My top 10 Dungeons and Dragons monsters

All right, so I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but in joining with the semi-recent spate of bloggers around the Web listing their top 10 favorite D&D monsters, I thought I'd write up mine. Note that this list pertains to monsters published for 1e AD&D.

10. Owlbear. These ferocious beasts are one of those species of monster that, along with beholders and gelantinous cubes, just scream D&D to me. I've always been horrified at the thought of running into a hungry grizzly bear in the wild; imagine encountering of these creatures, 8' or more feet tall and 1,500 pounds of owl-headed malice: "The horrible owlbear is probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard ... they are ravenous eaters, aggressive hunters, and evil tempered at all times," according to the Monster Manual. Owlbears can be PC killers due to their deadly "hug" (2-16 points of damage that round and every melee round thereafter until the owlbear is killed for the unfortunate character drawn in to its embrace).

9. Ogre. As a player, I always considered ogres a "coming of age" challenge for PCs: These brutes were killers of low-level characters due to their high strength and damage potential, but once able to defeat an ogre your character had accomplished a great feat and had graduated from mere dungeon-fodder. Ogres are also every DMs' friend due to their inherent flexibility, as they are able to serve as lone cave-dwellers, or as hired muscle and encountered with groups of orcs and the like. My current DM uses breast-plated, warhammer-wielding ogres called the Black Hammer as shock troops to supplement orc regulars.

8. Orcus. My favorite demon-lord and probably the most recognizable D&D arch-villain. I never ran or played in a game in which the PCs encountered the Prince of the Undead, but I always liked the thought of him as being at the ultimate end of nefarious plots by evil cults and the like. Goat-headed and grossly fat with hooved feet, he looks like every demon should. And the Wand of Orcus is a great illustration.

7. Frost giant. As a fan of vikings, I always felt a strong attraction to these bearded, horn-helmeted, axe-wielding species of giant. I have a special fondness for G2: The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl as a result, which also featured a white dragon and his mate, a white pudding (cool, who knew puddings came in different colors?) as well as the only (as far as I know) published appearance of the dreaded remorhaz (see no. 4 below).

6. Death knight. Fiend Folio gets a lot of flak from D&D fans, and I'll admit it does contain more than its fair share of ridiculous, essentially unusable creatures. But Fiend Folio also had some soaring heights of creativity, including one of my favorite monsters, the death knight. I always liked the fact that only 12 were known to exist, which, like the rare Type VI series of demon, forces the DM to get creative with their use. I used to have a list (long since gone) of names, personalities, and reasons why each of these former lawful-good paladins fell into evil. Armored in black plate-mail and riding on fire-hooved Nightmare steeds, death knights also make for a great visual image. And man, were they powerful--75% magic resistance (and if 11 or lower is rolled on percentage dice a magic spell is reflected back at the caster), plus once per day were able to use a power word of any type and generate a (20 dice!) fireball.

5. Dragon. Although dragons are the archetypal D&D monster, back when I was DMing I never used them much, probably because I was influenced by Tolkien and considered them to be exceedingly rare. I never saw the point in good dragons and prefer the standard chromatic evil dragons, including blue and black. But if I had to choose a favorite I'd go with the classic fire-breathing red, again, probably due to my love of Tolkien's portrayal of Smaug. I still love the mechanics of 1E breath weapon attacks, which did damage equal to the dragon's initial HP. You don't want to fail a save against an 88 HP ancient red dragon.

4. Remorhaz. Man, these things are nasty. A large remorhaz can swallow a PC whole on a roll of 20, and "any victim swallowed in this manner is instantly killed due to the intense heat in the monster's digestive system," according to the Monster Manual. If you touch a remorhaz's back, you take 10-100 damage (sadly I never had a PC do this, but as a DM I always wanted to break out the percentile dice to roll for damage).

3. Hobgoblin. I like orcs but they have too much of a Tolkien connection; Hobgoblins will always be more D&D to me. I fell in love with these creatures in part due to the illustration on the cover of The Keep on the Borderlands and they became my go-to monster for mass attacks. In my campaigns hobgoblins could whip up on orcs because they were more organized and took better care of their arms and armor.

2. Troll. I'm simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the awful appearance of D&D-style/Poul Anderson-inspired trolls, with their mottled green skin, twisted, muscled limbs, wiry hair, broken teeth, and (worst of all) empty, black, shark-like eyes. Trolls' regenerative properties made for great fights, especially if the PCs fought more than one (it was always fun to have characters scrambling to apply torches to a downed but not destroyed troll as other characters desperately fought a second or third). There was also something chilling in these creatures' capacity to fight up to three opponents at once--I can picture very clearly a clawed arm independently moving to claw a PC at its flank or rear as the troll bites a PC standing at its front.

1. Lich. Outside of the gods or perhaps a handful of unique creatures like the tarrasque, was anything tougher in AD&D than a high level magic user, and, by extension, the lich? Access to a arsenal of powerful high-level spells is what makes this monster such a fearsome opponent. Combine the spell-casting power of an arch mage (18th-plus level MU) with an undead, magic-resistant body, and a supra-genius mind which has centuries or millennia to plan its schemes, and you've got a receipe for toughest creature in the game. I always thought that the lich encounter in Descent to the Depths of the Earth, if played correctly, could/should probably serve as a TPK. I mean, the thing had access to limited wish and time stop--enough said.

Cimmerian sighting: Dunsany’s The Sword of Welleran a cold comfort for heroes

Such was Merimna, a city of sculptured Victories and warriors of bronze. Yet in the time of which I write the art of war had been forgotten in Merimna, and the people almost slept. To and fro and up and down they would walk through the marble streets, gazing at memorials of the things achieved by their country's swords in the hands of those that long ago had loved Merimna well.

--Lord Dunsany, “The Sword of Welleran”

Every age reveres its heroes. The ancient Greeks idolized their even more ancient forebears, the godlike heroes of the Trojan War. Medieval knights modeled their chivalric ideals upon Arthur’s round table. Many in our current generation look back with awe on the deeds of the vanishing heroes of World War II.

But is this longing a form of misplaced nostalgia? Were we to strip away the romance and look with unsentimental eyes upon the grim deeds these heroes actually performed on the battlefield, how would our perspectives change?

Cloaked in rousing high fantasy trappings, Lord Dunsany’s short story The Sword of Welleran (1908) explores the myth and the reality of war and its heroes, leaving the reader at story’s end with a chill, anti-heroic undercurrent. It serves as a warning for the warriors of the next generation not to over-romanticize the way of the sword.

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

In memoriam

Welcome to the land of imagination. You are about to begin a journey into worlds where magic and monsters are the order of the day, where law and chaos are forever at odds, where adventure and heroism are the meat and drink of all who would seek their fortunes in uncommon pursuits. This is the realm of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Adventure Game.

--Gary Gygax, The Keep on the Borderlands

Thanks again Gary, for introducing me and so many others to this "uncommon pursuit." You are not forgotten.

Elric of Melnibone--a review

It’s a testament to the imaginative might of author Michael Moorcock that his most famous creation, Elric of Melnibone, has become a permanent and prominent thread in the fabric of fantasy history. Though he may not be quite the same household name as Conan, what fantasy fan hasn’t heard of the albino warrior/sorcerer, he of the tortured soul and wielder of the black demon sword Stormbringer?

The character of Elric first appeared in print in 1961 in a short story entitled “The Dreaming City.” Author Michael Moorcock later expanded the work into a short novel, Elric of Melnibone (1973). Though not perfect, I consider this latter a must-read for fans of fantasy fiction. It’s a marvelous work of imagination whose beautiful trappings include Imrryr, a city of alien architecture and strange, often abhorrent customs; demon-summoning sorcerers; and appearances by elementals and the gods of chaos. It combines the fast-pace and adventurous swagger of pulp fiction with a main character prone to brooding meditation and self-doubt.

The Elric stories are deliberately iconoclastic, taking an ironic stance in opposition to traditional/Tolkienian high fantasy and their often conservative worldviews. Elric is the reluctant emperor of Melnibone, a decadent, fading, yet still powerful kingdom that has dominated the Young Kingdoms of the earth for 10,000 years (think of Rome had it never lost its military might and was ruled by emperors like Caligula for millennia). Drunk on the blood of conquest, immoral to the core, and frequently under the influence of dream-inducing drugs, the Melniboneans live by the philosophy, “seek pleasure, however you would.” Slaves perform all the menial work, and some have been surgically altered/bred to perform single functions like singing a single, perfect note, or rowing a war-galley.

