Wolfe’s lost road: Discovering an author’s personal essay on J.R.R. Tolkien

Freedom, love of neighbour, and personal responsibility are steep slopes; he could not climb them for us—we must do that ourselves. But he has shown us the road and the reward.

--Gene Wolfe, “The Best Introduction to the Mountains”

J.R.R. Tolkien has so many readers, and his works have become so pervasive in the broader culture, that coming to his defense hardly seems necessary anymore. Haven’t we established Tolkien’s credentials by now? Magazines like Time have selected The Lord of the Rings as one of the top 100 novels ever, according to Wikipedia it’s one of the top 10 best-selling books of all time with 150 million copies sold, and the movies upon which it’s based won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Tolkien has made it onto several college syllabi and there are academic journals and numerous critical studies devoted to his works, including Tom Shippey’s par excellence works Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-Earth.

But someone always comes along to attack Tolkien on the basis of his conservatism or religion, his perceived racism, and/or the perceived shallowness/non-literary nature of The Lord of the Rings, and I’m reminded of why we need to vigilant. For example, David Brin of Salon.com, Science fiction/fantasy author Richard Morgan (author of The Steel Remains), and Phillip Pulman (author of the His Dark Materials trilogy) have all taken shots at The Lord of the Rings and/or Tolkien himself in recent years, calling him outdated and dangerously conservative (Brin), a refuge for 12-year-olds and adults who have never grown up (Morgan), and shrunken and diminished by his Catholicism (Pulman).

Now I’m not saying Tolkien is above criticism, but critics like Brin and Morgan have essentially gutted The Lord of the Rings, attacking it on an existential basis and more or less claiming it should be placed in the dustbin of history. When people take aim at classics like Ulysses or Moby Dick you rarely see criticism elevated to the level of calling into question the very existence of these works. Yet Tolkien criticism for whatever reason frequently ascends to shrill peaks of outrage.

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

Heroes of the Fallen: A review

With the bittersweet music of battle over, I found him at dusk, buried amid the mass of his ten thousand. He and I, the last of his legion. Taking my general back up the great hill, halfway up we surveyed the apocalyptic scene. Twenty-three legions in all, completely decimated in a matter of days. He wept. I cannot, there is nothing inside anymore but a burning sadness.

--Heroes of the Fallen, David J. West

I will admit that when I started reading Heroes of the Fallen (WiDo publishing, 2010), I was worried that I was about to wade into a religious tract. I’m not a particularly religious person and its author, David West, is a devout Mormon who drew inspiration for Heroes of the Fallen from the events described in the Book of Mormon.

Ultimately however my fears proved unfounded. West is a man of deep faith, but while religious sentiment informs the work, it does not overwhelm it. Instead, a rousing adventure story is exactly how I’d describe the story.

Heroes of the Fallen is about the build up to a coming war between the Lamanites and the Nephites. After centuries of uneasy peace, the Lamanites, long-time rivals of the Nephites, are fueled into open war by a secret brotherhood called the Gadiantons and a depraved sect of worshippers of the dark god Shagreel. The Lamanites and their allies the Ishmaelites begin a series of political and military machinations, including a series of assassinations and border skirmishes, designed to weaken the Nephites and place blame for the conflict upon them.

The strength of Heroes of the Fallen is its skillful ratcheting up of tension to this coming clash. It’s populated with colorful heroes and villains: Akish-Antum is a memorable villain, a cunning warlord and seer who is also a fearsome warrior who slays with a taloned gauntlet; Bethia, a princess who leaves home and encounters the hard realities of the road, evokes the reader’s sympathy; Mormon, a great bear of a man and an earnest father trying to bring up his son in the midst of the carnage and conflict, is another likeable character. While there are clear heroes and villains, there are also people in the middle like the young prince Aaron, who is swayed to the Gadiantons’ side by his own weaknesses and ambitions, and the Lamanite bodyguard Zelph, whose conscience and faith causes him to defect to the Nephites’ cause.

Heroes of the Fallen is quite violent but not overly gory. There are plenty of battles and they are conveyed with a sense of danger but without over-the-top eviscerations and graphic battlefield carnage. I also enjoyed the sense of history West conveys. The prologue is set some 60 years after the ensuing events in the book and paints a vivid battlefield picture of the terrible trials to come.

