Languages

As we have seen, other languages, whether ancient, alien or artificial, play some role in the kinds of fiction discussed on this blog.

See:

Interstellar Intercourse

Temporal

Eriau

Planha

Anglic (scroll down)

Fictional Lewis does not just quote fictitious Natvilcius. He first quotes the latter's Latin, then translates it for us. Later, another of Lewis' characters, Wither, addresses the man whom he thinks is the revived Merlin in Latin:

"'Magister Merline,...Sapientissime Britonum, secreti secretorum possessor...'"

-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT CHAPTER 12, 6, p. 626.

My Point? I wish that:

I had been taught French, Latin and (in our case, in the Republic of Ireland) Irish properly, to read and to speak them;

I had been helped to understand that this was worth doing.

Instead, we were force fed something that we neither understood nor wanted at the time. But our expected social role did not require us to speak or read anything other than English.

Strange Dimensions

The Broken Sword, XXII.

En route to Jotunheim, Skafolc and Mananaan sail further than any mortal ship ever can over chill, dead water under stars, moon and aurora. I think that, like some lost sailors in Tolkien's Middle Earth History, they sail not around the curve of the earth but straight out from the earth. 

"Skafloc thought this realm could not lie on earth at all, but in strange dimensions near the edge of everything, where creation plunged back into the Gap whence it had arisen. He had the notion that this was the Sea of Death on which he sailed, outward bound from the world of the living." (p. 156)

Maybe so but I am quite certain that Skafloc did not think of "dimensions"! This is sf terminology intruding into heroic fantasy. 

CS Lewis, not as author but as fictional first person narrator, quotes an entirely fictitious seventeenth century writer, Natvilcius, who hypothesizes that an angelic or demonic body:

"...exists after a manner beyond our conception in the celestial frame of spatial references."

-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT 1, p. 158.

Fictional Lewis comments:

"By the 'celestial frame of spatial references' I take him to mean what we should now call 'multi-dimensional space'. Not, of course, that Natvilcius knew anything about multi-dimensional geometry, but that he had reached empirically what mathematics has since reached on theoretical grounds." (ibid.)

Skafloc also reaches out empirically, not theoretically. 

While we are outside our normal dimensions, let's take another look inside the Old Phoenix:

"...I suspect that besides being at a nexus of universes, the hostel exists on several different space-time levels of its own."

-Poul Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, September 1981), pp. 9-20 AT p. 10.

If each universe comprises a four dimensional space-time continuum, then the nexus is in a fifth dimension, neither spatial nor temporal but something else? Maybe. But what is a space-time level? The narrator retreats from this suggestion:

"Well, let's not speculate about the unanswerable." (ibid.)

See:

Knowledge And Understanding

Mananaan And The Wind

The Broken Sword, XXII.

Mananaan Mac Lir is an Irish sea god and the son of Lir, one of the Three of Ys. When Mananaan and Skafloc embark for Jotunheim, Mananaan sings to the wind, calling it to blow him on his quest. And indeed a strong breeze springs up so that the boat surges. The wind tosses Mananaan's hair.

He refers to the Tuatha De Danaan as no longer gods or at "'...their full might.'" (p. 155) These powers are fading.

The Demon Of Scattery by Poul Anderson and Mildred Downey Broxon (illustrated by Alicia Austin) is a tale told to Skafloc by Mananaan during their voyage to Jotunheim. Some of Anderson's works have extraordinary intertextual interconnections. (In sf, the Maurai future history is a work of fiction published during the course of the time travel novel, There Will Be Time.) 

Stars In People

The Broken Sword, XXI.

At the council of the Sidhe:

"Eochy Mac Elathan, the Father of Stars...sat wrapped in a cloak like blue dusk, and bright points of light winked and glittered in it and in his hair and deep within his eyes. When he spread his hands, a little shower of such glints was strewn to dance on the air." (p. 150)

Why have we never noticed this guy before? He reminds us of some guests in the Old Phoenix who:

"...were shadowy and full of small starlike sparkles."

-Poul Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, 1981), pp. 9-20 AT p. 10.

When I began to reread The Broken Sword this time, I had no idea that it was such a rich text. It seems that, in discussing it, we discuss everything else. We have mentioned Shakespeare, Aeschylus, the Elder Edda, Virgil, Neil Gaiman, Stieg Larsson, the New Testament etc.

One more word from the Old Phoenix:

"...keep yourself open to everything, and perhaps, just perhaps, you will have the great luck of joining us in that tavern called the Old Phoenix." (p. 9)

Good advice: keep yourself open to everything. We join them in that tavern if we read two short stories and one novel by Poul Anderson.

Skafloc In Ireland

The Broken Sword, XXI.