The army is unwaveringly loyal to the lineage of the Ruby Throne, as are its emperors—until Elric inherits the throne. He begins to question the old traditions, including the Melnibonean’s right to rule the Young Kingdoms with an iron fist. At heart Elric wants to abdicate the throne and run away with his love, Cymoril. But he’s afraid that the next in line to the throne—his cousin, the wicked Yrkoon, a throwback to the cruelest lords of Melnibone—will institute a reign of terror in his stead.

Yrkoon and his followers despise Elric, whom they perceive as weak and a threat to Melnibone’s place of power. They devise a plot to kill him during a barbarian invasion from the sea. Elric leads a successful attack that routs the barbarians, but at his lowest ebb (Elric’s weak constitution requires him to take a potent concoction of daily drugs to maintain his energy), Yrkoon shoves him into the sea. Weak and weighed down by his armor he begins to drown.

Thinking Elric slain, Yrkoon sails home and assumes the throne. Elric, however, is saved by a whispered spell to an elemental god of the sea and returns to Melnibone to punish and exile his cousin. Aided by a handful of followers, Yrkoon takes Cymoril hostage and escapes the Dragon Isle to start an uprising in one of the barbarian kingdoms. The remainder of the book includes Elric’s quest to get Cymoril back, which culminates with Elric’s recovery of the powerful but cursed Stormbringer.

Elric of Menibone starts off exceedingly strong with some memorable description and characters. Moorcock succeeds in making Melnibone feel like an alien place, as torture, incest, and dining on human flesh are routine occurrences (a scene with the sinister court torturer/chief interrogator Dr. Jest—a thin, sinuous man wielding a merciless, razor-thin scalpel—is forever seared into my memory). Moorcock’s portrayal of magic is exactly the way I like it—powerful and capricious, accessed through great grimoires capable of summoning great powers of darkness, but also prone to turn on the caster in unpredictable ways.

For all its strengths, however, Elric of Melnibone—and in particular its sequels—are not perfect. Moorcock is blessed with a tremendous imagination, but at times I find that he fails to deliver on his promise. For example, we’re told that the Melnibonean sorcerer-kings engage in drugged dream-sleep that allows them to wander other worlds and universes, “consort with angels, demons, and violent, desperate men,” and learn the accumulated lore and magic of the Melnibonean race, all from their dream couches. As a result of these dream-quests, their minds are millennia old. It’s a great concept. And yet how does this activity result in a character like the impetuous Yrkoon, who acts like a spoiled 25-year-old prince instead of a thoughtful sage suffused with the wisdom of ages? I also found the Elric series slips into repetition in later books as Elric battles one demon after another. His world-weary attitude in itself grows tiring after several books as well.

Finally, I must state that I found this Audio Realms AudioBooksPlus presentation a mixed bag. The reader, Jeffery West, was talented and altered his voice enough to create recognizable characters. This version also featured a brief overview/introduction read by Moorcock himself, a very nice, unexpected bonus. But the production was marred by the head-scratching decision to play music in the background throughout the entire reading. This included a loud heartbeat sound played during dramatic scenes. After a while I ceased hearing the music, but at times it was jarring and took me out of the flow of the story.

Note to Audio Realms and other audio book producers: The thought is appreciated, but please drop the soundtracks and stick to the text.

Note: This post also appears on SFFaudio.com.

Cimmerian sighting: Are fast or slow zombies scarier?

The recent remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) surprised many fans of the horror genre—myself included—by tweaking one of its oldest conventions: That of the slow moving zombie. The shuffling, shambling hordes of George Romero were suddenly yesterday’s news, replaced by flesh-eating sprinters courtesy of Zach Snyder, director of the remake of Dawn.

This surprising twist was more than many horror fans bargained for. Suddenly, hard-core zombie survivalists who prided themselves on their (theoretical) ability to run rings around slow-moving corpses in order to grab guns and food found their odds of survival (ahem) eaten away.

Snyder certainly deserves credit for attempting something new in his remake of Dawn. Although I’m a purist in some respects, I’ve never understood the purpose of frame-by-frame remakes of films (see Gus Van Sant’s 1998 soulless photocopy of Psycho). Refreshingly, Dawn of the Dead 2004 was not afraid to embrace change. Zombies are fast in Snyder’s universe, at least as fast as their fleeing prey (and what’s worse is that the pursuers presumably never get tired). It’s a pretty scary thought, and I was admittedly shocked at the high-speed carnage shortly after the credits of the new Dawn of the Dead began to roll. In fact, I think the opening 10-minute sequence of that film is an improvement on the original, which is high praise, given the esteem in which I hold Romero’s masterwork. The new Dawn also has a pretty great soundtrack going for it as well.

But after the initial shock of watching zombies chasing prey into their homes and launching themselves onto screaming victims, the effect became progressively less scary. Ultimately, I discovered that I prefer the creeping death of Romero’s shamblers over the high-speed cannibals of Snyder’s new Dawn. Here’s why.

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

Taking another Tolkien-basher to task

Novelist Richard Morgan recently wrote a critical piece on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in which he argues that the book suffers from its shallow depictions of good and evil, “ponderous epic tones of Towering Archetypal Evil pitted against Irritatingly Radiant Good (oh - and guess who wins),” writes Morgan.

I don’t agree with Morgan’s piece and consider it a rather surface-level bit of analysis. It’s kind of like claiming that Watership Down is a simple tale of Nature vs. Man. But I will concede that he makes some good points that are certainly food for thought. Tolkien’s characters are rather simple and one-dimensional compared to what we are used to in the modern novel, though I don’t think this is proof of his failure of his as a writer, but rather the result of deliberate choice. Many critics have successfully argued that Tolkien based The Lord of the Rings on much older sources, including Beowulf and medieval romances.

Tolkien also did not choose to write from a liberal humanist perspective or create characters conflicted with self-doubt, though I do point out that the main character of the book, Frodo, is tormented throughout by inner struggle. This may be the evil influence of the One Ring, or it may be something much more interesting—his own frailty and desire for power. Or both. Morgan in his essay also seems to have forgotten Gollum, a complex character who began his life as a hobbit, succumbed to his own weaknesses and the One Ring, and was on the brink of redemption but tragically had his window of opportunity slammed shut by the (to quote Morgan) “unwearyingly good and wholesome” Sam.

I would also note that The Lord of the Rings offers much more than a simple struggle of good vs. evil. In it Tolkien explores coming to grips with death, the possibility of a higher power, the problem of power and possessiveness, and the pervasiveness of war and the long-term effects it wreaks.

But unfortunately this isn’t the end of Morgan’s piece. He then goes on to salt his essay with nasty stilettos aimed at the professor and his readers, spiteful barbs that for me completely undermined any legitimate points he may have been trying to make. Apparently anyone past puberty who finds value in The Lord of the Rings is developmentally delayed, according to Morgan:

I’m not much of a Tolkien fan—not since I was about twelve or fourteen anyway (which, it strikes me, is about the right age to read and enjoy his stuff).

I’m honestly at a loss to even answer this statement. It's so ludicrous, inaccurate, and poorly thought-out (and deliberately inflammatory) as to defy belief. Hell, a 10-second Google search would provide a litany of reasons why Morgan is wrong.

So, Mr. Morgan, here’s a homework assignment for you from all of us overgrown 14-year-olds. Read some Tom Shippey and John Garth. Pick up Meditations on Middle Earth by Karen Haber to find out what authors like George R.R. Martin, Orson Scott Card, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond E. Feist, and Terry Pratchett have to say about Tolkien. You may be surprised that all of these worthy authors seem to have found something of lasting value in The Lord of the Rings, which I guess in Morgan’s world makes them all uneducated hacks (sidebar: I wonder if 50-60 years from now we’ll be reading anything Morgan wrote).

Finally, Morgan concludes his “essay” with this:

Well, I guess it’s called fantasy for a reason. I only wonder why on earth anyone (adult) would want to read something like that. And I’ve written a fantasy novel for all those adults who wouldn't. I hope you like it.

Ah, now we get to the true purpose of this post. Congratulations, Mr. Morgan. By posting on my blog I’ve fallen for your trap, and given you what you obviously were after all along—publicity for your new book.

I hope it sells through the roof. And all you had to do was demean Tolkien and all of his readers to get it.

