The Nine Worthies

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VII.

The data necessary for a return to Earth have been lost in the crash landing of the ship:

"A groan went up. They were hardy men, but this was enough to daunt the Nine Worthies." (p. 48)

I have read The High Crusade twice before but do not remember the Nine Worthies and do not remember hearing of them anywhere else.

Christians
Charlemagne
King Arthur
Godfrey de Bouillon

Pagan
Julius Caesar
Hector
Alexander the Great

Jews
David
Joshua
Judas Maccabeus

Elsewhere, de Bouillon is placed in a triad with Richard the Lionheart and Raymond IV:

It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
-copied from here.

Second Blood

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER VI.

Sir Roger:

makes the ship hover above the fortress of Ganturath on the planet Tharixan;
burns down approaching aircraft;
lands lengthwise, crushing half the fortress;
leads a cavalry charge into the Wersgorix exiting the uncrushed part of the fortress;
kills three at once with his lance;
fights with his sword when the lance is broken;
leads men who use "...handguns from the ship..." (p. 42) as well as conventional weapons but who also engage the enemy so closely that axes, daggers and staffs are more effective than guns;
leads a second cavalry charge against the outlying fort holding the upward-pointing laser cannons;
defeats the defending Wersgorix, who are no longer familiar with ground combat;
leads a further charge of armored cavalrymen on galloping horses that topples a small spaceship before it can take off to attack from above;
makes it impossible for patrol boats flying overhead to shoot downward without killing their own people.

Attacking a detachment of longbowmen, the patrol boats and their pilots are riddled with arrows and crash. The toppled spaceship fires lasers but the bowmen, using a fallen steel beam as a battering ram, break open the portal and kill the crew. The speedy attack has destroyed the far-speakers and the nearest estates are not close by so it will be a while before the escaped Wersgorix can summon reinforcements. Few Englishmen have been killed and none are seriously wounded because the heat beams either kill or miss.

The Next Stage Of Mastery

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER V.

Words have power even if they are not magical spells. The prisoner learned Latin. Now Brother Parvus learns the Wersgor language, quickly because it is uninflected. Finding charts and numerical tables with exact writing (print), he identifies navigational directions and a map of the target planet, Tharixan, showing:

"...the symbols for land, sea, river, fortress, and so on." (p. 37)

Then he interprets symbols on dials for altitude and speed but does not yet understand "fuel flow," "sub-light drive" or "super-light drive." (p. 37)

And I do not think that it will be anything like that easy to understand the interior of an alien spaceship.

Cosmological Revision

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER V.

Brother Parvus revises his cosmology:

the Wersgorix inhabit the Third Heaven;

scriptural references to "...the four corners of the world..." (p. 35) mean a cubical universe, not Earth;

he has already started applying the word "planet" to Terra;

the blessed must dwell beyond the cosmic cube;

Brantithar's references to a molten Terrestrial core fit with "...prophetic visions of hell." (ibid.)

(Dante places Hell in the Terrestrial center whereas Milton locates it at the bottom of Chaos:

 As far removed from God and light of Heaven
As from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.
-copied from here.)

In the attached image, the three heavens are the atmosphere, space and what we would call "Heaven."

The Wersgorix And Souls

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IV.

Brother Parvus' problems:

if the Wersgorix have souls, then it is the Christians' duty to try to convert them;

if they do not have souls, then it is blasphemous to administer sacraments to them although provisional baptism can be given if requested;

an authoritative definition of doctrine is required;

when asked whether he has a soul, Brantithar replies only that scientists lack sufficient data to answer the question whether personality is a pattern that can be transferred to another matrix.

Such a pattern would not be a soul. Parvus acknowledges that the Wersgorix can reason. I was taught, although I no longer believe this, that the soul comprised precisely the combination of intellect/reason and will. If this were true, then it would follow that the Wersgorix have souls. However, in Anderson's The Merman's Children, medieval Catholics believe that merpeople can reason yet lack souls.

