MYTHC0MICS: "CALL OF THE WILD" (CONAN THE KING #28, 1985)

 

I'm sure it's been at least twenty years since I read an issue of this Marvel magazine, which began in 1980 as KING CONAN and which lasted a healthy nine years, albeit under the altered title CONAN THE KING. It was a relatively high-ticket item, starting at $1.25 and ending at $1.50, and was the last Conan project from Roy Thomas before he left Marvel for DC. I imagine KING was launched for the usual economic reasons, but I'd like to think there was some thought of giving the barbarian a venue more expansive than the regular color comic.

There's a certain irony to Marvel devoting stories to the famed sword-slinger in his mature years, since Young Conan was always the most popular incarnation in prose and in comics. Robert E. Howard devoted one short story and one novel to Mature Conan, but clearly the WEIRD TALES readers liked the hero best when he was a young freebooter ranging from realm to realm. Nevertheless, KING presented Conan at an even later phase of life than Howard ever had. By the time of KING #28-- the last Conan tale for writer Alan Zelenetz-- the barbarian has sired a teenaged daughter and a somewhat younger son by his queen, Zenobia. The text of "Call of the Wild" implies that Conan is sixty years old, though artist Alan Silvestri draws both the barbarian and his red-haired guest-star as if they're merely in their forties.

Despite having ascended to the kingship of Aquilonia, Conan chafes at the confinements of civilized life. He dons a disguise and goes drinking at a lowly tavern. Monarch's business intrudes, so Conan orders everyone to clear the hall. One hooded figure seems minded to defy the King's order but then chooses to leave. 

Back at Conan's palace, his daughter Radegund anticipates her "confirmation" (whatever that means in Hyboria) but her father has conspicuously forgotten the Big Event. He's selfishly mourning the freedom of his younger years, and he departs the castle grounds for the forest. However, his cloaked "friend" from the tavern has apparently followed him-- a good trick, given that she couldn't have known when he'd leave and which way he'd go-- and reveals herself to the startled potentate.    

Unlike Conan, Mature Sonja has remained true to the wanderer's life, never marrying or settling down. She claims to have come to Aquilonia only to fulfill a commission, and to have run into Conan purely by accident-- though she could hardly be ignorant of the barbarian's royal attainments. It's worth remembering that in the first two-part tale of the Marvel Comics Sonja, she tricked Young Conan into doing heavy lifting for her. Mature Conan is delighted to see her and dearly wishes to talk over old times. She scorns his royal ascension, and her refusal to be Conan's nostalgia-buddy very nearly crushes him. But then Sonja switches gears and "allows" Conan to render her aid.

              

Zelenetz could have had Sonja lead Conan to any number of routine treasure-troves-- a lost tomb, a wizard's castle. Instead, Sonja's quest takes them to "a death barge-- sacred to the darkest gods of the nether realm." Aboard the ship, guarded by fanatics, lies the enshrined body of a necromancer, and Sonja's been hired to steal a gem from the dead wizard's eye. The two thieves have no real compunctions against robbing the dead, though in a symbolic sense the Death Barge might represent the world of Death itself, which will eventually consume all living warriors. In fact, Married, Not So Mature Conan can't quite resist getting grabby with Sonja's forty-something charms. Yet he doesn't resent getting her boot in his face, since his desire for the allure of pure adventure surpasses all else.

While Conan kills a bunch of guards (I'm sure they were all Bad People), Sonja steals the jewel-- but the dead wizard retaliates with a spell of deadly smoke. Conan hits on the idea of flooding the cabin, which interrupts the spell for some reason. Sonja keeps only her stolen eye-jewel while Conan randomly takes a "token" in the form of a necklace. Then they swim back to land, leaving the disposition of the Death Barge up to the reader's imagination.

Conan is all for deserting his throne and returning to his old wild ways, but Sonja tricks him one last time, albeit for his own good. Silvestri does a fine job showing Sonja's stoical acceptance that she's no longer a part of Conan's life, and off she rides, leaving him to his kingship-- and implicitly to his queen and children (though Sonja's only comment on the Cimmerian's marital life is a catty remark about Conan having a "harem.") Conan's poised to pursue her-- and maybe, his lost freedom-- when he hears temple bells and remembers that he's got a daughter waiting for him to perform his paternal duties.

     

But "all's well" for the King, whose dereliction of his responsibilities put into his hands just the right sort of booty to be a gift to the daughter he completely forgot. Zelenetz and Silvestri came up with a sort of "family melodrama" take on barbarian adventure, and my vague recollection of the whole series is that it often pursued storylines more in the vein of Hal Foster than of Robert E. Howard. To be sure, the KING series never lets an issue pass where Conan isn't mightily smiting enemies with his iron thews, so a lot of his complaints about civilized life ring false. Zelenetz's title is as ironic as his conclusion, for Conan's trajectory is less like that of Buck in London's CALL OF THE WILD-- the dog who embraces the wild life-- and more like that of White Fang, the star of London's other canine outing, the wolf-dog that finally gives up the wilderness in favor of domesticity. As a further irony, it's the she-devil with a sword-- the hero whose gender is best known for "nesting"-- who remains loyal to the allure of wanderlust.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS (1972)

 

SLEEPING SORCERESS was the second of the Lancer paperbacks to spotlight novel-length adventures of Elric. It's not nearly as well-composed as the first novel and is more transparently a fix-up of separate stories. All the stories here are, like the tale "The Singing Citadel" in the collection of the same name, are prequels to 1962's "The Stealer of Souls," in that they all concern Elric's conflicts with his first major enemy, the sorcerer Theleb K'aarna. The stories written from the 1960s and 1970s set the foundation of Moorcock's multiverse, but as he himself has commented, he was often making up things as he went along.   

Book One of SORCERESS, entitled "The Torment of the Last Lord," is the source of the image of a sleeping enchantress whom, one presumes, the hero will rescue-- though in the whole of the book, this is only true up to a point. Elric and his sidekick Moonglum have just left behind Queen Yishana in "Citadel" in order to pursue Ka'arna, and they encounter a castle inhabited only by the sleeping body of Empress Myshella, an ally of the Powers of Law, just as Elric is aligned to the powers of Chaos. Myshella instantly reminds Elric of his lost love Cymoril, whom he tried to rescue but slew instead, but despite those bad memories, he finds a magical means to revive her. Myshella wakes up just as Theleb K'aarna, allied to an army of Mongol-like warriors, marches on the castle to eliminate its potential threat to Chaos. Myshella summons forces that destroy the horde but K'aarna escapes. Not surprisingly, Myshella is instantly drawn to the brooding albino, and she soon becomes the newest in Elric's "Bond Girl" collection.