Heroes of the Fallen is also a genre-buster. I’d be hard-pressed to give it a label—it inhabits some war-torn battlefield between historic fiction, swords and sorcery, and epic fantasy. At times it feels like sword and sorcery, particularly in the way West writes his characters. These are painted with pulp overtones and bright splashes of color. Amaron has shades of Robert E. Howard’s favorite Cimmerian about him (or perhaps more accurately Solomon Kane, as Amaron is a man of deep faith). You can clearly see West’s sensibilities and literary inspirations in the way the book is written and its dialogue. For example, REH comes leaping off the page in an early duel between the Amaron and Helam and a group of assassins:

Amaron slashed two more of the dagger men as they attempted to flank him, roaring at them, “Jackals of Set! You have never before fought a man with his blade ready for you!” Another man went down, clutching his stump.

But despite its S&S inspiration, the long storyline, multiple characters, and interweaving plot threads of Heroes of the Fallen are all hallmarks of epic fantasy, as is the fact that the story is broken up into at least two (and perhaps multiple) volumes. Which may be why Heroes of the Fallen was not my ideal cup of tea. I found that it featured a few too many characters, and none of them in any great depth. It’s written not unlike George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, told by multiple characters with continually switching point of views.

In addition, I find myself drawn partial to shorter, self-contained works these days, and after 300 pages too much of the story of Heroes of the Fallen remained unresolved. I’ve been burned by A Song of Ice and Fire, and my sufferings with Martin’s overdue for completion epic series may have unfairly biased me against Heroes of the Fallen.

But West did plant some nice hooks to draw readers into Blood of our Fathers, the next in the series with a planned 2011 release. While the arc of character development was slow, by book’s end I could feel myself drawn to the plight of a few characters, including Mormon and Amaron, and I wanted to know how their stories resolve. There’s an excellent apocalyptic duel between Amaron and the Gadianton warrior/tracker Uzzsheol that very much seems to set up events in the sequel.

So in the end I enjoyed Heroes of the Fallen and give massive props to David. He followed his dream, harnessed his Muse, and wrote a fine first book. I hope his success continues to build with Blood of Our Fathers and the additional writing projects he’s pursuing. Heroic fiction needs more authors like him moving the genre forward.

IT: A review

You don’t have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.

—Stephen King, IT

What quality separates an adult from a child? Is it responsibility in the former and unbridled freedom in the latter? Do adults possess a higher order of thinking? Or, to take a cynical view, are adults merely physically larger (perhaps they/we never really do grow up)?

I happen to think there is a difference, though it’s hard to say precisely what. You could describe adulthood as a phase through which we all must pass, else we remain stunted and undeveloped, looking backward instead of forward, unable to transform into the mature beings that the hard world requires. Indefinable and amorphous, you may as well call this period of transition it. Stephen King did, and in 1985 he wrote a massive book by the same name about this very subject.

As is King’s forte, IT is also a horror story, and a terrifying one at that. The villain of IT is a creature that lurks in the sewers of Derry, Maine, one that takes the shape of our worst fears. IT’s favorite shape is a painted clown known as Pennywise, friendly at first glance but whose greasepaint smile reveals a double-row of Gillette razor teeth. Pennywise can also take the form of a werewolf, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein, and more. Whatever a particular child finds most terrifying, Pennywise can take its shape.

Pennywise has preyed on the children of Derry for untold generations, emerging from a deep slumber in the sewers every 27 years to feed. After a year of gruesome killings (written up in the press as mysterious child disappearances, or frequently blamed on other sources), the cycles end with a culminating event, typically an awful orgy of destruction, after which the creature resumes its hibernation.

But Pennywise—aka., IT—always comes back. Derry is perennially under its pall and seems to accept the darkness as “just the way things are” and the horrors continue in cyclical fashion. But then comes the summer of 1958. A group of 10 and 11-year-old children called the Loser’s Club, led by a stuttering, charismatic child known as Bill Denbrough, unite to battle Pennywise. All have had close brushes with the monster. Scarred by their experiences but united in purpose (Bill’s six year old brother Georgie is dragged into the sewer and killed in a gruesome scene at the beginning of the novel, and Bill vows revenge), they travel into Derry’s byzantine sewer systems to put an end to the monster. Following an epic confrontation in the creature’s den the children vow to return to Derry should Pennywise/IT ever return.