Blueskins And Women

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IV.

The captured spaceship carries twice as many men as women and is bound to a place where the "blueskin" (Wersgorix) females are expected to be as unsightly as the males that were encountered and defeated. However:

"'How do you know they don't hold beautiful princesses in captivity that yearn for an honest English face?'
"'That's so, my lord. It could well be.'" (p. 32)

Beautiful princesses! It could well be! If this were a novel by ERB, then it would well be! Any ERBian planet bears both a race of recognizable aliens and also a human race with a beautiful princess for the hero to marry.

The High Crusade is not that kind of pastiche. If it were, then Anderson would either accept human Martians etc as one of the premises or ingeniously rationalize the existence of such a race. For example, in Michael Moorcock's Martian Trilogy, the hero time travels to Mars at a time before the human race had migrated from there to here - and there is also a blue (not green) race that did not come to Earth.

Two Kinds Of Aliens In SF

There are anthropomorphic aliens in action-adventure fiction but also hypothetical organisms in serious speculative fiction. The Wersgorix and the Merseians are obviously the former, space opera villains, like fantasy trolls or orcs. The second kind of aliens appear in Poul Anderson's Starfarers, The Avatar and "Kyrie." His Ythrians are a serious speculation about post-mammalian organisms. Thus, Anderson's major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, incorporates both kinds of aliens. And these brief remarks might be all that I have time for today. The blog contains information about the fictional species mentioned here.

Military Technology

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IV.

Anderson has to inform us of some arbitrary facts of military technology:

the ship's fire-beams would be able to "'...reduce a city to slag...'" (p. 30);

however, Wersgor cities are protected by force screens;

but the ship lacks such screens because the screen generators would be too bulky for it to carry.

We are used to FTL warcraft protecting themselves with force screens. It sounds as though the ship, on arrival, will be vulnerable to attack from a planetary surface. However, Anderson will arrange matters so that the Earthmen can turn the tables. Human superiority is a familiar theme in sf although Anderson, covering every option, writes in other works about human inferiority.

More than a thousand years later, a descendant of these fourteenth century Englishmen will say:

"'I'd have loved a fresh crusade. Life's been dull since we conquered the Dragons ten years ago.'" (EPILOGUE, p. 160)

This sense of crusades as an adventure is shared by Lorenzo de Conti in Anderson's The Shield Of Time. However, these feudal conquerors are nowhere near as oppressive as Anderson's Merseians, Larry Niven's kzinti or SM Stirling's Draka.

Outward Bound

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTERS II-III.

The Wersgor prisoner, Brantithar, learning Latin quickly, is told to fly the ship, with the entire population of an English castle and village on board, first to France, to win a war there, then to Jerusalem, to recapture the Holy Land for Christianity. Instead, he sets the ship on automatic pilot to the nearest colony planet of his race. Brother Parvus, who had spotted what the reader knew to be an air lock, is now scandalized to see mountains and craters on what should be the perfectly circular Moon.

The narrative has now left England, Earth and even the Solar System never to return. There is a sort of nightmare inevitability to the plot. I saw that Anderson was going to take his characters as far as he could but not that he would take them as far as he did.

The large ship had had a small crew because it was supposed to return to base with many samples of Terrestrial life. Thus, it is big enough to accommodate not only the knights but also their wives, lemans, children, clergy, serfs and farm animals. There is an explanation for everything.

First Blood

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER I.

With swords and axes, the Englishmen kill the mostly unarmed alien crew, taking only one unconscious prisoner:

"The ship's artillery was ready to use, but of no value once we were inside." (p. 14)

The entire novel is like that. Not knowing any better, the English attack, then (mostly) plausible factors work in their favor. But this has to be a self-contained narrative - there is one short sequel - because such unlikely events cannot be fitted into any longer historical or future historical series.

At the end of this chapter:

"[Sir Roger's] eyes grew thoughtful as he stared at the ship." (p. 15)

As well they might.