Cimmerian sightings: London calling

"I have carefully gone over, in my mind, the most powerful men – that is, in my opinion – in all of the world’s literature and here is my list: Jack London, Leonid Andreyev, Omar Khayyam, Eugene O’Neill, William Shakespeare. All these men, and especially London and Khayyam, to my mind stand out so far above the rest of the world that comparison is futile, a waste of time. Reading these men and appreciating them makes a man feel life is not altogether useless.” —Robert E. Howard, letter to Tevis Clyde Smith, 20 February 1928 

 It’s no secret that Robert E. Howard was a devotee of Jack London. In fact, Howard once referred to London, a spinner of rugged tales of the Klondike and the Yukon, as “this Texan’s favorite writer” (for more examples of the glowing praise Howard heaped on London, head on over as I did to the REHupa Web site). And yet, I hadn’t fully appreciated the extent of London’s influence on the greatest swords-and-sorcery writer who ever lived until this week, when on my commute to work I listened to the audio version of my favorite London story, The Call of the Wild (1903). It was a startling reminder that Howard’s sensibilities are splashed across every page of this wonderful book. If you are a Howard fan frustrated by fruitless searches for like-minded literature, I recommend you turn your gaze backwards, to Howard’s influences, and London in particular. Don’t be turned off by the lack of traditional fantasy trappings in London; while you (unfortunately) won’t find swords, man-eating apes, and giant snakes in The Call of the Wild, there’s plenty here to satisfy lovers of pulp action and adventure, including epic dog duels, murdering Indians, and high-stakes wagers placed on improbable feats of strength. More to the point, there’s more of Howard—the dark philosophy that makes Howard uniquely and greatly Howard—to be found in The Call of the Wild than in most other sword-and-sorcery tales published since Howard’s death. London’s work certainly puts most of the pastiches to shame in this regard. 

The Call of the Wild is a hymn to the law of club and fang. The rule of might-makes-right is pounded into the reader in literal fashion by the unforgettable Man in the Red Sweater, who delivers a brutal lesson at the outset of the story. London’s disdain of civilized, city-bred types is readily apparent in his depiction of Hal, Charles, and Mercedes, a pathetic trio who are swallowed up by the unforgiving wilderness, a fate reserved for all the decadent cities and peoples of Howard’s Hyborian Age.

London’s book even features a Howard-like treasure-hunt, a perilous search for a lost mine rumored to be shrouded by some ancient, evil fear: “Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest . . . no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead,” London writes.

Even more than its Howardian themes and storylines, shades of Howard’s most famous creation stalk through the pages of The Call of the Wild. While some may find a comparison between Conan and a member of the canine species less than flattering, Howard appears to have derived at least some of his inspiration for the Cimmerian from Buck, the great St. Bernard/Scotch shepherd crossbreed and undisputed leader of the pack. Though he may lack the square-cut mane of black hair and sullen blue eyes, Buck is a testament to the superiority of the wild-hardened beast over the soft, civilized races.

Although Conan is a barbarian born, and Buck, at the outset of the story, is introduced as domesticated and city-bred, this civilized veneer is purely illusory. For within Buck’s powerful breast dwells “the dominant primordial beast,” the barbarian spirit. It was always there, lying dormant until the stark, unforgiving Yukon country brings it out:

All that stirring of old instincts which at stated periods drives men out from the sounding cities to forest and plain to kill things by chemically propelled leaden pellets, the blood lust, the joy to kill — all this was Buck’s, only it was infinitely more intimate. He was ranging at the head of the pack, running the wild thing down, the living meat, to kill with his own teeth and wash his muzzle to the eyes in warm blood.

Like Conan, Buck has no physical equal among his own species. He’s a massive, powerful animal with lightning-quick reflexes who exhibits a terrible ferocity in combat. And like Conan, Buck is also smarter than his foes: On the few occasions when his might isn’t enough, Buck uses war-tricks and cunning to prevail over huskies, timber wolves, and occasional larger prey.

Buck even shares ancestral memories of a time very similar to Howard’s Hyborian Age. The subject of Howard’s poem “Cimmeria” reflects on an age of axes and flint-tipped spears, a heritage which leaves him wrapped “in the grey apparel of ghosts”; Buck’s dreams are haunted by a Neanderthal man from a remote and yet very real past, a barbaric time in which the law, down from the depths of time, was kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. Like Buck, Conan possesses a brooding savagery in every fiber of his being, an ancient trait passed down by generations of barbaric ancestors.

Yet for all this Buck is not a mere analogue of the Cimmerian. Early on Buck embraces a form of servitude, bending his might willingly to the honest toil of the sled traces. Conan would never stoop to working for another man. Also, Buck at story’s end heeds the call of the pack and melts into the wilderness to live among the wolves, while the latter eventually becomes a king, seizing the crown of Aquilonia. Buck arguably proves to be the greater savage of the two. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that Conan is an amalgamation of Buck and his companion, John Thornton. Though he’s a self-sufficient man of action, more at home in the rough Yukon than the sun-drenched Santa Clara Valley, Thornton, like Conan, recognizes the value of gold.

One other sequence from London’s book bears mentioning: Fans of the film Conan the Barbarian may be startled upon reading this passage from The Call of the Wild:

One day the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed-rock three hundred below . . . A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind. “Jump, Buck!” he commanded, sweeping his arm out and over the chasm. The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were dragging them back into safety.

Shades of James Earl Jones/Thulsa Doom? Was this paragraph the predecessor to the “Come to me, my child” cliff-diving scene from Conan the Barbarian? Perhaps John Milius and Oliver Stone themselves drew from Howard’s source material when writing the screenplay for the film, and, like Howard, also recognized the powerful barbaric heritage of the Call.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: The Iliad

7. The Iliad, Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Book V—A Hero Strives with Gods

Many fantasy fans avoid Homer’s ancient heroic epic The Iliad, perhaps fearing that it will prove too academic and stuffy, one of the dreaded “classics” so revered in academia (and avoided outside the classroom). This is a mistake. If you’re a lover of bronze-age battles and the clash of spear and shield, The Iliad is a must-read. Who would have thought a near 3,000-year-old poem would contain some of the greatest depictions of hand-to-hand combat ever put to the printed page?

I was shocked by its scenes of carnage, which, without exaggeration, equal or surpass the gory combats of George R.R. Martin and Bernard Cornwell. For example, when the great Achaean warrior Ajax spears Archelochus, Homer describes the blow thusly: “Just at the juncture of his neck and skull the blow fell on his topmost vertebrae, and cut both tendons through. Head, mouth, and nostrils hit the earth before his shins and knees.”

Or this:

Peneleus instead brought down Ilioneus, a son of Phorbas, the sheepherder … Peneleus drove his spearhead into the eyesocket underneath the brow, thrusting the eyeball out. The spearhead ran straight through the socket and the skull behind, and throwing out both hands he sat down backward. Peneleus, drawing his longsword, chopped through the nape and set the severed helmeted head and trunk apart upon the field. The spear remained in the eyesocket. Lifting up the head by it, as one would lift a poppy, he cried out to the Trojans, gloating grimly.

Homer is not shallow in his treatment of combat and does not treat the battlefield as a glorious stage for heroes. He refers to the bloody action as “man-wasting war,” a costly harvest that leaves in its wake grieving mothers and fathers, and wives and children bereft of husbands and fathers. Tragically, Homer reminds us that many loved men with beautiful homes and far-ranging vineyards back in Greece will never return home on their long ships. Like the heroes of Normandy, their lot is to be buried in graves in far lands.

The events of The Iliad comprise 50 days in the 10-year war between the Achaeans and the Trojans. Homer’s epic poem is highlighted by various heroes who experience an aristeia, a sustained period of excellence in combat. Achilles’ wrathful aristeia is the most well-known in The Iliad, but for epic action I prefer Diomedes’.

Diomedes is arguably (along with the giant Ajax) the second-greatest of all the fighters on the field behind Achilles. Supported by the goddess Athena, in Book V of The Iliad he goes on a glorious rampage that nearly routs the Trojan army single-handed:

But as for Diomedes, you could not tell if he were with Achaeans or Trojans, for he coursed along the plain most like an April torrent, fed by snow, a river in flood that sweeps away his bank. No piled up dike will hold him, no revetment shielding the bloom of orchard land, this river suddenly at crest when heaven pours down the rain of Zeus. Many a yeoman’s field of beautiful grain is ravaged. Even so before Diomedes were the crowed ranks of Trojans broken, many as they were, and none could hold him.