Book Two, "To Snare the Pale Prince," is a needlessly confusing sequel to the story "To Rescue Tanelorn" from CITADEL.  "Tanelorn" seems to take place after Elric meets Rackhir the Red Archer in the 1972 ELRIC novel before the latter has visited the mystical city of Tanelorn, while in the short story Rackhir resides in the city and protects it from a Chaos-inspired invasion by an army of beggars from the corrupt realm Nadsokor. Elric is referenced in "Tanelorn" but he does not appear-- and yet, "Prince" tells readers that Elric has visited Tanelorn at some previous time, and thus the albino and his buddy become allies with Rackhir's forces as they defend themselves from a new invasion. This time K'aarna allies himself with Urish, King of Nadsokor, who also has a previous grudge against Elric. The two villains conspire to steal a magic ring from Elric, knowing that he and Moonglum will come to Nadsokor to retrieve it. The evildoers also unleash a new invading force upon Tanelorn, a gaggle of demons who look like women and who therefore prove difficult for Tanelorn's defenders to strike down. Elric summons a troop of male demons, described as "ape-like," who destroy the female creatures and then die as well. ("Beauty and the Beast," anyone?) Elric recovers his ring and there's a rather pointless exchange with the hero's demon patron Arioch. K'aarna gets away again but kills Myshella in the process. His next foray against Tanelorn transpires not much longer afterward.

Book Three, "Three Heroes with a Single Aim," takes place during a period when Rackhir has invited Elric and Moonglum to abide in Tanelorn. The peace of the eternal city does nothing to dispel Elric's anomie, so he rides out into the wilderness, possibly hoping to die. Instead, he stumbles across K'aarna utilizing a mystic device to transport alien reptiles from another cosmos in order to attack Tanelorn. When Elric seeks to destroy the device, it hurls him into another dimension, which is the hero's first real encounter with the Moorcockian multiverse. He meets both Prince Corum of the "Swords trilogy," conceived around the same time, and Erekose, a character whom Moorcock loosely formulated in 1957 and then updated for a stand-alone novel in 1962, and they all realize, in some vague metaphysical manner, that they're all aspects of the same "eternal champion." I wrote up my impressions of "Heroes" in a previous post and my re-reading now does not alter my verdict:

Trouble is, while such heroes are interesting individually, they're not quite as interesting when they meet each other.  In the 1972 "novel" THE SLEEPING SORCERESS-- actually a collection of three separate novellas featuring Moorcock's most popular character, Elric of Melnibone-- the albino-skinned protagonist encounters two other heroes. Both are, like Elric, aspects of the "Eternal Champion," a sort of archetype that remains constant in many multiversal domains.  One is "Prince Corum," who had his own series of adventures around the same time as Elric. The other calls himself "Erekose," though he's not entirely identical with the character from the one-shot 1970 novel THE ETERNAL CHAMPION. For one thing, the Erekose-warrior in this story is explicitly black-skinned. I have not recently reread ETERNAL CHAMPION, but as I recall no reference is made to the race of the original Erekose. I assume Moorcock was having a bit of fun playing around with the racial identities of his heroes in different incarnations.

The crossover-novel brings the three heroes together in the equally eternal city Tanelorn, where they battle the magic of an evil sorcerer. It's a decent enough story but loses some punch given that all three heroes sound and act pretty much the same. Further, this sequence of SLEEPING SORCERESS was originally derived from a similar section in the 1971 Corum novel THE KING OF THE SWORDS. Since they're pretty much the same story, I decided to count the Elric version as "best crossover," simply because it stands upon its own better as a crossover-tale.  Further, it's a good basic representation of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" concept, though perhaps not its most complex manifestation.

After Elric helps the other two heroes overcome an adversary in the other dimension-- a singularly underwhelming threat-- Elric returns to his own world and uses magic derived from the other dimension to thwart K'aarna's plot. Again, K'aarna gets away, as he must to satisfy the continuity. But the threat of Myshella is arguably greater. She has to perish because, if she's allowed to survive, she might tempt the hero away from his dolorous quest to slay lots of sorcerers and monsters before he dies. In the final analysis, there is enough symbolic discourse in all three chapters to justify my saying that its mythicity is high. But SORCERESS is not even close to being as aesthetically pleasing as ELRIC OF MELNIBONE.    

          

THE READING RHEUM: THE SINGING CITADEL (1970)

 

I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Michael Moorcock's Elric saga, since I often find the results uneven. I may just finish up with SLEEPING SORCERESS and then conclude with STORMBRINGER, the collection of stories in which Moorcock killed off his hero-- thus engendering dozens of prequels and interstitial tales. After that, maybe I'll explore his other two serials of the 1960-70s, Corum and Dorian Hawkmoon.

SINGING CITADEL was a Berkely paperback edition of four stories Moorcock had previously published in British magazines, only one of which is an Elric story, while two others were brought into the "Elric universe." Instead of reviewing them in order of collection, I'll go with the order of publication.

TO RESCUE TANELORN (G)-- This story, published in 1962 (the year after Elric's debut), is tangentially connected with the albino hero, thanks to a brief mention of Elric's rumored adventures. I don't know if Moorcock contemplated bringing this story's hero, Rackhir the Red Archer, into the Elric-verse that early, since the two character would not meet until 1972's ELRIC OF MELNIBONE. In any case, "Tanelorn" is easily the best story in the collection. Rackhir is a "warrior-priest" who served the same Lords of Chaos seen in the Elric tales. However, he and many similar warriors became weary of fighting their Lords' pointless battles, and so retired to a vaguely mystical city, Tanelorn. A Chaos Lord takes offense at these defections and summons an army of mindless beggars to destroy the city. Rackhir consults an aged magician to learn to reach a group of entities, the Grey Lords, for help, and the two of them venture into several alternate dimensions in search of Tanelorn's salvation. The conclusion seems rushed, but "Tanelorn" serves to put forth one of the author's best sketches of his nihilistic universe.

