Before The Eddas And The Vedas

To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

An apprehended but suiciding assassin invokes a name which Saruke and we recognize:

"'Wodinaz...God of fighters. God of good warrior death, leads warrior dead to halls of Gods.'" (p. 165)

When Denesh leaves the Bakhri, King Thuliash asks:

"'...Indra the Thunderer that he bid his warrior Maruts watch over you for as far as their range may reach...'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, July 1991), PART SIX, p. 278.

These gods were around a long time ago, still multiple and of limited range, of course, back then.

In Preston ("Priest Town," a hot-bed of Catholicism), near here, by the river, there is a dog leg street with a Hindu Temple at one end and a pub that used to host a Pagan Moot at the other. I contemplate Vedic gods, British gods and the river god... As a matter of fact, the Temple is closed to the public in the afternoon so, on visits to Preston, I used to meditate in a more convenient Jesuit Church in the City Centre. Why am I posting about this now? I am inspired by references to Woden and Indra in different timelines.

Aryans

The Turn The Tide, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

To conclude the ceremonial transfer of Jewish merchant Josephus's Sarmatian woman warrior, Saruke, to time traveller Arthur Vandenberg, now called Artorius, Saruke raises her arms and addresses the four quarters in archaic North Iranian, then bows to Artorius with hands pressed together:

"...in a gesture that looked oddly Hindu.

"No, Artorius thought, with an eerie thrill.

"It's Aryan, original vintage, and survived in India all those thousands of years. And on the steppes where they came from in the first place, evidently; she's descended from the ones who stayed there when the others went south and ended up in the Punjab and became something different." (pp. 157-158)

Keith Denison of the Time Patrol traces:

"'...the migrations of the different Aryan clans.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 2, p. 60.

Three Missions By Denison

(i) Denison and Manse Everard accompanied a prehistoric band from the Don over the Hindu Kush. There were steppes.

(ii) Denison went alone to Iran in 558 BC and played the role of Cyrus the Great in a divergent timeline.

(iii) In 1765 BC, Denison and Agop Mikelian stayed with the Bakhri of the Aryas until the tribe went to winter in the lowlands. When it was time for the two guests also to depart, Denesh (Denison) need only tell King Thuliash that his god beckoned him. Thuliash sensed that Denesh was a wizard.

(Some blog readers will already know this but that year of three emperors in "Star of the Sea" turns out to mean not that there were three contemporaneous contenders but just that two died in quick succession. Bit of an anticlimax.)

Superwine

To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER EIGHT.

The time travellers know how to produce "'...superwine...'" which:

"'...gets you good and drunk faster...'" (p. 111)

And Manse Everard escapes by using whisky to get his Mongol captors so drunk that they pass out:

"...most of what they brewed in the thirteenth century ran well under five per cent alcohol, with a high foodstuff content to boot."

-Poul Anderson, "The Only Game In Town" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 129-171 AT 7, p. 167.

They think that they can drink whisky like beer or wine. Some factors remain common between timelines.

The Ashes Of His Fathers And The Temples Of His Gods

To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER TEN.

Sextus wants to use gunpowder against invading barbarians:

"'This province is my home, the home of my family and my kin, it holds the ashes of my ancestors of many generations, the temples of my Gods, and the hope of my descendants.'" (p. 152)

We remember Horatius.

"And how can man die better...?"

Firing explosives at the enemy from a distance, man will not have to die. A much better outcome! The time travellers can make a genuine attempt to use instruments of war to prevent further wars instead of to perpetuate them indefinitely. But, of course, I do not know how this series is going to turn out any more than any other reader.

Cover Story

To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER TEN.

The time travellers':

"...cover story was that they were political exiles from a land beyond Hibernia called America, now torn by a terrible war. It accounted for their various strangenesses, and was reasonably plausible, since the Romans had vague accounts of Britannic legends of fantastic realms out there." (p. 133)

That is more than a plausible cover story. It is the truth as far as it can be expressed without going into unnecessarily confusing detail. Remember when, in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, a Tyrian in 950 BC deduced the truth about Time Patrolman Manse Everard:

"'I think,' said Pum, 'my lord intends to do battle, in a strange realm where wizards are his foes.'

"Am I that transparent to him?'"

-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (December 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 32.

Yes, Eborix. You are that transparent to a Tyrian wharf rat. Pummairam has deduced the truth. "Time travel" is just a detail of that "strange realm" where there will be battles with wizards.