Diomedes suffers an arrow-wound in the right shoulder, though his armored cuirass prevents a fatal or crippling wound. After his chariot-driver pulls the shaft free, spattering Diomedes’ bronze armor with blood, he returns to battle in a fury. Homer uses metaphors like no one’s business in The Iliad, and Diomedes-as-lion is one of my favorites:

And once more he made his way into the line. If he had burned before to fight with Trojans, now indeed blood-lust three times as furious took hold of him. Think of a lion that some shepherd wounds, but lightly as he leaps into a fold. The man who roused his might cannot repel him, but dives into his shelter, while his flocks, abandoned, are all driven wild. In heaps, huddled they are to lie, torn carcasses, before the escaping lion at one bound surmounts the palisade. So, lion-like, Diomedes plunged on Trojans.

Diomedes quickly slays eight Trojans, including two sons of King Priam (Echemmon and Chromius). Observing the slaughter, the mighty Trojan warrior Aeneas, son of the goddess Aphrodite, and fellow Trojan Pandarus spur their chariot at Diomedes. Pandarus hurls his long spear, punching through Diomedes’ shield and glancing off his chest armor. Diomedes responds with a mighty cast to “cleave Pandarus’ nose beside the eye and shatter his white teeth. His tongue the brazen spearhead severed, tip from root, then plowing on came out beneath his chin. He toppled from the car, and all his armor clanged on him, shimmering.”

Aeneas attacks Diomedes on foot, moving in with spear and shield. Weaponless, Diomedes lifts up a boulder that “no two men alive could lift,” hurls it, and smashes Aeneas’ hip joint. Aeneas would have died there if not for the intervention of Aphrodite, his mother, who whisks him away from harm. Diomedes wounds the goddess’ hand with a lance thrust as she flees back to the heavens. Diomedes later becomes the only mortal to wound two gods in a single day, spearing the god of war himself, Ares, and driving him from the field.

I can’t leave The Iliad without quoting one of my favorite combat descriptions. Roused by the death of his good friend and companion Patroclus, Achilles finally joins the battle and wreaks awful vengeance on the Trojans. Homer compares his wrath on the battlefield to an unchecked wildfire:

A forest fire will rage through deep glens of a mountain, crackling dry from summer heat, and coppices blaze up in every quarter as wind whips the flame. So Achilles flashed to right and left like a wild god, trampling the men he killed. And black earth ran with blood.

The Grail? I've already got one

Joseph of Arimathea used it to collect Christ's blood. King Arthur's knights spent decades questing for it, scouring Britain from end to end in a fruitless search. Launcelot, the greatest knight of all, had it within his grasp but proved unworthy.

Me? I bought the Holy Grail two weeks ago in Epping, NH. It cost me all of $5.25, plus tax and tip. Best of all I didn't have to kill any of Mordred's knights to get it, or spend decades wandering in the wasteland. Historians should take note it holds exactly 20 ounces of liquid.

The waitress seemed puzzled when I suggested in astonishment that her establishment was committing a grievous mistake by selling the Sacred Vessel at such a low price. After a raised eyebrow she completed the transaction, whereupon I feel to my knees in praise. And a 2,000-year-old quest was ended.

I didn't know how empty was my soul... until it was filled... with beer.

Cimmerian sightings: A line drawn in blood

In anticipation of the release of the remake of Friday the 13th, which hits the theatres tomorrow (on Friday the 13th—imagine that!), the Boston Globe ran a prominent feature story this past Sunday on slasher flicks, “The Genre That Wouldn’t Die”. In this piece the Globe’s film critic, Ty Burr, pulls no punches in expressing his antipathy for slasher films: “I hate the nasty little things," he writes.

Hates slasher films? That got my hackles up immediately. I’m a big fan of the horror genre, both on the printed page and in cinema. While I prefer the tales of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stephen King to the films of Wes Craven, John Carpenter, and Sean S. Cunningham (the latter directed the original Friday the 13th), I still enjoy a good horror flick. Even the badly-made ones have some merit as harmless fun.

As I read Burr’s piece I mentally began preparing my counter-argument, mulling over which implement to take up in defense of the slasher genre (Machete? Fire ax? Chainsaw, perhaps)? But I soon discovered that Burr’s article wasn’t such easy prey. Instead of taking shots at the artlessness and bad taste of the slasher film genre—old, tired saws that many critics choose to employ—Burr asks some penetrating questions: Why do we like these films? What makes people want to watch explicit violence?

To read more, click here.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: Battle of Cynuit

8. The Last Kingdom, Bernard Cornwell
Battle of Cynuit

He stared balefully across the encampment where men were drinking. “Do you know who wins battles, boy?”
“We do, Father.”
“The side that is least drunk,” he said, and then, after a pause, “but it helps to be drunk.”
“Why?”
“Because a shield wall is an awful place.”

—Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom

As a self-professed lover of medieval-flavored fantasy and historical fiction battles, and as someone who relishes in bloodshed on the printed page, I nevertheless must come clean: Some periods of ennui aside, I’m quite glad that I live in modern, civilized times. I especially thank the powers that be that I don’t have to strap on arms and armor and fight in the blood-soaked hell that was a viking shield wall.

Bernard Cornwell shattered any fantasies I may have had of engaging in dark ages combat in his wonderful, ongoing series The Saxon Stories. These books have something of a shield wall fetish, and are a repository for the sweet science of making one (keep that in mind should the need ever arise). For example, there’s this good-to-know factoid:

You can hear a shield wall being made. The best shields are made of lime, or else of willow, and the wood knocks together as men overlap the shields. Left side of the shield in front of your neighbor’s right side, that way the enemy, most of whom are right-handed, must try to thrust through two layers of wood.

Cornwell describes how many battles were delayed for hours as men on both sides gulped ale to build up their courage. Shield walls were simply too brutal and murderous to stand in completely sober. Picture a rugby scrum in which the participants not only push but stab one another with spears and short blades over the rims of their shields, or underneath, at exposed legs and ankles. Many fighters would strap iron plates to their boots to turn such wicked strokes, Cornwell says.

But more about shield walls later. The background of the battle of Cynuit is as follows: Uhtred of Bebbanburg, a Saxon who was captured in a raid as a youth and raised among the Danes, Ealdorman Odda, and approximately 900 Saxons square off against the raven banner of Ubba Lothbrokson and his 1,200 Danes. Odda and Uhtred have the advantage of high ground and some degree of protection from the old, eroded, earthen fort of Cynuit. But they have only a day’s worth of water and cannot withstand a siege, so they must act.

Uhtred develops a plan to sneak out at night with a small force of 100 men and burn the Danish ships, which are moored in a nearby river. Since the Danes are so protective of their longships, Uhtred predicts that they will lose their discipline when they rush back to quench the fires. Uhtred’s small force will fight them there, on the narrow strip of marsh-lined beach where Ubba cannot bring all his strength to bear. Then, in the heat of the combat when shield walls are locked, Odda will fall upon Ubba from the rear with the rest of the men from the fort.

But this plan is easier said than done. Though he’s beginning to gray Ubba is a mighty fighter, perhaps the mightiest in hand-to-hand combat of all the Danes. He wields a wicked heavy axe in combat and no man who has stood before him in battle has lived. His men are better armed than Uhtred's. But Ubba’s one weakness is his superstitious nature. He does nothing without a sign from the gods, and in this battle the runesticks have fallen against him. Thus, when Uhtred and Odda refuse his offer to surrender, Ubba feels fear.

Uhtred’s plan works. Sneaking through the pre-dawn hours on foot he manages to set fire to a few Danish ships at daybreak, rousing Ubba’s small army like a swarm of angry bees. The few Danes near the ships are confused and easily cut down. Uhtred and his 100 men form a shield wall that stretches across the narrow beach and close with the main of the Danish army. Uhtred recalls his father’s words as the shields touch close.

Shield wall. It is an awful place, my father had said, and he had fought in seven shield walls and was killed in the last one.

The angry Danes make the mistake of charging like mad dogs and not forming a proper shield wall of their own. Uhtred’s men slaughter the first wave. “It was ax work and sword work, butchers’ work with good iron.” A battle calm comes over Uhtred and he finds killing frightfully easy with his short sword Wasp-Sting:

I lunged Wasp-Sting forward, and the Dane ran onto her point. I felt the impact run up my arm as her tip punctured his belly muscles, and I was already twisting her, ripping her up and free, sawing through leather, skin, muscle, and guts, and his blood was warm on my cold hand, and he screamed, ale breath in my face, and I punched him down with the shield’s heavy boss, stamped on his groin, killed him with Wasp-Sting’s tip in his throat.

The Danes regain their composure and order a shield wall of their own. Five or six hundred Danes advance with murderous intent. Uhtred encourages his small force to stand its ground. “They’re coming to die! They’re coming to bleed! They’re coming to our blades!” he shouts.

