Wednesday 21 October 2015

A Substantial Text

"All of Gaul is quartered into three halves," according to a joke translation of a famous passage in Caesar's Gallic Wars. All of Poul Anderson's 611-page historical novel, Mother Of Kings, is quartered into six Books:

THE FINNS (Chapters I-XIX)
THE BROTHERS (I-XXII)
THE WESTMEN (I-XXV)
HAAKON THE GOOD (I-XXXI)
THE WITCH-QUEEN (I-XV)
HAAKON JARL (I-XXXIII)

Thus, there are in total CXLV chapters unless I have miscounted. In Book One, Gunnhild, the title character of the novel, learns magic from Finnish wizards and marries Eirik, son of King Harald of Norway. Early in Book Two, she has borne a son, the first of her nine children. Harald's last child, Haakon, has also been born.

From these births, we expect great events to follow but we must read on to learn more and I am about to embark on a boat trip.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Ummmmmm, "quartered" in your first paragraph seems a bit odd when used to describe a book which has SIX large parts, not four. It would have looked less peculiar if you had used double quotation marks. Sorry, I'm being nit picky!

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
Of course, but I was just copying the absurdity of the comical (mis)translation of Caesar that I had quoted! Anyway, MOK is substantial. Book One alone could have been lengthened slightly into a single novel.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Understood! I fear I lapsed into pedantry in my first comment above!

I'm currently reading THE PSYCHOTECHNIC LEAGUE (which would better be titled THE PSYCHOTECHNIC INSTITUTE). So far I've reread "Marius" and am now deep into "Un-Man." I'm finding it interesting comparing these early stories with the more polished works PA began writing around 1958-59. And some of the ideas in the Psychotechnic stories were later rejected by PA.

Sean