(We keep Time Patrol to hand for useful comparisons.)

From Nero To Domitian

We are currently reading fiction and non-fiction in parallel:

"Galba succeeded Nero."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 242.

For the first twelve Roman Emperors and the conflict between Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian after the death of Nero, see Caesars.

For Poul Anderson's additional reference to Vespasian's son and successor, Titus, see Another Caesar And Synagogues.

For Anderson's reference to Domitian, see Domitian.

Thus, Anderson's "Star of the Sea" refers to the last seven of Suetonius' twelve "Caesars."

I have been to the gym today and will shortly go to a meeting. Staying here and blogging would make me lose my reason!

The heavens opened this afternoon but fortunately there is a local bus service from the Bus Station to near here. Civilized life continues in Lancaster.

Some Miscellaneous Remarks

(i) If you had a Time Patrol timecycle and if you realized that you had left your wallet lying on a park bench yesterday afternoon, then you would be able to return instantly to that park and that afternoon and to retrieve your wallet a microsecond after your younger self had left it there. Suddenly all of space and time becomes like your backyard. The Time Patrol exists to prevent abuse of this unprecedented freedom of movement - or does it? Would the Patrol care about crimes that were committed with time machines but that did not violate causality?

(ii) "Nero felt no ambition to extend the Roman empire; he even considered withdrawing his forces from Britain, yet kept them there because such a decision might have reflected on the glory won by his adoptive father Claudius."

-Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (London, 2007), p. 216.

Such a Neronic withdrawal from Britain would have altered the beginning of Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy which opens in Roman Britain centuries later.

(Augustus had a reason for curtailing imperial expansion, according to Neil Gaiman.)

(iii) Suetonius catalogues Nero's acts:

"...in order to segregate them from his follies and crimes, which I must now begin to list." (ibid.)

- as with Caligula.

Nero: a ruler who blustered when things went badly. Assassinations were common among early Roman Emperors.

Modernity And Futurity

To Turn The Tide.

In 165 CE, everyone is superstitious:

"...apart from a tiny handful of philosophical rationalists." (p. 95)

(They would have been at home in University Philosophy Departments where I have studied.)

"Even they mostly believed in the Gods, they just thought the Olympians didn't interact with humans, so you could discount them." (ibid.)

(The last stage before full atheism.)

Paula Atkins thinks:

"Because I'm black I'm a curiosity here, but it isn't important. I'm black but I'm living before the concept of race was even invented. And that feels just as odd as the rest of it." (p. 109)

This new timeline will have no trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Paula is creeped out both by the fact of slavery and by everyone around her taking it for granted. That it has nothing to do with skin colour demonstrates a lot about how ideas, assumptions, expectations etc are historically conditioned. We keep asking: what will the future of the new timeline be like?

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. 

Time Travellers' Technological Innovations

To Turn The Tide.

Innovations:

wheelbarrows

stirrups

harnesses

horseshoes

a threshing machine

spinning wheels

paper

printing

a nineteenth century plough

gunpowder

These are happening or planned in the opening chapters. There is considerable technical discussion to which I am unqualified to contribute.

I am more inclined to theology than to technology. In fact, we are informed that it is illegal to invoke Jesus but that Jeremy McCladden, supervising the threshing machine, the plough and the planting of potatoes, feels self-conscious invoking Jupiter, Mars or Venus. Imagine coping with that while simultaneously inspiring an industrial revolution. This is a time travel novel inspired by its predecessors but going further.

Manse Everard thinks that attempts to change history make things worse...

Gods And God

To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER SEVEN.

"'Stop the goddamned mules!' Jeremy McCladden screamed...

"What he'd actually said was: damned by the Gods mules." (p. 85)

So that could have been: godsdamned mules.

There is a ritual in Lancaster where we chant, "Grant gods send us a thumping good crop." However, if some among us chant, "Grant God send...," there is no way to hear the difference.

I knew a Unitarian who appreciated Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. He commented, "He says, 'the gods,' you know, but you could easily replace that with 'God.'" I would no longer make that substitution, now regarding the gods as traditional and mythical. I can in good conscience invoke gods or Bodhisattvas, understood as personifications, because no one insists that we recite a creed affirming their literal existence.

The two ways from polytheism to monotheism are: "There is only one god" and "All gods are one." But many gods remain in myth and literature. The time travellers would get used to referring to them. Manse Everard of the Time Patrol finds that they are a miserly lot.