The clash of shield walls rings like a thunderclap. Uhtred experiences “the thunder of shield hitting shield, my shield knocked back against my chest, shouts of rage, a spear between my ankles, Wasp-Sting lunging forward and blocked by a shield, a scream to my left, an ax flailing overhead.” The battle degenerates into a grunting mass of men hacking and stabbing and dying and bleeding. Uhtred’s shield wall is driven back on the burning ships.

But then Odda arrives and takes the Danes from behind. The pressure is immediately relieved. Uhtred draws his battle-sword Serpent-Breath and attacks, discovering that he is in elite, deadly company:

Beware the man who loves battle. Ravn had told me that only one man in three or perhaps one man in four is a real warrior and the rest are reluctant fighters, but I was to learn that only one man in twenty is a lover of battle. Such men were the most dangerous, the most skillful, the ones who reaped the souls, and the ones to fear. I was such a one.

Danes begin to fall back, and some retreat to their ships, shoving them off into the sea. But Ubba bravely stands, ordering a last shield-wall in a rearguard action. A berserk rage overtakes him:

And then, with a roar of fury, Ubba hacked into our line with his great war axe … his huge blade was whirling again, making space, and our line went back and the Danes followed Ubba who seemed determined to win this battle on his own and make a name that would never be forgotten among the annals of the Northmen. The battle madness was upon him, the runesticks were forgotten, and Ubba Lothbrokson was making his legend.

In a mighty single duel Uhtred slays Ubba when the latter’s foot slips in the spilled guts of a corpse. Uhtred stabs him with Serpent-Breath in the arm, then hacks his neck. Uhtred shows his foe the ultimate respect due a viking, holding Ubba’s hand tight to his axe as he dies, since only a man who dies on the battlefield clutching a weapon makes it to Odin’s hall.

“Wait for me in Valhalla, lord,” Uhtred says to the dying man. And with Ubba’s death, the Danes are finished.

Cimmerian sighting: Mourning the loss of print fantasy pubs

I'm thrilled to report that I've been asked to write occasional blog posts over at one of my most frequented cyberspace stops, The Cimmerian. It's a site dedicated to the life and writings of one of my favorite authors, Robert E. Howard. Recently The Cimmerian made the decision to widen its scope to include more broad-based fantasy and horror news, reviews, and analysis.

When I post there, my plan will be to include the first few paragraphs here, and then post a link to The Cimmerian if you want to read on.

Here's my first (and hopefully not last) contribution to The Cimmerian.
_____

So far 2009 has been a lousy year for fantasy fans who like the feel of good old-fashioned print publications in their hands. For starters, we’ve lost the award-winning Robert E. Howard journal The Cimmerian. Elsewhere, long-running fantasy fiction and reviews magazine Realms of Fantasy is closing up shop, ending its 15-year run with the April 2009 issue. And, to top off the bad news, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, a well-regarded “best-of” anthology that spanned 21 years, has also been discontinued.

I’m not about to indulge in hyperbole and declare that print is dead, but there’s no doubt that the void left by these losses feels like, to quote J.R.R. Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, “another piece of Mordor.”

To read the rest, click here.

Zombie alert!

I'm taking a momentary diversion from fantasy battles to report an important news flash: Run, zombies are on the loose!

One of my worst fears, along with being consumed by a great white shark, is the possibility that one day the dead will walk the earth (presumably when there's no more room in hell, to steal a line from George Romero). I mean, I love zombie books and films, but when I watch or read about cannibal corpses it's with a strange mixture of revulsion, terror, and relief that I'm not one of the poor souls holed up in the shopping mall. Thus, when I clicked the link above I had a moment of panic before I realized it was a hoax.

Suffice to say that if I was driving along I-95 on the way to work and passed a sign that said "Caution!! Zombies Ahead!!", I'd be the guy you heard about on the evening news who was hospitalized after veering off into the nearest ditch. Missing the ditch, I'd be headed for home to grab canned goods, bottled water, shotgun, and axe and bee-line for my zombie-proof shelter in the basement.

(Thanks to my friend Falze for bringing this impending catastrophe to my attention).

My top 10 fantasy fiction battles: Battle of the Blackwater

9. A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin
Battle of the Blackwater

George R.R. Martin is one of the most talented fantasy fiction authors writing today, and not just because of his great story-telling and characterization, or the cold-hearted, wildly unpredictable plot of his current series, A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin can also write damned good battle scenes, a few of which rank among the most convincing and violently portrayed that I’ve encountered in fantasy literature.

In particular, the Battle of the Blackwater from book two of his series, A Clash of Kings, is one of the bloodiest and most chaotic affairs I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. It features ship-to-ship combat, the use of catapults, scorpions, and alchemists’ fire, a charge of armored knights, drownings, severed limbs, men burned alive, and even prisoners executed via trebuchet (you have to read it to believe it).

The Battle of the Blackwater is a microcosm of Martin’s strengths as a writer. In this violent struggle on land and sea, he captures the gruesomeness and realism of what a pitched medieval battle must have been like, while also managing to spring several nasty shocks on the reader (true to form, Martin hideously maims the battle’s point of view character).

In this battle the forces of Stannis Baratheon sail up the Blackwater River to attack the castle of King’s Landing and approximately 5,000 defenders under young King Joffrey. Baratheon’s force is formidable—20,000 men, many borne on war-galleys, the decks of which are studded with scorpions and catapults capable of flinging stones and barrels of burning pitch.

But the army is overconfident and fails to send ahead probing ships. As a result, they run into a deadly trap. Many of the ships at King’s Landing are empty hulks full of vicious green wildfire, a substance akin to napalm which sticks to its unfortunate target and melts flesh like tallow. Martin describes it as, “Evil stuff, and well-nigh unquenchable. Smother it under a cloak and the cloak took fire; slap at a fleck of it with your palm and your hand was aflame.”

When the attackers ships move in, great trebuchets from King's Landing send rocks the size of a man’s head raining down upon them. “When they fell they sent up great gouts of water, smashed through oak planking, and turned living men into bone and pulp and gristle,” Martin writes.

Battle is joined. Ships ram one another, spilling armored men into the water, who quickly drown. Other ships lock together with grappling hooks in a death embrace, and decks are soon awash in blood as men hack each other with swords and axes.

Despite some terrible losses the attackers are winning until an unfortunate ship, the Swordfish, rams a Lannister hulk floating low in the water—with slow green blood leaking out from between her boards. The crew of the Swordfish fails to recognize the wildfire and crashes in. The explosion and towering gout of flame engulfs a dozen Baratheon ships, destroying most of their crews. More ships begin to catch fire. Then, horribly, the defenders haul up a chain-boom behind the attacking force, cutting off the mouth of bay and preventing retreat. Another dozen ships, piled up against the chain, go up in flames. The Blackwater is turned into the mouth of hell. This marks the turning point of the battle.

Yet many of Stannis’ ships make it through and the attackers manage to land a fair force on land. Some of the men bring a ram to the king’s gate and bash away at the oaken doors. The keep appears on the brink of falling after the Lannister’s mightiest warrior, the pitiless, murdering Sandor Clegane, is humbled by the roaring flames (he's mortally afraid of fire) and refuses to go out and repulse the attack.

But Tyron Lannister, the stunted, dwarfish son of Lord Tywin Lannister, leads a sortie out from the Red Keep to repulse the attackers. He shames a group of knights to follow him (“They say I’m half a man,” he said. “What does that make the lot of you?”). They slam into the attackers at the gate, running them through with lowered lances. Tyrion takes a man’s head half-off with a swing of his axe. Another knight, dazed on his feet, tries to hand Tyrion his gauntlet in an act of surrender; Tyrion realizes the knight’s hand is still inside the steel glove.

Martin describes the chaos and carnage—and Tyrion’s exultant, near suicidal mood—with master strokes:

Men were crawling up from the river, men burned and bleeding, coughing up water, staggering, most dying. He led his troop among them, delivering quicker cleaner deaths to those strong enough to stand. The war shrank to the size of his eye slit. Knights twice his size fled from him, or stood and died. They seemed little things, and fearful. “Lannister!” he shouted, slaying. His arm was red to the elbow, glistening in the light off the river. When his horse reared again, he shook his axe at the stars and heard them call out “Halfman! Halfman!” Tyrion felt drunk. The battle fever.

