The Past In The Time Patrol Series: Historical , Mythical, Personal

The penultimate section of Poul Anderson's "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," headed 43, is science fiction because it is about time travellers in Hawaii before the Polynesians came. The concluding section, headed 374, is historical fiction because it is only about the death of the Goth, Ermanaric.

The opening section of the following instalment, "Star of the Sea," is set not only in a mythical past, before the beginnings, but also in an imagined earlier phase of Northern European mythology.

A goddess says:

"'Each autumn I will leave you and go back to my sea. But in spring I will come again. This shall be the year and every year henceforward.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT I, p. 469. (Roman numeral.)

This shall be and is the year. Myths explain experience: the Biblical Genesis and others.

The god replies in part:

"'I will await you when the sun turns north.'

"'I will come to you on the rainbow,' Niaerdh plighted.

"So it was. So it is."

-ibid.

Niaerdh is a reconstructed earlier form of the goddess' name. She explains the rainbow which is not yet either the bridge to Asgard or a promise by God.

The second section, headed 1 (Arabic numeral), is historical fiction. Germans besiege a Roman camp. The third section, headed 2, is science fiction, about the Time Patrol:

"In the closing decades of the twentieth century..." (p. 477)

I suppose that "...the closing decades..." are the last two? In any case, the following page soon informs us that Manse Everard had last been in Amsterdam in 1952, before joining the Patrol, and that that was thirty-four years ago. This gives scope for personal reminiscence:

"Had that summer really been so golden, or had he simply been young, unburdened with too much knowledge?" (p. 479)

"Star of the Sea" first appeared in this collection, originally entitled The Time Patrol and published in 1991. Thus, "Star of the Sea" was five years in the past of its publication date. In fact, Anderson wanted this story to be set before "The Year of the Ransom," published in 1988, in which Everard first meets Wanda Tamberly on 30 October 1986. Everard's affair with Janne Floris must begin and end in "Star of the Sea" so that it will be over before Everard meets Wanda.

Everard's reminiscence about his summer in Amsterdam reminds me at least of Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me. The second and third chapters of that novel are entitled "Dear Dead Days" and "Spring's Awakening." In Chapter III:

"In my memory of those days the sun is always shining..."

-Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me (London, 1980), p. 34.

The narrator describes a river scene. She adds that there must have been rain, noise and clouds on some days but that she cannot remember them:

"The weeks slipped by like the river, sparkling, luminous, full of enchantment."

-ibid.

This is the past of happy memories, not to be visited by time machine:

"The Midwest of [Everard's] boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and Carthage and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return."

-Poul Anderson, The Shield of Time (New York, 1991), PART FOUR, 1990 A. D., p. 178.

Many passages of the Time Patrol series are eminently quotable and we have had this one several times before.