Acting on information imparted by the dead, Skafloc rows to Ireland where Lugh of the Long Hand, anticipating the arrival of:

"'...an elf...with strange tidings...'" (p. 148)

- has already:

"'...called all the Tuatha De Danaan to council in the cave of Cruachan, and the lords of other people of the Sidhe as well.'" (ibid.)

For some relevant references, see:

Snow, Sea, Sun, Stars And Sidhe

Angus Og

The Tuatha De Danaan remind us of Anglo-Israel theory. See:

A Midsummer Tempest II

British, English, Israelites And Trojans

But what I did not mention before was the extraordinary history of the Stone of Scone.

Wind And The Dead

The Broken Sword, XX.

When the sun sets:

"A wolf-toothed wind howled..." (p. 138)

When Skafloc and Freda depart by night to raise the dead:

"The wind skirled and bit at them. Sleet and spindrift blew off the waters in stinging sheets..." (p. 139)

"The night was gale and sleet..." (ibid.)

"...the wind skirls in icy branches..." (ibid.)

"The wind still drove sleet before it..." (ibid.)

When Skafloc prepares to raise the dead:

"Sleet blew in on the wind." (p. 141)

When he speaks the spell:

"The wind shrieked like a lynx..." (ibid.)

The wind ceases to be mentioned. One of the dead reveals that Skafloc and Freda are brother and sister. Their relationship ends but Skafloc's quest, and thus also the narrative, continues...

Scandinavian Countries

I feel that a contemporary novel or play set in a Scandinavian country and a fantasy novel based on Norse mythology are indirectly connected if only because the former is about the descendants of the people that had created that mythology. In Uppsala, where there is now a cathedral, there was a temple with idols of the Norse gods. When Stieg Larsson's Mikael Blomkvist travels north to the fictional town of Hedestad, he must pass through Uppsala. When Blomkvist investigates a series of Biblically based murders, he must consult a pastor - although about the Apocrypha, not about the Eddas. The national Church of Sweden is headquartered in Uppsala.

Odin and the Aesir are not mentioned although I sense their presence in the background. They were here in Northern Europe whereas it was a very different pantheon, the Olympians, that had held sway in Greece and Italy. This evening, I reread Poul Anderson's account of Odin appearing and intervening during the events of The Broken Sword, then  returned to rereading Larsson's Trilogy. Sometimes it is a relief only to deal with human beings!

Freda, Wind And Odin

The Broken Sword, XIX. 

While Freda waits for Skafloc to return from Elfheugh with the broken sword, wind fills a paragraph and comments on the action:

"A rising wind blew clouds ever thicker across the sky, so that the moon seemed to flee great black dragons which swallowed it and spewed it briefly back out. The wind wailed and roared (also here) around her, whipping her garb, sinking teeth into her flesh. Hoo, hoo, it sang, blowing a sudden drift of snowdrift before it, white under the moon, hoo, halloo, hunting you!

"Hoo, hoo! echoed the troll horns." (p. 136)

Freda stiffens as she realizes that the trolls are hunting and that their prey must be Skafloc. However, Odin - who, although it is not mentioned here, is the god of the wind - intervenes. Ancient heroes like, e.g., Aeneas, were guided and helped by regular divine interventions.

When Not To Kill

There are times when a character could have been killed but wasn't and we think about what might have happened if he had been. In The Broken Sword, XIX, Skafolc could have killed Valgard in his sleep but it:

"...would too likely make a noise and thus cost him the sword." (p. 130)

"Castelar wasted no time finishing [Varagan]."

-Poul Anderson, "The Day of the Ransom" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 641-735 AT 15 April 1610, p. 666.

Manse Everard has "already" met Varagan "later" so, although the latter could have been killed at Machu Picchu in 1610, we already know that he wasn't.

Lisbeth Salander:

"...opened the pistol and checked that she had one round left. and considered shooting Zalachenko in the skull. Then she remembered that Niedermann was still there, out in the dark, and she had better save it."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), CHAPTER 32, p. 562. 

So Zala survives into Volume III but Lisbeth does not wind up with a charge for murdering him.

You can probably think of other examples.

A New Way

The Broken Sword, XIX.

Skafloc reflects:

"Was Freda - was the White Christ of whom she had told a little - not right in saying that wrongs only led to more wrongs and thus at last to Ragnarok; that the time was overpast when pride and vengefulness give way to love and forgiveness, which were not unmanly but in truth the hardest things a man could undertake?" (p. 132)

The New Testament can be seen as fulfilling not only the Law and Prophets but also:

Virgil's Fourth Eclogue;

the transformation of the Furies into the Kindly Ones;

the mighty lord who comes on high, all power to hold, all lands to rule, in Voluspa 65.

A Christian missionary interviewed on British TV said that, in China, he learned of a mythological figure, the Old Grandfather, then identified this being with God the Father! You have to start somewhere.

Everything is the Old Testament if we see it that way.

"David's words with Sybil's blending..."