One of the club, Mike Hanlon, remains behind in the ensuring decades to watch and wait. When Pennywise does re-emerge 27 years later the children of the Loser’s Club are now adults in their late 30s. Some higher power has mercifully allowed them to forget the terrible events of their childhood and move on with their lives. But now they have to fight the terrible evil once more and growing up has diminished them in some way. This time around they find themselves less equipped to fight.

IT is a great story full of memorable events, places, and characters. King imbues Derry with its own personality, and the town feels like a member of the cast. King skillfully weaves in events from Derry’s awful past, including past murder sprees and the culminating bloodbaths that sent IT back into the sewers, including a horrific nightclub fire (The Black Spot) and the explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks.

But in the end, what I like most about IT, and what separates the book from much of the rest of King’s oeuvre, is its thoughtful exploration of that amorphous crossing of the bar from youth to maturity. To get where you want to go in life you have to grow up, King says, but it’s not a simple process. The transition from childhood to adulthood is complex and bittersweet, its benefits equivocal. Adulthood brings with it at least some measure of financial, parental, and geographic freedom. We can leave those hometowns that are so frequently a source of shame and failure and hidden darkness. But in so doing we lose a lot, too—our dreams, our innocence, our closest friends, and sometimes even our faith in a higher power. And the only way to defeat Pennywise—that monstrous, childhood IT—is through faith.

King has been accused by his critics of being shallow, all style and no substance (he did himself no favors by once calling himself “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries”). But I’ve found that his best material has more depth than meets than eye. IT is not just about battling monsters. Or rather it is about that, but the monsters are also the real, adult fears of loneliness, guilt, and dependency, of growing up, of confronting the monsters of one’s past and trying to move on. We are all incomplete until we face our past and determine who we are, what we stand for, and how we want to live our lives. This personal struggle, as much as visceral, horrific battles with Pennywise, is what brings me back to IT again and again. This time around I had the benefit of listening to it courtesy of Penguin Audio (my review will also appear on SFFaudio.com).

I will say that IT is not without its problems, including a sequence that remains controversial among King’s readers. Without spoiling the story, it involves a coming of age ritual in the sewers that is a bit off-putting and jarring, even though I do understand its purposes. Some of the characters feel a bit one-trick and allegorical (representative of concepts rather than three-dimensional human beings). Other readers have complained that IT’s denouement—Pennywise’s final reveal—is a bit of a let-down after 1,000 pages of build up. King is unfortunately often guilty of writing unsatisfying endings to otherwise great novels, and IT arguably suffers from the same problem. I don’t necessarily agree, as I find the epilogue incredibly satisfying, but others have made this criticism.

But despite its flaws, IT is one of my favorite books by King. With a memorable monster, a nice cast of characters, and a compelling, decades-spanning storyline with an epic final showdown, IT is a horrific page turner with deeper literary ambitions that it mostly fulfills.

This review also appears on SFFaudio.com.

Back in Black (Gate) and reading Clark Ashton Smith

Well, I made it back more or less intact from vacation. All that's changed is I'm a little bit tanner and my beer gut has grown a little more expansive. Nothing that a little office life and salad consumption won't fix.

Oh yeah, and I'm now going to be contributing bi-weekly posts to Black Gate blog, the online home of Black Gate magazine. It's a fine outfit that publishes fantasy fiction, reviews, role-playing game articles, and more. I welcome the chance to write for Black Gate, which is quite simliar to the now closed The Cimmerian website. It's got a great group of writers and while the main focus of the blog is fantasy literature, it branches out to include movies, horror, RPGs, and more. In other words, right up my alley.

You can read my first post up now. It's about my first experience reading a Clark Ashton Smith anthology, the recently-released The Return of the Sorcerer. Yeah, I'm not too proud of the fact that I've gone this long without reading a dedicated Smith collection, but now that I've delved into its dark waters, you can bet I'll be seeking out Smith again and again. I hope you like it.

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Confession: I am a fan of pulp fantasy who has, until recently, read very little Clark Ashton Smith. Yes, the man who comprises one of the equilateral sides of the immortal Weird Tales triangle has largely eluded me, save for a few scattered tales and poems I’ve encountered in sundry anthologies and websites.