THE GREATER CONQUEROR (F)-- Published in 1963, "Conqueror" takes place in the historical domain of Alexander the Great, shortly after he made his foray into India. However, in Moorcock's version, Alexander's reign is the center of a struggle between the opposed powers of Good and Evil, represented respectively by the Persian deities Ormuzd and Ahriman (who may be a big influence on the athor's conceptions of Law and Chaos), Alexander's mother Olympias, a worshipper of Ahriman, consecrated her son's body and soul to Evil, and in some vague way Alexander's path of conquest is supposed to aid Ahriman's mastery of the world. The possessed Alexander is not the story's eminent hero: rather, a skeptical mercenary, Simon of Byzantium, is drafted by the powers of Good to take out the Macedonian monarch. Simon is quickly converted to the reality of the Good-Evil struggle by his encounter with real demons, and yet the conflict proves underwhelming, even up to a final sword duel between the hero and the possessed ruler. The characters are all flatly conceived and "Conqueror" feels like a concept that might've been interesting in a full novel, something along the lines of the Haggard-Lang fantasy THE WORLD'S DESIRE.

MASTER OF CHAOS (P)-- According to this vital Moorcock site, this story was composed in 1964, shortly after Moorcock published the 1963-64 Elric tales that became the fix-up novel STORMBRINGER, the one in which Elric dies. The hero is a valiant knight, Earl Aubec, who seeks to extend the dominion of his queen/lover, only to find that he's encroached upon the terrain of Chaos, and he never returns. The aforementioned site includes the information that Moorcock considered doing a series of stories with Aubec, but when the proposed series didn't pan out, Moorcock may have channeled some of these ideas into another character. Aubec is name-checked in ELRIC OF MELNIBONE in that the hero acquires the knight's fabled sword. Most if not all Moorcock contains strong elements of irony, but "Chaos" comes closest to being purely ironic in tone.

THE SINGING CITADEL (F)-- This short tale appears to be the first of the "prequel stories," as well as being written to clarify events in "The Stealer of Souls," (reviewed here) an Elric tale published in 1962. In "Citadel," Queen Yishana hires Elric and his Melnibonean magic-mastery to investigate a mysterious citadel into which Yishana's knights have disappeared. However, Yishana sweetens the pot by sleeping with the hero, and this pisses off her former lover, the court wizard Theleb Ka'arna. Thus Elric has to deal with sorcerous assaults from both the wizard and the master of the citadel, a minor Chaos-Lord named Balo. The tale is just okay, with the best part coming at the end. Yishana tells Elric not to bother seeking vengeance on Ka'arna, that he should just remain in her domain as her consort. But Elric is hot to pursue the wizard, and it's evident that the hero's accumulated guilt and regrets make it impossible for him to "settle down," arguably contributing to his doom.

In my crossover-system, "Tanelorn" is a null-crossover for having name-checked Elric.                    

THE READING RHEUM: ELRIC OF MELNIBONE (1972)

 

Apparently Michael Moorcock so liked the title for his first Elric tale, one of novelette length, that he re-used it for the first full Elric novel, the first one written for the paperback market rather than for magazines. Later printings were re-dubbed ELRIC OF MELNIBONE to minimize confusion between the novel and the novelette. I'm reprinting the original Lancer paperback cover, partly because Charles Moll's illustration is the best of the pack, to say nothing of how Moll captures the surrealistic spirit of the 1970s.

My other reason for at least for referencing the original title here is that, though I will henceforth call the novel MELNIBONE for short, "Dreaming City" is much more appropriate for this prequel work than it was for the introductory novelette. From the first story, one barely gets a sense of what the city Melnibone is like, and how it influenced the formation of the doleful champion Elric. MELNIBONE was entirely devoted to providing a substantial background for Moorcock's increasingly popular hero.

As I mentioned in my review of Moorcock' s STEALER OF SOULS collection, the denizens of the decadent city Melnibone are humanoids, but despite having the same constitutions as humans, they're somehow distinct in terms of their origins. In the distant past, Melniboneans ruled a vast empire, and human beings were a young race kept under their dominion. But for whatever reasons, the empire has now contracted to one well-defended metropolis, Imryyr the Dreaming City. Moorcock never provides an explicit reason for the empire's decline, but he implies that the Melniboneans became preoccupied with abstruse aesthetic pursuits-- including the art of torture-- and so they lost their drive to conquest, much like decadent Rome.

As the novel opens, Elric is the hereditary emperor of his people, though he's set apart from them in having been born an albino. This means that in order to bolster his strength to normal levels he must take special drugs even to lift his sword. But with the drugs he's a good fighter, and it's not the color of his skin but the content of Elric's character that makes his people despise him. In short, Elric possesses a conscience, something most Melniboneans lack. He's capable of taking expedient actions, to be sure. When the city is threatened by spies from human armies planning an attack, the albino ruler does not have a problem allowing a court torturer to wring information from the captured agents.

However, Elric won't eliminate potential enemies gratuitously, and tolerates the disrespect of his cousin Yyrkoon, who clearly covets Elric's throne. Yyrkoon's sister Cymoril, the lover of Elric, advises him to do away with her brother, but noble Elric forfends. Possibly, because he was born so physically different from his people, Elric became alienated from their ways, though Moorcock doesn't say so. In any case, Yyrkoon rewards his cousin's generosity by trying to drown him at sea. For good measure, Yyrkoon mocks his sister's anger by telling her that once he sits the throne, he plans to revive the old custom of consanguineous marriages-- though there's no indication that Yyrkoon would do so out of real desire for anything but to further torment his sister.  

Only a beneficent sea-god allows the albino to return to Imryrr, where Elric condemns Yyrkoon to death. However, the villain escapes, taking his sister prisoner and using sorcery to conceal his whereabouts. Elric makes a devil's bargain with Arioch, Lord of Chaos, and thereby learns Yyrkoon's whereabouts. In the company of a faithful retainer, Elric journeys to the evildoer's sanctum, and finds that Yyrkoon has an almost impenetrable defensive weapon. Elric finally manages to liberate Cymoril-- though she's been drugged into a coma. 

Yyrkoon flees to another dimension, and once more Elric might put himself in debt to Arioch to follow his enemy. In the otherworld, Elric meets an exiled human warrior, Rackhir the Archer, and the two men team up. In a sacred cavern Elric catches up with his cousin, and they both behold two magical swords. The enemies each take one of the blades-- Elric taking one called Stormbringer, Yyrkoon possessing Mournblade-- and they fight. Elric wins, and Yyrkoon loses his sword, while Elric calls again upon his chaotic patron to get back to Imryrr, along with his new ally and his prisoner. However, instead of sentencing his captive to death, Elric seems to think that he's cowed Yyrkoon into submission, and he decides to depart Imryrr to explore the younger domains of the humans. Elric also decides to allow Yyrkoon to be his regent, which only makes sense in terms of solving a narrative problem for Moorcock, because he has to find some way of putting Yyrkoon into power again as he is in "The Dreaming City."