Down in the bay twenty galleys, wrecked and lashed together, have formed a treacherous bridge. Hundreds of Baratheon troops on the far shore are using it to leap from one deck to another and cross the Blackwater. Tyrion turns to Ser Balon Swann, one his knights, and utters perhaps my favorite line in the series:

“Those are brave men,” he told Ser Balon in admiration. “Let’s go kill them.”

Tyrion leads another charge to the water’s edge and hurls the enemy back into the water as they swarm ashore. The carnage is overwhelming: “His own killing was a clumsy thing. He stabbed one man in the kidney when his back was turned, and grabbed another by the leg and upended him into the river … A naked man fell from the sky and landed on the deck, body bursting like a melon dropped from a tower.”

Tyrion nearly drowns as the ruined ship breaks beneath him and he falls, grasping for the rail. He reaches for the hand of one of his trusted knights, Ser Mandon Moore, but the latter turns traitor and slashes Tyrion cruelly across the face.

But Tyrion and the defenders have held out long enough, and a huge combined Lannister-Tyrell army arrives to take the remainder of the Baratheon army from the rear, ending the ferocious battle.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: Battle at Leidhra

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

—John Keegan, The Face of Battle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrating REH with some comic-book savagery

As usual, I'm a day late on the news: Yesterday marked what would have been the 103rd birthday of Robert E. Howard, founder and reigning champion of the swords-and-sorcery genre. But my absent-mindedness didn't prevent me from celebrating Howard's life with a bit of fun reading in his memory--namely, revisiting the pages of The Savage Sword of Conan issue 24.

Re-reading SSOC 24 was certainly a blood-soaked trip down memory lane. This particular issue debuted in November 1977; I bought it second-hand in an old comic book shop for $1.00 probably 10 years after that. It's one of the best dollars I've ever spent, in hindsight.

Was there ever a better comic book/magazine than The Savage Sword of Conan? Only a Turanian boot-licker would say yes. For proof, click on the picture above to reveal the awesomeness of this issue's table of contents:

SSOC 24 includes one of Howard's better short stories, The Tower of the Elephant. It's a great adaptation by Roy Thomas, and is illustrated by perhaps my favorite Conan artist, John Buscema. Here's a great panel in which Conan first encounters the blinded and crippled Yag-Kosha, prisoner in the tower of the evil wizard Yara.

As I wrote in a previous post, one of the reasons I hold SSOC in such high esteem is that it was so much more than a comic book--a more accurate description is probably illustrated magazine. In its early days SSOC contained a wide range of articles dedicated to all things REH, and occasionally took a broader look at other happenings in the fantasy genre. This particular issue includes a review of Amra, a long-running fan/literary magazine devoted to the works of Howard and other sword-and-sorcery authors, plus an article on an event held by the Buffalo, NY chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA).

The SCA photos in the magazine are a howl (there's several more than I've included here). I don't do LARP or dress up in armor (save on a few select occasions), but this does look like fun. Although the guy on the lower left... nice helmet and shield, but the long-sleeve t-shirt and beer gut ruins the effect.


If The Tower of the Elephant, AMRA, and weekend warriors in t-shirts and great helms weren't enough, SSOC 24 also includes a reprint of Howard's epic poem "Cimmeria," as illustrated by the immortal Barry Smith in five glorious black-and-white pages. Here's the last page... nuff said.


If that's not a steal at $1, I don't know what is.

Long live REH!

Ranking on Rankin and Bass, and rating Poe's best

Not much to add today, just a few links to point out that I've found interesting.

Over at Black Gate, Ryan Harvey posted a very thorough review of the old Rankin and Bass production of The Return of the King. It's certainly the most comprehensive look at this film that I've encountered. I only wish I was half as fond of the film as Harvey was. There are a few scenes from The Return of the King that I enjoy and found to be well-done (I agree with Harvey's assessment of the Witch King and Eowyn confrontation, and also wish Peter Jackson included more of Tolkien's dialogue. And John Huston does voice the best Gandalf ever). But, overall, I deem Return of the King a pretty poor film, much worse than the flawed, but worth owning and watching, Rankin and Bass version of The Hobbit.

I tried watching Return of the King back-to-back with Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings a while back, and actually thought that The Return of the King suffers in comparison (and I'm no fan of Bakshi). Also, Return of the King fails as a "sequel" to Bakshi's film since it doesn't even pick up in the right spot. Ah well.

Over at The Cimmerian, Steve Tompkins has penned a nice 200 year birthday tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. I really must take note of these important dates as I always seem to forget about literary dignitaries like Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, etc, when their birthdays roll around (but as long as I remember my wife and kids,' I'm okay).

Anyhow, Poe is one of my favorite authors and resides firmly in the top three of my "horror trinity," which also includes H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. If forced to pick a favorite Poe story I'd have to go with The Masque of the Red Death, of which every word rings as poetry and contains one of the best closing sentences I can recall from any story ("And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.") But for chills its hard to top the suffocating brick-by-terrible-brick conclusion of The Cask of Amontillado, which left me with a terrifying visual that has remained seared into my imagination ever since.

A berserk bit of history: The Battle of Stamford Bridge

With my interest piqued by the recent news that HarperCollins will be publishing The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun by J.R.R. Tolkien in May 2009, I've been doing a bit of reading about norse myths and history. My "extensive research" has included surfing the Web and flipping thorugh a couple sourcebooks on the subject. These include a copy of Time Life Books The Northmen, from a long-extinct "The Emergence of Man" series, and The Vikings, also by Time Life, which is part of a series called "The Seafarers."

I think I paid 50 cents each for these hardcovers at a library sale. At roughly 170 pages each neither is exactly a treasure-trove of information, but they do contain some great full-color pictures of viking artifacts as well as a good overview of viking culture, and also provide inspiration for further reading. From one of these books I started doing a bit more digging on an event called the Battle of Stamford Bridge, which essentially marked the end of the viking incursions into England.

Of all the details of the Battle of Stamford Bridge, I found this bit particularly fascinating and awe-inspiring (you can read it here at Wikipedia) :

The story goes that a giant Norwegian armed with an axe held up the entire Saxon army, and single-handedly cut down over 40 Saxon soldiers. He himself was only killed when one Saxon drifted under the bridge in a barrel and thrust his spear through the latches of the bridge, killing the Norseman.

Now, this account is very likely an exaggeration or a distortion of the truth. After all, the battle occurred in 1066, in the midst of the Dark Ages. Three weeks later William the Conqueror prevailed over the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings, starting an age of Norman rule which eradicated much of England's history. It's unclear (or at least, I'm unclear) of who provided the account of The Battle of Stamford Bridge, how it was recorded, and how this particular detail of the battle survived.

Nevertheless, I think it's safe to assume that such a story has some basis in fact. While it's highly debatable whether a viking actually cut down 40 Saxon soldiers single-handedly, or was finally killed by a spear-thrust from below, its likely that some lone berserk viking held the bridge long enough to make an impression on the Saxons and survive into recorded history.

What a sight that must have been!

Historic fiction writer supreme Bernard Cornwell is currently in the midst of a great series about the Danish invasions into England called The Saxon Stories; although his stories are set much earlier in the conflict (the 9th century/early 10th century period, chronicling the stories of historic personages such as Alfred the Great, Ivar the Boneless, and Guthrum the Unlucky), I'd like to see Cornwell eventually tackle this battle and bring to life the tale of this nameless viking warrior who briefly held back the advance of an army.

300: Sound and pectorals and fury, signifying nothing

As someone who loves books by Bernard Cornwell and Vikings and war in general in all its many forms, 300 appears to be right up my alley. It’s chock-full of bloody combat. It’s got swords, shields, and spears (though oddly, no armor). It tells a classic story of sacrifice and a few standing against many. I wanted to like 300. Hell, I should have loved 300. But in the end, I found it very flawed and largely forgettable.

Part of me thinks it’s because I’m out of the target demographic of 300. I never read Frank Miller’s graphic novel upon which the film is based. Hell, I barely know who Frank Miller is.

But I think a larger reason for my disappointment may have been that I went in to 300 with the wrong expectations. I really, really wanted to see Gates of Fire on film. Instead, what I got was a two-hour orgy of videogame-y violence punctuated with repetitive heroic speeches and Braveheart-like cries of “freedom.” And plenty of posturing and flexing of chiseled torsos and biceps.

300 serves one purpose, and that is showcasing its CGI battle sequences. These started out cool but by film’s end felt pretty monotonous. And this from someone who enjoys a good knock-down, drag-out fantasy fight. For instance, I loved the battles in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, which served as (sizable) set pieces for those films, but were a part of the whole and in my opinion didn’t overwhelm the story. In contrast, 300 has nothing to offer outside of the combat.

