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.

To read the rest of this post, visit 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

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.

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

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)