’t resist repeating here: the watchtowers Emyn Beraid and Amon Sul; Minas Ithil, the Tower of the Rising Moon; Minas Anor, Tower of the Setting Sun; the massive Argonath statues; and the Pinnacle of Orthanc (Saruman’s future home). Atop these new towers the Númenóreans place the Seven Stones, aka the palantíri, which allow them to keep a vigilant watch on Sauron. They also settle the great realm of Gondor and construct the city of Osgiliath.

Meanwhile the disembodied, drowned spirit of Sauron eventually returns to the Mountains of Shadow where he sets his minions to work building Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower. Sauron takes up the One Ring, and after gathering his strength goes to war. His forces capture Minas Ithil (which later becomes Minas Morgul, “The Tower of Dark Sorcery”) and gain control of the palantír kept there.

Isildur vs. Sauron.

With Middle-earth in jeopardy of falling under Sauron’s dark rule, Elendil and the Noldorin high king Gil-galad unite in the Last Alliance, a great host of Elves and Men. In an all-out battle with Sauron’s forces on Dagorlad, the Battle Plain, the host of good prevails, then lays siege to Barad-dûr. Anárion is slain during the seven-year standoff. Finally Sauron himself issues forth, slaying both Gil-galad and Elendil in an epic throw-down. But Sauron is vanquished when Isildur cuts the Ruling Ring from his hand. This ushers in The Third Age and the events of The Lord of the Rings.

The Third Age doesn’t get off to an auspicious start for the forces of good as Isildur refuses to destroy the One Ring. Instead he opts to keep it as “weregild” for the death of his father and brother. A weregild is an Anglo-Saxon term meaning reparation for murder. In other words, the One Ring is a form of blood money and keeping it is a bad omen. It’s therefore not surprising when Isildur is slain by a band of orcs. The Ring is swept into the river Anduin and lost.

(This raises an interesting side-question: Is Isildur’s failure to cast the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom the result of the One Ring’s corruptive influence, or Isildur’s own lust for power? Tolkien leaves the issue open for interpretation.)

Sauron, defeated but not destroyed, arises from the ashes a second time and begins to rebuild his armies. His thoughts return to finding and recovering the One Ring, his source of power, which eventually is recovered by the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo’s nephew, Frodo, now has the unenviable task of taking it to Rivendell to allow the powers-that-be to decide what to do next.

Right about here a First Age hero may have confronted Sauron on the battlefield with the One Ring and destroyed him, but in the process becoming another Dark Lord in his stead. But this time, miraculously, evil is thwarted by an act of humble bravery by a meek, unlikely hero.

Frodo is unlike anyone we have seen in the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth. While the events of The Silmarillion are dominated by the long shadow of Fëanor, who vows to recover the great treasure of the Silmarils and inflict revenge on Melkor, its successor, The Lord of the Rings, is the inverse of this equation: It’s about a humble hero who bears an artifact with him into the heart of darkness with the intent to destroy it, not wield it as a weapon.

While Feanor is driven by a limitless pride in his own strength, Frodo is motivated by an inner sense of duty and undying loyalty to his friends. In the end he succeeds where greater Men and Elves would have (and have already) failed. The forces of the West would surely have been overcome at the last were it not for the hands of the weak, the long trek into Mordor of Frodo and Sam, who beyond all endurance and hope deliver Middle-earth from destruction. “For, as many songs have since sung, it was the Periannath, the Little People, dwellers in hillsides and meadows, that brought them deliverance,” writes Tolkien.

Frodo’s seemingly hopeless quest is the answer to the eternal question: How do you defeat force? The answer is through patient endurance and self-sacrifice. In other words, through unassuming, quiet heroism, by exhibiting pity for one’s enemies, and through subversion, by not playing by force’s rules. This is another of the great themes of Tolkien’s works, and one which he explains in a letter:

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth … And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature,’ that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easy it can be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easy can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously… 

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

But as is always the case, Tolkien’s works resist simple, reductive explanations. While we can interpret Frodo’s carrying of the One Ring to Christ’s burden of the Cross, for example, Middle-earth is not saved through pacifism and pity alone. The spirit of Feanor endures in the suicidal feint at the Black Gates of Mordor and the sacrifice on the Pelennor Fields, which I would argue are just as integral to victory as the quest into Mordor. The Elf-Lord Círdan says as much when gives Gandalf the Ring Narya, hoping that the some of the Ragnarök-like spirit of the First Age will help the heroes of the Third:

“For this is the Ring of Fire, and herewith, maybe, thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valour of old in a world that grows chill.”

It is the union of Northern courage and Christian faith, “hammerstrokes with compassion” as coined by C.S. Lewis, that ultimately delivers the Third Age from the black night of Sauron’s victory.

Terrific Tolkien: Finding joy in unhappy endings

In Tolkien’s legendarium victory is never the black-and-white happy ending that it appears to be. Yes, Sauron is destroyed when the One Ring is consumed in the fires of Mount Doom. But the Ring’s destruction opens an artery in the heartstrings of Middle-earth, from which magic drains away, along with its greatest heroes. Writes Tolkien:

In that time the last of the Noldor set sail from the Havens and left Middle-earth for ever. And latest of all the Keepers of the Three Rings rode to the Sea, and Master Elrond took there the ship that Cirdan had made ready. In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed into the Ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.

Last ship to Valinor.

For all the race’s previous acts of pride and stubbornness, it’s noteworthy that a Noldorin Elf commits the greatest self-sacrifice of all. Galadriel, one of the Eldest of the Eldar, has the One Ring in her grasp after Frodo offers it to her freely in Lothlórien. She could have taken it and used it to defeat Sauron. Think of her temptation: The fate of the One Ring is tied to the Three Rings. Had it not perished the three Elven Rings would also have endured, along with all the great works of the Elves which the Rings protect and preserve, including Lothlórien and Rivendell. Yet in the end Galadriel resists its temptation. The Elves choose to sacrifice the Ring and their Rings though it results in the destruction of all their works. They opt for freedom over immortality. It’s a wonderful inversion of everything we’ve seen so far in The Silmarillion.

Like The Lord of the Rings, I find the ending of The Silmarillion incredibly sad. I grieve for the departure of the Noldor, for the draining of magic from the world, for the last ship which pulls away from the Havens, and for our own, grayer world left in its wake. While reading Tolkien’s letters, I was interested to find that he began a story placed about 100 years after the downfall of Mordor, “but it proved both sinister and depressing,” and he wound up abandoning the project.

I can sympathize. During a few (all too fleeting) times in my life, I’ve felt glimpses of magic at the edges of my vision, dim remembrances of heroic ages separated by vast epochs of time. Just as quickly, these tantalizing images fade, and I’m back in the here and now of modern life, a world of banal existence, drab landscapes, and moral turpitude. Does this make me crazy? (Arguably) no, just someone who loves slipping into the world of fantasy fiction, and in particular the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Silmarillion provides these rare, exotic glimpses of a rich and wonderful secondary world, of which I have yet to find an equal. Everything in The Lord of the Rings is an echo of a grander, more epic work. The Silmarillion may not be as grounded, as accessible, nor ultimately as successful as a work of literature as The Lord of the Rings, but in my opinion it’s just as great. For it is myth writ large.

(Images by J.R.R. Tolkien, Jos, Ted Nasmith)