This past week that all I changed when I cracked the cover of The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith (2009, Prime Books). As I read the introduction by legendary fantasy author Gene Wolfe I knew I was in for something special: Not only was Wolfe singing Clarke’s praises (“No one imitates Smith: There could be only one writer of Clark Ashton Smith stories, and we have had him”), but he ended with this declaration:

“Earlier I wrote that Smith had come—and gone. That he had been ours only briefly, and now was ours no longer. That is so for me and for many others. If you have yet to read him, it is not so for you. For you solely he is about to live again, whispering of the road between the atoms and the path into far stars.”

The stories that followed did just that. Smith came alive for me, and I find myself a changed man. I have trekked on distant planets, seen alien beings beyond my conception, and peered wide-eyed over the shoulders of reckless sorcerers reading from musty tomes of lore that should not be opened. I have witnessed wonders and horrors beyond the knowledge of mankind. It was a wonderful experience. Though they comprise only a small part of his body of work, the stories of The Return of the Sorcerer reveal Smith as a man of staggering imagination, considerable poetic skill, and surprising literary depth.

To read the rest of this post, visit the Black Gate website: http://www.blackgate.com/2010/07/08/the-return-of-the-sorcerer-falling-under-clark-ashton-smith%e2%80%99s-potent-spell-for-the-first-time/

A pause in programming

Note to passers-by: I won't be posting to The Silver Key for a good week or so--I'm taking a vacation (internet-free) with the family.

See you after July 4.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: Camlann

1. Battle of Camlann, from various sources

Many a spear was thrust and splintered,
Many a stern word spoken;
Many a sword was hacked and bent,
Many a helmet broken;
Noble companies clashed together,
Battering helmets bright.
A hundred thousand fell to the ground;
The boldest were quelled ere night.

Since Brutus voyaged out of Troy
And Britain for kingdom won,
No war so wonderfully fierce
Was fought beneath the sun.
By evening not a knight was left
Could stir his blood and bone
But Arthur and two fellow-knights
And Mordred, left alone.

—Le Morte Arthur

Camlann, the final battle of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, has been retold and re-imagined by authors as diverse as Sir Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Bernard Cornwell, appearing in ancient sources like the stanzaic poem Le Morte Arthur (written circa 1350) and modern novels like T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (published 1958). Despite differing details of the order of battle and the manner in which its final blows were struck, all the sources agree that Camlann was the end of Arthur’s reign. He either dies outright, or is mortally wounded and spirited away to the mystical isle of Avalon from which one day he will return, healed, to repair a broken world.

Was Arthur a real figure? I suspect he was. Ancient legends, however altered they may become with the passage of years and the vagaries of recorded history, typically have some basis in fact. Most histories place Arthur as a sixth-century ‘dux bellorum’ (war-leader) or high king of the post-Roman period in Britain. His legend fomented in Geoffrey of Monmouths’s History of the Kings of Britain, was adapted and romanticized by various French poets, and eventually reached its fullest form in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.

But beneath all the romance and splendor of the myth—handsome knights winning favors for their lovely ladies in tournaments, or riding off gallantly on glorious grail quests and the like—is the grim, bloody battle that ended the dream. Whether it was fought in the fifth century A.D. by bearded warriors armed with spears and shield and wearing coats of ring-mail, or was a mythic 15th century tilt of plumed knights in gothic plate, Camlann kicks ass and rates as no. 1 on my list of Top 10 fantasy fiction battles. There are many reasons why it has such resonance with me, but here’s a few:

• The aging Arthur, lacing them up one last time like an aging but still dangerous prize heavyweight. Arthur bleeds pathos; betrayed by his best friend and his wife, hated by his bastard son, and unable to patch together his squabbling knights, he nevertheless rides out to battle one final time for the good of the world. He fights for a concept of what is right.

• Lancelot, Arthur’s disgraced betrayer, returning to the fray to help out his beloved king. In many versions of the story he reaches the battle too late, but I’ve always been partial to those where Lancelot returns in the nick of time, fights bravely, and dies at Arthur’s side after begging his forgiveness. See John Boorman’s Excalibur (cue lump in throat when a wild-haired Lancelot rides into the fray swinging a mace).

• Mordred is a complex enemy. Either you love to hate him, or find it hard to wholly root against him. In some versions of the tale Mordred is Arthur’s nephew and a terrible betrayer, utterly unsympathetic to the reader. In others he’s Arthur’s illegitimate child whom the King in a moment of supreme weakness tries and fails to drown after hearing a prophecy that his birth will bring ruin to Camelot. Thus Mordred’s hatred for his father and the Round Table is rather justifiable.