I would encourage anyone who enjoyed 300 to read Gates of Fire. In the first 50 pages of Steven Pressfield’s novel I promise you will learn far more about Spartan culture and military training (which were largely synonymous) than you ever receive in 300. According to 300, the Spartans made great soldiers by cuffing around their male children and then throwing them out, naked, to fight wolves in the snow. This is, of course, fairly ridiculous. If you really want to learn why the Spartans were arguably the finest military force in history, you’ll find the answer in Gates of Fire. You won’t find it anywhere in 300.

After watching 300 I poked around some of the comments on Rotten Tomatoes and discovered, not to my surprise, a bunch of testosterone-fueled young men savaging any critic who dared to voice a negative opinion of this film (questioning the sexuality of the critic in question was a favorite insult). However, a few voices among the teenage cacophony raised a valid point in the film’s defense, which is this: 300 was never intended to be realistic. It’s based on a comic book, and it succeeds as an adaptation.

That argument seems to have some merit, and if I had read Miller’s graphic novel maybe I could buy into it. But I also think it lets the makers of 300 off the hook far too easily (this “adaptation” argument is used for defending literally everything that’s wrong with the movie). Also, director Zack Snyder seems to want it both ways: He’s been quoted has saying the events of the film are “90% accurate” to history (a crock), and in other interviews backs off and calls it a fantasy, a mere comic-book adaptation.

More than a nod to historic accuracy, I would have settled for some common sense in 300. But there was precious little of that to be found. In particular, I found myself unable to get past the following gaffes:

The lack of formations and military discipline. We get one great early shot of the Spartans’ phalanx and why it was so effective. But the rest of the film is largely one-on-one, over-stylized, slo-mo combats. There’s a laughable scene where a Spartan captain is singled out for “breaking ranks” when his son is slain and he charges the enemy. I thought to myself: And how is this different from what every other Spartan is doing?

A massive, bottomless well in the center of the Spartans’ city. Presumably this exists solely to throw in arrogant Persian messengers. Surely it couldn’t be there for a water source: Rotting bodies are notoriously poor for a city’s water supply. Regardless of its purpose, I’m still not sure why the Spartans would choose to dig a massive, open hole and leave it uncovered in the middle of an otherwise busy city square. Civilians plunging over the edge, especially at night, is presumably a routine occurrence.

No armor. Just think if the 300 Spartans actually wore a cuirass! They’d still be guarding the hot gates today. No Persian would have ever made it through. When queen Gorgo tells Leonidas to “come back with your shield, or on it,” I wanted her to add, “And put some armor on, damnit!”

The 300 trudge off to war with nothing but their spears, swords, and shields. Food and supplies are nowhere in sight—but these are overrated, I guess. Later on the Spartans manage to manufacture meat and fruit and blacksmithing supplies out of thin air, so no foul. And good thing they all wear those long, encumbering red capes. No one would ever think of yanking a Spartan down by one of those in a fight…

The whole “freedom isn’t free” spiel from the Spartans. This from a society which kept slaves (which, of course, are nowhere to be seen in 300). One of the last lines in the film was laugh-out-loud funny: “We rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny!” says the narrator. Tyranny? Really? I don’t know what this guy calls a culture that demands its families cast their sickly or malformed infants over a cliff, but “tyrannical” is one word that comes to mind.

Xerxes’ army of Mordor, which included giants, orcs, sword-armed crab men, and more in its ranks. Which all proved to be pretty wimpy, to boot. When you saw one of these beasts, the formula was the same. 1. Slo-mo shot of the monster to build up its ferocity. 2. Someone looses a chain, monster kills a bunch of Persians in its path. 3. A Spartan runs the monster through, or knocks it over a cliff, and ends the fight.

The ripoffs of Gladiator. The wheat-field dream sequences with Leonidas and his family, accompanied by mournful pipes playing in the background, seemed awfully familiar. I would think Ridley Scott has a plagiarism suit on his hands if he wants to pursue one.

I’ll close by saying, overwhelming evidence above to the contrary, that I didn’t find 300 completely devoid of merit. I liked some scenes (the arrows blotting out the sun was a nice touch), and some of the fights. It’s certainly not boring. Much of it looks pretty. There’s a great early scene where the Spartans use a phalanx to great effect. But in general, I found it pretty disappointing. If all that you expect out of a film is two hours of mindless, orgiastic hacking and stabbing, 300 is for you. I was hoping for something more and it just didn’t deliver.

More on Tolkien and RPGs

I’d like to take a moment to comment on a great post over at Grognardia which celebrates the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien and explains some of the reasons why his works are generally avoided, save for their surface trappings, by those playing older editions of D&D. I largely agree with what author James Maliszewski has written there.

In this vein I’d also like to comment upon another related topic that I have personally encountered, either in person or on various RPG message boards. This being that LOTR is too “high fantasy” and not bleak or bloodthirsty enough for the kind of D&D they enjoy. These folks’ campaigns are “serious,” avoid nonsense like “hobbits and elves” and “epic quests,” and don’t have “happy endings” like The Lord of the Rings—or so I’ve been told.

I’m going to climb on a soapbox for a moment here and state that these arguments betray a deep ignorance of Tolkien’s source material. Now, some of these people have read The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings (though I’m frequently surprised by the number of gamers whom I’ve encountered that have not). In some cases they’ve only watched Peter Jackson’s films. Very few of these critics, apparently, have read any deeper.

Now, I’m not being a Tolkien snob here, and I will readily acknowledge that you can enjoy The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as standalone works. Millions of readers have and continue to do so. I did it for years myself. But there’s something to be said for digging deeper and getting at the "why."

James at Grognardia deserves praise for his continued exploration of “the history and traditions of the hobby of roleplaying” (as he describes the purpose of Grognardia). He continually reminds his readers that we cannot claim to understand why OD&D and 1E AD&D are the games they are without understanding their source material, which includes pulp fantasy and authors like Howard and Leiber, Vance and De Camp. These were the authors that informed and inspired Gary Gygax, author of D&D, as he wrote the game.

Now, you can play and enjoy OD&D and 1E AD&D without having read the pulps, and millions have. But before you attempt to “fix” their mechanics or declare them “unfun,” you should make an effort to understand why these games are written and function as they do. The authors of fourth edition D&D, for example, apparently have either not read these works, or have but decided to base their mechanics on other sources.

Likewise, you cannot dismiss Tolkien out of hand without at least making an effort to understand the roots and foundations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These sources include The Silmarillion and its associated tales and myths (i.e., The Children of Hurin, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle Earth), which in turn were inspired by northern mythology.

The history of Middle Earth (its legendarium, as Tolkien called it) was Tolkien’s true love and the work of his life; Tolkien began laying down its origins in 1914, decades before The Hobbit and LOTR. He frequently returned to this legendarium as he wrote those two books and spent the latter portion of his life revisiting his broader creation. It was Tolkien’s great regret that these foundational stories of Middle Earth never saw publication (during his lifetime, of course); Tolkien’s letters and biography reveal his disappointment when publisher Allen and Unwin rejected much of what we know now as The Silmarillion, which Tolkien sent in for consideration following the success of The Hobbit. Stanley Unwin had asked Tolkien for a traditional sequel to The Hobbit, but what he received was very, very different.

These and other sources prove that Tolkien’s greatest love was his legendarium and the northern myths from which he derived inspiration; I would argue that “old school” RPGers who deride Tolkien for being too high fantasy/high medieval/a feel good escapist may feel differently if they spent some time on the origins, tales, and the deeper “whys” behind Middle Earth. Tragic and bleak are a few of the words I’d use to describe these sources. But they’re also a great read and loaded with cool ideas and campaign hooks. In fact, some of Tolkien’s gaming critics who choose to do take a closer look may feel inspired to create a gritty AD&D/Warhammer/Basic Role Playing campaign based on the First Age of Middle Earth.

Who knows—it might make for a heck of a fun game.

Praising Middle-Earth's darkest hour: A review of the Children of Hurin

Warning—some spoilers follow.

Although critical appreciation for J.R.R. Tolkien has increased over the years, fantasy's greatest author has frequently been derided as a spinner of happy-ending fairy tales, a writer of children’s stories and guilty of wish-fulfillment. Back before I began to understand what The Lord of the Rings was all about, but had read some of Tolkien’s critics, I thought, mistakenly, that maybe these guys were right, and my love of these stories was merely a vestigial piece of my childhood, a guilty, secret passion best left behind closed doors.