This dodgy conclusion, though, is MELNIBONE's only major flaw. Moorcock is not usually what I'd call a "poetic" writer. However, in his soaring descriptions of Imryrr and the doomed love of Elric and Cymoril, the author taps into a lyrical power I've rarely seen elsewhere in his other works, one that compares with the best "poetic prose" of Tanith Lee and Clark Ashton Smith. The next and last of Moorcock's works for Lancer, THE SLEEPING SORCERESS, is according to one online source less of a unified novel and more an assemblage of three separate novelettes.       

ADDENDUM: Until I read the SINGING CITADEL collection, I didn't realize that this novel is both a crossover, in that Elric meets Rackhir, hero of the short story "To Rescue Tanelorn" (which takes place after ELRIC), and a null-crossover in that the albino acquires the sword of Earl Aubec, the hero of "Master of Chaos."  

    

       

THE READING RHEUM: VATHEK (1786)

 

Following the first European translation of a version of The Arabian Nights in the early 1700s, various European authors attempted to emulate the freewheeling charms of the famous Oriental story-collection. The English lord William Beckford produced one of the most enduring such works of the period. Apparently he fell in love with the Nights in his early twenties and wrote VATHEK in a white-hot expression of literary ardor. Then Beckford never wrote fiction again, according to Lin Carter, who edited the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback of this unique effort, a favorite for such authors as HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

I say "unique effort" advisedly, because I don't consider VATHEK great literature, even of the sort produced by Lovecraft and Smith. The book feels a bit like Marlow's Faust festooned with Oriental tropes and suffused with Beckford's perception of the casual cruelty in the original stories. Beckford also copies the paper-thin characterizations and wandering narratives of the Nights, and though neither of these is necessarily a bad thing, one does have to be prepared for this style of writing. VATHEK doesn't capture the wilder fantasies of the Arabian Nights, though, because the main narrative-- as well as three side-stories-- all share the theme of the Satanic overreacher. 

The Caliph Vathek, ruling in the city of Samarah in the Abbasid period, only appears to be the defender of the Muslim faith. In truth he's a thoroughgoing hedonist who thirst after forbidden knowledge, much like his mother Carathis, a sorceress who follows the fire-worship attributed to the Zoroastrians (frequent villains in the Nights). One day Vathek is visited by a Giaour ("non-Muslim foreigner") who slowly draws the caliph into renouncing Allah to gain knowledge. That the Giaour is clearly not a human being is shown by an amusing scene in which he somehow morphs into a ball and lures Vathek and the rest of his subjects into becoming a huge soccer-team, kicking the animated ball all the way out of Samarah and up to the edge of a cliff. Beneath the level of the cliff is a literal doorway to the Islamic Hell, where rules the Islamic Satan "Eblis." At the cliff's edge Vathek receives a private message from Eblis' servant The Giaour: Vathek can gain supreme knowledge if he will sacrifice fifty Muslim children to Hell.

That Vathek does not succeed in delivering this sacrifice is not for lack of trying. But in Vathek's single-minded, impious quest, a lot of innocents do perish-- including fifty Samarah citizens who attempt to save Carathis from what they think is a raging fire, and who all end up getting killed by the witch's servants. Vathek and his mother make excellent, utterly conscience-less villains.

Unfortunately, in the second half Beckford's narrative vacillates. He has Vathek and a great entourage leave Samarah to visit an Emir, whose daughter Vathek eventually weds. This romantic subplot drags the narrative pace downward, partly because Beckford initially suggests that the Emir's daughter Nouronihar will resist Vathek because she's in love with her nancy-boy cousin Gulchenrouz. Then for no clear reason Beckford changes Nouronihar's character, so that she joins Vathek because of greed. Carathis, hearing about the effeminate Gulchenrouz, thirsts to sacrifice the youth. However, a beneficent genie rescues the cousin and takes him into a bower of immortal existence, along with the fifty children Vathek tried to sacrifice to Eblis. (Beckford does not explain why the genie didn't return the children to their parents in Samarah.)  Then eventually Vathek and Nouronihar make their way to the Islamic Hell, thinking they're going to enjoy the fruits of paradise, only to become, like all other damned souls, bereft of joy and hope.

Before coming to this dolorous conclusion, Vathek listens to the testimonies of three other damned souls about what deeds brought them to Hell. I lost interest in the first, "Prince Alasi," which just seemed like a reprise of Vathek's own career, and so have little to say about it. The third story, "Princess Zulkais," is a little better. It starts out with another tyrant who goes to extremes to push his only son into becoming a great ruler. The trouble is that son Kalilah really has a passion to stay in the company of his twin sister Zulkais. Beckford never shows any incestuous act, but Zulkais also goes to extremes to stay within the orbit of her brother, makes a deal with the devil, and so they both end up hopeless in Hell.

The middle story is meatier if still uneven. The eponymous narrator of "Prince Barkiarokh" is like Vathek an overreacher who hungers for anything he cannot have. By dumb luck a female peri, Homaiouna, falls in love with Barkiarokh at first sight, and maneuvers things so that he marries her and she sets up him up to ascend to the throne of Berdouka. However, Prince B. doesn't want to live the virtuous life Homaiouna expects him to observe. He betrays her with a mortal woman, hires thugs to knife his peri-wife over and over just to make her go away (he's aware it won't kill her), and finally falls in lust with his grown daughter by his mortal wife. Again, the main attraction of this story is much the same as the main one: to see just how ruthless a villain Barkiarokh can be, just as the main story focuses on the iniquities of Vathek and Carathis.

Scholars of the period have seen Vathek as a precursor of the obsessed Byronic hero (not least because Byron admired the book and wrote a narrative poem called "The Giaour") and of the Gothic villains who arose mostly in the 1790s (in belated reaction to Walpole's OTRANTO in 1764). But I find Beckford's concentration on over-the-top intense sadistic scenarios to have more in common with the works of the Marquise de Sade. Beckford began VATHEK four years before it was published, and the year after VATHEK was published in 1786, Sade wrote the work that made him famous, JUSTINE, which when published four years later would comprise an introduction to his doctrine of libertinage and Sadean excess. I'm not arguing direct influence. But it seems as if something was in the wind around that time, even though Beckford and Sade were in most other respects utterly unalike.      

             

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. But I missed an important insight, and it's a strange oversight on my part, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic." In the overlooked insight, Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from the era of the Crusades. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and after he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There existed a few broad fantasies like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even when the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

ADDENDUM 4/12/2026-- I chanced across this abstract, suggesting that the critical acceptance of "romance" began to shift back to acceptance, after the form's long absence during the Age of Reason, slightly before the 1764 publication of OTRANTO. 