• The desperate nature of the affair. Order and the age of chivalry hang in the balance, and underneath the pounding hooves of Mordred’s forces can be heard the heavy footsteps of an approaching Dark Age. Against these are arrayed a thin red line of Arthur’s knights, the remains of the once great round table.

• Its finality. Everyone of consequence pretty much dies in the Battle of Camlann, including Arthur, Mordred, and the great knights Lancelot and Gawain. It’s the end of a golden age and a shining castle on a hill.

The alliterative Morte Arthure says that Mordred’s forces include 60,000 soldiers while Arthur’s troops number just 1,800 knights. The stanzaic Le Morte Arthur estimates a larger order of battle with a combined 100,000 casualties.

Camlann is often started seemingly a random when, during a parley of the opposing forces, one of Mordred’s men is stung on the foot by an adder and draws his sword to kill it. Thinking that their king has been deceived, Arthur’s knights attack. Perhaps the serpent is an allusion to Satan, the deceiver and sewer of discord, wreaking mischief on the Christlike Arthur.

Of the battle itself there are numerous versions. Bernard Cornwell wrote a memorable version in Excalibur, the concluding volume of his highly recommended Warlord Trilogy. Here Arthur’s knights engage Mordred’s in a clash of shieldwalls on a narrow strip of sandy beach (would you expect anything less from Cornwell, he of the shieldwall fetish?) Mordred’s forces vastly outnumber Arthur’s but he can’t bring them all to bear at once and his advantage is nullified. Cornwell does a usual fine job of depicting the nasty, brutish conflict that occurs in the interlocked walls of wood:

I recall confusion and the noise of sword ringing on sword, and the crash of shield striking shield. Battle is a matter of inches, not miles. The inches that separate a man from his enemy. You smell the mead on their breath, hear the breath in their throats, hear their grunts, feel them shift their weight, feel their spittle on your eyes, and you look for danger, look back into the eyes of the next man you must kill, find an opening, take it, close the shield wall again, step forward, feel the thrust of the men behind, half stumble on the bodies of those you have killed, recover, push forward, and afterwards you recall little except the blow that so nearly killed you. You work and push and stab to make an opening in their shield wall, and then you grunt and lunge and slash to widen the gap, and only then does the madness take over as the enemy breaks and you can begin to kill like a God because the enemy is scared and running, or scared and frozen, and all they can do is die while you harvest souls.

At the end of most versions of the battle only four combatants are left standing—Arthur, Mordred, and Arthur’s knights Sir Lucan and Sir Bedievere. Mordred and Arthur’s final death-duel differs depending on the source material. Most tales have Arthur running Mordred through with a spear, but suffering a mortal head-wound when the latter cleaves his helm and brain-pan with an overhand sword-stroke.

But in the alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur, mortally wounded in the right side by a sword-stroke from Mordred, slashes off the latter’s sword-hand an inch from the elbow. Mordred falls to his knees in pain and Arthur drags him back upright again and drives Excalibur all the way up to its hilts. Cornwell’s version also has Arthur wounded in the side and right eye but concludes with Arthur chopping through Mordred’s skull-topped helmet (and Mordred’s skull beneath).

In any case, Arthur is terribly wounded, perhaps mortally. Lucan’s heart bursts as he tries to bear his wounded king from the field, leaving Bedievere as the final survivor of the battle. Arthur’s last order is for Bedievere to cast Excalibur into the sea, and after two false starts Bedievere follows his king’s command. The last rays of a red sun glitter on the sea as it dips below the horizon.

Some legends say Arthur is taken by boat to the Isle of Avalon to heal. Others say his wound was mortal and he died on the shores of the sea and was entombed there. But whether from some mystical isle or beyond the realms of death, Arthur will one day return. He is after all the Once and Future King.

***

So that does it for my top 10 fantasy fiction battles. Some honorable mentions that could have made the list on another day include The Battle of the Pelennor Fields and Helm’s Deep from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, The battle of the ice wall from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the final battle in C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, the battle of Nemedian and Aquilonian armies from Robert E. Howard’s The Hour of the Dragon, and The Battle of Yonkers from Max Brooks’ World War Z.

What are yours? Comments are welcomed.

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.”