Of course, it was they who were wrong—so dreadfully wrong. For now, if the time hasn’t already come, we deserve another re-evaluation of Tolkien. So say I after reading The Children of Hurin.

Were they given The Children of Hurin as a companion piece to read alongside The Lord of the Rings, my guess is that Tolkien’s detractors would have experienced an epiphany on the level of a First Age cataclysm. Once I closed its covers I immediately began to re-evaluate everything I had previously known about Tolkien. Suffused with the perspective of the great, bleak, tragic tale that is The Children of Hurin, it's impossible not to. This story casts a long shadow over all the succeeding events of Middle-Earth, back-lighting Tolkien’s world in a grand opera of suffering and cruel fate. My appreciation for the man’s works is now all the more deeper and richer, if that is indeed possible.

Before I get too carried away, The Children of Hurin is not in the same class as The Lord of the Rings. It lacks that book’s tremendous depth, sweep, and sheer imagination. But The Children of Hurin in no way tries to imitate LOTR. It’s a different kind of book, very much inspired by Tolkien’s love of the old Norse sagas.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I picked up The Children of Hurin anticipating another Silmarillion. I’m a big fan of The Silmarillion but I’ve always thought of it as a reference work, something to pick away at and enjoy in small bursts. In fact, it’s not unlike reading the Bible—though that ancient holy text contains some great stories, memorable passages, and poetic sequences, you’re not really supposed to pick it up and read it straight through. The same can also be said of The Silmarillion, which lacks a unifying, coherent narrative.

But if you’ve been avoiding The Children of Hurin for this reason—as perhaps, subconsciously, I had been since I purchased the hardcover—fear not. It is not dry history, but a red-blooded retelling of a tale of the elder days of Middle Earth.

The Children of Hurin could have accurately been titled The Tale of Turin Turambar, since it follows the life of this character, Hurin’s son, from his childhood until his death. It’s a story of cruel, inescapable fate. It explores the great paradox of man’s ambition, perhaps our greatest trait and our greatest flaw, capable of elevating us to perform great deeds and also leading us to ruin.

For The Children of Hurin is, among other things, a cautionary tale about the dangers of pride. In the First Age, the elves (which exist in much greater strength and numbers than they do in the Third Age), repeatedly warn Hurin and later Turin of reaching too far. Theirs is the safe counsel—against the powers of Morgoth, it’s best to take the long view—to fight defensively, to hold on to what is dearest for as long as you can, and to wait for the right time, if it ever comes. In other words, to swallow your pride.

But Hurin and later Turin are men of action, if not entirely rash then overbold, gamblers who believe that you should strike hard and now. Their first and strongest instinct is to meet the enemy on the open field and crush him, or die honorably in the attempt (I myself am sympathetic to this view). But while the elven perspective is (probably) right, Tolkien obviously had a soft spot for the passionate race of men, the Ragnarok spirit, and of the hot-blooded Hurin and Turin in particular. These two great warriors very closely resemble the great figures and heroes of northern myth with which Tolkien felt an obvious kinship. We cannot help but sympathize with their unyielding spirit, even when it leads them terribly astray.

Hurin is a fully realized human—a man of great passions and strengths, but also great flaws, the greatest of which is pride. Turin, being of the same blood as his father, is destined to follow in his footsteps. And thus, very early on we realize that The Children of Hurin is a tragedy of the highest proportions. This is a black book, filled with untimely deaths and bitter defeats. Despite his unparalleled skill at arms and the great victories he wins, Turin is forever hearing the feet of doom creeping behind him.

And yet Tolkien is a writer of many meanings. It is never made explicit whether the doom of Hurin/Turin is self inflicted—the result of their own ill choice—or whether Morgoth, who curses Hurin and his children, is responsible for their downfall. Tolkien is revisiting familiar ground here, as the same argument swirls over the One Ring—is its wielder bereft of choice, consumed by its terrible power, or does the Ring reflect and amplify our own weakness? Turin is indeed cursed with terrible luck, but he does have a choice in how to react to the terrible events that befall him—and his own flawed responses, perhaps more than Morgoth's pronouncement of doom, makes him the “cursed” man that he is.

Perhaps.

But ahh, Morgoth. You thought Sauron was evil? Get ready to meet a dark lord of ten times his strength. In The Children of Hurin Morgoth is in full, wicked bloom as a dark demi-god, and more—he is a symbol of all that is twisted in mankind’s soul, all that of which we despair in the dark of night, rolled into a being of unspeakable malice. When he lays his curse upon Hurin and Turin, they are truly doomed. Morgoth evokes the ultimate fear of all mankind: that death is the end, and that nothing—literal, uppercase Nothing—awaits us in the grave. Says Hurin:

“Beyond the Circles of the World you shall not pursue those who refuse you.”

“Beyond the Circles of the World I will not pursue them,” said Morgoth. “For beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing. But within them they shall not escape me, until they enter into Nothing.”

I must warn potential readers that finding light in the gloom and darkness of The Children of Hurin is difficult, to say the least; it is well that the story of Middle-Earth was not told chronologically, else few readers would have the stomach to finish it to the end. The third age, and its victory over Sauron (pyrrhic though it was), is downright cheery in comparison.

Great elven cities fall in The Children of Hurin but seemingly only after they open their gates to men; Tolkien’s message may be that magic loses its wonder when it is examined and exposed; best leave it alone as a shadowy once upon a time. But, fortunately, Tolkien ignored this instinct and produced this time-shrouded tale of the First Age. With the help of his son and editor Christopher, the two have brought to life a brief, enduring moment from that time with The Children of Hurin.

Yet more reasons to read
All the above is my interpretation after a first read, but there’s so much more to commend The Children of Hurin than I’ve mentioned. I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight the following, which make it worth reading for simple reading's sake:

Glaurung, a horrific wingless dragon, the wyrm progeny of Smaug. Glaurung is mighty of body but, horribly, his most fearsome power is the wicked lies he spins with his voice, great charisma, and hypnotic eyes.

The fall of Nargothrond, a great elven city sacked by an army of orcs with a fire-breathing Glaurung at its head. Glaurung’s encounter with Turin at the gates of the city is unforgettable.

Turin’s black sword, Gurthang. Steve Tompkins over at The Cimmerian wrote a nice piece about the echoes of cursed blades throughout fantasy literature—two noteworthy examples being Michael Moorcock’s Elric, and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. The Children of Hurin adds another legend with Gurthang, a black sword made of iron that fell from heaven as a blazing star ("The heart of the smith still dwells in it, and that heart was dark.") Gurthang can be viewed as a metaphor for those mighty weapons whose power is too great to handle and, once employed, are cursed to destroy their wielders.

The Battle of Unnumbered Tears. This brief chapter, which describes the utter ruin of a great army of elves and men and dwarves gathered outside Angband, contains perhaps the best writing in the book. The cover price is worth these (alas, too short) eight pages. My favorite passage in The Children of Hurin is the following description from the battle, which already ranks among the greatest scenes I’ve ever read in fantasy literature:

Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and seized the axe of an orc-captain and wielded it two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried aloud: ‘Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, who thought thus to do him more evil than by death.

Seventy times, day shall come again—that sends a chill down my spine, especially knowing the long, long night of Morgoth’s victory, the full extent of which colors every page of this wonderful book. Go read it.

Starting off the New Year with ... Tolkien, of course!

I'm going to start off 2009 with a review of The Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien (2007), edited by Christopher Tolkien. I still have 60 pages or so to go, but I can say with certainty that reading The Children of Hurin is an incredible experience. I knew within five pages of starting that I was in for a great ride, and now I don't want it to end.

I went into The Children of Hurin anticipating another Silmarillion--interesting and very worthwhile, but dry and staid in tone. But this is no historical tract or textbook. The Children of Hurin is not only a legend of the elder days of Middle Earth, but is a living, breathing story to boot with an engaging narrative flow. It has definitely exceeded my expectations.

Much more on this to come, but here's a favorite early passage:

Then Morwen bade farewell to Hurin without tears; and she said: "I will guard what you leave in my keeping, both what is and what shall be."

And Hurin answered her: "Farewell, Lady of Dorlomin; we ride now with greater hope than ever we have known before. Let us think that at this midwinter the feast shall be merrier than in all our years yet, with a fearless spring to follow after!" Then he lifted Turin to his shoulder, and cried to his men: "Let the heir of the House of Hador see the light of your swords!" And the sun glittered on fifty blades as they leaped forth, and the court rang with the battle-cry of the Edain of the North: Lacho calad! Drego morn! Flame Light! Flee Night!