In 1762, when Richard Hurd (1720–1808) published a small work of historical-literary criticism, this was for him not the start of a long career in literary endeavor or scholarship. While not seeking a career in literary scholarship, Hurd’s two volumes of commentary were hugely successful, going through six editions in just a few years. Thomas Warton (1728–1790) revised his influential Observations on the Fearie Queene of Spenser (1754) after reading Hurd’s third Dialogue, on the Age of Queen Elizabeth. This chapter examines Hurd’s Elizabethan past, in which the monarchy, in the person of Elizabeth, and the nobility were in a balance of political power, while chivalry and romance formed the cultural and literary norms.

 

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 2

 Following on the heels of both my review of THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL and the first part of this two-part series, here's a longer exploration of the relevance of MINSTREL to my concept of the superhero idiom.

My criterion for both "de facto superheroes" (those that everyone agrees to be superheroes for whatever reasons) and those characters who are "superhero-adjacent" is that they must always satisfy the connotations of "super" and "hero" thusly:

For a character to be a hero, he or she must possess, or have access to, *megadynamic* combative abilities. This can mean abilities that go beyond those of ordinary mortals, or they can be an ordinary mortal's abilities taken to extraordinary heights. 

As indicated above, the character does not himself or herself have to be "super" in the common connotation of possessing either natural super-powers (Superman) or artificially enhanced powers (Iron Man). But the hero who possesses megadynamic capabilities must move within a world where "super" phenomena are possible, whether the hero opposes those phenomena or receives aid from them.

Now, to the latter category, there's no question that the world of Scott's MINSTREL is one where supernatural phenomena are readily accepted, even though the events take place in the late 16th century-- which, ironically, is about the time that stories of chivalric romance began to die out for the most part. In this respect, MINSTREL may resemble a lot of the literary fairy tales that proliferated in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th. I say "may" because I'm talking about only original literary creations by particular authors, not retellings of oral narratives, and I've not read many works in the former category, not even the best-known of them, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST from 1741. 

Still, because Walter Scott was a historian, he doesn't emulate the tendency of oral stories to take place in generic times and places. The 13th-century scholar Michael Scott is given an anachronistic makeover, so that he has perished only some years previous to the poem's main story, and here all the ahistorical legends about his having been a benign wizard are completely true. Lady Scott, who desires to possess Michael's magical book for unspecified reasons, is herself educated in magic, and the author even claims that she learned the skill from her father, himself educated in Padua-- which is generally more information than one gets about your generic bad witches and conniving faerie queens.

MINSTREL's main hero, loose though the poem's structture is, is the loyal bondsman William of Deloraine, whom Lady Scott sends to fetch the thaumaturgic tome from the warlock Michael's tomb. It's a spooky episode, though Deloraine doesn't end up fighting anyone or anything until he gets back from his mission. He crosses swords with Cranston, boyfriend of Lady Scott's daughter Margaret, and Deloraine is wounded. He loses the magical book to Gilpin, the goblin-servant of Cranston and Cranston's family, though Gilpin takes this action on his own recognizance, since no one in Cranston's clan even knows anything about the book. The book's only function in the story is that when the goblin gets a brief look at one page, it teaches him an illusion-spell that Gilpin is able to use later.

Clan-war breaks out while Deloraine is convalescing under Lady Scott's care, and one of the demands of the enemy clan is that they want Deloraine's life for his having previously killed the brother of an enemy lord. Deloraine has the choice of being tried for murder outright, or fighting in a one-on-one with Redgrave, the lord who lost his brother. So, will Deloraine be forced to drag himself from his sick-bed to prevent total clan-war? No, because Cranston-- who's such an insubstantial character, he almost seems like Deloraine's shadow -- gets Gilpin to cast an illusion-spell that makes Henry look like Deloraine, so that the unwounded young warrior can triumph over Redgrave.

It's not hard to imagine how a later melodrama would have jacked up the duel of mystic powers, maybe having Cranston's clan using the goblin's powers against Clan Scott, and Lady Scott retaliating by seeking the warlock's magic book. Assuming that everything in MINSTREL is original to Walter Scott and not borrowed from some unremembered oral source, Scott just wants Gilpin to be a mischievous imp instead of a major threat, and that does keep the poem's stakes on a low side. Deloraine doesn't get to shine in a final combat scene, any more than does his descendant Ivanhoe. But he is, by all indications, a doughty warrior, and he receives supernatural aid that saves him from being slain by another skilled fighter. Deloraine doesn't request the help, the way archaic Greek heroes would request weapons from their goddess-patrons. But structurally, Deloraine is a "hero" aided by a "super" phenomenon, even though his substitute is in reality an ordinary skilled man fighting another ordinary skilled man. But once all the goblin's business has been finished-- both petty pranks and benign actions-- his supernatural master arises from his tomb to reclaim him. This is not quite a moment akin to Shakespeare's "I'll drown my book," but it may not be a total coincidence that the main story is being related by an old minstrel, who appears to live in "our" world, a world in which magic has become only the stuff of literary fantasies.   

ADDENDUM 1/3/26: I later decided, as per my characterization of Cranston as Deloraine's "shadow," that LAY, the first post-Renaissance work in the superhero idiom, should be classified as having two complementary heroes, Deloraine and Cranston. Without Cranston's command of the goblin, he's not able to impersonate his comrade-in-chivalry Deloraine. However, without Deloraine's courageous theft of the magic book from Michael Scott's tomb, Gilpin would not have been able to make Cranston look like Deloraine.       

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM

I suppose the following "wish" might be deemed by some self-fulfilling-

I may as well as mention that the writer I **wish** had some strong candidates in this idiom is Sir Walter Scott. It looks to me like he single-handedly reinvented the adventure genre in the early 1800s, after the Age of Enlightenment made most of the fiction very talky and didactic, even when one sees occasional glimmers of adventure in Gothics or Byron's proto-swashbucklers.

-- because, after I read various summaries of Walter Scott works online, and chose to analyze the 1805 LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, I found what I wanted on my first try. "What are the odds?" a skeptic might say.   

Still, I'm fine with admitting that MINSTREL is not the ideal "first post-Renaissance almost-superhero." While Scott's narrative poem was popular in its day, its status as a long poem probably kept it from being influential on genre fiction of the 19th century. This stands in contrast to the way, say, Scott's novel IVANHOE unquestionably influenced the 1844 penny dreadful THE BLACK MONK. So other candidates for "first almost-superhero," such as one finds in the French crime-novel THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS or the fictionalizations of the English "urban legend" Spring-Heeled Jack, would seem much more credible as DIRECT influences on the superhero idiom that would eventually include such later 19th century proponents as Allen Quatermain and Nick Carter.

However, in a purely FORMAL sense, MINSTREL has most of the right elements for what might be termed a "fantasy-hero" if not a superhero. The poem has one supernatural creature in it-- a goblin with magical powers-- and a combative conflict between powerful opponents who can be loosely framed as "hero and villain." The fly in the ointment is that though the goblin might be said to be allied to the side of the "villains" in a general sense, the creature is not opposed to the hero in the way readers now expect from most fantasy literature following the birth of "sword-and-sorcery." MINSTREL also has a sorcerer, but he's not specifically helpful or harmful to either heroes or villains. In essence I think in MINSTREL Scott was trying to meld elements of "feuds between rival Scottish clans" with those of "people encountering the supernatural"-- both of which elements appeared in the older ballads Scott had been translating before he wrote MINSTREL, his first notable original work. One may argue that the two sets of elements don't quite cohere as one might desire.

Still, since I don't imagine I'll ever be devoted enough to this topic to read the entire Walter Scott oeuvre, I'm pleased that even on the purely formal level, the author has some skin in this particular literary game. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL (1805)

 I recently commented to a poster on CHFB that if any author deserved to have the honor of reigniting "the superhero idiom" since its suspension at the end of the 16th century, it would be Sir Walter Scott, who as far as I can tell also reignited the combative mode in canonical literature. I made this comment, however, having only read two Scott novels-- IVANHOE and THE TALISMAN-- though I'd also seen various film adaptations of Scott novels. Up to this point, I would have said that 1812's IVANHOE was Scott's most significant work, as it brought back the "chivalric romance" that had been destroyed by the early 1600s release of DON QUIXOTE's two sections. Yet I was intrigued to read on Wikipedia that after Scott gained a measure of fame translating old Scottish ballads, often about border wars between feuding clans, his first attempt at an original ballad was an immediate success with 1805 audiences.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's plan to include a long original poem of his own in the second edition of the Minstrelsy: it was to be "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment".^[28] He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. (It was not to be published until 1816.)^[29] Scott was able to draw on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and written sources beginning in his childhood to present an energetic and highly coloured picture of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "Dies irae" at the end. The work was an immediate success with almost all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year.^[16] The most celebrated lines are the ones that open the final stanza:

 The Wiki article also described enough of the plot for me to surmise that MINSTREL might be in the combative mode, which could potentially make it relevant to the superhero idiom, if not necessarily "superhero-adjacent." That, however, will be a separate argument for another post, and from here on it, I'll simply set down my impressions of Scott's first big hit.  

The word "lay" in the title connotes a narrative poem, traditionally sung by a minstrel in various European cultures, and the titular lay here is a framing-device for the main story, as it is related to a court full of listeners by a minstrel. I have no idea why Scott dubbed the unnamed singer "the last minstrel," unless he simply wanted to suggest the idea of a time that was passing in the shadow of the Industrial Age. Following the introduction of the framing-device, the minstrel only pops in at the end of each of the ballad's six cantos, as he takes a rest from his narrative.

The main story is set in historical Scotland, apparently of the 16th or 17th century. I'm sure that MINSTREL contains dozens of references to real Scottish and/or English history that simply went right past me, though I don't think Scott kept complete fidelity to historical sources. For one thing, a major part of the story involves a famous Scottish scholar, one Michael Scott, who though deceased is treated as if he had been a contemporary of the other characters in the narrative. In real history, Michael Scott lived in the 13th century, and though various legends made him a wizard there's no indication of occult knowledge in the real scholar's history. Still, English readers of the period would have recognized dozens of Renaissance-era historical figures worked into the story, even though I assume some though not all of the principal characters were fictional.

As the story opens, the Clan Scott has just suffered a grievous loss thanks to their enemies Clan Kerr, as Lord Scott has been killed in combat. The widow Lady Scott is not a happy camper.

Vengeance, deep-brooding o'er the slain

Had lock'd the source of softer woe;

And burning pride, and high disdain,

Forbade the rising tear to flow

Lady Scott, who is said to possess magical talents (she's seen listening to voices of local spirits), orders a trooper, William of Deloraine, to undertake a macabre mission. Deloraine must ride to the crypt where the wizard Michael Scott (no relation to the Scott Clan so far as I could tell) lies buried. Deloraine must descend into the crypt and remove a Book of Magic from the corpse of the wizard and bring it back to Lady Scott. The author never puts into words what Lady Scott plans to do with the book. though "vengeance for the slain" seems a not unreasonable conclusion. 

Deloraine journeys to the site of the crypt, and with the help of a monk (who claims to have known Michael Scott in life) the young man successfully liberates the magic book. Though the author puts in a lot of eerie descriptions, nothing specific happens during the crypt-raid, though the monk passes away a day or so later-- again, not from definite sorcerous causes.

Deloraine only gets into trouble in Canto 3, when he gets closer to his home base. Prior to the slaying of Lord Scott, his grown daughter Margaret fell in love with Cranston, the heir apparent of Clan Kerr. Naturally, Lady Scott is not much inclined to entertain a clan-uniting marriage after her husband's death. Cranston has however managed to contrive a secret if brief meeting with Margaret, and as he leaves the castle of Clan Scott he runs into Deloraine. The two fight, and Cranston wounds Deloraine. Cranston calls upon his page Gilpin to transport wounded Deloraine into the castle without detection, which is something Gilpin can do, because Gilpin is a goblin.

The author provided a loose history as to how the head of Clan Kerr came to be served by a goblin of magical talents: apparently Gilpin just appeared to the Kerr lord one day and insisted on becoming the lord's servant. Toward the poem's close, we finally learn, more or less, that Gilpin was originally in the service of Michael Scott, and that after the wizard perished, Gilpin apparently had to offer his services to some mortal. Or maybe Gilpin does so just to have opportunities for mischief, for while transporting Deloraine back to the castle, Gilpin also steals the magic book. He never does anything with the book, because it's bound with iron clasps he can't open, but he keeps it for the rest of the story. I'm not sure the author didn't forget about it, since Lady Scott, tending Deloraine's wounds, never asks any questions like "what happened to the book" or "how'd you get in the castle without anyone seeing you?"

Moreover, once Gilpin is on "enemy territory" as it were, he feels free to make more mischief. He lures the unnamed small son of Lady Scott into the forest, and though Gilpin would like to kill the kid, the goblin fears some retaliation from the boy's mother. So while the kid wanders in the forest, Gilpin assumes his appearance, returns to the castle and begins committing acts of childish destruction.

But although Cranston returned to his own lands without incident, his kindred have decided to march on Castle Scott for past grievances. Some outriders find Lady Scott's wandering son and take him hostage, since the boy is good enough to inform them of his lineage. Clan Kerr's forces and their English allies clash a few times with Clan Scott's soldiers. Then during a parley Clan Kerr reveals its hostage and proposes one of two outcomes. They'd like to try Deloraine for past acts of malice against their clan. However, since one of those acts included slaying the brother of a lord named Musgrave, Clan Kerr is amenable to letting Musgrave and Deloraine settle their quarrel in one-on-one combat. However, Deloraine still suffers from wounds that might make it tough for an equal battle. (The author uses this trope again in IVANHOE.)

Miraculously, wounded Deloraine appears to fight and slay Musgrave. But big reveal time: the man beneath the helmet is Cranston, who wanted to spare the life of the man he wounded. Cranston somehow came across Gilpin and compelled the goblin to use his powers of illusion to make Cranston appear to be the other knight. In fact, Deloraine makes a belated appearance after Cranston kills Musgrave, with the Scott clansman rather offended that someone else swiped his identity.

The final canto starts off with familiar lines that almost no one can ever quote the origins of--

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

--and the sentiments seem appropriate here, because the main action of the poem has been to provide a happy ending to a story of warring families. Cranston and Margaret, the discount versions of Romeo and Juliet, receive permission to marry from the mollified Lady Scott, and apparently everyone in Clan Kerr is fine with it too, now that someone has died as a sort of scapegoat-that-solves-the-problem. The unnamed son of Lady Scott is of course returned, leaving just one difficulty, that of Gilpin-- which is solved when his master apparently leaves his unquiet grave to claim the goblin (and maybe the book too, for all I can tell). While the lords and ladies are feasting in a grear hall, Gilpin is seeking to make mischief again, when there's a flash of lightning and the goblin disappears, as well as a supernatural intrusion that out-otrantos OTRANTO.

Some heard a voice in Branksome Hall,

Some saw a sight, not seen by all

That dreadful voice was heard by some,

Cry, with loud summons, "Gylbin, come!"

And on the spot where burst the brand

        Just where the page had flung him down,

Some saw an arm, and some a hand,

        And some the waving of a gown.

The guests in silence pray'd and shook,

And terror dimm'd each lofty look.

But none of all the astonish'd train

Was so dismay'd as Deloraine

His blood did freeze, his brain did burn,

'Twas fear'd his mind would ne'er return;

For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,

Like him of whom the story ran

Who spoke the spectre-hound in Man.

At length, by fits, he darkly told.

With broken hint, and shuddering cold,

That he had seen, right certainly.

A shape with amice wrapp'd around,

With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,

Like pilgrim from beyond the sea;

And knew--but how it matter'd not--

It was the wizard, Michael Scott.

But once the dread apparition has passed, everything returns to normal, the happy couple is wed, and the frame-story of the minstrel's lay comes to an end. And I will deal with the ramifications of this story for the superhero idiom in a separate post.  

     

                  

THE DAWN OF THE MAGICAL ERA

 To be more specific, it's the dawn of my term "magical-era stories," which takes the place of the former term "magical fantasy stories." I introduced that term in the essay-series MIND OUT OF TIME, which wrapped up here. In that essay I provided this rationale for reworking the term "fantasy" so that its dominant exemplars, like CONAN and LORD OF THE RINGS, fall into a more specific category of fantasies that take place in an era that validates magic over science:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

  The more I thought about in the ensuing months, calling something a "magical fantasy" didn't speak specifically to my formulation: that certain fantasies are categorically different than others in that the former evoke an archaic era in which magic supervenes science. Thus, "magical-era stories" at least specifically references my main concept.  

The two types described above also broadly describe the way magical-era fantasies were structured. The narratives we commonly call "myths" tend to emphasize large-scale events, some of which take place largely in the worlds of the gods, of the heights of Olympus or the depths of Hades. In contrast, many folktales tend to be more limited in scope and deal with ordinary humans encountering supernatural presences. However, in keeping with today's review of Jack Vance's DYING EARTH, I should mention one other form of archaic fantasy that indirectly influenced many pop-cultural descendants: the apocalyptic fantasy that describes the final fate of the profane world, seen in both the Norse Ragnarok and the Christian Book of Revelations. To the best of my knowledge there were no archaic apocalypses that involved the concepts of science, because such concepts had yet to become systematized. Modern "futuristic" magical-era stories can't avoid being influenced by science-fiction tropes, which is the case with both DYING EARTH and its literary ancestor, Clark Ashton Smith's ZOTHIQUE. More on these matters later, perhaps.

THE READING RHEUM: THE DYING EARTH (1950)

 I did a semi-deep dive on the origins of this collection of interlinked stories taking place in the titular world. Apparently author Jack Vance was unable to sell the EARTH stories individually to SF magazines of the 1940s. However, in 1950 Vance convinced small-time paperback publisher Hillman (now remembered today mostly for their 1940s comics, AIRBOY and THE HEAP) to publish this all-original book of stories. I don't have any info on contemporaneous sales, but I theorize that Vance's exotic fantasy-stories grabbed readers in the relatively small SF/fantasy readership and so made possible the writer's long career from the 1950s through the 1980s.     

I have a rough theory that because Vance grew up reading magazines like WEIRD TALES in his youth (as he admitted in interviews), he wanted to do something like the "Big Three" of WT-- H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith-- by crafting fantasy-stories linked to one another. (Influence from the SF mags of the period is a definite possibility too.) In one interview Vance mentioned a probable (though not intentional) stylistic influence on him from Clark Ashton Smith. I don't know that Vance ever admitted that his Dying Earth stories were a reaction to the far-future domain of Smith's ZOTHIQUE. 

I probably read EARTH in the seventies or eighties, but the only story I remember really liking was "Mazirian the Magician." Oddly, Vance wanted to use that story-title as the book's title, which is odd given that Mazirian only appears in one story, while other characters appear in more than one tale-- though no single character appears in all six chapters. I like Thomas Monteleone's term "mosaic" for novels cobbled together from stories not related by a supervening plot. All that said, I didn't get much of a myth-vibe from Vance's stories. Mostly, I remembered that Vance isn't really very good with characterization. I've seen arguments that he's doing an "anti-heroic" type of fantasy opposed to the reigning American influence of Howard. But in these stories at least, Vance is not really any more firmly committed to irony than he is to adventure, so I suppose I would still consider these adventure-stories.      

TURJAN OF MIR-- This story introduces readers to the Dying Earth, a quasi-medieval domain which like Zothique exists millions of years removed from modern Earth, and one where magical entities and disciplines have returned to prominence, though there are still remnants of super-science. The titular Turjan is both sorcerer and scientist, first seen seeking to create artificial, intelligent life. He fails and decides to seek the help of Pandelume, a sorcerer in another dimension. Turjan accesses that dimension and is attacked by a swordswoman. This is T'sain, Pandelume's own failed experiment at creating life, for T'sais is mentally afflicted and views everything beautiful as hateful. T'sais runs off and Turjan solicits Pandelume's help. Pandelume requires Turjan to complete a dangerous errand for him, but once Turjan completes said task, the two wizards somehow have much better luck in creating another adult female, T'sain, the twin of T'sais. At story's end, T'sais meets her twin but cannot kill her despite the desire to do so. "Turjan" doesn't have much of a plot and largely exists to set up two other tales, which might be a big reason why it didn't sell as an independent magazine-story.

MAZIRIAN THE MAGICIAN-- The events here clearly take place after "Turjan," because the young sorcerer has been captured by evil sorcerer Mazirian and T'sain must come to Turjan's rescue. I think I liked the story on first reading because a large part of it contains what I'll term "the maiden's magical flight" trope, wherein a woman flees a male oppressor. In various myths and folktales, the woman either keeps changing shape, only to be matched by the pursuing male, or she throws magical objects into the hunter's path and he's delayed overcoming the obstacles. It's my recollection that I was aware of the myth-parallel when I first read "Mazirian."

T'SAIS-- This is the first emotionally satisfying of the collection, though it's not that deep. T'sais prevails upon Pandelume to send her to Turjan's Earth-like dimension, to see if she can find some way to overcome her alienation. She's able to conceive something like empathy when she meets Etarr, for he's been cursed with a hideous face by his ex-lover, the sorceress Javanne. Better delineation of the characters might have upgraded the story to something more than formula. I'll note that T'sais doesn't have outstanding sword-skills but owns a sword that kills her enemies independently of her will.

LIANE THE WAYFARER-- During the peregrinations of T'sais, she overcomes the brigand Liane but doesn't kill him despite his attempt to rape her. Liane then becomes the viewpoint character of a completely separate narrative. He hears about a beautiful witch named LIth (for "Lilith," no doubt), but when he tries to get cozy with her, she repels him with her magical arts. She swears to become his lover if he fetches for her a special item from the castle of a great wizard, but it's all a setup to make Liane the victim of both magicians. Liane is probably a dry run for Vance's amoral serial character Cugel the Clever, who became the main protagonist when the author executed his second "Dying Earth" story in 1965. 

ULAN DHOR (G)-- This story, whose title is the name of its protagonist, is the only one in the collection that I'd rate as having mythopoeic concrescence. Prince Khandive, who's mentioned in an earlier tale, assigns his nephew Ulan Dhor to travel to Ampridatvir. There, Ulan, who possesses skills in both swords and sorcery, will seek to recover the lost magicks of that city's former ruler, Rogol Domedonfors. Once he reaches the city, Ulan learns that two groups of residents who have been enspelled so that neither can see the other, apparently to prevent their fighting. Unlike a number of Vance protagonists, Ulan has a conscience, and he intervenes to prevent the needless execution of a young local woman named Elai. Togther Ulan and Elai plumb the mystery of the long vanished ruler Rogol, who rears a very ugly head to exterminate Ampridatvir. 

GUYAL OF SFERE-- This story had the most potential of all six, but Vance doesn't realize that potential. Young nobleman Guyal is an original idea in that he annoys his sire and others in the court by asking all sorts of ponderous, unanswerable questions. When Guyal learns of a legendary "curator" who possesses all knowledge, the young man seeks the curator out in order to become his disciple and to answer all questions. However, Guyal gets waylaid by a tribe and is forced to deliver Shierl, a sacrificial maiden, to the curator's door. I guess Shierl gives Guyal someone to talk to on the way, but she proves a distraction from the inventive premise. Similarly, the revelation of the Curator's nature and of his haunted domicile were merely boring standard fantasy-devices.       

None of these short stories are as evocative as the best tales in Smith's ZOTHIQUE. It's true that Vance isn't as obsessed with rotting corpses as Smith was, and that's a plus to those not looking for zombie action. But Smith had a much greater talent for mixing the pageantry of exotic worlds with the perversity of their inhabitants. Vance's style here is colorful, but not as poetic as I've seen in later stories by the author.  

THE READING RHEUM: THE WHITE HART (1979)

 

I must have read Nancy Springer's fantasy-"pentalogy" THE BOOKS OF THE ISLE over twenty years ago, but I may not have read them in order. However, some or all of the books don't take place in the same eras, as is the more usual case with multi-book fantasy-epics. At present I don't know if I'll re-read the other four in the near future, but Springer has at least moved to the front of the line.

Springer's magic world of Isle takes place on a large island of that name, and in WHITE HART there are no indications of other contiguous lands. Celtic and Arthurian myths inform the background of this world, though Isle has no direct connection to the "real world" in any era. Many of Springer's recapitulations of mythic material is easy enough to trace: a cauldron that can bring the dead back to life comes from Welsh myth, and a stone that predicts the next ruler of Isle hearkens back to British myths behind the still-venerated "Stone of Scone."

HART's master trope, however, evolves from a romance between a mortal princess, name of Ellid, and a half-mortal, half-faery hero named Bevan. But I use the word "evolves" because Ellid, as necessary as she is to the plot, is not one of the central characters. Prior to her being rescued from captivity by Bevan, the princess is informally betrothed to her cousin Cuin, a noble warrior. He initially hates Bevan for winning Ellid's heart, but when Bevan saves Cuin from torture and probable death, Cuin feels bonded to the faery-prince. The honorable friendship between the rivals thus becomes more important to Springer's story than the romance per se, and their mutual battle to protect Isle from the death-god Pel Blagden provides the main physical conflict. However, the prophecy that Bevan, scion of an ancient fairy-race, will become Isle's High King takes some very hard-to-predict turns, as does Bevan's romance with Ellid.         

Given the cast of characters in this short novel, HART might fall into the category I've termed the "journey opera." However, based on my recollections of the other books in the series, the entire corpus of the Books of the Isle would probably constitute a "quest opera" overall.